Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Tiffany Taste (1986) followed the first book after a gap of five years. In it are more beautifully photographed tables for a variety of meals in splendid locations, indoors and out, designed by socialites, designers, and fashion editors. The first table setting is a plate with caviar and champagne in a Pan Am Boeing 747 airline cabin. Loring had asked Jackie to move this as far forward in the book as possible, as it is clear from the book’s acknowledgments that Pan Am had probably flown Tiffany staff for free to many of the book’s far-flung locations around the world. She told him, “Pan Am is on page 1 in all its glory,” as if to say, “I hope you’re happy.” Jackie is not mentioned in the New York Times’s review, but she did allow a picture of herself at the book party held at Le Cirque to be published in W. Carolina Herrera had designed a dress for her with jeweled shoulder pads, which seemed more Las Vegas or Houston than Newport or Middleburg. In the photograph she was promoting not only the book but also Herrera, as one of her chosen designers, and Le Cirque, owned by Sirio Maccioni, who had designed one of the tables in the book and who gestures as if to kiss her hand. In other words, with Tiffany Taste she made a number of exceptions to her rule that her name should not be associated with a commercial enterprise. The book has one photo after another of spectacular dinner tables, including one decorated with Chanel perfume bottles and scarlet lipsticks, but Jackie was certainly involved in commercial enterprises beyond the sale of the book.

  Tiffany’s 150 Years (1987) marked a significant anniversary and examined some of the highlights of the company’s production, from jewels produced for the wife of Napoleon III to the silver Super Bowl trophy. One of the book’s interesting features is a page on Mary Todd Lincoln, who apparently consoled herself for being poorly received in Washington society by going on “extravagant spending sprees” during her husband’s presidency. She bought herself an expensive set of pearls at Tiffany. This recalls a passage in Jackie’s televised White House tour in 1962 where she noted—twice—that Abraham Lincoln had criticized his wife in the White House for her extravagance. What no one in the TV audience knew was that she was privately under fire from JFK for the same thing. Nor would anyone reading this new book on Tiffany’s history note that the editor had once publicly declared her sympathy with extravagant first ladies, that she had defended her own extravagance by appealing to a Lincoln precedent, and that the fate that befell Mary Todd Lincoln had also befallen her. The convention for well-bred women in her generation was that it was all right for your name to be in the newspaper on only three occasions: when you were born, when you married, and when you died. Jackie also had a certain native shyness to overcome whenever there was a question of publicity, either for what she did in the White House or for what she did with her books; in addition to that shyness was a repeated attempt to defend her own record by appealing to historical evidence.

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  For their next book together, The Tiffany Wedding (1988), she and Loring looked over the existing guidebooks for planning weddings. They found them far too full of rules and regulations. Jackie particularly objected to Martha Stewart’s book on weddings as too prescriptive. “Let’s try to liberate the American girl from this nightmare,” Jackie told Loring. “Let’s tell girls they can do whatever they want.” Once again she allowed Loring an unusual liberty. In a section on engagement rings, he superimposed a photo of a sapphire ring on a picture of Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss house in Newport where Jackie had held her wedding reception after her marriage to JFK. In a book that mentions her name nowhere at all, this is the one sly reference to her. “It was an in joke,” remembered Loring. “We both thought it was kind of cute.” By the late 1980s Jackie’s mother had been forced to sell the house. Auchincloss finances had taken a turn for the worse, and her mother moved out of the big house into a smaller house on the grounds. A group of investors hoped to remake the big house into a tourist attraction and had renamed it Camelot Gardens. Jackie told her stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, that she thought the name was “tacky.” The tourist attraction never came to be, but it is fun to think of America’s foremost symbol of taste and style having that word in her vocabulary.

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  Jackie wrote thank-you notes to Loring that are warmer and friendlier than was necessary for a duty-calls social convention. “You are the nicest kindest most life enhancing person to work with,” she wrote in one. In another she said she wanted to get a flagpole for a scarf he had given her “and fly it from my apartment as a banner proclaiming the joy it is to do these beautiful books with you.” However, in their next-to-last book together, Tiffany Parties (1989), some sort of line was crossed. Loring asked the gossip columnist Aileen Mehle, who wrote under the pen name Suzy Knickerbocker, to write a preface. In this preface, Jackie was referred to as the hostess of an unusual party. Mehle wrote that she had been in Palm Beach “on board Aristotle Onassis’s floating palace Christina when free-spirited Ari never stopped recounting his Rabelaisian exploits and Jackie, cool in white silk pants and a ruby or two (big ones), charmed lovers of eighteenth-century furniture Jayne and Charles Wrightsman while the famous Mexican society beauty Gloria Guinness wigwagged her kitten hips to the music. I would love to tell you the precious mosaic swimming pool on deck was filled with champagne, but it wasn’t. Everyone else was.” Jackie didn’t mind Mehle, and had once tried to persuade her to write a book of her own on “the world of New York society women. ‘Write about them, their lives, their ambitions, their lies. Write how nothing really is the way it seems. How these women who seem to have it all, are really desperate and trapped.’ ” Mehle thought to herself, “Et tu, Jackie?” Mehle never wrote that book, although Jane Hitchcock’s Social Crimes comes very close to the sort of book Jackie as an editor had imagined.

  She allowed Loring to use a picture of her and JFK soon after they were married, arriving for a party in the entrance hall of Marble House in Newport. The picture could not have been more prominently placed. It was opposite Loring’s foreword to Tiffany Parties. She also allowed her name to be published in the book for “The Literary Lions Dinner,” at which famous writers hosted “well-heeled admirers” to benefit the New York Public Library. People at Doubleday started making fun of it as “the book of empty chairs” or simply “the chair book,” as it featured table after table set for grand dinners but without anyone there. Then at the launch party, thrown by three New York socialites, the guests mobbed her. Nearly a hundred of them scrambled to have their picture taken with her by the W photographer, one by one. She didn’t like it. “Those people have really got my back up,” she told Loring. “I can’t do it again.”

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  She didn’t entirely blame Loring, but no more would she allow references to her to be used. In their last book together, The Tiffany Gourmet Cookbook (1992), they still had fun. Loring asked various celebrities to design table settings, this time with recipes for the dishes on the table. Jackie made it clear that she didn’t want another chair book. “What it needs is a different beginning, as I have noted on ms., so that we know this is a NEW book about FOOD.” In what sounds like a catty remark, probably designed specifically for Loring’s consumption, as he would get the joke more than anyone else, she objected to a table set for Thanksgiving by the country music singer Barbara Mandrell. On the table were orange peels stuffed with mashed sweet potato and melted marshmallows. She wanted this out and told him, “You wouldn’t want Caroline to think that I would approve of her doing this, would you?” Jackie wasn’t a snobbish person, but she knew what would raise a laugh in discussions with the design fraternity. Loring’s introduction to the cookbook is surprisingly class-conscious for a person who was already in an influential position at a famous company and with the world’s most famous woman as his editor. He tells readers that his mother had a house in Venice, that his brother owned a huge place in Greece, and that when he went to Paris as a young man he was taken up by a grand Parisian family. Even if all these things wer
e true, as no doubt they were, it probably would have been better to pass over them in silence than to exhibit them like a social CV.

  Jackie’s joke about the mashed sweet potato and marshmallow is in the same vein as one she made to another of her authors. This author telephoned Jackie from Los Angeles, worried that when her book was featured on a game show being filmed there, To Tell the Truth, Jackie’s name as the editor was being used more prominently than Jackie would have liked. Jackie reassured her, laughing and saying, “Don’t worry.” Then she whispered, “No one we know watches To Tell the Truth.”

  Because Jackie loved Loring and wanted to acknowledge all the work they had done together, she nearly paid him the signal favor of speaking to a reporter about him when The New Yorker did a profile of him in 1992. He arranged for the magazine’s fashion correspondent, Holly Brubach, to meet Jackie at a party at Tiffany & Co. Loring remembered being in a conversational circle when Brubach was introduced to Jackie. He saw Jackie flinch “one-thirty-second of an inch.” It was her “I smell a rat” flinch, and though she was polite to Brubach, she later refused to take the interview idea further. In her article, Brubach praised Loring for promoting good design that achieved commercial success, but she also took off her gloves and said that while his Tiffany books claimed to be about taste, they were in fact about cash: “This is the etiquette of consumerism, a course of instruction in the exercise of money.” The Tiffany Gourmet Cookbook, then on sale, cost fifty dollars, and in 1992 this might have made even a tycoon think twice about buying it. Brubach’s New Yorker profile of Loring was not quite the unreserved endorsement Jackie and Loring had both hoped for, and this is what Jackie sensed when she turned down the interview with Brubach.

  When Jackie grew unwell in 1994 and her cancer was announced in the papers, many of her friends wrote to her, sensing that her time was near. In reply to a concerned letter Loring wrote to her several weeks before she died, Jackie wrote, “I just loved your letter. I think it is you who have given me all these sprees of joy at old Doubleday, and seeing you was always like champagne.”

  Jackie’s family knew how much she was attached to Loring. They asked him to help with some of the arrangements for her memorial service and the reception at 1040 Fifth Avenue after she died. Several years later he was still in touch with Jackie’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy. When he published Magnificent Tiffany Silver (2001), Loring sent her a copy, along with a memory of her mother. He told Caroline that when he and her mother had been working on The Tiffany Wedding, Jackie had noticed a photograph of a thick bunch of wet asparagus tied together with a pink rubber band. “Oh, isn’t that beautiful? I just don’t know why American brides can’t carry bunches of asparagus at their weddings.” Pause. “I guess that would be too close to the truth.” Loring remembered Jackie as having a genius for the odd, slightly off-kilter remark delivered at an unexpected moment. Thanking Loring for the book, Caroline said she couldn’t believe she had escaped the asparagus bouquet at her wedding: “It would have been so like Mummy.”

  A Debutante’s Diary

  Louis Auchincloss was twelve years older than Jackie. Via family connections, they met in Washington before she was married to JFK, but they did not see one another at all in the White House and then ran across each other again after Jackie went to New York in the mid-1960s. She regularly invited Auchincloss and his wife to the Christmas parties she threw in the 1970s; they knew lots of people in common during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

  As the chronicler of Manhattan’s upper crust, Auchincloss was an expert observer of manners in the social world he and Jackie inhabited. Sitting in his Park Avenue apartment a year before he died, he gave the impression of having observed her and her world very closely indeed. He had the sharp look of an eagle in tortoiseshell glasses.

  He recalled first seeing Jackie at a dinner in Washington during the 1950s. “I knew her when she was a girl,” he said. He recalled that she had been engaged to John Husted but had broken off that engagement after she began dating JFK. Auchincloss dismissed John Husted as someone who was socially unimportant, then warmed to this theme. Of Lee’s first marriage, to the son of one of New York’s great publishers, Auchincloss observed, “Michael Canfield was not considered a great match a-tall. Cass Canfield had a lot of money but was not going to give it to Michael, an adoptive son rumored to be the bastard son of an English peer. I can’t exaggerate how unimportant he was.” Why would a Bouvier marry down in the world, to a Husted or a Canfield? Why would Jackie in later life say she felt like an “outsider” in New York society? “Well,” said Auchincloss a little impatiently, “the Bouviers weren’t important. They were not really ‘in’ anywhere.” He had spent a lifetime examining the descendants of families with big fortunes at the turn of the century. Next to the Vanderbilts, the Bouviers looked like small beer. “Jack Bouvier was a great liability at any party,” Auchincloss continued, “because he drank too much. He did come to Lee’s wedding reception at Hugh Auchincloss’s house in Washington” after Janet had divorced him. “Black Jack whirled Janet around the floor. He looked like a big sexy Negro. He danced Janet around when she didn’t want it at all. We thought he’d take Janet away with him.”

  Auchincloss unwittingly described some of the ways in which Jackie’s attitude to social position might have been mixed up with her relationship to difficult parents. There was Black Jack, who was downwardly mobile the whole time she knew him, drinking too much, squandering money borrowed from his father, not doing very well with the funds he invested in the market. Janet always claimed to be descended from southern families that had fought with the Confederate Army, when in fact her relatives were much more recent Irish immigrants. Auchincloss recalled that Janet’s temper tantrums were so awful that sometimes “she’d strike Jackie. Then she’d be cooing like a dove a few minutes later. Janet had black moods. She didn’t like JFK’s girlfriends.”

  Janet’s marriage to Hugh Auchincloss made her the hostess of Hammersmith Farm, but it may not have been easy for either mother or daughter to be rubbing shoulders with blue bloods in Rhode Island’s oldest resort for people with Gilded Age fortunes, who would have been examining Janet and Jackie critically, measuring them up. A hint of this comes from Jackie’s explanation about why she wanted to publish the Gilded Age diary of Adele Sloane, the grandmother of Louis Auchincloss’s wife. The diary repeatedly returns to the question of who is related to whom. Jackie told Auchincloss, “It reminds me of listening to Mrs. Whitehouse and Mummy talking at Bailey’s Beach in Newport about what Charlie Whitehouse calls ‘tribalism.’ I think tribalism is interesting and you might want to discuss it somewhere. How important it was for everyone to know who everyone was.”

  When Auchincloss submitted his first draft of Maverick in Mauve: The Diary of a Romantic Age, Jackie was a little severe with the author. “As it now stands,” she told him, “it is a book that should be privately printed. It is a book by one of that world for that world. It lacks interest to the general reader because the gilded world in which the diarist lives is naturally taken for granted by her, so there is not the appraisal and description of it which would interest people who are not of that world.” She wanted the analysis and historical context that would make the document more than just a young girl’s diary from the 1890s. Auchincloss was happy with the document’s antiquarian interest, with the way in which it showed that his wife was directly connected to this turn-of-the-century grandeur. Jackie wanted something bigger: an anatomy and an assessment of where these families fit into the history of the country. He revised the manuscript and resubmitted it to her, but when the book appeared, it still fell short of the broader historical canvas that Jackie had imagined. She persuaded John Kenneth Galbraith to write a short comment for the book to place on its back cover. Even her old friend produced lines that were fairly low-key in their enthusiasm, calling the book “a small but very interesting document.”

  Author and editor had other disagreements. Auchincloss wanted copious f
ootnotes, and Jackie vetoed them. He wanted to include photographs that were only from the exact years of the diary itself. “Oh, Louis,” she said with exasperation, “do we have to be so technical?” He agreed to include some photos of Adele Sloane in her later life. They decided to have the launch party at the Museum of the City of New York, and a small exhibition was specially arranged to coincide with the book’s publication. Auchincloss spent $2,000 on the party. “Johnny Sargent added a little so there could be proper glasses,” he recalled. “I threatened to have paper cups if he didn’t. There was quite an extensive guest list. Everyone accepted. Jackie was to be the hostess.” Then, just before the party, “Nancy Tuckerman called to say there would be too many photographers there. ‘Jackie can’t relax and have fun in such a setting. Therefore, she feels it best not to come.’ ” Auchincloss was angry but replied coolly that he would consider it to be “an act of nonfriendship” if she didn’t come.

  In the end, Jackie did attend. She stayed late. However, Auchincloss remembered the occasion as nearly a social slight rather than a successful book party. “She was so used to doing exactly what she wanted. I was outraged that I had been talked into this party and then she proposed at the last minute not to come.” He concluded that one had to know how to treat her and not everyone did: “You had to remember that she was the only woman on the planet to whom everyone said yes. Sometimes you had to tell her no.”

  Auchincloss sold most of his private correspondence with Jackie when her children put up her books and furniture for sale. “If they didn’t care, why should I?” he said. He nevertheless brought out a prized letter from Jackie, which he had refused to sell. She had written to say how sorry she was to hear that his wife had died. He kept it carefully preserved in a clear plastic envelope. The letter suggested that his memory of Jackie and her connection to his life had more appeal for him than he was quite willing to admit.