Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  (photo credit 11.3)

  Elliott decided to use some of the prize money, along with an advance on royalties from Doubleday, to retire what remained of his debt and to write his autobiography. Jackie thought he needed some help, so she contacted Mike D’Orso, who had helped with the writing of Somerset Homecoming, and asked him to contribute. D’Orso said of Jackie’s request, “The way she approached it was, ‘This is a great story,’ not how much it meant to JFK.” Elliott’s wife had died, and he was living alone in a dilapidated house in his coal-mining region of Alabama. Weeds were growing through the windows and the roof leaked. He had sacrificed his political career in a showdown with George Wallace in the 1960s, and now, thirty years later, he had the chance to tell his side of the story.

  D’Orso went down to Alabama and lived with Carl Elliott for five months. “It was tough living with him,” said D’Orso. “Physically he’s a big man. He sat in a wheelchair in his pajamas all day long. When it would rain I’d put pots under the drips. I slept upstairs in his and his wife’s bedroom.” Elliott was now unable to climb the stairs. “Sometimes I’d make us a sandwich for lunch. We’d sit in the evenings and watch the Gulf War on TV.” D’Orso remembered it all as especially depressing because he was going through a divorce himself. Jackie knew this. She would call him up to ask how he was doing. They had several long conversations about D’Orso’s relationship with his wife. “To me it felt like I was just talking to a friend. She was a good friend to me.” It would only occur to him after he had hung up the phone that he’d just been pouring his heart out to a woman who had been famously involved in difficult marital relations herself.

  Afterward she would sometimes invite D’Orso to New York to have lunch together. But he loved what they had on the phone: “I sensed the fragility of it.” He didn’t want to endanger it and didn’t have any stargazing need to do it. He thought going to New York and having lunch with “Jackie O.,” in quotation marks, would ruin it. She was the only person who supported him in that season. Even his friends got tired of hearing his story.

  When Carl Elliott’s Cost of Courage came out, in 1992, Jackie sent a copy to every congressman in Washington as well as to all the justices of the Supreme Court. The responses she got were mixed. Some were handwritten thanks mentioning the themes and incidents of the book. Others were recollections of times the correspondent had spent with her in Washington. Phil Gramm, Republican senator from Texas, sent Jackie a form letter saying, “Thank you for your interest in my work.” John Seymour, Republican senator from California, wrote, “I am sure this novel will make a fine addition to my personal library.” Jackie circled “novel” and put a happy face under it.

  The book represented some of the progress Jackie had made in reaching a sense of proportion about JFK’s achievement. Whereas she had wanted to micromanage passages by Schlesinger and Sorensen in the 1960s, by the time Elliott’s book came to be written, in the 1990s, she could tolerate unflattering references to her former husband. In the midst of generally admiring allusions to Kennedy, Elliott did recall that as a young congressman Kennedy had been capable of making crass remarks about money when he had just been given $2 million by his father. At the same time he opposed legislation to bring libraries to rural poor people. Jackie read this in draft before it was published and did not object.

  The following year another book on a crusading and courageous southerner, Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights, appeared on Jackie’s list. Johnson was a federal judge who made landmark antisegregation rulings in the 1960s, including orders to desegregate the transportation system of Montgomery, Alabama, to allow black people to serve on juries, and to prevent the state from discouraging voter registration among blacks. A Johnson decision also forced Governor George Wallace to allow the last of three famous Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, led in part by Martin Luther King, Jr. Johnson was a Republican. As a result of his rulings, a cross was burned on the judge’s lawn, his mother’s house was bombed, and he had to be put under constant protection by a federal marshal.

  In 1978, a decade after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, his second son published a biography of Johnson. The next year Jackie was in touch with Judge Frank Johnson to see whether he would write his autobiography. He sent her a proposal and completed about a third of his manuscript. Johnson’s wife remembered later that Johnson didn’t have the time to finish it and Jackie couldn’t offer an advance substantial enough to buy him time for it. Ten years later—a long time to carry a torch for a book—Jackie and Johnson were still corresponding about how to get his book into print. At about the same time Jack Bass, a newspaper journalist who had recently left journalism for academia, approached Johnson and told him he’d like to write about him. Judge Johnson had been profiled in Bass’s previous book Unlikely Heroes, edited by Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster. Bass had asked Mayhew whether she would sponsor a full-scale biography of Johnson. She had responded with interest but added that such a biography might be only “a regional book,” an editor’s way of saying, “Hmmm, this is small potatoes. I’m not thrilled.” Bass passed on Mayhew’s verdict to Judge Johnson, who told him he should try Jacqueline Onassis instead.

  Bass immediately had his proposal for the book sent to Jackie, and within a few days he heard that she was interested and wanted him to sign a contract. Bass’s biography traced Johnson’s life, beginning with his upbringing in an unusual Alabama county where more men fought with the Union than with the Confederacy in the Civil War. It described the violent showdowns with George Wallace in the 1960s and noted how at the end of Johnson’s career, when Wallace sought his forgiveness for the personal attacks Wallace had made on him, Johnson replied that “if he wanted forgiveness, he’d have to get it from the Lord.” The book received accolades from former Chief Justice Warren Burger and former president Jimmy Carter. Senator Harris Wofford quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., in his New York Times review, saying that the judge’s rulings “gave true meaning to the word ‘justice.’ ”

  One of Bass’s friends had told him that he needed to hire a line editor for detailed revisions of his book, as Doubleday wouldn’t provide that sort of thing. “I called Shaye Areheart and asked, ‘Who’s going to be the line editor?’ ” he remembered. “Mrs. Onassis,” replied Shaye. Bass thought Jackie was a “terrific editor. Certainly the best editor I’ve ever had.” With his previous books he hadn’t had much contact with the editor beyond the acquisition stage, but Jackie told him directly where his manuscript needed work. She wanted extensive cuts; about a quarter of the manuscript he had submitted to her had to go. He cut about 17 percent and said that was the most he could do. “In retrospect,” he noted, “I should have cut more.” Jackie was right.

  Bass recalled asking her why she had taken on his book. “She kind of looked at me and said, ‘I guess it goes back to the White House and hearing Jack and Bobby talk about Judge Johnson.’ ” He felt a little anxious, as his account of Martin Luther King’s release from jail, when he had been imprisoned unjustly because of a minor traffic violation in 1960, didn’t give the credit to Robert Kennedy, as several other books had. Bass told a more complex story. Both Kennedy brothers were interested in securing King’s release because it might help JFK’s presidential campaign. King’s imprisonment was an injustice that concerned them, but they were also afraid of offending bigoted southern white voters. Bass considered this a different and less flattering story than Sorensen and Schlesinger had told about the episode. “RFK is not the hero,” Bass said. “Jackie didn’t know until she read my story.” She didn’t flinch. Instead, she took Bass to lunch upstairs at New York’s ‘21’ and said simply, “You are a very good investigative reporter.” It was part of Jackie’s rewriting of Camelot in the 1990s: if Jack and Bobby didn’t always turn out to be quite the heroes they had been made out to be, it was all right with her.

  There is an ironic footnote to Jackie’s publication of
these two books about men who crusaded, at significant personal cost, against the power of George Wallace. After she died, her son, John, chose to publish an article on Wallace in the inaugural issue of his magazine, George. The magazine’s title referred to George Washington, but its editor flew south to interview another George—Wallace himself. Although late in life Wallace had spoken of his error in supporting segregationist policies, John Kennedy’s provocative editorial move was something his mother might not have approved of. Still, John Updike noted after John Kennedy died in an airplane accident in 1999 that the young man had gone through a transition in his life that was a silent tribute to his mother. Although he had started out in law school, grooming himself for a political career modeled on his father’s, he ended as an editor, doing work that was modeled on what his mother did at Doubleday.

  A Spy Story

  It is hard to recapture the way that everyone from the 1950s through the early 1990s worried about nuclear war with the Russians. This war that never happened was a frame for Jackie’s life as well. The desk at which JFK had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 sat in her apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue. In her editorial career she published a novel by David Wise, The Samarkand Dimension (1987), in which a CIA operative spies on the Soviets, and Jack Valenti’s novel about the presidency, in which the cold war is a backdrop. Oddly enough, when it came time to consider Vogue’s invitation to join the staff after she won the Prix de Paris in the 1950s, she told the editors that she might have to take a job she was considering at the CIA, which was nearer her home.

  When Jackie went with Tom Hoving to Russia for the first time in the 1970s, there was something rather daring about it, as travel behind what was called the Iron Curtain was not common then. It was even more daring for her and Vreeland to sponsor works at the Costume Institute that celebrated the era of the tsars and the Russian aristocracy at a time when American politics revolved around trying to set up careful, nonconfrontational exchanges with a regime that defined itself as the people’s antithesis to royal Romanov rule. Jackie also became friends with Leonid Tarassuk, a former curator of Arms and Armor from the Hermitage who ran afoul of the Soviet system. When he was a young man, his apartment was bugged, possibly as a result of survival supplies he and his cousin had hidden away in a cave in the Crimea. Remarks critical of the government were recorded, and Tarassuk spent time in a Soviet prison. After his release he was allowed to rejoin the staff of the Hermitage in a diminished position. Tarassuk and his family were Jewish, and when he applied to emigrate to Israel in the 1970s, the Soviet government fired him from his job at the Hermitage, as the application alone was considered “anti-Soviet.” His plight came to the attention of Americans, along with that of some other prominent Soviet Jews, including the dancer Valery Panov and his wife, who were also harassed by the Soviets. With the help of American sponsors, the Tarassuks left Russia in 1973, spent some time in Israel, and then came to New York in 1975. Tarassuk later joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum as an expert in the Arms and Armor department. Jackie’s friend Karl Katz introduced her to Tarassuk, and Tarassuk helped her write captions and introductory remarks for In the Russian Style. When the book received a hostile review in the New York Review of Books, Tarassuk leapt to Jackie’s defense. Tarassuk’s daughter, Irina, remembered Jackie coming to visit them at their New York apartment. She was stunning not only in her appearance—she always had her dark glasses on—but also in her demeanor. As a joke, Irina’s father once framed one of the cigarette butts this elegant woman had left behind.

  Tarassuk and his wife died in an automobile accident while they were on vacation in France in 1990. Jackie sent a large bouquet of flowers to their memorial service and contributed to a fund organized to support the Tarassuks’ children. Then, on New Year’s Eve 1991, a man—a stranger to her—faxed an odd story about Tarassuk to Jackie’s assistant at Doubleday. Philip Myers was an attorney from Santa Barbara who had business in the high-tech industry. His work had taken him to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991, and there a colleague had told him that Leonid Tarassuk had been part of a small band of spies who volunteered to work on behalf of the United States, with the goal of alerting America if the Soviets tried to launch a nuclear first strike. Tarassuk, Myers learned, had also collaborated with Jacqueline Onassis on one of her first books at Viking.

  Myers thought this story would make a great book, maybe a film, so he faxed a summary of what he had discovered to Jackie. He didn’t expect to hear back from her right away, if at all. He was shocked when he found a message from her on his answering machine a few days later, asking him to call her back at Doubleday. “I’m fascinated by what you sent me,” she said, sounding less like her whispery-voiced White House self than a polite but busy editor, talking fast with a New York accent. “Holy smokes!” Myers thought to himself when he played her message. He called her back, expecting to deal with someone aloof and reserved. When she came on the phone, he found himself talking to what he described as “the most funny, unguarded, candid person imaginable.” She was intrigued by the idea that her friend had been an undercover spy, but she found Myers’s story about Tarassuk convoluted. There were parts Myers wasn’t willing to disclose, even to her, for fear of endangering his Russian contacts. When Myers shared some of his cloak-and-dagger concerns with her, she replied, “You’re going to end up squished in a trash can somewhere.” She began taking Myers’s story around to her contacts. She ran it by Steve Rubin at Doubleday. She also approached Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, who encouraged her to believe that the periodical might run an article on Tarassuk and other cold war spies. She also went to Mort Janklow, one of New York’s most prominent literary agents, and asked him whether Myers’s story might work for Hollywood. She mentioned Jann Wenner and Mike Nichols as people she thought might be interested. Myers’s head was spinning. One minute Jackie was an impossibly distant figure; the next she was working the phones and trying to sell his idea to the most powerful people in the media business.

  Rubin rejected the idea. With the end of the cold war, he told Jackie, they had too many Russian books in the pipeline. Janklow said the story was still too confusing for him to be able to sell it to the film business, although he asked to be kept informed if she did turn it into a book. Myers and Jackie decided to go it alone, with Jackie helping him outline what further research he would need to do to make his story viable. This wasn’t something she was being paid for; her interest in the story was what drove her. She also told Myers she considered Tarassuk to be a hero of the cold war. She reported to Myers a conversation she had had with Karl Katz in which he had speculated that maybe the Tarassuks’ car crash hadn’t been an accident; maybe it was some sort of Soviet revenge for Tarassuk’s having worked for the Americans. This surprised Myers, because it hadn’t come up in his discussion with his Russian contacts. Myers was also shocked because “for someone who was supposed to crave privacy and stand above the fray, it seemed like a pretty dicey thing to pass along to me, a comparative stranger.”

  Myers began the research program he and Jackie had discussed, requesting Tarassuk’s files from the American intelligence services under the Freedom of Information Act. When the file arrived, 90 percent of it was blacked out. Clearly there was something to hide. The high level of welcome the Tarassuks had received from American officials when they arrived in the 1970s indicated this, too. Their daughter, Irina, remembered that her father had met with both Henry Kissinger and President Nixon—pretty good for someone who was supposed to be simply a museum curator who knew about historic guns.

  The first time Myers met with Jackie in her office at Doubleday, she once again surprised him. She appeared at the end of a corridor, striding toward the reception area to meet him and looking like an athlete in her thirties rather than a former first lady in her sixties. Her office was also “a big shock.” Myers had imagined “something grand, with parquet floors and museum-quality paintings.” Instead it was tiny, dominated by
what looked like an army-issue Formica-topped desk. The floor was linoleum. In this strange room, the story deepened, for here Jackie recalled Tarassuk as “a refined Old World gentleman.” D’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers had been his hero. He and Jackie had spoken French together. “I loved the man,” said Jackie. She said it in a restrained, detached way, as if she were speaking about a work of art rather than a man, but the honesty of it still surprised Myers.

  When Myers told her that he had been in touch with Nixon’s former chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, who had been convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal, Jackie wasn’t pleased. She said Haldeman was “a felon,” but she did ask with curiosity if he “still had his short funny hair,” gesturing with a chopping motion over the top of her head to indicate Haldeman’s famous crew cut. Nevertheless, Haldeman had furnished Myers with a key piece of the puzzle that the Tarassuk story had become. He said that art museums like the Metropolitan, the Getty, and the National Gallery were all routinely used as covers by CIA operatives. It lent credibility to the idea that Tarassuk had been working for the intelligence services under the cover of his curatorial work for the Met. Myers believed that some lines about Jackie and Tarassuk in Tom Hoving’s memoir, Making the Mummies Dance, that didn’t align with what his Russian sources had told him or what the newspapers had reported, were the result of intentional obfuscation on Hoving’s part, spreading disinformation to cover up the spying activity that was going on at the Metropolitan.