Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  When Myers proposed interviewing former president Nixon, Jackie “recoiled in horror” and was adamantly opposed to Myers’s idea. Nevertheless, she was still on board with the project. She ended the meeting by putting on a full-length black leather coat as she prepared to walk out with him and go to lunch. She struck him as free, unafraid, and determined to follow the story wherever it led.

  Myers began receiving some odd telephone calls that seemed to be timed just in advance of his meetings with Jackie. In one there had been no voice, just a recording of Gregorian chants. This led Myers to wonder whether there was some Vatican connection to the Tarassuk story. Tarassuk had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union with Cardinal Slipyj, a figure in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches whose freedom in 1963 had been won partially through lobbying by both Pope John XXIII and President Kennedy. Still, Jackie was not afraid, and according to Myers “was clearly delighted with the whole effort, and was enjoying robustly the adventure of it all.” She even agreed to meet with Myers’s prime Russian contact, who came to New York in the fall of 1992. She met with both men in her apartment, and she gave a copy of Profiles in Courage to Myers’s Russian friend, signing it not “Jacqueline Onassis,” but “Jacqueline Kennedy.” She had slipped back into her role as the heroine of Camelot.

  Jackie died before Myers could finish the research for his story, though she had Nancy Tuckerman write to him and acknowledge one of his letters in the week before she died. Even though the Tarassuk story was becoming more bizarre and approaching dimensions of her life in the White House that he thought she would never consider, she was still giving Myers her encouragement. After her death, the Tarassuk story opened up on stranger avenues still. She had believed that it was about a courageous group of pro-American spies who had risked their lives to warn the Americans about Soviet nuclear plans. After her death, Myers believed that he had uncovered information that Tarassuk was working on behalf of the American government when he was at the Met to acquire guns for covert American operations. He was also mixed up with a shady character, well known among gun collectors and prominent in the effort to get the Tarassuks out of Russia, called Larry Wilson, who later served time in a federal prison. Myers had a creased picture of Tarassuk in this era, standing before a cache of weapons, holding a gun with a price tag. It doesn’t look like it’s a museum-quality piece.

  (photo credit 11.4)

  Irina Tarassuk posed for Playboy. She moved to Atlanta, married, and opened a catering business. She became a Rottweiler fancier and started rescue work to save endangered Rottweiler puppies. She recalled that Jackie had reassured her about Myers when he first approached her and her brother out of the blue. Jackie had faxed her a three-page letter saying that Myers was “naïve,” with an off-putting manner, and “very American,” but she also said she thought Irina could trust him. Jackie told Myers that helping the Tarassuk children was one of the prime reasons why she was still involved.

  There the story still stands, intriguingly and mysteriously half finished. In the spy-following fraternity, belief in high-level conspiracies is common. One would have expected Jackie, who had to endure a lifetime of speculation about whether there had been a Soviet or other high-level conspiracy to murder JFK, to have steered well clear of such a tale. Here she was, however, countenancing Philip Myers as he connected the dots between the Soviet Union, the CIA, the Vatican, and the Kennedy presidency, although we do not know if she believed it all.

  Nancy Tuckerman remembered how courageous Jackie could be, even to the extent of foolhardiness. She would go out to jog around the reservoir in Central Park on the edge of evening in the face of sensational newspaper reports about how women were being attacked there. Jackie was a fighter, a crusader, a woman determined to be her own historian and to endorse her own stories about what she and Jack and Bobby Kennedy cared about. She was dedicated to remembering the country’s Spanish heritage as much as her husband’s Irish ancestry, and she memorialized the sacrifices of those who fought George Wallace at home and Soviet power abroad. That multidimensional, multifaceted part of her personality also helped make her what she is now: America’s most powerful myth.

  CHAPTER 12

  In September 1995, looking like a cross between JFK and Black Jack Bouvier, John Kennedy, Jr., stood before the press in a dark suit and tie, with a white handkerchief rakishly tucked into his breast pocket. It was the year after his mother died and he was launching his magazine. George, he told the assembled reporters, would investigate the connections between celebrity and politics. “The marriage of publishing and politics,” he explained, “simply weaves together two strands of my family’s business.” He might have said three strands, because ever since the 1920s, when Joseph Kennedy, Sr., started making Hollywood films, celebrity had been a strand of the family enterprise, too.

  The Power of Myth

  THE BOOK JACKIE EDITED OF WHICH SHE WAS PROUDEST

  John made the rounds of the television talk shows to promote his magazine. His pitch was that the magazine would be an irreverent, insider’s look at politics. Larry King briefly disarmed him by saying that his mother had been a success in publishing at Doubleday and asking what she would think of this new publishing venture. Laughing, John remembered that when he had first mentioned his idea to her, she had asked him, “Well, John, you’re not going to do the MAD magazine of politics, are you?” It was a typical Jackie move: wrap a criticism in an unexpected joke. Her son defended himself by saying to King, “I think she would have appreciated the fact that people always said that you can’t do a fun magazine about politics, that combines the serious along with the playful.” George would look at personalities, “because that’s what public life is all about.” In an interview with CBS News, John said the magazine would acknowledge that celebrities attract attention, which is an important dimension of how modern American politics works.

  John was owning up to a dimension of his own appeal, his own celebrity, in a way that his mother never had. Jackie seemed forever camera-shy. She had disliked walking in the grounds at the White House because tourists could look through the shrubbery and she hated the idea of “starring in everybody’s home movies.” She would even refuse to show up at a party to launch one of her books if she thought too many cameras would be there. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about her work as an editor, then, was that she, too, like her son, although more covertly than he, explored the phenomenon of celebrity, of fame, even of what it meant when an ordinary person was transformed into a myth. In public she remained hidden behind her dark glasses, but at Doubleday she acknowledged to her colleagues that one of her special roles was sometimes to bring celebrity projects to the publisher. Her books on John Lennon and Michael Jackson show her behind the scenes, asking for answers to problems she had spent a lifetime dealing with herself. Further, Bill Moyers’s PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, delved into how the small and transient features of celebrity might be transformed into the large and eternal stories dealt with in mythology. She had seen the programs and she saw the potential for a book.

  Across the Park from Jackie’s Apartment

  Annie Leibovitz was one of the last to see John Lennon alive, and the morning of his assassination she had taken one of her most iconic photographs of him. She captured Yoko Ono clothed and lying on the floor while the naked Lennon curled around her like a baby in a fetal position. The photo was to accompany a Rolling Stone interview by Jonathan Cott, scheduled to run in an upcoming issue. That morning Lennon had insisted that he and Yoko Ono be photographed together, although no one at the magazine thought it was a good idea. They wanted him alone. He was the real star.

  Shortly after five that same December afternoon, Lennon and Ono left their apartment at the Dakota on Seventy-second Street, south of and on the other side of the park from Jackie at 1040 Fifth Avenue. They were on their way to a recording studio to mix a song on an album Ono was making. Before getting into their car, Lennon stopped to sign a
utographs. A crowd was nearly always assembled to see him come and go, and he frequently obliged fans by writing his name on the albums they’d brought. On December 8, 1980, one of the autograph seekers was Mark David Chapman, a twenty-five-year-old security guard from Hawaii. Lennon signed a copy of the album Chapman presented to him, Double Fantasy, which had been released only three weeks previously, and asked him, “Is that all you want?” Chapman didn’t ask for anything more.

  Six hours later, Lennon and Ono returned to Central Park West from the recording studio. It was nearly eleven at night. Ono went into the Dakota ahead of Lennon. As Lennon followed her into the building, Chapman stepped from the shadows of an interior archway and shot him four times in the back. One of the gunshots severed Lennon’s aorta. Two policemen laid him on the back seat of their squad car to take him for help, but doctors pronounced him dead on arrival at New York’s Roosevelt Hospital. Chapman sat quietly on the curb and waited to be arrested.

  Ono declared that there would be no funeral, but memorial services were held around the world a week later, when fans observed ten minutes of silence, at Ono’s request. More than 225,000 people went to the memorial service in Central Park alone. In the aftermath, at least two of Lennon’s fans committed suicide. In the twentieth century, Lennon’s assassination ranked with those of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy for the magnitude of the shock waves that spread around the country and the world. Though Lennon was not a politician or a clergyman, his songs embraced some of the same political idealism associated with the two Kennedys and King. For many, there was the same collective sense of disbelief and loss.

  That sense was particularly poignant at Rolling Stone, which had followed Lennon’s career almost from the beginning and to which Lennon had granted a number of privileged and searching interviews. Jann Wenner felt Lennon’s death as a strong blow, but it did not blunt his publisher’s instincts. Wenner backed an idea to convert the January 1981 issue of the magazine, which was already scheduled to carry Cott’s interview with Lennon, into a special issue of the magazine memorializing the artist, and then to assemble all the different pieces the magazine had run on Lennon over the years, together with some new material, and publish them as a book. The magazine decided to have an auction for it among competing publishers. Wenner already had an offer of $25,000 before they began. In the competition, Doubleday bid $200,000, an enormous sum in the early 1980s, and won the deal. Jackie, as a friend of Wenner’s, agreed to be the editor of the project. She was not in charge of the auction, if she was involved at all, but she did know that the book on Lennon was something that Doubleday had paid a huge amount for in advance and that a lot was riding on whether she could make it a success.

  The book, a collaborative venture between Rolling Stone and Doubleday, appeared in 1982 as The Ballad of John and Yoko. “We thought John and Yoko would be a commercial project,” remembered Wenner. “Jackie was always interested in taking commercial projects as well as the arcane stuff she liked.” The book’s appearance so soon after Lennon’s death was not entirely an opportunistic commercial venture, however. Wenner had the contract written so that some of the profits would benefit the Foundation on Violence in America. This organization, founded by Wenner after Lennon’s death, was a nonprofit dedicated to reducing handgun violence in America. In order to help him obtain support for his foundation in Washington, D.C., Jackie introduced Wenner to Sargent Shriver, who was married to JFK’s sister Eunice and then a prominent lawyer in the capital. Wenner admitted that for Jackie, Lennon’s death must have had an “unpleasant association, which she could have avoided and walked away from, but she didn’t.” She didn’t want to be too prominently in the fore on gun control advocacy, but, Wenner pointed out, she was also “the principal sponsor of this book.”

  Jackie’s friendship with Wenner had begun on sunnier slopes. He had been introduced to her by Dick Goodwin, a lawyer and speechwriter who assisted JFK, Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy. Goodwin also wrote on politics for Rolling Stone. In the early days, Wenner and the magazine were out in California, but when they moved to New York, Jackie took Wenner and his wife under her wing, inviting them to parties and introducing them to her friends. She even went to the opening party for Rolling Stone’s new offices in New York and allowed herself to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz as she sat with Wenner, although her body language conveys distinct discomfort with having Leibovitz circling her in the room. She thought of Wenner as a bridge between her generation and the generation of her children. For his part, Wenner was one of the few who weren’t afraid of her, and the two developed a teasing relationship. Scott Moyers remembered that when Wenner called Jackie at the office, he could tell that they “knew each other very well. Jann was a bad boy, who was very irreverent, very cheeky to Jackie. They had this kind of badinage. She really enjoyed him, actually.”

  Jackie asked Wenner to write an introduction to John and Yoko, which he did. In October 1981, Jackie told him that she thought it needed work. She was trying to improve a piece of writing and also to help him deal with what she knew was causing the problem with the piece’s detachment and emotional distance: his grief. Speaking directly from personal experience, she told Wenner, “It helps people who mourn to be able to do something for the cause of the fallen, not to have let them die in vain. Even though you may feel a deep weariness and despair, you mustn’t abdicate a leadership that has meant a great deal to mankind.” In her letter to him, even the unconventional way Jackie spaced her final four suggestions for revision on the page suggest that she was using her own appreciation for style to make her writer come up with a more moving piece. She thought Wenner could make his text better by saying why he loved Lennon’s music, or his unique point of view, or what he was fighting for, or by referring to their friendship. In subtle ways, unknown to the Lennon fans who would buy the book, Jackie was putting her imprint on the book’s contents. Her line about helping people who mourn was important enough to Wenner that he reproduced it twice in the book without attributing it to Jackie (and she may specifically have asked him not to attribute it to her).

  (photo credit 12.1)

  The book’s authors acknowledged the importance of Jackie’s faith and sponsorship in completing the project. Many people who worked with Jackie remember her reading the entire text of a manuscript closely, even when she was not required to comment or chose not to. She certainly would have noticed a passage from Jonathan Cott’s last interview with Lennon, days before he was killed, in which Lennon talked about his fame. Lennon remarked that fans don’t like letting famous people break out of their pigeonholes. They hadn’t liked it when the Beatles ceased to be. They hadn’t liked it when he had married Yoko Ono. Those actions didn’t fit with the image they had formed of him. “But that’s the same as living up to your parents’ expectations, or to society’s expectations, or to so-called critics,” said Lennon. You shouldn’t do it, and you just have to cope with the fans’ wrath when you choose to be a different person. Lennon mentioned that Bruce Springsteen’s fame was then growing. He’s popular now, Lennon remarked, but “when he gets down to facing his own success and growing older and having to produce it again and again, they’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.” It’s hard to know whether the changes in Lennon’s identity are the reason why Chapman killed him, but they certainly infuriated some of Lennon’s fans. Jackie had experienced precisely that violent turning away from her, and the same swift condemnation, when she had married Onassis. Jackie, however, had somehow learned to separate herself from all that. In the old-fashioned Newport tradition, she certainly wasn’t going to complain about her lot—and that’s why she had a hard time getting along with Michael Jackson.

  Moontalk

  “They both actually talked the same,” remembered Wenner. Michael Jackson talked “in that same breathy voice” Jackie sometimes used. Nevertheless, it wasn’t Jackson’s idea to approach Jackie about editing his autobiography, which became Moonwalk in 1988. Nor was it t
he sort of project Jackie would have proposed to do on her own. Bill Barry remembered of the Jackson autobiography that Jackie “took one for the home team”; the book for her was “an exercise in pure for-profit responsibility” and one that he “suspected she came to regret.” The journalist Hillel Italie described the book as the “classic celebrity project,” because it wasn’t written or conceived by Jackson himself. Rather, it was an idea that originated at Doubleday, and Jackie agreed to sponsor it. One of the unspoken expectations at Doubleday was that the publisher might support the more speculative books that she was passionate about if every once in a while she agreed to go after a commercial book that might generate significant profit.

  In the mid-1980s, Jackie and Shaye Areheart flew out to Encino, California, in order to meet Jackson, something she rarely did for her authors. Those who weren’t already based in New York usually flew there to meet her. Areheart tells one version of this meeting and the subsequent writing of Jackson’s book in the new edition of Moonwalk, rushed out in 2009 after Jackson’s unexpected death.