by William Kuhn
According to Areheart, Jackie and Jackson got along well. Jackie was present at the initial meeting with Jackson in Encino in 1983, but it was Areheart who had to follow up when the project got messy. At the first meeting Jackson took Areheart and Jackie to his trailer adjacent to the studio where he was making the music video for his song “Thriller,” and there they talked about what the book might look like. Jackson proposed a kind of picture book with text, and both Doubleday editors were willing to entertain that as an idea. It was in his trailer that Jackson asked Jackie to write the foreword and she agreed. She also wanted something unusual from him, though: to reveal something important about a life lived in the spotlight. Areheart noticed that he was enthusiastic about setting the record straight when so many false things had been written about him but that he also felt some conflict. Some things he wanted to stay private.
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Areheart found that writing the book was less interesting to him than making music, and that delayed the book’s appearance. When the first writer who was assigned to the project didn’t work out, Areheart got more actively involved. She flew to California with a tape recorder to record Jackson’s responses to her questions about his life and career. She had a full-time job in New York, however, and eventually handed off her material to a second writer, Stephen Davis, who had written books on Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin. He took the recorded material and shaped it into a narrative. At this point Jackson was on tour in Asia and Areheart had to fly to Australia to get his approval of the text. He didn’t want to read it, so she read it to him, line by line, for two weeks in 1987, making notes of his changes. They could work only on the nights when he wasn’t performing, and they would sit on his bed, Areheart in a pair of jeans and Jackson in red silk pajamas, going over the manuscript.
When they were finished, and after Areheart had flown to Los Angeles so Jackson could approve Doubleday’s plans for promotion, Jackson decided that he didn’t want the book published after all. After all the expense of time and production—the book was ready at that point to go to the printer—the people at Doubleday were shocked. Areheart thought this about-face happened because Jackson suddenly felt “terribly exposed,” in a way he had never done before. Eventually, after some high-level persuading, he relented, and Moonwalk immediately went to first place on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as elsewhere around the world.
Jackie’s colleagues remembered different dimensions of the story. Areheart herself told one literary agent that dealing with Jackson was “a huge nightmare, just a lot of sturm und drang.” J. C. Suarès, the designer hired from outside Doubleday to work on the book, was present at Jackie and Areheart’s second meeting with Jackson in California, when they showed Jackson some layout ideas. Even before Jackie went to California, Suarès’s answering machine recorded a fragment of her dismay at being involved in the project. “How the hell did I get [to be] doing a book on Michael Jackson? I’m still trying to think of why,” her voice says on the tape. “Someone must have told me to go and do it.” Suarès remembered the Encino meeting as a bizarre occasion. He, Jackie, and Areheart had arrived at Jackson’s house and been seated at a long table. Jackie was at one end. At the other was an empty spot for Jackson. He was late. It was not enough that Jackie had flown out to meet him; he had to show his superior star power by being the last to arrive. On the plane back to New York, Jackie asked Suarès, “Do you think he likes girls?” and she went back to the subject several times while they were working together. The star’s studied ambiguity on the question made them curious.
Jackie told Edward Kasinec, whom she sometimes met over a sandwich and a can of V8 juice when she went to work quietly at the New York Public Library on days when the library wasn’t open to the public, “Michael Jackson is driving me mad with his phone calls.” Jackson would make lengthy calls to her house on Martha’s Vineyard to complain about something he was sure she would understand: the burdens of fame. She didn’t want to talk about that. Few of her authors remember her ever being willing to discuss it, except by mistake or in passing. She refused to entertain it as a topic of discussion, although she listened politely to the singer’s complaints.
When a first draft of the book arrived, it was much shorter than everyone had anticipated. Nancy Tuckerman recalled experimenting with the old college-student trick of double- or triple-spacing it so it would come out at a respectable length. Suarès described it as “all puff and no substance.” Jackie called Jann Wenner and asked him what she should do. “The book she thought she was getting,” said Wenner, “was an autobiography. Michael was not going to provide anything like that. He was not going to write it, let alone speak it. He wanted to provide a photo book of how wonderful he was. His idea of a good photograph book was him receiving this award or that award. It wouldn’t even have been a good photo book, because it was going to be his personal achievement scrapbook.”
After thinking long and hard about it, Jackie decided to reject Jackson’s manuscript. “But she didn’t want to upset Michael,” recalled Suarès. “She gave him an ultimatum in a calm, firm voice. She instructed him to open up and give the reader a sincere show of feeling—about growing up black in show business, for example.” She finished by telling him that if the book was only public relations or promotional material, “we’d all be made fools of.” Suarès said that Jackie’s performance was vintage Bette Davis. Jackie loved that, but it wasn’t the end of the troubles for the book.
Alberto Vitale, who was then the CEO of the holding company, Bantam Doubleday Dell, into which Doubleday had been merged, reported that it was nearly impossible to pin down Jackson when Jackson needed to give final approval to his manuscript. “He was like a moving target,” and that’s why Vitale approved spending the money to fly Areheart out to see Jackson in Australia. When Jackson wanted to back out of his contract with Doubleday, Vitale and the head of Doubleday, Nancy Evans, had to meet with him in New York in order to persuade him to stay in. It was a civilized meeting, but Vitale thought the people surrounding Jackson were not necessarily helpful. Jackson ultimately abided by his contract, but Vitale remembered publishing the book as an exasperating experience. The fact that no paperback followed the hardback was a testament to the bad blood between Jackson and the publisher.
Jackson discussed his fame in several lines of his finished manuscript. He said that he had tried to “shun personal publicity and keep a low profile as much as possible.” This was the only way he could survive, he said. “The price of fame can be a heavy one,” he continued. “Is the price you pay worth it?” He admitted to being obsessed with privacy. He said that the dark glasses and the surgical mask he often wore were his ways of taking a break from having everyone look at him. In the final version, he wrote, “My dating and relationships with girls have not had the happy endings I’ve been looking for. Something always seems to get in the way.” Reading this, a music critic for the New York Times observed that Moonwalk was “eccentric, contradictory and helplessly revealing.” Jackson was “a master of deadpan banality” who had given out “significant information between the lines of psychobabble.”
Ultimately, what Jackie disliked about celebrity was the cheapness of it, its transience, the fact that it so often lacked substance, that she could be lumped into a category with Michael Jackson on the basis of fame alone. What gave her greater satisfaction was to think about the way something small and light and impermanent, like a singer’s fame or her own, could be transformed into something bigger, heavier, and riper with potential significance. That was the subject that Bill Moyers investigated with Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, which came out in the same year as Moonwalk. It was a bestseller too, and understandably gave her a lot more pride than the Jackson book.
Follow Your Bliss
Joseph Campbell was a writer and lecturer whose success in the 1960s came from popularizing academic research in comparative mythology and religion as well as from distilling these common themes into
simple rules to live by. In one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the character of Edward Casaubon is a little like Campbell. Casaubon is a clergyman toiling away at a work that he conceives will provide the “key to all mythologies,” the underlying truth and meaning that hold all the different world religions of the past together. Casaubon never finished his work and died in obscurity. Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, went on public television with Bill Moyers and recorded a series of interviews about the meaning of mythology. Campbell was a beacon for millions of people who were tired of conventional religion and wanted an alternative path to spiritual revelation. When once asked how human beings should live their lives, Campbell said, “Follow your bliss, and doors will open for you that you didn’t even know were there.”
Jackie found something like bliss working with Moyers on the Campbell interviews. The project encompassed her past, present, and future. Campbell had a link to one of her other authors, because he had first come to the attention of Moyers when Campbell and Eugene Kennedy published a collaborative article in the New York Times. Further, Campbell repeatedly cited Jackie’s performance at JFK’s funeral as the only modern example he knew of in which a myth—a story to live by—was made. He himself had participated in this large communal rite, when an entire diverse nation was united as one, rapt in its attention for those few moments. Jackie was the behind-the-scenes genius of President Kennedy’s funeral. She had begun planning it on Air Force One, flying back from Texas. It was she who insisted that the precedents from Abraham Lincoln’s funeral be looked up at the Library of Congress. The riderless horse with reversed boots in the funeral procession was included at her insistence, as was the eternal flame at Arlington. What Jackie may have found moving about Campbell was that he was one of the few who could write a sensitive appreciation of all she had done. The funeral, wrote Campbell, had been a ritual that was of the utmost importance and necessity. It compensated for the shock and grief people felt. It was a restatement of American dignity before the world. It reestablished national solidarity. It helped Americans begin to heal after the wounding sense of disorder and disbelief that had followed the tragedy. That terrible need for a meaningful ceremony was the challenge to which Jackie had risen, and her specific choices, thought Campbell, made the ritual a piece of compelling, sacred theater.
Campbell’s name continued to crop up after Jackie commissioned The Power of Myth. Martha Graham, whose autobiography had yet to be conceived, later testified to the overwhelming influence of Campbell on her choreography. Jonathan Cott also relied on Campbell’s work in trying to describe the significance of the Egyptian mythology of Isis and Osiris in a book he later wrote for Jackie. These were not coincidences but part of the network of attraction Jackie felt for Campbell’s work.
The Power of Myth was also the beginning of a fruitful partnership between Jackie and Moyers, who collaborated on several other books—books that could be marketed through Moyers’s television programs, thus usually ensuring healthy sales. Jackie’s contribution to The Power of Myth was to put an emphasis on art rather than publishing the text of the interviews alone. The book, just over 200 pages long, includes ninety-seven different images. Jackie went out of her way to try to make the book equal the visual impact of the television series. The color insert included excerpts from some of her favorite cultural traditions: representations of the Hindu gods Krishna and Vishnu, a Navajo sand painting, and a stained glass window from Chartres Cathedral. Judith Moyers recalled Jackie saying, “There will be some people who don’t care about mythology, but when they see this marvelous art, they will buy the book and read it.” Working with Jackie, Judith Moyers discovered that “her sensibilities had been honed to a very fine point not just by tragedy but by the lyrical, beautiful parts of life as well.”
Several passages in The Power of Myth go to the heart of why fame and celebrity, though burdensome to the person who is famous, can be of use to society at large. Campbell had told Moyers, “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.” He explained that the power of myth is to take us out of the realm of getting and spending. It leads us into a world of intense appreciation by manifesting themes from our everyday lives in stories of the eternal. Campbell had told Moyers that it was natural to focus on personalities, on modern, accessible versions of godlike figures, in order to reach that higher plane of consciousness. “I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.” Bill Moyers pressed Campbell on the subject of an ordinary mortal’s becoming a legend, a myth. “What happens when people become legends? Can you say, for example, that John Wayne has become a myth?” How could you possibly say that a tough-talking Hollywood cowboy had become a sacred figure? “When a person becomes a model for other people’s lives,” replied Campbell, “he has moved into the sphere of being mythologized.” If people chose to pattern themselves after him, he had to be seen as occupying a quasi-divine status. Moreover, knowing the stages of such a Hollywood actor’s life was a way of becoming accustomed to the difficult stages in one’s own life. Calmly preparing for death is one of life’s great challenges, but myths help us accustom ourselves to it. “One of the great challenges of life is to say ‘yea’ to that person or that act or that condition which in your mind is most abominable,” noted Campbell. The Power of Myth might well have helped Jackie say “yea” to Michael Jackson and to the way her own fame seemed no more than tinsel, by showing how that fame could be of use to other people in living their lives.
She Will Go on Eternally
The last of several books on the subject of fame that Jackie brought out in 1988 was David Stenn’s biography of Clara Bow. Stenn’s book discussed how Bow had been “catapulted to oppressive fame” in the 1920s. Did the author have the impression that his editor had experienced something similar? Stenn thought not. Jackie saw a difference between Hollywood stars, who were famous for their acting careers, and her own fame, which had come from being married to JFK. Bow, said Jackie, “was famous.” Of herself, she would say only, “I’m well known.” Stenn explained, “She drew a distinction between the two. She accepted her celebrity as a byproduct of someone whom she was once married to. It didn’t have anything to do with her, in terms of anything she had done.”
This came up again in connection with Stenn’s biography of Jean Harlow, Bombshell (1993). According to Stenn, Harlow also suffered from “a professional imprisonment by her public image.” He did not see Jackie as someone who was imprisoned. He saw her as someone who had gone through a period of imprisonment and then freed herself. She was doing what she loved and had created a life for herself. So whether she identified with some of the tribulations of David Stenn’s two Hollywood stars or not, he saw her as “controlling everything.” One additional piece of evidence of Jackie’s success in controlling the use of her image came when Stenn went to look for a video clip of Jackie, which he intended to use in his documentary on Patricia Douglas, Girl 27. Jackie had encouraged him at the start of the project and he wanted to use her image, but he couldn’t find anything available for purchase from any of the ordinary news or film outlets. Video cameras were less ubiquitous then than they are now, and Jackie had carefully limited the occasions on which she appeared in moving images.
Stenn also recalled a conversation he had with Jackie about Marilyn Monroe, a topic that he had avoided touching upon. That’s why he was surprised when she brought it up. Jackie didn’t mention Monroe in the context of JFK but r
ather as part of a continuum with Jean Harlow: both of them were blondes who made their sexual appeal the center of their screen personalities. As with Vreeland, Jackie was willing to discuss Monroe with Stenn in a completely dispassionate, even admiring way.
Jackie’s colleagues saw something similar when Jackie was sometimes forced to deal with her own fame at work. Tom Cahill remembered the difficulty of traveling in the elevator with her when people were going to floors of the building that Doubleday didn’t occupy. “She would get on the elevator. No matter how many people were on it, she would manage to get on, move to the back, and put her head down. That’s how she traveled the elevator,” he said. “There were plenty of people who had some sense of decorum, but then there were plenty of people who didn’t. Almost inevitably, there would be somebody in the elevator who would say, ‘My God! You’re Jackie Kennedy!’ I remember one day a woman said this when I was on the elevator with Jackie and she replied”—here Cahill imitated the Jackie O. whisper—“ ‘No, I’m not.’ ”
Doubleday’s art director, Peter Kruzan, said that under certain circumstances, Jackie would allow herself to be teased about her fame. She once said to him of Princess Diana, “I don’t know how anyone can withstand that kind of media attention.” Kruzan said, “You sometimes had to call her on these things. I looked at her and said, ‘Jackie, you have got to be kidding me!’ She giggled. That’s how she handled it when you called her on something.” On another occasion they visited the office of an important magazine publisher. When she was asked to sign the visitors’ book, she avoided the question. They kept insisting. “All right,” she said. She signed and they left. Kruzan wanted to kid her a little about this: “Well, they finally got you to sign the book.” “Yes,” she said, “but I only gave them ‘Jacqueline Onassis,’ not ‘Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.’ ”