Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  The best jokes have a kernel of truth in them. She acknowledged that the Kennedy part of her legend was more admired and more valuable than the Onassis part. She even told some of her post-Onassis boyfriends, like Pete Hamill, how much she had loved the senator from Massachusetts, and this was long after the extent of his serial infidelity was well known to her and the outside world. Choosing to be buried at Arlington next to JFK rather than on Skorpios next to Onassis was certainly a statement about how she wanted to be remembered. But her books speak more warmly of who she was than a grave next to an eternal flame does.

  She was a woman who transformed her maternal pride into successful children’s books with Carly Simon and who recognized the talent of Peter Sís before he was ever considered for a MacArthur “genius” grant. Although she had been the wife of a president and a billionaire, her books championed a black slave who bore children to Thomas Jefferson and a newlywed who walked out on Sam Houston to spend the rest of her life fiercely guarding her privacy. Her books were often written by strong-minded women like Dorothy West and Dorothy Spruill Redford, Martha Graham and Judith Jamison, who made their own unusual careers in the twentieth century; or they examined the lives of eighteenth-century Frenchwomen who had had unprecedented influence on the politics and high culture of their time. She was the subject of some of the last century’s most famous photography, and as an editor she made photography one of her specialties and looked hard, as Vreeland taught her, to find art even in the work of the paparazzi. She was sometimes accused of being too regal for American public life, and indeed a dozen of her books examined and defended regal traditions in different international contexts. She was a tastemaker whose Tiffany coffee-table books linked her as undeniably with a luxury goods store as the movie made from Truman Capote’s novella had done with Audrey Hepburn. Camelot was not only a metaphor but also a library she built, an award she helped endow, and a series of books she edited about Kennedy-era ideals, doings, and personalities. She flew to California to commission Michael Jackson’s book and stood behind Joseph Campbell to say what it might mean in a mythological context to be the king of pop or America’s queen. Her books were inextricably bound up with who she was, how she reflected on her past, and who she aspired to be. They are prism-like reflections of the persistent passions of a woman with a beautiful mind.

  If Jackie was a more imperious figure than we had known before, American twentieth-century history has yet to acknowledge that she was also a more intellectual, better-read, and better-informed woman than we had known before. To have worked on about a hundred books in a career she came to only late in life certainly raises her stature not only among American first ladies but also among all people in American public life. Who else in the public life of the twentieth century could come close to her personal elegance combined with her knowledge of European and American history, manners and fashion, dance and photography, civil rights and children’s books, historic architecture and historic preservation, women’s history and women’s fiction, as well as the art and archaeology of India and Egypt?

  Through it all she remained someone who appreciated the absurd and the ridiculous. That was an enduring trait that appeared throughout the many stages in her career as well as in the different facets of her personality. It’s the part of her that redeems her from her commercial and imperial moments. It’s the part that humanizes her in her mythological moments.

  The White House senior usher during the 1960s, who was the official in charge of keeping all the servants and ceremonies in order, was J. B. West. He and Jackie became friends. One of West’s anecdotes about dealing with Jackie holds the key to how she experienced her own role as a legend, as well as to why her legend remains fresh and attractive for us. When she was first lady, West enjoyed what he called her “breezy, mock-autocratic” instructions written to him on lined yellow paper. After the assassination, she moved briefly to Georgetown before deciding that it wasn’t private enough and she would live in New York instead. We have a chilling image of her behind the black silk veil in that era, but when she invited West to dinner in Georgetown, he found elements of the old Jackie still alive and well. When he came inside, she greeted him at the door, and he kissed her. “Oh, Mr. West, you never kissed me when I lived at the White House,” she said. She then narrowed “her eyes wickedly. ‘Did you ever kiss Mamie?’ ” “All the time,” West answered. They stood back and looked at one another and laughed.

  EPILOGUE

  In the last twelve months of Jackie’s life, from about June 1993 through May 1994, more than a dozen projects crossed her desk. They were in all different stages of development, from rudimentary proposals to imminent publication as books. They give a final glimpse of her not only as a woman who was continuing to draw on the familiar authors and the well-established themes of her list, but also as someone breaking new ground and exploring new territory. She was over sixty, but her mind was still curious and she was continuing to grow.

  Two of her last books addressed the subject of healing. She edited Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind (1993) and Naveen Patnaik’s Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India (1993). She had worked with both authors before, but the subject of unconventional medicine improving the lives of those who were ill was new. The Moyers book was based on a five-part television series which first aired on PBS early in 1993. It examined the difference between “healing” and “curing.” Conventional medicine aimed at curing diseases, but in the early 1990s there was a movement that aimed at healing, in some cases where a cure wasn’t possible, by paying attention to the spiritual and emotional dimensions of disease. At the end of the series, one director of a California retreat for cancer patients said that a cancer diagnosis is like “being pushed out of an airplane with a parachute into a jungle, into a guerrilla war, with no training and no weapons and the expectation you’ll survive.” He wanted to give cancer patients some of the training and the weapons that traditional doctors would deny them.

  Judith Moyers and Bill Barry both recalled one of Jackie’s signal contributions to this book. At her urging, Doubleday used an image from a Georgia O’Keeffe painting for the cover. This was unusual, because the owners of the rights to O’Keeffe’s work had never before allowed the painter’s art to be reproduced as jacket art. The painting showed a nautilus shell’s internal spiral, which to Jackie suggested eternity or infinity. What Healing and the Mind conveyed, both the book and its cover, was that some spiritual part of our selves is independent of and may live on beyond the lives of our physical bodies.

  Jackie’s book with Naveen Patnaik on the healing plants of India was also about a kind of medicine that cannot be found in an American pharmacy. It explored ayurveda, an Indian system of medicine complementary and alternative to traditional medical practice. Ayurvedic therapies use herbs, massage, and yoga to return people to health. The book explores the medicinal properties of herbs and other plants, such as ginger, plantain, and mango. Jackie and the author commissioned unusual artwork to illustrate it. One of the artists they employed, Bannu, was from the family of the hereditary court painters to the maharajahs of Jaipur. Sarah Giles remembered going to the launch party for this book, where Jackie remarked of enormous plants in brass containers distributed around the room, “My, will you look at all these brass pots!” Giles thought this was Jackie’s trademark whimsicality. It was the most exotic and glamorous party in New York that night. Indian artists circulated, painting the guests’ hands with henna. The author, who was a very social man, had invited every personality he knew. There was Jackie, taking no notice of all the social buzz and remarking on the planters instead. Although she could not have known what was coming, Jackie had forearmed herself with these books. In the lead-up to her own illness, she had learned about some of the resources, as well as some of the limits, of alternative medicine. She also knew about how healing might work for cancer patients when curing would not. Her sense of humor was another alternative therapy at her command. />
  In the last months of her life, Jackie worked on two novels by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Poet and Dancer (1993) and Shards of Memory (1995). Jhabvala was a novelist whose reputation was already established and who had recently acquired renown through her screenwriting collaboration with the film producers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. There was some fiction of which Jackie was very proud, Mahfouz’s work foremost, but fiction hadn’t been as marked a specialty for her as dance and photography. To acquire Jhabvala was to branch out into something new, and to do so with a writer of distinction. When one of Jackie’s Doubleday colleagues congratulated her on signing Jhabvala, Jackie replied, “Every once in a while you have to do something for the soul.”

  If the soul is nourished by where we’ve been as well as by our hopes for the future, some part of Jackie’s soul continued to live in Paris while she worked in New York. She had published a dozen books that touched upon the Paris of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Soon after she arrived at Doubleday, in 1978, she worked on acquiring a project with Ray Roberts about the women of Montparnasse, one of the most intellectual and bohemian neighborhoods of twentieth-century Paris. When her friend John Russell sent her his book on Paris in 1983, she told him, “I am drowning in it, in a sweet agony of wishing I were back there, wishing I could live another passage of my life there.” It is not surprising, then, that in the last year of her life she was working on a new book on Paris. This was a controversial project, because it dealt with the bloodletting, rough justice, and score-settling that followed the Germans’ departure from Paris in 1944. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper’s Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949 (1994) examined the ways in which collaborators with the Nazis and members of the French resistance battled with one another in the French capital in the years immediately following the Second World War. Jackie had arrived to study in Paris just after the time examined in the book, and she had met some of the people it discussed. Antony Beevor recalled the book’s interest for her: “Her time in France had been such an impressionable one that she was attracted to the idea of our book.” She had known his wife’s grandparents, the postwar British ambassador, Duff Cooper, and his wife, Diana, as well as a number of other characters in the story through parties given by the writer Louise de Vilmorin at Verrières. One mark of Jackie’s personal investment in the book was the way she resisted Beevor’s suggestion for the jacket cover. “Over here,” she told Beevor, who was writing the book in Britain, “the choice of a book’s cover is akin to a Japanese tea ceremony.” Doubleday would certainly look at anything he would like to propose, but she wouldn’t let him dictate. It was her book, too, and she was passionate about getting the jacket art right.

  Several books from her last months also indicate Jackie’s love of history. Isis and Osiris: Exploring the Goddess Myth (1994) tells the story of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, who married her brother Osiris. Osiris died in a violent fight with his brother Set, who cut Osiris to pieces. Isis and her sister went all around Egypt, from the Nile Delta to Nubia, collecting the pieces of Osiris in order to put him together for a proper burial. As Jonathan Cott tells the story, they were “remembering Osiris, as they remembered him in their hearts, for to remember is to heal.” In putting him back together, in burying him properly, they also resurrected Osiris. They rendered his spirit eternal.

  The Temple of Dendur had originally been dedicated to the worship of Isis. Although Jackie had worked hard to have the temple saved, she was not initially happy about bringing it to New York. When Tom Hoving phoned her in the 1960s to see if she would support the Met’s application to acquire it, she told him she did not want it in the museum. She wanted to keep to the original plan of rebuilding it in Washington as a memorial to JFK. When the Met won the competition to get the temple and it was reconstructed within view of her apartment, she complained about reflections from the floodlights at night shining into her bedroom.

  By the time that Jackie was working with Cott on Isis and Osiris, she had forgotten all about that. She ended up rather liking the temple. It enhanced the view. She remained interested in anything ancient or modern that had to do with Egypt. Cott’s book is both, because it explores how ancient Egyptian gods are still worshipped today in places as far away as a castle in Ireland and the suburbs of Edmonton, Alberta. Cott believed that this movement back and forth between ancient and modern was one of the features that attracted Jackie. “She was really enamored of the Isis and Osiris myth,” he said. “We used to talk about that a lot. That’s what gave me the idea for a book about Isis and Osiris: how those particular gods—god and goddess—were worshipped and are worshipped still by people all over the world. Jackie was very, very attached to that story. It’s about the dead husband who is restored and remembered, so to speak, by his wife and given eternal, immortal life by her. She didn’t say that to me, but I assume she maybe had an identification with that story.” It is no great stretch of the imagination to say that Jackie, like Isis, spent a part of her life picking up the pieces of JFK and trying to remember or immortalize him.

  Some of the most surprising of Jackie’s last books were also unconventional histories. Through Karl Katz she had been introduced to Larry Gonick, once a student of mathematics at Harvard, now a cartoonist. He had written The Cartoon History of the Universe 1, Volumes 1–7, From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great (1990), which had been a surprise success and was totally unlike anything that had ever been on Jackie’s list before. It was a comic retelling of all of recorded history from the beginning of the universe to the end of classical Greece. It may have been aimed at children, but it had humor that appealed to adults, too. Jackie and Gonick got into trouble with Ann Landers, the pen name of Eppie Lederer, whom Jackie persuaded to promote the book in her column. Gonick’s cartoons take a highly literal but also irreverent view of history, so since the Old Testament related that David presented the foreskins of two hundred Philistines to King Saul, Gonick designed an image based on the biblical text. Christian readers objected that this was not suitable for children, and Jackie had the Doubleday religion editor write a letter for Landers to send to her angry readers about how there was nothing in Gonick’s book that wasn’t also in the Bible. Jackie wasn’t at all put off by the angry reaction to Ann Landers’s column, and in her last months she commissioned a new book from Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe 2, Volumes 8–13, From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome, India Too! (1994). The distinguished historian of China Jonathan Spence wrote in his review that Gonick’s books were a “curious hybrid, at once flippant and scholarly, witty and politically correct, zany and traditionalist.” Spence believed that Gonick had answered the question “Why study history?” with “Because it is interesting and because it is fun.”

  Gonick too has an account of Isis and Osiris, colored with the author’s comic view of religion and mythology. Gonick emphasizes that the only part of Osiris that Isis couldn’t find after Set cut him to pieces was his penis, which had been eaten by a fish. Nevertheless, in burying him, Isis successfully resurrected Osiris, and he became a judge of the dead. As in many sacred stories, Isis also defied common sense by conceiving a child, Horus, even though her husband had apparently lost the organ to effect this. After his resurrection, Osiris judged good souls at death and sent them to labor in his fields, while he condemned bad souls to be eaten by a demon, which Gonick drew as a fat crocodile sitting at the feet of a mummified pharaoh on a throne.

  It wasn’t just other people’s religions and other cultural traditions that Jackie allowed to be spoofed. Tom Cahill remembered Jackie’s reaction when an American cardinal condemned a Doubleday book about women in the Catholic Church and thereby won some welcome additional publicity for the book. As Cahill and Bill Barry conferred about the cardinal’s statement in the morning paper, they walked past Jackie’s office and heard her call out to them, “You two bad Catholic boys!” Cahill also recalled Jackie’s telling him, “We’re all relaxed Catholics here,” playing, possibly
it was unintentional, on the similarity between “lapsed” and “relaxed.” She did remain interested in Catholic history, however. Cahill ceased to be an editor and wrote a book, the first volume in a successful series called The Hinges of History, entitled How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995). When Jackie heard of this, and learned that it would be edited by one of her colleagues, she asked Cahill with pretend exasperation, “Why didn’t you give that book to me?”

  (photo credit epl.1)

  Two of her final books were about recluses who chose communing with nature over socializing with other human beings. Her last book with Jonathan Cott was a specially illustrated collection of Emily Dickinson’s verse, Skies in Blossom: The Nature Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1995). Dickinson rarely left her room and preferred guarding her privacy to the varied social life of Amherst, Massachusetts. She turned her private hours to account through the composition of lines about intensely observed natural phenomena.

  At roughly the same time Jackie plucked a book from the Paris bestseller list about a Russian family who, owing to a religious schism, journeyed to a remote part of Siberia and cut themselves off from civilization for forty years. This was Vasily Peskov’s Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness (1994). When Russian scientists doing research in the area happened to come across them, they found the family living in a handmade hut, wearing shoes made from bark. The daughter of the family, who had been born there and knew no other world, used handwriting reminiscent of Old Church Slavonic print. The family stayed away from the geologists and intensely disliked being photographed, but their daughter was willing to speak to Peskov and tell him their story. This book was not about gorgeous interiors or beautifully laid tables. It was not about court ritual or dance. It was not about the Kennedy administration or the power of myth. But it was a story that Jackie wanted to read, and she bet that others would, too. It’s the best evidence there is that in her last year she continued to look forward to learning something new.