Jackie After O

by Tina Cassidy

  “The greatest debt is owed to my research assistant, Theodore C. Sorensen, for his invaluable assistance in the assembly and preparation of the material upon which this book is based,” Kennedy wrote in the preface to the book, named Profiles in Courage. But the final person Jack thanked in the preface—and the person he dedicated the book to—was Jackie. “This book would not have been possible without the encouragement, assistance and criticisms offered from the very beginning by my wife Jacqueline, whose help during all the days of my convalescence I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.”

  The next year, with Kennedy back on his feet, Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography* and helped ignite his launch for the presidency and perhaps Jackie’s interest in editing.69 But for the moment, Jackie was devoted to another profession: being a smartly coiffed and supportive political wife.

  Instead of pursuing others with a notebook and a camera, she was now pursued. While Jack thrived on crowds, she avoided them, instead finding quiet corners to voraciously read novels by Kerouac or Colette, or the memoirs of the Due de Saint-Simon about life at Versailles, which especially prepared her for life in the White House. During the Wisconsin primary, she read War and Peace, two bleak landscapes playing off each other.70 Even if she did not like politics and the fishbowl it forced her to live in, she had great instincts, knowing how to motivate an important demographic, as for example when she addressed a Bronx crowd in Spanish, or how she could inform an important speech by translating French books and documents to help her husband’s Senate testimony on Algeria or Indochina.71

  Aside from adapting to the glare of politics in the early years of her marriage, Jackie was also transformed in another way: she became a mother. After giving birth to a stillborn daughter in August 1956, Caroline was born by cesarean section in November 1957.

  Pregnant again—with John Jr.—during the presidential campaign in 1960, her doctors wanted her to take it easy given her obstetrical history. So instead of riding airplanes and shaking hands, she put her writing skills to work again, penning six weekly newspaper columns between September 16 and November 1 called Campaign Wife. The folksy dispatches portrayed what it was like to be married to a man running for president. In effect, the columns were Jackie’s way of being public when she was pregnant and unable to travel on the campaign. The columns were issued out of the Democratic National Committee as press releases, at least being honest about what they were.

  The first column was about weathering a hurricane in Hyannis Port that knocked down trees and blew off part of the roof. “We really weren’t terribly frightened, but Caroline did worry about what was happening to her father and whether her kitten and puppy were safe,” Jackie wrote. “Once she was assured Jack was in Texas where there was no storm, and Mitten and Charley were with us, we spent a cozy evening reading stories by candlelight.” In the next paragraph, she writes that her doctor allowed her to go to New York for a campaign trip, where she appeared on a TV show, shopped for maternity clothes, and spoke with reporters. “All the talk over what I wear and how I fix my hair has amused and puzzled me,” she wrote. “What does my hairdo have to do with my husband’s ability to be President?”72

  In the last column, she could barely contain her excitement. “One more week until November 8th. It’s hard to imagine how everyone can keep working at the same pace even seven more days and yet these are the most important days when volunteers across the country are calling to be sure everyone goes to the polls. If everyone is working as hard and the women who have sent in thousands of Calling for Kennedy forms telling what women believe to be the most important issues facing the country Jack and Senator Johnson are sure to be elected!”73

  All of these writing experiences came rushing back to her in late 1974 as Jackie toiled on the New Yorker piece. She took her time reporting it and reviewed her words carefully, knowing that the magazine was just another kind of fishbowl. She put the pages in an envelope and sent the piece by courier to William Shawn’s cluttered office at 25 West Forty-Third Street. How surprisingly good it would feel to have a published article again—in one of the most influential literary magazines in the world—even without her name on it, as the Talk of the Town pieces did not include bylines then. The New Yorker was a magazine that had published Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Ring Lardner, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, E. B. White, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and most every other literary light of the twentieth century. It had been a long dry spell from journalism for her, at least as a member of the fourth estate. Of course now she was the object of it, and had been for some time.

  When Shawn was done editing her submission, he called her in to discuss the final changes.74 She could barely see the man seated behind his desk, which was stacked with papers and mail, and contained a glass vase filled with pencils next to a hand-crank sharpener. Behind him, snapshots were tacked to the wall. Her brief visit to the office sent ripples of excitement and curiosity through even the most hardened scribes on staff, who suddenly felt compelled to stretch their legs, gather around the water cooler,75 and catch a glimpse, all the while imagining what she could have written that he thought was worth publishing.

  By mid-January 1975, the Christmas tree was gone from Rockefeller Center but Jackie knew she had one last gift coming to her, and it was waiting in her mailbox. There, rolled up, was the January 13, 1975, issue of The New Yorker, in which her Talk of the Town article finally appeared. Upstairs in her apartment, she was thrilled to hold the magazine in her hands, perhaps noting the irony of its cover—a drawing of ladies lunching. The article, spanning four pages, was tucked into the front section. She noted that Shawn had cut the feature in half, to fifteen hundred words, to fit stylistically with the other short pieces.76 He had also changed Jackie’s first-person singular to the magazine’s standard “we” and gave it the odd title of “Being Present.”

  She read her familiar words again, the piece beginning with her description of a lunch at the Met with Karl Katz, whom she called one of the “guiding spirits” behind the photography center, and how they discussed Capa and his humanistic approach to photography. After the lunch, she and Katz had walked up the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as the Museum Mile to Ninety-Fourth Street, and into the historic brick Georgian mansion that had housed the Audubon Society before Capa had located the center there. The piece, she thought, didn’t read half bad:

  As we stood talking, Mr. Capa walked in—a sturdy man of fifty-six, with bushy hair, bushy eyebrows, and a smiling face. “There you are,” he said. “The baby is about to be born. We will make it for the opening. Come I want to show you everything.”

  Mr. Capa put one arm around Mr. Katz and the other arm around us, and began to steer us through. “We have put the house back exactly as it used to be,” he said. “When we moved in there were many partitions, which we have taken down. See the paneling? We will never hurt it. We designed special boards to hang pictures from, with metal rods.” He pointed to a rod that Mr. [Bhupendra] Karia was holding. “A genius who was produced by Karl Katz thought these up. But, like all geniuses, he made the rods so that they wouldn’t fit in the holes. Right, Bhupendra?” Mr. Karia smiled.77

  Although the article was unsigned, it didn’t take long before everyone knew she had written it. The Washington Post was so breathless about her writing the article that the paper immediately reprinted it. Time magazine ran an item in its People column suggesting she wrote it for the paycheck. “Is Jackie Kennedy Onassis going broke?” the magazine asked.78

  Jackie, slightly bemused by the attention, issued a typically demure statement through her old classmate and former White House social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, which said, “I am glad The New Yorker took my piece if it helps more people to know about the International Center of Photography.”79

  The reclusive Shawn, of course, was not interested in engaging the press either, though he no doubt understood the value of having Jackie’s name in the magazine, for reasons
other than its literary merit. Rather than deal with each reporter who called, he, too, released an underwhelming statement, saying the article “was delivered to us by messenger. It’s a straightforward little piece of reporting, very good and very usable with a little editing … She will be paid at the regular rates, which run into the hundreds rather than the thousands.”80

  Crossing the street from 1040 Fifth for some fresh air in Central Park, Jackie could see The New Yorker on the newsstand, and if she smiled, it was surely in the knowledge that years after her debutante ball, this literary coming-out party allowed her to unleash a little bit of creativity in a very public way. She had produced something of worth and had been paid for it. She had exposed her passion for art, culture, and preservation, as well as an abiding curiosity about what to do next with her life—things that had been on her mind more lately with her marriage ending and her children verging on adulthood. By publishing, she was asserting herself, reviving her talents, and erecting a bridge to a new land, from one rarified world of glamorous parties, exotic vacations, and a life defined by her husbands to another, where she could express her true self. It had been a long time since she had received a check to publish her work. And it felt good, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that she was married to one of the richest people in the world. That the piece explored art (photography) as well as architecture (the Audubon House) is not surprising. Surely she knew what Hemingway said: Write what you know.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Preservationist

  Jackie was home at 1040 Fifth on the morning of January 22, 1975, reading the Times over breakfast, when she spotted a story by Paul Goldberger, the paper’s young architecture critic. Her eyes locked on the front-page headline: CITY’S NAMING OF GRAND CENTRAL AS A LANDMARK VOIDED BY THE COURT. She hurriedly read the words on the cover and jumped to the rest of the story inside the paper. There, with the article, was a picture of the terminal’s facade, with the modernist Pan Am building, completed in 1963, looming over the north side of Grand Central—a stark reminder of how easily the skyline could change for the worse. Jackie was outraged by what she read. She cared about the station. It was a place symbolic of old Manhattan, a city her grandfather had helped build.

  Grand Central was one of America’s finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture, which uses classical elements and sculpture in a monumental way. The Beaux-Arts school originated in Paris, where Jackie had seen the style applied at the Opera, the Louvre, and the Grand Palais. In her own city, there was City Hall, the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, and the Federal Reserve Bank, to name a few—all inspiring buildings. This was a building, a very democratic one, that she believed was worth keeping. She picked up the phone.

  Laurie Beckelman, a twenty-three-year-old part-time office assistant at the Municipal Art Society, was fielding calls as quickly as she could from the moment she walked in. People were alarmed by Goldberger’s story, which said that State Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol had invalidated the landmark status of Grand Central Terminal, making it possible for the station to be redeveloped as an office tower, with the bulk of the new structure plunked on top of or encompassing the old building.

  The phone rang again. Beckelman reached for it, expecting this caller to be like all of the others, asking how they could help to save Grand Central.

  “May I please speak with Kent Barwick?”

  “May I ask who is calling?” Beckelman said, sitting at her wooden desk, which was cluttered with papers and a typewriter in the two-room office on East Sixty-Fifth Street.

  “Jacqueline Onassis.”1

  Beckelman’s boss, Kent Barwick, was executive director of the Municipal Art Society (MAS). He had been a copywriter at the global advertising agency BBDO before becoming interested in preservation when three iconic places in New York were threatened with destruction: Fulton Market, the iron facades of SoHo, and, his personal favorite, McSorley’s saloon. He was an ardent volunteer at MAS and was eventually asked to lead the group as executive director in spring 1969. Born on suburban Long Island, Barwick’s grandparents had lived in New York and when he visited he was always awed by the vision of elegantly dressed men with their briefcases spilling out of Grand Central. But he had no idea his interest in urban landscape and architecture would lead him to this.

  “I know you won’t believe me,” Beckelman shouted to Barwick, a short distance away in his office, with Jackie on hold. “But there’s a woman on the phone who claims she’s Jackie Onassis.”

  The only other person working in the cramped space that morning was a young aspiring actress, Laura Korach, and she, like Beckelman, stopped what she was doing and stood up to see Barwick’s reaction to the call. After picking up the receiver, Barwick heard the unmistakable voice and signaled with a nod that it really was Jackie.2

  Grand Central had taken ten years to complete in 1913 at the staggering cost of $65 million. By 1929, the year Jackie was born, 47 million passengers were passing through the station annually.3 Behind the terminal’s Indiana limestone facade was a city within a city, a vast place with vaulted ceilings and a four-sided golden clock in the middle of the main concourse. It was filled with the vibration and bass hum of the trains and the click-click-click made by heels scurrying across the Tennessee marble floors and the giant schedule boards telling commuters heading to Connecticut and the Hudson River Valley their track numbers. Around Grand Central’s perimeter and underground, there were restaurants and shops convenient for nearby office workers—such as those working at Vogue, as Jackie had, in the Graybar building next door.

  The station’s appearance, as well as its location in the heart of the city, had served as the perfect backdrop for drama. Hitchcock movies were filmed there. Soldiers’ funeral processions paraded through. And crowds gathered to catch glimpses of living history shown live on a giant television screen: singer Frank Sinatra, boxer Joe Louis, or a rocket launch, like one during the Kennedy administration. Grand Central was a place where people could catch a train or buy a book, a meal, a stock, a bet, or, indeed, by 1975, drugs or a trick.

  In the baby boom years after World War II, the car had become a symbol of American freedom. The suburbs were draining families and revenue from cities, especially New York, and train stations, in their neglect, had become seedy and run-down. Grand Central was no different. It was dangerous and depressing. Its cerulean blue ceiling depicting the zodiac in gold was virtually obscured by nicotine soot. Its windows were partly covered with advertising. Its skylights, painted black during the war, remained so. The building was starved of natural light, making it seem even dirtier. Tenants had stripped storefronts of fanciful entries, making it uglier. The roof leaked.4 Although Jackie knew there was beauty beneath the grime, Grand Central had become a place that New Yorkers had given up on, ceding its waiting room to homeless people.

  As Jackie read the rest of the Times story, she saw that Judge Saypol had found that the landmark designation imposed an “economic hardship” on the terminal’s owner, Penn Central Railroad. Because landmark designation prevented any major changes, it “constitutes a taking of the property.” And taking property without compensating the owner is unconstitutional; it says so in the Fifth Amendment.

  The decision was alarming to preservationists, whose efforts were being led by the venerable Municipal Art Society, formed in 1893 by architects, painters, sculptors, and civic leaders to create murals and monuments in the city’s public spaces. Inevitably, the group had become engaged in bigger urban issues, successfully calling for the city’s first zoning code in 1916, helping to plan the subway lines, and pioneering the Landmarks Preservation Law in 1965. That law was created as a result of the razing two years earlier of Pennsylvania Station, designed by the preeminent Beaux-Arts civic building architects McKim, Mead & White. Not only was Penn Station knocked down, but also many felt insulted by its replacement—the modernist office complex and the hideous squat black steel-and-glass arena called Madison Square Garden.
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br />   With Penn Station gone, MAS knew that Grand Central was legitimately threatened. In fact, Penn Station’s destruction had been the motivating factor for the city to landmark Grand Central in 1967, in the hopes of saving it.

  The railroad had hired Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect, to design a skyscraper for the terminal site. Breuer, known for his 1920s classic leather and metal tube chair called the Wassily, had two years before completed the Whitney Museum, a showcase for contemporary art and an institution where Jackie was an honorary trustee.5 Set among traditional limestone and brownstone buildings not far from Jackie’s apartment, the Whitney was built out of slabs of gray granite, designed with only a few windows, in the style of brutalism, a form of architecture that aspired to create sculpture out of concrete, but can look as heavy and harsh as it sounds. Breuer had been a leader of the brutalism movement while teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where his students included Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei. In 1954, Pei had sketched what would have been the tallest structure in the world—a 108-story “hyperboloid” that also would have replaced Grand Central entirely. His proposal, which looked like a slender nuclear reactor with steel webbing on the outside, was rejected.

  Breuer was determined to succeed where I. M. Pei had failed and in 1968 he completed his first proposed design for building on top of Grand Central. The plan called for fifty-five stories set on the main terminal, leaving the historic facade intact but destroying its beloved waiting room. The Landmarks Preservation Commission had rejected that proposal. Breuer’s next design was for a tower three stories taller, but essentially the same shape, thin and rectangular, like the lid of a shoebox standing on its side. What was different was that the base of the building was supported with posts that dropped over the face of Grand Central like prison bars and would require the demolition of much of the terminal building. The city had denied that proposal as well.