Jackie After O

by Tina Cassidy

  After the assassination, when Jackie had moved back to Manhattan and craved evenings out that were interesting rather than just simply fashionable, she’d go to Elaine’s, a club that Guinzburg, Plimpton, and their intellectual friends had made popular with a crowd that would later include Andy Warhol.

  Guinzburg had assumed the helm of the Viking ship, which now faced financial difficulties. He ran the operation from an opulent office, which had a Viking helmet on the windowsill, and a dartboard on the wall containing pictures of agents and reviewers who annoyed him.20 He knew what made a good editor; that’s all he hired. But he also understood the importance of notoriety, a less subtle way to encourage writers and agents to send their best work to the house, and for readers to buy books. Jackie would be a public relations boon for Viking. He recognized that right away. But still, this was her idea, not his.

  They met at Le Périgord, which, because it was not far from the United Nations, was a draw for diplomats and politicians. By the end of their meal, they agreed in principal that she would work at Viking. But they still needed to settle some important details, and made a date to meet at her apartment at 1040 Fifth.

  There, he made his way past the doorman, up the elevator that opened to her apartment, and by the domestic help into the sanctuary of Jackie’s home. She greeted him warmly and brought him into the living room. He peered out French doors that offered a magnificent view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its new enclosure, which would house the Temple of Dendur, a Cleopatra-era monument about eighty-two feet long that had once stood on the banks of the Nile. The temple was sent to America in appreciation of the $12 million in federal funds that Jackie had convinced JFK to offer Egypt for saving temples that were at risk of flooding when the Aswan Dam was built.21 Now it was being reconstructed stone block by stone block on an island—Manhattan—within Jackie’s daily view. That something so monumental and literally set in stone could have a new life seemed symbolic at that moment in 1975. And Jackie made a mental note to bring Caroline for a private tour of the project when she graduated in a few weeks. The reconstruction work was almost done, and it was marvelous to see.22

  She and Guinzburg had barely begun to talk when the phone rang, a call Jackie had to take. Just then, Caroline bounded in and plunked down her bag. With her light brown waves, all one length just past her shoulders and parted in the middle, Caroline looked the part of the irreverent teenager.

  Caroline spied Guinzburg sitting alone and approached him.

  “Is my mom gonna go work for you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said.

  Caroline grimaced, as if she had just smelled something rotten. It was the face of a typical daughter who did not think her mother was capable of doing anything, let alone getting a job. He chuckled. Jackie returned to the room and Caroline retreated elsewhere in the apartment.

  The two settled in to talk. This was not an interview. In his mind, she already had the job. It was just the details that needed to be finalized.

  “What title do you want?” he asked her. “It might be hard to throw you in as an editor.”

  “How about associate editor? I kind of like that.”

  But associate editor would have meant that she would have line-editing responsibilities—something for which she had no experience. They agreed she should start as a consulting editor, which meant all she really had to do was acquire books, spot talent, and bring ideas to the table. She would have Mondays off for the hairdresser, and Fridays off for horse riding at her new country home in New Jersey. There might be other days not in the office because she would be in the library.

  Salary?

  “I don’t care about money,” she told him. “This is not about that.”

  He explained that market pay was about $10,000 a year. The sum was fine with Jackie, but they both knew that she could spend that entire year’s salary in one fitting at Valentino.

  They agreed she’d start her job after Labor Day. Publishing was notoriously slow in the summer, with the industry fleeing the city in August. And besides, Jackie had a few other important milestones that would consume the season.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Hot Prospect

  Jackie could have been forgiven if she never wanted to step foot in Greece again, but she mustered her strength and with her kids planned one last trip to Skorpios for July, when she would turn forty-six, to say a proper good-bye, round up what remained of their belongings, and pack in the memories.

  Jackie also invited her New York friend Karl Katz, as well as Paris Review editor Clem Wood and his wife.1 Onassis’s sister Artemis would also be joining them.

  But this would not be the relaxing vacation any of them hoped for. Jackie, for one, felt the doors to the past slamming shut all around her. Her parents had just told her that Hammersmith Farm, the childhood home that she loved and the place that had hosted her first wedding reception, was finally sold after four years on the market in a deal that was not yet public.2 And Tuckerman—her right arm for so many years—would be starting a new job in publishing as the assistant to Doubleday’s publisher, Sam Vaughan, working in the publicity and promotion department, creating special events for authors. That news was also still a secret.3

  July 14, 1975. Saying good-bye to Skorpios. (Anastasselis Polydoros/Gamma-Raphovia Getty Images)

  Then, shortly after they landed on the tiny island, Jackie learned of more surprising news. Christina was going to marry Alexander Andreades—the son of a wealthy industrialist whose grandfather had been Greece’s prime minister. Christina had only known him for a month and had become engaged the week before.4

  Meanwhile, despite front-page headlines implying that Jackie had been relatively cut off from Onassis’s vast fortune, few people knew that Christina and her stepmother were privately negotiating a settlement in the $20 million range. Once that deal was done, they never had to speak to each other again. For now, Jackie was trying to keep up appearances. Christina, under pressure from her aunt Artemis, invited Jackie to attend her wedding.5 Regardless of the acrimony between them and the media circus that would likely ensue, Jackie and her son flew from Skorpios to Athens for the ceremony, held at a tiny, sweltering church surrounded by cypress and olive trees in Glyfada.6

  About a hundred people crammed the street outside the chapel trying to catch a glimpse of this unlikely family: the troubled heiress, America’s queen, and the handsome, dark-haired teenager. Old ladies dressed in black and mothers pushing baby carriages jockeyed for position along with the paparazzi. Police were there attempting to maintain order and not succeeding as the bystanders and photographers rushed the first limousine, this one carrying the groom. When he emerged from a car wearing a blue suit with red pinstripes and holding a cigarette in its plastic holder, the crowd applauded him. He seemed surprised.

  Jackie, John, and Christina arrived forty-five minutes late. When Jackie stepped out of the limousine, the crowd surged toward her, leaving plenty of room for the bride and her stepbrother to climb out of the car. Christina wore an off-white layered gown with a purple sash and a gold cross around her neck. She made her way inside, was married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony, and emerged once again confronted by the gawkers, this time shouting their wishes of “Na zisete!” Long life to you.7

  July 22, 1975. Bride Christina Onassis Andreadis and her groom, Alexander Andreadis (right), chat with the groom’s father, Stratis Andreadis, during the garden party following the couple’s wedding in Athens. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  John complained about the temperature. “Gosh, it was hot in there,” he said.8

  Jackie was more sophisticated in her public remarks, her words perhaps reflecting her hopes for herself.

  “I’m so happy for that girl,” she said. “There is a lot of happiness ahead for her after a great deal of sadness.”9

  But it was not to be. Almost immediately, Christina was completely alone again. The groom, in the army, had to return to his barracks without a honeymoon. The
ir marriage lasted only fourteen months. Then, in 1978, Christina married a one-eyed Russian, Sergei Kauzov, who was a former Soviet shipping executive and a suspected KGB agent. Their relationship ended within sixteen months. Christina, adrift, battling weight that exceeded two hundred pounds on her five-foot-five-inch frame, and trying to improve her looks with hair dye or plastic surgery, married for the fourth and final time in 1984 to French businessman Thierry Roussel, her crush as a teenager. They had a daughter, Athina, before divorcing in 1987 after he left her for another woman. A year later, while visiting friends in Buenos Aires, where her father first sought to make a fortune, Christina followed her family’s tragic path as she was visiting friends: The official cause of death was pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, perhaps caused by a heart attack. But she had sleeping pills by her side in her room, where she was found in the tub, in a few inches of water.10 Christina, three weeks shy of her thirty-eighth birthday, was buried on Skorpios near her father and brother. Jackie did not attend the funeral.11

  Jackie, her friends, and family—after a languid good-bye to Skorpios, the yacht, the Ionian Sea, and whatever luxury, peace, and privacy they had been afforded over the last seven years—were headed home, back to the noisy streets of New York. Shortly after she landed in the sweltering city Jackie was struck by yet another hard reality. Skorpios had not been the completely private retreat she thought. Perhaps it never was.

  Hustler magazine’s cover that month, August 1975, featured a woman’s round, white, naked rear, set off by an ink-black backdrop and the words:

  EXCLUSIVE

  JACQUELINE

  KENNEDY

  ONASSIS

  NUDE

  There were no exclamation points necessary. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt had bought the photos from a paparazzo, who had taken the shots of Jackie from a distance on the water off Skorpios four years earlier. She eventually knew the shots had been taken, but Onassis had refused to sue the photographer because he was too “cheap” to make it worthy.12 Five full-page color photographs showed Jackie totally naked, her wet hair pushed back from her face. Two were frontal shots, with her standing, holding a blue beach towel beside her. Two others showed her walking away, but oblivious she was being watched. Another had her bending over. One million magazines, which included a nude poster of her, flew off the newsstands in just a few days. If there was any solace in being so exposed, it was this: she may have been in her forties, but she had the slim, toned body of a woman half her age.

  As it does every August, New York’s center of gravity shifts east, to Long Island. And Andy Warhol’s oceanfront compound in Montauk was a special draw for celebrities. He had rented the property, known as the Church Estate, a cluster of bleached-out cottages, to Lee Radziwill beginning in 1972. This summer, he had kicked off the season by inviting the Rolling Stones to come and stay, to practice “Angie” and “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll” for “The Americas Tour.” They blared their music beyond the bluffs and then took off. The estate, called Eoönen, or dawn, was located—conveniently for Lee—next door to the artist Peter Beard, whose place overlooked the very tip of Long Island. Beard, a handsome Yale graduate, spent time on Skorpios with the sisters and had been working on a book called Longing for Darkness about meeting Out of Africa author Isak Dinesen. When Random House had declined to publish the manuscript Jackie asked him what she could do to help. “Have a dance with Africans around a campfire in Newport?”13 Instead, she wrote the afterword for the book, giving it an extra boost when it was finally published that summer:

  What an extraordinary surprise and gift it was, when Peter Beard first showed me the fables and drawings of Isak Dinesen’s beloved Kamante. I had not known he was still alive. To hold his drawings was like touching a talisman that took you back to a world you thought had disappeared forever.

  Maybe I was so affected because Out of Africa has always meant more to me than any other book. But then I watched my children respond to the fables with the freshness of young minds. My son started to make African drawings, some of which he asked Peter Beard to send to Kamante for him …

  Peter Beard reveals the immediacy her philosophy can have for the young people of today—who are so passionately idealistic, so ready to be martyrs. This book can help them; show them that they had allies in an earlier time, who knew that courage was endurance as well as abandon …

  How contemporary Isak Dinesen is; her prescience of how man would destroy his environment, her belief that his only hope was to get in tune with it again. It seems to me that so many of the movements of today, ecology, anti-materialism, communal living—they were all in Out of Africa.

  She was one of the first white people to feel that “black is beautiful.” She was the first to see how “all the dark forces of time, evolution, nature” were being disrupted in Africa. Cecil Rhodes saying “teach the native to want” so quickly became Galbraith’s “Affluent Society.”

  One of my favorite passages in Out of Africa is where Isak Dinesen asks: “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

  This book is the echo she longed for. Yes, Africa does have a song for her. It is Peter Beard and Kamante who have made it for her.

  Kamante’s drawings and Peter Beard’s photographs share a purity—of a wild animal looking at the camera with free and vulnerable eyes.

  This book is a work of love—of a love that a young man, young enough to be her grandson, was struck with when he first read Out of Africa. The book changed his life. He went in search of that Africa she knew. He saves its memories, her memories, for us.

  Before it is too late?

  Now, here they were, in Montauk, celebrating Beard’s success and marveling over the fact that Jackie’s body was a major spread in Hustler. There was only one thing to do with the centerfold. She pulled it out and signed it for Warhol:

  For Andy, with enduring affection,

  Jackie Montauk

  Leaving the beach behind for the city, Jackie wanted to check out a new Broadway production called Chicago. She went to the show with an old friend, the diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. He had first met her in the 1950s, when he had arranged a meeting for then senator Kennedy to discuss business interests in South Africa. During her White House years, Jackie had made frequent trips to New York, attending the theater with UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been Tempelsman’s lawyer. Sometimes Tempelsman would tag along with them for dinner.

  This time, it was just the two of them. But hardly anyone paid any attention. In many ways, Tempelsman was like many of Jackie’s escorts, who fell into one of three categories: gay, married, or old. Tempelsman could appear a bit frumpy, but was merely middle-aged, born the same year as Jackie into a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in Belgium. He was definitely not gay. But he was married—with three kids.14 That important fact aside, Jackie enjoyed him. Having fled Europe to America with his parents during World War II, he was fluent in French. He was also wise about finance and politics. He had joined his father’s diamond business as a teenager, and now he was brokering deals directly with entire African governments. While Jackie was grappling with Onassis’s declining health earlier in the year, Tempelsman was in Zaire (the former Belgian Congo), the biggest producer of diamonds in the world, negotiating with its corrupt President Mobutu.15 Although he was no billionaire, Tempelsman—short and balding, with an elfish twinkle in his eye, an easy smile, and rosy cheeks—was wealthy and alluring.

  Now that Onassis was dead, Tempelsman was keenly aware that Jackie was lonely, in need of some financial advice, and maybe even a date or two.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Work
ing Woman

  After Labor Day, Tom Guinzburg finally had to reveal to his staff the secret that he had carried all summer: he had hired the most famous person in the world. Like Epstein, he knew that there would be some editors and young employees who would view Jackie as competition, a distraction, an insult, or an unapproachable icon. He knew that some of them would inevitably think, How could this chronic shopper, this socialite, this woman who has not had a real job in more than two decades, simply waltz in here and do what I’m doing—or take the position I wanted?

  Before he told them, he turned to a young, friendly editorial assistant, Rebecca Singleton, who had arrived at Viking two years before, straight from college in Georgia, where she had majored in literature. She had impressed her colleagues from the start and Guinzburg had been nurturing her talent and ambition by allowing her to originate two nonfiction projects. He liked her ideas. He saw her potential and had noticed how grounded she was, a rare trait in the hothouse, sometimes backbiting atmosphere of New York publishing. Unlike many of her Ivy League coworkers, Becky, as many called her, was uninhibited by ideology. She was a single working girl in the big city, just like Mary Tyler Moore, but she approached her job with eagerness and practicality, not the feminist zeal that some of the other editorial assistants had, the kind that made them refuse to get coffee for anyone, or admit that they did not know something. There were already three female editors at Viking at the time, in Singleton’s eyes a sign that the workplace “war” was over. Singleton stood out from the pack for other reasons: she already had had other job experiences, as a bookstore clerk, a waitress, and a nurse’s aide in a psychiatric ward—all of which, oddly, would prepare her for what was about to happen.