Reading Jackie Read online

  ALSO BY WILLIAM KUHN

  Democratic Royalism:

  The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914

  Henry and Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria

  The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli

  Copyright © 2010 by William Kuhn

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Estate of C.P. Cavafy: Excerpt from “Ithaka” by C.P. Cavafy, copyright © by C.P. Cavafy.

  Reprinted by permission of the Estate of C.P Cavafy

  c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.,

  20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

  The Groton School: Excerpt from “Growing Up with Jackie, My Memories 1941–1953” by Hugh D. Auchincloss III (Groton School Quarterly, vol. LX, no 2, May 1998).

  Reprinted by permission of The Groton School.

  Ms. Magazine: Excerpt from “On Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” by Gloria Steinem (Ms., March 1979).

  Reprinted by permission of Ms. Magazine.

  Frontispiece: Paul Adao / New York News Service ©

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kuhn, William M.

  Reading Jackie : her autobiography in books / William Kuhn. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 1929–1994. 2. Book editors—United States—Biography. 3. Editors—United States—Biography. 4. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN149.9.O53K84 2010

  070.5′09492—dc22

  [B] 2010032689

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53100-9

  v3.1_r1

  for Emma Riva

  and

  for Maria Carrig

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOKS EDITED BY JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS

  JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS AS AN AUTHOR

  SOURCES

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  A Note About the Author

  Author’s Note

  I considered calling her Mrs. Kennedy or Mrs. Onassis, the names she might have preferred herself. I also wanted to avoid the inequality of the old convention whereby women were called by their first names and men by their last names. However, as this book explores what she did on her own, after both her husbands died, it didn’t seem quite right to refer to her by their names. Although aware of its limitations and of an implication of familiarity I don’t intend, I’ve called her Jackie, not only for clarity but because it’s the way most people know her, because it’s simpler, and because it’s the way we speak now.

  PROLOGUE

  In the end the diagnosis came as something of a relief. She had been feeling unwell for so long and didn’t know what it was. She had had flu symptoms ever since the previous summer, when she and her companion Maurice Tempelsman had traveled in southern France. They went not to the beaches and shops along the Riviera where everyone imagined she liked to go, but along the Rhône, to the Roman towns at Arles and Avignon. She wrote a postcard to one of her authors, Peter Sís, saying she’d been to Roussillon, where they made a famous paint out of local clay and ochre-colored pigment. Sís was also a painter and an illustrator, and she loved talking to him about art. She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t felt quite right. She expected all that to clear up. Then, during the fall, when she didn’t improve, and in the Caribbean around Christmas, when she was worse, she knew she needed some help. When the doctors told her in January 1994 that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, it wasn’t the end of the world. Yes, it was cancer. But they thought they’d found it early enough to treat it and make her well. At least she knew what she was dealing with. She could read about it in a book. The doctors recommended chemotherapy, and even that wasn’t too bad. She told Arthur Schlesinger, once Jack Kennedy’s special assistant, now a distinguished historian and her old friend, that she could take a book along and read as the drugs dripped into her arm. The woman who had taught a nation what it was like to have courage had an instinct not to overdramatize things, to play it low-key, to stay upbeat. She lost her hair. Well, she would wear a wig. She sometimes didn’t feel like going into her office at Doubleday. Well, she could telephone her authors from home.

  In the spring of 1994, Steve Rubin, the head of Doubleday, called in Jackie, who was now a senior editor, to say that he’d give her a sabbatical until she felt better. She saw her old friend Nancy Tuckerman and asked her, “Nancy, what’s a sabbatical?” The two women had known each other since fifth grade at the Chapin School in New York. They’d also been roommates at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Tuckerman had served as White House social secretary and worked for Aristotle Onassis at Olympic Airways, where she helped to found the first New York City Marathon with the airline’s sponsorship, and now her office was right next to Jackie’s at Doubleday. Tuckerman was used to Jackie’s innocent way of asking a question in order to raise a laugh. She had seen her do this to the teachers at school and be sent to the principal’s office. So now, faced with the question “What’s a sabbatical?” she replied, “Jackie, I’ve worked partly for you for years, and you’ve never given me a sabbatical, so how should I know what a sabbatical is?”

  There were scenes at the hospital. Jackie suffered from side effects of the chemotherapy. She had to go back to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center, where she was being treated for an ulcer. There they discovered that the cancer had spread and more invasive methods of administering chemotherapy had to be tried. During one of her hospital stays, former president Nixon, now living in retirement part of the year in New Jersey, had a stroke and was sent to the same hospital. Tuckerman, as Jackie’s spokesperson, fielded calls from the press. A young voice from a tabloid called to ask, “Could Mrs. Onassis and President Nixon be photographed together?” The suggestion that two seriously ill people should be wheeled into a common room for a photo op was grotesque, and also a little funny. Jackie had never been able to stand Dick Nixon, and once when he called her because he wanted her permission to publish a photograph of them together in his memoirs, she refused to return his phone calls until one day, by mistake, she picked up the phone and there he was. “Hel-lo, President Nixon …”

  As Jackie’s condition worsened, the press grew more impatient for news. Jackie’s attitude to reporters had always been that they should be told as little as possible. As far back as the White House, her formula had been to give them minimum information with maximum politeness. Tuckerman knew that Jackie wouldn’t want them to know that her illness was developing complications and becoming more serious, so her press bulletins remained opaque and featureless. This irritated the head of the hospital. He didn’t want Jacqueline Onassis dying in his hospital to the surprise of the whole wor
ld. So he called Tuckerman in to upbraid her. Why, the hospital head asked her, was she telling the press that Jackie was doing “as well as can be expected” when she knew, in fact, that Jackie was dying?

  Nancy Tuckerman defended herself as best she could. She was also under pressure from Jackie’s family to divulge as little as possible about her health. Caroline and John had had trouble getting through the front doors of the hospital because of the gathered reporters and photographers. The family didn’t want to encourage more crowds or speculation. Tuckerman fell back on the only human defense she could think of before the big man across the desk from her: “She’s my friend. And I’m not going to say she’s dying when I have not been told so.”

  Shortly afterward Jackie’s cancer spread to areas of her body where it refused to respond to chemotherapy. The doctors had to tell her that there was nothing more they could do. Maurice Tempelsman was called aside to speak with one of the oncologists. Tuckerman was left alone standing by Jackie’s hospital bed.

  “What’s going to happen, Nancy?” Jackie asked her.

  “You’re going home, Jackie.”

  · · ·

  In her last days Jackie had enough energy to do a short walk through Central Park on Tempelsman’s arm, placidly and unconcernedly allowing photographers to snap her picture while she was wearing a headscarf and a trench coat in the May sunshine. After a while she went to bed. Some of her friends recall reading to her from three of her favorite books: the Danish writer Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; the French novelist and memoirist Colette’s Chéri, whose hero was an effeminate man wearing pearls with his silk pajamas; and Jean Rhys’s famous Wide Sargasso Sea, about an heiress who loved, in spite of herself, a domineering, unsuitable man. As Jackie grew weaker, however, she grew less able to resist the take-over Kennedys’ coming in and taking over. She’d learned to keep her distance from that family. She intended to be buried in Arlington Cemetery next to JFK, but his surviving brother and sisters had never been her best friends. They were brash, overbearing, and abrasive, everything she wasn’t. One of Jackie’s close friends remembered cutting short a journey to Italy and flying back to be at her bedside. As Jackie slipped into a coma, one of the Kennedy sisters posted herself in the bedroom to be a kind of public address system for Jackie’s intimates, who were slipping in to kneel by the bed. “As her friends visited her, whispering their last goodbyes, pressing religious medals into her hands, the sister narrated in a loud voice: ‘_________ says she loves you, Jackie!’ ” Jackie had a bright scarf tied around her head. Her eyes were closed and her hands were calmly folded in front of her. In the last moments when she had consciousness and energy to think about it, she might well have laughed to herself at Jack’s clueless sister hitting exactly the wrong note.

  Her son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., on the other hand, spoke lines that she certainly would have loved had she been there to hear them. When he came downstairs at 1040 Fifth Avenue to tell the assembled reporters that his mother’s life had ended the previous evening, on May 19, 1994, the one unusual thing, the most personal thing, he mentioned was his mother’s books. She was “surrounded,” John told the crowd, “by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things that she loved. She did it in her own way and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that.” A few days later, in his eulogy at her memorial service, he said that one of his mother’s essential characteristics had been “her love of words.” If who we are finally is the record of whom and what and how we have loved, then John managed to strike exactly the right note, because it is those twin loves—of books and of words—that help to define who his mother was.

  · · ·

  Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was one of the most private women in the world, yet when she went to work as an editor in the last two decades of her life, she revealed herself as she did nowhere else. In the books she selected for publication she built on a lifetime of spending time by herself as a reader and left a record of the growth of her mind. Her books tell us what she cared about, whom she believed in, and what ideas she wished to endorse in print. Her books are the autobiography she never wrote. Not only do the books show what interested her when she worked first at Viking and then at Doubleday, they also recall the themes and events of her entire life. “I drop everything for a book on ballet,” she had written when she was barely out of her teens. In her thirties she asked choreographers such as George Balanchine and dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev to the White House. As an editor she brought out a book of recollections by Balanchine’s friends, commissioned autobiographies from dancers Martha Graham and Judith Jamison, and asked Nureyev to write an introduction to fairy tales by Alexander Pushkin. A biography of Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk were both on her list. The woman who riveted a nation with her poise at her husband’s funeral showed in her final decades that the question of how to move elegantly through space was something she had dwelled on for a lifetime. She edited nearly a hundred books in a publishing career of almost twenty years. What these books show is that Jackie’s journey, which might seem a record of interrupted marriages, child rearing in different locations, and constant travel, actually had an enviable coherence. To read her books, and to learn the story of how she helped them to publication, is to travel with her on that road, to revisit the memories that meant the most to her, to see what made her tick, to find out where she wanted to go next, and to learn what she wanted to leave behind.

  The Jackie we think we know is linked to the men she married. She was the woman in Oleg Cassini suits who was JFK’s wife. Or she was his widow, the woman who launched the idea of Camelot as the way he and his White House ought to be remembered. Or she was the woman who married a Greek billionaire, who went on spending sprees at his expense, who suffered from his humiliations when he was alive and from his attempt to shut her out of his fortune when he died. But the more interesting Jackie is one who made her own way, independent of men, when her children were busy with school and after both her husbands had died. This was a Jackie who was able to declare on her own terms what mattered to her. This was a Jackie who, through her books, told us what she was thinking, what she was learning, and what, as she reflected on an extraordinary life, was worth remembering.

  In one of the only autobiographical reflections she ever wrote, Jackie described herself as a small girl, sent upstairs to take a nap and secretly reading books from her mother’s library, books that were “far too old for me.” Then, at the end of an hour, she carefully wiped the soles of her bare feet so the nanny would not discover that she had been out of bed. Similarly, Jackie’s one-time assistant in the White House Mary Barelli Gallagher wrote that while most people imagined Jackie was off living a high life with the jet set, she was usually by herself in her room, reading a book. In the weeks before she died, she was at home with the manuscript of a British writer, Antony Beevor, who had written about postwar Paris, a city she knew well. He’d struggled with the conclusion and it wasn’t right. He knew she wasn’t feeling well, so he remembers being shocked to receive a fax from her saying she had read it and had a suggestion for how to fix it.

  Something else that few people know about the real Jackie is that she was a talented writer. English teachers at school early on recognized this ability, but as Nancy Tuckerman remarked, Jackie hid her talent and kept it secret. The last thing she wanted was to be known as “a brain.” For most of the twentieth century it was not cool for an American girl to be smart. Just as Jackie was finishing college, she applied for Vogue’s Prix de Paris, a competition in which the prize was a stint interning at the magazine’s offices in Paris and New York. It says a lot about her talent that although there were hundreds of applicants from colleges and universities all over America, she was the winner. The Vogue editorial staff who read Jackie’s essay thought she wrote marvelously and had already grasped the magazine’s editorial point of view. Her mother, afraid that she would lose her daughter to Paris for good, made her turn down the prize, b
ut Jackie never ceased to admire writers. Nor did she entirely stop writing herself: an anonymous piece she published in The New Yorker was key to her decision to start work at Viking. Her silky voice on the page is as distinct as if she were still alive. When one of her letters turns up, it nowadays commands a high price at auction, but few people know that pages and pages of her writing and books that bear her distinctive editorial mark are freely available in public libraries—if you know where to look. Jackie as a writer is the second of three identities that appealed to her sense of who she was, or might be.

  Above all, this is a book about what Jackie did when she was an editor. It’s the first book published by the company where she spent most of her publishing career but which for the most part kept her role under wraps to protect her privacy. As Steve Rubin wrote in a small, privately circulated book at Doubleday after she died, “There was an unwritten law among all of us at Doubleday—that we would never publicly discuss Jackie. The genesis of this posture was nothing more than a desire to shield her, but the flip side of this protective gesture was the fact that few people understood how committed and talented she was at the work she chose to do.” Now that more than a decade has passed, it is no longer a question of not hurting the feelings of a living friend or of wheeling skeletons out of her closet, but of showing how a middle-aged woman remade her life in the years after she moved out from the shadow cast by her husbands. That woman is Everywoman, and this book is about her rather than about the icon staring down from Andy Warhol canvases. This book celebrates the accomplishments of a woman whose editorial talents have never been sung.

  In two different letters to famous writers whom Jackie counted among her friends, she used a nearly identical phrase to say why books and writing meant so much to her. To Truman Capote, who had written a letter to say how sorry and sad he was that she had lost her baby Patrick in 1963, she wrote gratefully, marveling how “all the things you write move people.” Later in life she became good friends with the Irish writer Edna O’Brien. When O’Brien’s novel Time and Tide came out in 1992, Jackie told her why she couldn’t put the book down: “You have the power to move more than anyone I know.” The power to move was the magic Jackie found in her favorite writers and books. The shy woman with the whispery voice also had the ambition to move us through the books she published, and this is her story as well.