Reading Jackie Read online

  The Wedding

  Toward the end of her life, Jackie was working with another woman, this time one who was more than twenty years her senior. An amusing irony of these later years was that Jackie, at a time in her life when she was truly and happily finished with being married, and Dorothy West, an African American writer in her eighties who had never married, should have been collaborating on West’s novel called The Wedding.

  Scott Moyers is now a respected literary agent. He has a square jaw, an open manner, and what looks like a dueling scar on his forehead. In the 1990s, not far beyond his college years, he sat outside Jackie’s office in the corridor at Doubleday as her assistant. He remembers the day a package arrived with a Martha’s Vineyard postmark; it contained several chapters and an outline for Dorothy West’s novel. The package also included an edition of her 1948 novel, The Living Is Easy. West was one of the last writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and had been friends with American literary greats such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. “Hot spit!” Moyers remembered Jackie saying and rubbing her hands together as she did whenever she was excited about a project. Here was just the sort of book she lived for, something with real literary merit, historical interest, and the author a Martha’s Vineyard neighbor to boot. She lost no time in contacting West and telling her she wanted to publish her new novel.

  What Jackie and Scott Moyers did not know was that the material they had just read had been written in the 1950s, when the novel had been under contract with Houghton Mifflin. Even with a new Doubleday contract in her hands, West had lost momentum and found it hard to finish the book. But Jackie made West her mission. Whenever she was on the Vineyard, she would drive her blue Jeep to West’s house on Oak Bluffs, a prosperous African American community with a historical presence on the island. The two established a friendship: Jackie in her sixties, West in her eighties, the two of them from very different worlds but warm and affectionate collaborators nonetheless. Dorothy West remembered, “I think I was as unique to her as she was unique to me. I was without self-consciousness and so was she. Neither of us felt we had to apologize to the other for being who we were. I was born and bred in a very special circle of colored Bostonians for whom the now descriptive word ‘black’ had not yet been invented as a rallying cry. So neither of us felt embarrassed at being different from the other and indeed were enchanted by the difference.”

  The trouble came when Jackie grew ill in 1994. West’s novel was still not done. As she worked on the book, the quality of her writing diminished, and she grew reluctant to see it in print. Doubleday had it scheduled for 1995, and the company wanted the book published. After Jackie died, West appeared to lose interest, and there was pressure by the publisher to get the novel finished whether West herself wrote the end or not. One of West’s colleagues read the final draft of the novel and remarked, “This sounds like a white person wrote it.” Scott Moyers worked with Dorothy West at the very end, after Jackie died. He remembered that West had a very detailed outline of where she wanted to go, but added that she definitely needed more help. Beyond that, he would only say that the relationship of a writer and an editor is privileged, like that of lawyer and client.

  The first portion of the novel is written in a poetic prose that includes biblical language and is reminiscent of a Negro spiritual; the very last portion is not. This did not detract from the book’s success, however. The publication of The Wedding led to a resurgence of interest in Dorothy West’s earlier work and to a celebration of the author on Martha’s Vineyard that Hillary Clinton attended. Oprah Winfrey put the weight of her publicity machine behind the book and produced the novel as a television miniseries starring Halle Berry, though the events of the story were significantly altered and the sad ending turned into a happy one.

  Had Jackie lived, it’s doubtful whether she would have allowed a second author to finish the book. Probably she could have coaxed Dorothy West to complete it in the same voice that Jackie so admired in the book’s beginning. As it is, the novel is a wonderful look at the black upper middle class in the 1950s, living a life of prosperous ease on the East Coast’s most exclusive island, worrying about interracial marriage and the different shades of skin color that resulted from those marriages. It includes a marvelous line about one character on her way to a wedding in the late 1800s. Josephine is a poor white woman from a plantation-owning family in the South, but in the post–Civil War era, broke and fearful of being forever an old maid. She takes the train north to marry Hannibal, the black son of one of her grandfather’s slaves. Feeling so poorly that she might collapse, “Josephine boarded the train, and did keel over twice before she reached New York from the heat of the bridges burning behind her.” What fun Jackie must have had reading that. She and Josephine had something in common.

  As the novel reaches its climax, one of its heroes, himself the veteran of an unhappy marriage, sits down to tell his daughter the truth about the love everyone thinks is supposed to underpin a married partnership. This daughter is about to be married in the wedding referred to in the book’s title. Clark tells his daughter, Shelby, “Sometimes I think romantic love is just another scourge put on this earth by the Lord, another measuring rod that no one thinks they quite measure up to, a simple idea that never seems to fit the two messy lives it’s assigned to cover.” Jackie would have been ready to testify to the truth of that, too.

  In the space of a two-decade editorial career, Jackie had many manuscripts before her about marriages that rise to a more transcendent understanding of human love. She went from editing books by Barbara Chase-Riboud and Princess Grace to having a philosophical detachment about men’s infidelity and the imperfections of marriage with the books of Diana Vreeland, Elizabeth Crook, and Dorothy West. Her comment to a friend who complained at lunch about men sleeping around outside their marriages was a simple “Well, all men are unfaithful anyway.” Jackie was not a victim. She had the last word on marriage with both of her husbands, by chance, because of their early deaths, and by choice, because of the books she selected to edit. The question “What was it like to be married to them?” she answered best in her relationship with Maurice Tempelsman: better never to marry, and keep your money separate.

  There was also wisdom about marriage in Jackie’s book with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. In The Power of Myth, Campbell tells Moyers, “Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.” Toward the end of her life, Jackie could not regard JFK and Onassis as brutes or herself as the victim of marital unhappiness. She couldn’t take her history that seriously. She sprinkled her conversation with their names, and none of her authors could remember her being critical of either one. She found that casually dropping a memory of Jack into a conversation with any male was one way of charming him. The normally skeptical New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik was moved by her mentioning Jack to him in a dinner-table conversation, but she did that with lots of men. Yes, her husbands had caused her some pain, but they had also given her children, money, and scope to get started again once they were gone. She lived to tell the story and could certainly joke about them. Bill Barry remembered sitting one day in her office when she was telephoning Maurice Tempelsman to make an appointment. Tempelsman’s assistant answered the phone, and Jackie said, “May I speak with Mr. Onassis, please?” The assistant, knowing whom she really meant to speak to, briefly put Jackie on hold. While Barry looked on, Jackie took off her shoe and pretended to chew on it.

  However, it was no Freudian slip that Jackie also mentioned Tempelsman’s name in the opening paragraphs of her will, before she even got to the money and property she was leaving her children. In the first paragraphs, she named two Indian miniatures she wanted to leave to her friend Bunny Mellon. Next came Tempelsman, to whom she gave “my Greek alabaster head of a woman.” She would not deny her past with JFK, next to whom she chose to be buried, nor her marriage to Onassis, with whom she collected Greek ant
iquities. Tempelsman was a man who could comprehend all that, give her the ample space to be the woman she’d always wanted to be, and love her, too.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jackie often told friends and even casual acquaintances that her proudest achievement was having raised her children. Pete Hamill knew her well enough in the 1970s to become a warm semi-paternal friend to her son, John. Books, Hamill thought, would never cease to be written about Jackie. One of the most important things those books had to make clear—one of the most difficult things to dramatize without cliché—was that “she loved her children.” Many people scoffed when she first went to Viking, saying that she had no experience for the job. Her genius was to take what she had learned from being a mother and make it the foundation of her success as an editor. How she did it, how that late-in-life mothering led her to important new relationships and some beautiful books, is one of the best episodes in her life as an editor, and one that shows in a surprising way how much she had learned from bringing up Caroline and John.

  An editor becomes kind of your mother.

  LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS, REMEMBERING JACKIE

  In the mid-1960s, when she was still trying to recover from what had happened in ’63, she confessed to Harold Macmillan one of the strangest of her feelings about being a mother. She had been invited to go to England with John and Caroline in 1965 to inaugurate a memorial to JFK at Runnymede. Britain was paying him a significant tribute, because Runnymede was also where King John had signed the Magna Carta in 1215, a charter that limited his power, acknowledged the freedoms of his subjects, and established a precedent for the rule of constitutional law in the English-speaking world today. She told Macmillan she was pleased with the way the children had behaved at Runnymede, but she was also grateful to them, because they were, in her post-assassination slump, the only reason she had to keep living. She had tried not to think of JFK in order to concentrate on the children and raise them to be the sort of people he might have admired. “Probably I will be too intense and they will grow up to be awful,” she wrote. She worried about passing on her own depression to her children. She apologized to Macmillan for burdening him with her worries, but remarked that he was a useful substitute for writing a diary or undergoing psychotherapy.

  In another letter to Macmillan a few months later she said she had begun to feel a bit stronger and better. But there was still something oddly ragged about her feelings toward child rearing. Again she wrote of her delight at the children they were becoming, but she also said that “if they grow up to be all right—that will be my vengeance on the world.” She didn’t blame Lee Harvey Oswald or the Texan radical right, which had been fomenting hatred of JFK in advance of his visit there in 1963, but “the world” for Jack’s death and what she had been put through. She wanted revenge on the world and the world’s nonstop scrutiny of her life. Some of the energy that went into raising her children was not only understandable recuperation from a tragedy but also a more complex rage.

  Even before the assassination, Jackie sometimes teased her children in a way that sounds as if it were in the English tradition of being a bit cruel rather than the American way of giving unilateral approval. Arthur Schlesinger remembered coming upon Jackie with her two children in a corridor of the White House. She had recently taught Caroline to curtsey and John to bow. When they encountered Schlesinger, Caroline dutifully curtsied, and instead of bowing, John curtsied, too. Jackie said she thought this was “ominous,” and Schlesinger laughed. John, having overheard and understood the joke at his expense, complained that he had bowed rather than curtsied. Perhaps Jackie’s insistence on these correct, courtly forms related back to her mother, whose climb up the social ladder had been fairly steep, and whose insistence on correctness may have accompanied a feeling of social insecurity. Jackie’s wanting her own children to observe the forms is reflected in a photograph from Runnymede, which shows John Kennedy doing a proper bow by putting his head down as he reaches out to shake hands with Queen Elizabeth. For Jackie, teaching her son to behave correctly around royalty was as important as saluting his father’s casket. The 1960s were more formal days than today, but Jackie’s child rearing still had a European, Old World discipline about it.

  (photo credit 5.1)

  (photo credit 5.2)

  Jackie also passed on traits for which her children remained grateful. She was a reader, and she hoped to make them readers. Her daughter, Caroline, published a book in 2001 of the poetry her mother had taught her to appreciate. The cover illustration she chose was of Jackie reading to her as a young girl. A few years later, when there was another sale at Sotheby’s to auction off her mother’s belongings, Caroline put a memory of her mother in the sale catalogue. She explained the number of books in the auction by saying, “My strongest image is of my mother reading, whether on a winter afternoon in the city or a summer evening by the sea.” In 1968 Jackie commissioned a portrait from Aaron Shikler of her two children with books. Loving her children and loving books at the same time were the part of motherhood that came most naturally to her.

  The White House majordomo J. B. West said in his memoir of working with Jackie that he had the feeling that she was often “performing” her role as first lady, but that she was at her least self-conscious around her children. Nearly thirty years later, Bill Barry observed the same thing. When he was in public with her, she would hold herself in a way that suggested she knew she was being watched. Once, at a book party held in the New York Public Library, Barry watched Jackie as her son, John, arrived. For a moment, all the attention shifted away from her and John was in the spotlight. She was without envy and had a look of intense pride. “A lot of times in public she had a ‘face,’ but that was as natural a face as I’ve ever seen on her anywhere,” said Barry.

  There are relatively few surviving video images of Jackie interacting with her children, but two that do survive show the same thing. One is a campaign film aired in September 1960, in which Jackie is sitting with Caroline on her lap while JFK is making the pitch that he should be elected president. In the concluding frames Caroline points to her mother’s microphone and says, “What’s that?” The stilted smile Jackie has been giving the camera vanishes, and ignoring the millions of viewers for whom the film was being made, she turns to explain it to the single viewer she is holding in her arms. Another is a film of Jackie at John’s graduation from Brown in 1983. John is in a procession walking by the spot where Jackie is standing. “Hi, Mummy,” he says to her, and again her guard drops: she claps her hands together under her chin as if every wish she has ever had has been granted. Whatever the kinks in her own personality, some of which she had even before the death of her first husband, it’s clear that motherhood provided Jackie with some of her most sublime moments.

  You Probably Think This Song Is About You

  Doubleday under Steve Rubin was not a specialist in children’s books. When he came to head the company in 1990, he knew the children’s book business was an entirely different specialty within publishing from bringing out trade books, or wide-release nonfiction and novels. Books for kids were not a core part of Doubleday’s business, he decided. Children’s books were expensive to produce, because their illustrations were in color on glossy paper, and they could represent large losses if they did not sell well. That Jackie was allowed to publish children’s books was one of the privileges Doubleday extended to her; almost no other editor was permitted to combine books for adults and children on a list. Laughing at the semantic nicety with which he justified Jackie’s exceptional privilege, Rubin remembered, “She was allowed to do children’s books because we called them ‘books for children of all ages.’ ”

  Jackie’s interest in children’s books predated Rubin’s arrival at Doubleday. She had thought when she wrote her Vogue essay in 1950 that she would like to write books for children. Bringing up her own children had deepened her interest in the subject. However, she didn’t often claim privileges the other editors didn’t have, and the story of
how she came to do her first children’s book is more the story of her adopting a celebrity from the music world and championing her work than it is of asserting her authority.

  Herman Gollob is now retired from the publishing business. He went to Texas A&M, served in the air force in Korea, and after a career acquiring as well as editing other people’s books, he took an Oxford summer course for which he wrote a paper on The Merchant of Venice, then wrote his own book, called Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard. In the 1980s Gollob was an editor at Simon & Schuster. He was riding the train back to New York from Boston when a beautiful woman got on board and sat down in his car. He recognized her as Carly Simon, not only a nationally known recording artist but also the daughter of Richard Simon, cofounder of the company for which he worked. “I can’t sit on a train for four and a half hours and not say something to Carly Simon,” Gollob thought to himself. He overheard her talking to her traveling companion about a book she wanted to write. This was his opening. He went over and said, “I heard you talking about a book. I happen to be in publishing.” “What publisher?” Carly Simon asked. “Your daddy’s old company!” They laughed, and talked on the train for a long time. He suggested that she write a memoir of her father. They also discussed other people she might like to write about. “We had lunch two or three times,” Gollob said, and he recalled her saying, “I still love James [Taylor], but he’ll always be an addict and I can’t get back into that.” They were close to signature on a deal in which she would write her recollections of the important people in her life when Doubleday offered Gollob the position of editor in chief.