Reading Jackie Read online

  Long after Jackie tried to be a writer herself, she formed a deep friendship with a younger woman, Carly Simon, her neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard. They published four children’s books together, an unmistakable mark of Jackie’s confidence and admiration. As for Carly Simon, when invited to look back on those days, she recalled: “Jackie and my mother were the two most important women in my life.” She discovered that in writing two of her children’s books for Jackie, she had inadvertently revealed a terrible passage of her own childhood. Between the ages of six and fifteen she had a stammer that crippled her speech. Of all her family, only her mother understood how to help her. “She never finished my sentences. If I was having trouble finishing, she’d suggest that I tap my foot and sing it, even if it was only ‘Please pass the butter.’ ” When she reflected on these two books, she found to her surprise that both of them “had to do with me.” They were about finding music and ceasing to be mute, about a character rediscovering “her note” and so finding her voice too. “I hadn’t thought of that before,” Simon said, surprised at what had turned up in the conversation. Her children’s books with Jackie were a way of revealing a hurt she had had as a child and overcoming that hurt by turning it into song.

  Unpublished Papers

  A close examination of Jackie’s work turns up similar discoveries. In the fall of 1950, when she submitted her Prix de Paris application to Vogue, she was just twenty-one. In the essays for the magazine, at the very moment that she was making her bid for the editors’ attention, she cast herself as already reconciled to never being able to become a writer. She said she’d had dreams of locking herself up and turning out children’s books and New Yorker short stories, but her current ambition was to be a Condé Nast editor because her writing talent was not “pronounced enough.” Working on the magazine’s editorial staff, she maintained, would allow her to keep up with new ideas in the arts that excited her. Vogue in the 1940s and ’50s was a more serious magazine than it is today. It published all the heavyweights of the writing, fine art, and photography worlds. So for Jackie even to have made the first cut in the Prix de Paris competition, when there were as many as one thousand applicants from three hundred schools and when the magazine took its cultural criticism seriously, says a great deal about the talent she certainly had, even if she downplayed it. Applying to Vogue also speaks of ambition.

  Jackie famously remarked in her application to Vogue that the three men in history she would most like to have met were Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Serge Diaghilev. All three were artists who stood in defiance of the old Victorian convention that the purpose of art was to teach people morality. They all believed that rather than serving as a means to teach people how to behave well, art existed for its own sake. Art was valuable as pleasurable and aesthetic experience in its own right. Wilde was a playwright, Baudelaire a poet, and Diaghilev the ballet impresario who first put the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky on stage in a see-through leotard. Two were gay, two were dandies, and the older generation regarded all three as decadent. Compare this to what is known about Jackie’s father. A silk handkerchief came spilling out of his breast pocket. He wore two-toned shoes and unbuttoned suit-coat sleeves turned back to reveal his shirt cuffs. He lived beyond his means and preferred showing up on Long Island for the weekend in a convertible roadster to saving money for a rainy day. He lived above the rules that governed most people’s style and morality. Jackie’s tribute to men like Wilde, Baudelaire, and Diaghilev suggested that she saw in them the same elevation of style for style’s sake that she knew and loved in her father.

  It was daring for Jackie to play with gender stereotypes in those conservative postwar years under President Truman. A dandy is a feminized man, whose exaggerated attention to dress suggests a woman’s attitude to clothes. For her Vogue application, Jackie proposed that the magazine do a spread on women cross-dressing as men. She imagined an entire issue of the magazine dedicated to “nostalgia,” with women dressed in men’s outfits that recalled “the Directoire Dandy.” The Directory was an era in France when revolutionary violence was out and austere neoclassical decoration was in. That time’s most famous representative on the other side of the Channel was Beau Brummell, the man who pioneered the black dinner jacket. Jackie suggested that as a tribute to one of Brummell’s successors, who also made an art out of dressing up, “we all wear a green carnation,” just as Oscar Wilde had done. She also favored the sort of suit that her father might well have worn in the decade she was born: “a 1920s gigolo air, boxy tapering jacket with wide revers [lapels] … slim skirt, like the mannish suits shown by [French designer Jacques] Fath last fall.” Before she married and had children, her inspiration came from French and English history, from fin-de-siècle dance and literature, and from imagining a stylish gender-bending that was no longer immoral or decadent, only a bit mischievous.

  She showed a more cautious side of herself in a short story she submitted for a writing class she was taking in her senior year at George Washington. It’s about two young Americans, about her age, living in Florence, possibly as students or summer travelers. What might have been about the sexual initiation of two twenty-somethings swept away by a feeling of freedom at being so far away from home turns out to be about a young woman in love with language. They are going out for dinner. The girl asks the boy to teach her something in Italian, not “thank you” or “good morning” “but something really Italian.” He proposes a flirtatious proverb: “Come bello fare l’amore quando piove,” or “How beautiful it is to make love in the rain.” The girl says it over “slowly … And then faster. What a lovely Italian thought! I didn’t think it would be very beautiful to make love in the rain, but it was so pretty to say so.”

  After dinner they go for a walk and decide to cross the Arno at a treacherous point where the river runs deep. In order to get across, the boy has to hold the girl aloft, their bodies pressed together on a warm evening. She does not enjoy it. Neither does she like the physical contact, nor his naked feet underwater looking “like dead martyr’s feet in paintings,” nor the water rat they encounter on the other side. The story conveys her love of exotic European adventure and her love of language and the feel of it on her tongue rather than the prolonged contact with a boy. She enjoys learning the Italian phrase more than being carried in the boy’s arms.

  Sarah Bradford had a key insight on what the story says about Jackie. Bradford is the doyenne of British biographers, author of more than a dozen books, and Jackie’s most reliable biographer to date. The daughter of a brigadier and the wife of a viscount, Bradford knew Jackie’s social world from personal experience, and she observed that Jackie was always slightly uncomfortable with the sexual side of herself. Like Marietta Tree and Evangeline Bruce, other prominent women from posh backgrounds, Bradford thought that Jackie was always envious of Pamela Harriman, who had used her sexual appeal to land a succession of husbands from Randolph Churchill to Averell Harriman, and to influence presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton. Jackie thought she could never do what Pam did. In this story she wrote when she was twenty-two, Jackie revealed that sexual shyness, whether she intended to or not.

  There was a gap between the 1950s, when Jackie wrote these pieces, and the 1970s, when she tentatively started writing again, this time for publication. In the meantime she had married twice and raised two children, who were now old enough to be away at boarding school. Like many of the bright women who had come to adulthood in the postwar era and who had been raised mainly to be supporters of their husbands, she was faced with the difficulty of how to forge a career in her forties. In the early 1970s, when Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women were beginning to make feminism mainstream, it no longer seemed enough to be the keeper of a household and a mother to children. To launch any new career is difficult; to get started again when you are entering middle age is tougher still. The women of Jackie’s generation had not been trained for it. Many of them had begun college and never finished, when the work
of being a wife had greater urgency and cultural approval. Jackie had been among the first presidential wives ever to have finished college, but even her college career—Vassar, a Smith junior-year-abroad program in Paris, George Washington University—was a patchwork of spur-of-the-moment decisions rather than a plan to enter a profession. The majority of the first ladies who followed Lady Bird Johnson had some experience of higher education, and many of them completed degrees, but it is nevertheless interesting how recently in American history presidential wives have been expected to have educations that equal those of their husbands. Jackie was ahead of the curve in having been to college; she would be ahead of the curve in taking paid work beyond her mothering years too.

  Written for Publication

  In the 1970s, when marriage to Aristotle Onassis was neither occupying all her time nor fulfilling all her expectations, Jackie began to allow a few of her written pieces to appear in print. The first of these was a brief reminiscence of her friendship with Randolph Churchill. Sir Winston Churchill’s son was an arrogant and charming alcoholic who, because of his father, had met many of the famous personalities of the twentieth century. Randolph died in his fifties, having failed to fulfill his promise and having lived most of his life in his father’s shadow. Like many young people who lived through the Second World War, Jackie revered Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Counting both men’s sons among her friends was part of her way to have contact with some of the great events of the century. In 1971, a friend of Randolph’s, Kay Halle, put together a collection of memories, and among them was Jackie’s.

  She recalled a visit Randolph had made to Hyannis after JFK’s death and the impression he had made on her son, John. She remembered that Randolph didn’t alter himself to suit the little boy but was the same larger-than-life character who so entertained the adults. John was fascinated. Randolph later sent John all forty-nine volumes of his father’s collected writings in a tin trunk, as a gift. “John is always taking one out,” Jackie wrote, “and asking me what it is about.” It was important to her to pass on her own love of books to her children, and Randolph Churchill had assisted her in this. She noted that JFK had always been interested in Winston Churchill’s writings, too, and had had some of his volumes when he was a student at Harvard. Jackie thought that when John grew older, if “he finds in them what his father found in them—that would be this strange touching legacy of Randolph’s.”

  She identifies herself mainly in this short piece by her connection to men—to a prominent friend, to her former husband, to her son—but at least one passage shows her own talent for evoking a sense of place. When JFK was still alive, Randolph came to the White House to accept honorary citizenship of the United States on his father’s behalf. Both men were nervous lest they spoil a tribute to Sir Winston, of whom they both stood in awe. After the ceremony was over, when both men had spoken well and without mistakes and when most of the invited guests had gone, the president returned to the Oval Office. Jackie remembered it was “a spring day after rain, with the afternoon sun streaming into the Green Room.” A small group of friends had stayed behind to relax with Randolph. “We sat around a table … with glasses of warm champagne.” In that after-party glow, he was a genial man whose friends appreciated him not for being the son of his father but for who he was in spite of his faults.

  Jackie’s sister, Lee, though younger and less talented as a writer, still had influence on Jackie. In 1974 Lee persuaded her that it would be all right to publish a scrapbook they had made for their mother in 1951, when they had gone on a summer vacation to Europe together. Published as One Special Summer, the book features cartoons drawn by the girls and stories narrated in their distinctive separate handwritings about their adventures on the Continent when they were twenty-two and eighteen. Although they had written the book twenty years earlier, the fact that Jackie allowed Lee to publish it toward the end of her marriage to Onassis, who died the following year, suggests another of the ways in which she was trying out being a writer in the 1970s.

  That the sisters’ relationship could be difficult is evident early on in the book, when Jackie insists they go out to a party in Paris rather than spend the evening in their hotel. Lee moans, “Oh I don’t even want to go.” Jackie replies, “Don’t you ever want to meet fascinating people,” or did Lee just want to spend all her time with her “dreary little American friends”? Like most older children, Jackie could be a bit of a bully. At a very young age, she was also sure that more interesting people could be found in Paris than at home in Newport. Boys in Brooks Brothers shorts, content to spend their lives collecting dividends, did not interest her.

  Jackie could also be very funny. She wrote two waspish sections in which she makes fun of herself and her sister trying to flirt with boys they find abroad. Both times she satirizes her own certainty that the boys are likely to be better when they are found in France. On the first occasion they go in search of Paul de Ganay, the son of a marquis. They have met him before and they know him to be a cadet on army maneuvers in the countryside. They arrive at the maneuvers in their little car in the midst of munitions exploding like fireworks. Jackie writes: “I rolled up the windows to deflect shrapnel, crouched on the floor of the car and yelled ‘Come on Lee—You can make it if you really try!’ ” They drove into a clump of trees and “screeched to a stop at the feet of the 2 best looking officers this side of Paradise. They wore blue berets and had lovely gold cords twining underneath their arms. We tumbled out, patting our hair into place and inquired if anyone knew where we could find L’Aspirant de Ganay. The Lieutenant smiled. I had to put on my sunglasses to intercept the ardor of his glance.” The lieutenant blew his whistle, and in a few minutes de Ganay magically appeared, “trotting through the trees.” “ ‘Paul!’ we cried, and sprang for him. He recoiled and greeted us very formally. We were crushed. It would have been such fun to kiss him on both cheeks the way they do in newsreels. He stood there, a ramrod of agony and disapproval while we toed the ground nervously, wishing we had sweaters to cover up our strapless sun-dresses.” Jackie was making fun not only of the awkwardness of two forward American girls meeting this boy in full view of his commanding officer, but also of her mother, who had been prompting them in her letters to behave and to dress in a ladylike fashion while they were abroad.

  Jackie was also aware of the fun in her comeuppance at the hands of another boy they met, an American whom she called Ace. She and her sister were in Cannes. Ace proposed they go together to visit one of the casinos farther along the Riviera. “It took us an hour to drive there and all the way he [Ace] kept exploding: ‘Gee—do you realize we’re going to Monte Carlo! That glittering den of iniquity! The hangout of the Gay International Set, where Empires are won and lost nightly.’ We got there and at the end of the ballroom were three truck drivers playing poker and sucking wet cigars.” Still only in her early twenties, Jackie already suspected that the “Gay International Set” was not all it was cracked up to be, but it would take another twenty years for her to reach that conclusion via prolonged experience with Mediterranean yachts and smart society.

  Late in 1974, her sense that she had to do something to get a career off the ground grew. She began discussions with William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, about whether she might contribute to the magazine. Few people know that her preferred social set in New York included writers like Philip Roth, editors like Shawn and Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books, museum curators like Cornell Capa, and the New York Public Library’s president, Vartan Gregorian. One of the hazards of being Jackie O. was that influential people were willing to give her a great deal more rope to hang herself than a beginning writer would ordinarily be given. Shawn agreed that she might write a short piece for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town on the opening of a new museum of photography. She had known the new museum’s director, Cornell Capa, a long-haired Hungarian, since he had taken photographs of JFK for the 1960 campaign. Though she was at ease with Capa, for a
new writer to publish in that magazine was a bit like making a TV debut in prime-time. It was a frighteningly prominent place, with highly educated and critical readers, to try out one’s self-conscious sentences. The only protection she had was that in those days all contributions to the Talk of the Town were anonymous.

  (photo credit 2.1)

  The new International Center of Photography, she wrote in the magazine’s issue for January 13, 1975, was housed in a Fifth Avenue mansion once occupied by the Audubon Society. She described the house in a three-word sentence with surprising syntax: “Lovely it is.” She also made fun of the magazine’s convention whereby all writers referred to themselves as “we.” Cornell Capa and Karl Katz, an influential force in the ICP’s founding, were going to show her around. “Mr. Capa put one arm around Mr. Katz and the other around us, and began to steer us through.” European monarchs used the royal “we,” too, but no one could tell that this anonymous writer in the magazine was “America’s queen.” As in her unpublished work, however, she could not help but reveal a rather private side of herself in this short piece. She chose to give special emphasis to a slide show at the museum that had a voiceover by the famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I love life,” she quoted Cartier-Bresson as saying. “I love human beings. I hate people also … I enjoy shooting a picture, being present. It’s a way of saying, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’… And there’s no maybe.” Photography helped Cartier-Bresson overcome his shyness by his engagement with the subject of the picture. The New Yorker editors grasped that this was the point of Jackie’s piece and gave it the title “Being Present.” The question she had before her was whether writing such pieces for The New Yorker, fulfilling an ambition she had had ever since she was in her twenties, would help her overcome her shyness and be present in a new way as well.