Reading Jackie Read online

  The year 1975 was among the most significant years of her life. Not only had she successfully written this short piece for America’s foremost literary magazine, but Onassis died, freeing her at last to take up a career. In the autumn of that year she joined Viking. She traveled to Russia to do research for In the Russian Style and to encourage the Russians to be more forthcoming with Vreeland’s requests for loans of historic dress. She commissioned an expert, Audrey Kennett, to write a historical introduction to the book, but Jackie chose the pictures, composed captions, and wrote short introductory sections for each chapter. Once again she displayed her talent as a writer, at the same time revealing herself in the elements of Russian history she chose to emphasize. For example, here is the writerly Jackie introducing the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century tsar Peter the Great: “A huge man six feet seven inches tall, cruel, crude, and devoted to Russia, Peter was a contradictory figure.” She manages alliteration (“cruel” followed by “crude”) as well as a surprising reversal of direction in midsentence (“devoted to Russia”), when the reader least expects it. Here, too, is Jackie identifying with that portion of Russian history which she most aspired to emulate: while only seven books a year had been published under Peter’s reign, she pointed out, eight thousand were published under Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.

  Moreover, mindful of criticisms from the Kennedy family, from Onassis when he was alive, and from a hostile press—that she was unduly extravagant, likely to plunk down $60,000 for a snuffbox from her favorite antiques and jewelry shop, Manhattan’s A La Vieille Russie—she filled the book with historical illustrations drawn from the archives of the store. “This is who I am, and who I want to be,” she seemed to be saying. “Take it or leave it.”

  The problem with publishing a book and putting your name on the cover is that it invites criticism. Detractors can take potshots at you in public journals. As a good deal of ego tends to be invested in a writer’s work, that criticism can hurt. Jackie was shocked to find that a prominent intellectual, a Russian composer now living in the United States and a man whom she considered a friend, Nicolas Nabokov, was willing to attack her book in the New York Review of Books. Nabokov said that her book was filled with inaccuracies and sloppy history. It was the work of a dilettante, not a professional historian. He ended his review with a line aimed directly at Jackie: “Beware of well-meaning but muddle-headed amateurs, however illustrious their names may be.” If writing her first piece in The New Yorker was an unusual privilege, being attacked in the New York Review of Books, a journal of record for the American intelligentsia, was a very public flaying. Even though her friend Leonid Tarassuk, a senior research associate in the department of Arms and Armor at the Met, came to her defense and published a number of letters in succeeding issues that took aim at Nabokov’s points, she still felt humiliated in a new and uncomfortable way.

  Jackie had been taught from before she was ten that when she was thrown from her horse, she had to get back on and keep going. So once again she followed Diana Vreeland, writing a piece for an exhibition catalogue to accompany a new show at the Costume Institute. The exhibition, entitled Vanity Fair, was Vreeland’s answer to the seventeenth-century Puritan attack on vanity written by John Bunyan. Jackie’s accompanying essay, “A Visit to the High Priestess of Vanity Fair,” a tribute to her mentor in the shape of an interview with Vreeland, appeared in 1977. The essay is unparalleled not only because of its writing, but also because it is the only place Jackie ever appeared in print explaining why she cared about clothes.

  In the essay, Jackie writes of following Vreeland around on a personal tour of an exhibition mainly of the fine craftsmanship that went into women’s historical dress. She begins her essay by choosing two unusual metaphors. Vreeland was “whippet boned” and looked “like a high priestess, which in a way she is, and her temple is on the ground floor of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Here was Jackie’s teacher, resembling both an elegant animal and the celebrant of a sacred rite. Jackie quoted Vreeland’s explanation of why women ought not to be ashamed of dressing up. “Do not be too hard on vanity,” Vreeland said. “Some may think it vain to look into a mirror, but I consider it an identification of self.” She observed further, “The feel of a perfect piece of silk to a woman is a very exciting thing. It’s the greatest projection of pleasure. And what’s wrong with pleasure?” For Vreeland, fashion was also about the exquisite craftsmanship of women’s clothes, itself an art, not inferior to painting or writing or photography. It was important for women of means to sustain this art; otherwise the knowledge of the craftsmen—the sewing, the cutting, and the intricate beadwork—would die out. To wear a beautifully intricate dress was to keep that knowledge alive, and it was also about a kind of hedonism in which women ought to indulge from time to time. As if to cap off her praise of the vanity Bunyan would have regarded as sinful, Vreeland remarked of a daring dress that Pauline de Rothschild wore to a Parisian ball in 1966, “Nothing is illegal in France, as we know.” Jackie had indeed known what it was like to be young in Paris, and it was for some of the same reasons that her mother had called her home and forbidden her to accept the Vogue internship in Paris when it was awarded to her.

  Jackie took Vreeland’s lesson and put it into words she chose herself. She discovered an anonymous verse found on an ancient Egyptian papyrus, probably part of the inscription at a burial place of the pharaohs. The tombs and chapels of famous men are all temporary, says the verse. They crumble and fall, just as people do. That is why you should “follow your desire while you live,” and “increase your beauty,” because “no one goes away and then comes back.”

  The verse Jackie quoted is similar, both in sentiment and in the eastern Mediterranean geography of its origins, to the Cavafy verse her friend Maurice Tempelsman quoted at her memorial service. That poem wishes that the traveler will have “many summer mornings when

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

  may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

  to buy fine things,

  mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

  sensual perfume of every kind—

  as many sensual perfumes as you can;

  and may you visit many Egyptian cities

  to learn and go on learning from their scholars.”

  Tempelsman was reiterating a point Jackie had made long before in her essay on Diana Vreeland, on which the two of them were in warm agreement.

  In writing this piece, Jackie learned something else. To collect and commission beautiful things—whether beautiful dresses or beautiful books—was itself a form of creation, of worthwhile knowledge, because it stimulated the work of other artists. Sartorial connoisseurship is a stimulus to creation in fashion. Editorial connoisseurship stimulates the production with pen and ink of the work of others. She showed with her metaphors and her quotations from obscure but illuminating sources that she had a writer’s talent, but it was not necessary to write herself to participate in the creative process. This is evident from another work that appeared in the next year.

  Jackie’s travel to Russia for In the Russian Style had piqued her interest in Russian clothes, Russian history, and the Russian visual arts. In the 1970s she also met Andreas Brown, the proprietor of the Gotham Book Mart, where she set up charge accounts for herself and her children. Brown showed her some rare books illustrated by Boris Zvorykin, a Russian artist and illustrator who had been in the circle of Diaghilev and Stravinsky before he emigrated to Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917. At Viking, Jackie brought out a new edition of Zvorykin’s illustrations, The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales. Later in her publishing career she would seldom do what she did with this Zvorykin edition, which was to write the introduction. Zvorykin had had to start all over in Paris. He had presented this collection of folktales with illustrations to his publisher, Louis Fricotelle, as “a gift of gratitude for a new
life, celebrating all he valued and missed in the old.” The artistic circle around Diaghilev had fascinated Jackie when she was applying for the Vogue prize in the 1950s. Twenty years later, it was as if she were fulfilling the dream she had had then of doing something to educate herself and disseminate the genius of those turn-of-the-century Russian artists.

  The last of her written works from the 1970s was an introduction to a collection of photographs of the famed French photographer Eugène Atget. One of Jackie’s editorial choices was to emphasize photographs of royal parks and palace gardens. This was a passion that had been present in the White House and would resurface later in her editorial career. The tabloid press and one of her biographers called her “America’s queen,” not always in admiration. Nevertheless, she embraced that title by showing her interest in what European historians call “court studies”: the history of the costumes, architecture, and customs of kings after the fall of the Roman Empire. The black-and-white photographs in the Atget book captured Bourbon palace gardens at Versailles, Sceaux, St. Cloud, and the Tuileries.

  In writing about the vanished grandeur of the French royal court in her introduction, Jackie noted that the avenues, axes, and vistas laid out in the seventeenth century were often still extant today: “The royal vision lingers wherever the antique lines they imposed long ago on the landscape still survive, despite all the vicissitudes of time.” She acknowledges with regret that middle-class people now occupy the spaces once designed for kings. Atget was photographing royal gardens in the early twentieth century, when many of them had become public parks. For example, “In the Luxembourg,” Jackie wrote, “the fountain has become a family gathering place. We find these photographs troubling because we can connect to them. The time is bourgeois here, and our grandfathers sit in black serge suits along the paths laid out by kings and queens.” Her father’s family, the Bouviers, had originally come from France, and it unsettled her to see bankers and cabinet-makers seated with such ease around a royal fountain. Some of Atget’s photos reminded her of “a wild Greek island with terme and tree torn by wind.”

  Still, what impressed her most was the beauty of the photographs. Atget had been successful in preserving memories of these distinctive spaces in the art of his photography. Jackie quoted a member of the French Academy, Georges Duhamel, as saying, “In the present disorder of the world, to conserve is to create.” This is what Atget had achieved: his act was a double act of creation, for not only had he taken beautiful photographs, he had created something new by conserving and preserving the genius of these crumbling royal gardens. Jackie also quoted Edith Wharton, who was, like Jackie, an American who lived as an expatriate in France for many years: “Of the art of France, Edith Wharton said that we had only to look around us and ‘see that the whole world is full of her spilt glory.’ ” In this piece Jackie showed that she had ability to be the writer she sometimes dreamed of being, quoting widely from dissimilar experts, making daring passes at telling her own life story, and using the alliteration of her remembered Greek island’s “terme” and “tree.”

  Something else was happening in her writing of the Atget introduction, however. What may well have dawned on her was that what most attracted her was not textual but visual material—a Russian costume, a turn-of-the-century illustration, a photograph of a royal garden. For a shy woman who wished to control as much as she could of what the world learned about her, it was maybe too bold to start a discussion in her own words of the Bouviers and of what she recollected of Greek geography. If “to conserve is to create,” if to recognize and give shape to the artistry of another is itself a form of artistry, perhaps her safest and most fulfilling role could be as an editor, to choose what was brilliant in the work of others rather than to be a writer herself. This, too, was a form of creation.

  Fading into the Background

  In the 1980s, Jackie’s published writings came to an abrupt halt. She wrote only three short pieces, all briefer than her works of the 1970s, all to advance specific projects she cared about, and spent more of her time learning to be an editor who faded, unacknowledged, into the background. Acknowledgment was not what she craved anyway; what she wanted was to be a part of the creative process.

  The three brief pieces she did allow into print in the 1980s are nevertheless just as expressive of her personality and her passions as the work she had already published. She wrote a foreword to accompany Grand Central Terminal, a catalogue published by New York’s Municipal Art Society to accompany a traveling exhibition. Jackie had played an important role in standing with preservationists who saved the Grand Central building from destruction. Two bankrupt railroads had proposed to improve their balance sheets by tearing it down and building an office tower. The 1963 destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station and its replacement by the present Penn Station in a dirty basement underneath Madison Square Garden can give an idea of what might have happened to Grand Central. Jackie was justly proud of her role in saving Grand Central. She began her foreword with a flourish. The writer James Agee had collaborated with the photographer Walker Evans to expose rural poverty in the American South during the Depression in their crusading book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Jackie wrote of her crusade, “Let us now praise Grand Central Station.”

  She rued the loss of the old Penn Station. She argued that “old buildings are a precious part of our heritage, and … we cripple ourselves if we destroy them.” History had to be our guide when we sought what was valuable in great architecture. If we value only what is modern, we will have lost wisdom about architecture that our ancestors had. “Great civilizations of the past recognized that their citizens had aesthetic needs, that great architecture gave nobility and respite to their daily lives.” To preserve Grand Central, to republish Atget’s photographs, to restore the White House to the Monroe era of its original construction, was to point out the magnificence that was open to all if they were to step into the structures built in the past.

  Preservation of the rural countryside is the theme of another of Jackie’s short pieces from the 1980s. Marshall Hawkins was a photographer known for his work documenting the rural hunts she had participated in on horseback since she was a child. Hawkins had taken a famous picture of her falling off her horse in Virginia when she was first lady. In fact, Hawkins had startled her horse and was partially responsible for her fall. Jackie had asked JFK to prevent Hawkins’s photo from being published. The president had responded, “When the first lady falls on her ass, that’s news,” and had allowed the photograph to be printed over her objections. More than twenty years later, when she was asked to write the foreword to a group of Hawkins’s photographs, she showed no particular resentment over the earlier incident. What she recognized was a much more urgent problem: “The inexorable press of modern development has steadfastly reduced the perimeters of our natural environment, not just for horsemen, but for nature-lovers all. Everywhere we look, we are reminded of the countryside which once was, and we wish for earlier times.” Hawkins’s photographs are less impressive as images of a lucky few who own horses and riding coats than they are of a vanished countryside. But once again she sounded the elegiac note. Hawkins’s subjects—and she included herself here, because there is the photo of her being thrown as well as a shot of her getting up afterward, uninjured—valued these images as “intensely felt, vanished moments now fixed forever.” Many of Jackie’s written pieces expose this side of her personality: her nostalgia for vanished grandeur, whether in the built or the natural environment, whether in beautiful clothes or in royal gardens. She was nostalgic not for a simpler world, but for one that was more elaborate, more formal, and more hierarchical.

  The last of her published pieces, one that had appeared in 1988, is a brief foreword of no more than a few lines to Michael Jackson’s memoir Moonwalk. She says much by saying little. It was not a project she particularly enjoyed. It was a book she felt she had to do for the company’s bottom line, and as everyone expected, it was a bestseller. Jack
ie felt she ought not to say very much, as it would have been dishonest to praise Jackson effusively. Jackson and his representatives had pressed her to write a foreword, and she wrote one, asking, “What can one say about Michael Jackson?” as if with an ironic wink.

  What she learned in the interim period, mainly in the 1970s, when she published works under her own name, was that she need not be a writer herself in order to assist at the creation of the work of other artists. Jackie’s friend Jane Hitchcock modeled a character on Jackie, Clara Wilman, in a novel she wrote after Jackie died called Social Crimes. The narrator of the novel looks up to Clara Wilman, just as Hitchcock had intensely admired Jackie. Hitchcock put words into Clara Wilman’s mouth that Hitchcock acknowledges having heard from Jackie first: “The secret is not so much knowing how to do it yourself—it’s knowing whom to choose.”

  Jackie had remarked to Dorothy Schiff that she thought she was not a bad writer herself, but it took her a long time to write anything. She said it was “agony.” It was also pretty painful to be taken to task for the “shabbiness” of her work by Nicolas Nabokov in the pages of the New York Review of Books. In later life she would publicly go to bat for her authors’ books and stand up to defend them against criticism, but this was a personal and painful experience that she cannot have wanted to repeat. Jackie adored stylish things—beaded jackets, formal parterres, marbled concourses—but in these published works she also showed that she could produce a stylish sentence herself. One part of herself revealed in writing was that she valued flourish and swagger and poise not as marginal extras but as things worth having in their own right. Of Atget’s photographs, she concluded, “His conquest of us [his viewers], like that of his own visible world, [is] complete.” Having learned that lesson, she moved into the background of her books, allowing her authors to have pride of place, but with no less ambition to achieve complete conquest of us as her readers.