Reading Jackie Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  The Jackie that no one knows is the one her colleagues remember sitting down on her office floor, cigarette clenched between her teeth, laying out illustrations for a book. “This very grand woman getting down on the office floor to arrange photographs, literally abasing herself,” was how her assistant Scott Moyers put it. Another colleague remembers hearing, while sitting at a desk outside her office, “Oy vey,” loud and low, in a deep voice. He went into her office to see if she was all right. He was surprised to find her down on the floor doing her filing. Jackie as a working editor was not the gossamer creation that she appears to be in many of her photographs. She was a down-to-earth woman who struggled with office politics, messy files, and authors who always wanted more four-color photographs than the higher-ups would pay for. The strange thing is that office life, far from tying her down, set her free. She went from being a shy celebrity recruit to a respected editor with a long list of books that were not only distinctively hers but that even today make publishing executives shake their heads in admiration of what she accomplished. Taste is not some evanescent thing that people are born with: Jackie acquired hers by sitting quietly in the presence of people who knew better than she did, by having the courage to say what she loved, and by making sacrifices in order to bring what she loved to life.

  I want to be the kind of editor you want me to be.

  JACKIE TO ONE OF HER WRITERS

  Jackie was given her chance to try out being an editor because she was a publisher’s chance for increased publicity, but she ended as an editor who had produced a number of commercial successes. Although she allowed her new employer to trumpet her employment and put her picture in the papers when she arrived at Viking, she ended by publishing most of her books silently, unheralded, and usually without the use of her name. Even today, a Jackie book is indistinguishable from the dozens of others produced at Viking and Doubleday in the same era, because many, perhaps the majority, of them do not have her name anywhere on them—not on the cover, not in the acknowledgments, nowhere. She wanted her books to succeed because something deserved to be said or shown, not because of her “celebrity”; even the word made her shiver with an instinctive dislike. How she did all this, and how the two decades after 1975 transformed her life, can be seen in the story of how she arrived at Viking in the first place and was forced to change jobs two years later. She then spent sixteen years at Doubleday, first very much in the shadow of editors who knew a lot more than she did but slowly emerging from that training period on the basis of book projects she took the initiative in selecting. It is a story that has her not only getting down on the floor but holding the hands of her authors, getting money for them, spotting talent, encouraging writers by showing interest in what they had done, and sometimes telling them no. She once remarked to Mabel Brandon, “Oh, Muffie, aren’t we lucky we work?” Jackie’s discovery in these years was that reading by herself in a corner, sailing on a yacht, and buying couture clothes in Paris were all a great deal less sustaining than going into the office and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.

  When Jackie and Lee had sought out the art historian Bernard Berenson in Italy during the summer of 1951, he had told them, “The only way to exist happily is to love your work.” Going to see Berenson, a distinguished intellectual and art dealer, when she was only twenty-two was among the first indications that Jackie was a good deal more than a shy debutante. She was at odds with her era, because in the 1950s and 1960s, “work” for most women was tending to husbands and households, getting married and raising children. Although Jackie had briefly had a job doing a column as a photographer for a Washington newspaper, she had never collected a salary for long or aimed at a career. Like many women of her generation, however, she began to think about work when her children gave signs of soon needing her less. Aristotle Onassis’s death in March 1975 gave her further reason to reorganize her life. She remarked to an acquaintance, “I have always lived through men … Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.”

  Though Dorothy Schiff had never persuaded Jackie to write a column for the Post, she had kept in touch with her. In 1975, after Onassis died, Schiff impulsively put a new proposal to her: Jackie should run for the Senate as a Democrat to unseat New York’s conservative senator James L. Buckley, brother of the right-wing ideologue William F. Buckley, Jr. Jackie played with the idea for a short while. Did Schiff think she could do the job on only three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—in Washington? Schiff told Jackie she thought four days a week was the minimum. Jackie’s question and the fact that she turned down Schiff’s idea after only one night to sleep on it show that the job she had just started at Viking was holding her interest. She had worked only three days a week when she was in the White House, spending long weekends either in Virginia or at Hyannis. She would keep to that same three-day-a-week schedule when she worked at Doubleday. It was not because she did not intend to work; the evidence is that she worked with authors in her apartment and at her summer houses. One of John’s friends wandered out onto the terrace of the Hyannis house one summer afternoon and was surprised to find his friend’s mother working on a manuscript instead of a tan. She was working on, in his words, “some language conundrum.” It didn’t really interest him, but he did note that she had an unusual grasp of language and that because of her, John had developed a surprisingly large vocabulary. Jackie knew that a person with her shyness around people could not stand more than three days a week of constant face time. New York was the center of the world she loved, and she was not about to give it up for a return to Washington, where she had been simply a political wife.

  Moreover, she had no intention of working nine to five. She later established a routine at Doubleday that was more like eight-thirty in the morning to twelve-thirty in the afternoon on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Then she was gone. She was also absent for about three months in the summer, when she was on Martha’s Vineyard. This was an enormous privilege, and it caused resentment, even though she could honestly say that she was on call in the afternoon and in the evening, at home and at the beach. She often met authors for editing sessions at 1040 Fifth Avenue, occasionally attended sales meetings on Long Island, traveled to California and Washington on book business, and lunched with a wide variety of people whose manuscripts she hoped to bring into the office. Nevertheless, she did not like being reminded that the three-day-a-week privilege extended to her was not extended to all, even to the most accomplished of her colleagues. One fellow editor of Jackie’s generation, who had been at school with some of her Kennedy in-laws, once spoke with Jackie about the number of books they worked on. The two had a little laugh together about how to fill out what seemed a pointless new Doubleday form. Jackie’s colleague remembered saying, “Oh, but of course you only work part-time.” It was a gaffe, and the mood changed abruptly. Jackie stiffened when she realized that her work was regarded as part-time. Her colleague backpedaled furiously. To speak of her privilege or her celebrity in her presence was one sure way of making Jackie angry, yet privilege and celebrity were also two of the reasons why she had been hired in the first place and, perhaps more revealingly, two of the subjects that she had most success exploring in her list. Understanding that contradiction and finding out how it animated her as well as sometimes causing friction with coworkers is the story of her life in the office at Viking and Doubleday.

  Shall We Tell Jackie?

  Thomas Guinzburg’s father had founded the Viking Press, and the business was still family owned when Jackie signed on in the fall of 1975. To one of her later authors, she recalled enjoying the fact that when in 1953 her sister, Lee, married Michael Canfield—the adoptive son of Cass Canfield, the head of the publishing house that has since become HarperCollins—she had new contact with writers. Going to Viking, she imagined hopefully, would be more of the same. When she accepted Guinzburg’s offer that she should be a consulting editor and join Viking in September 1975, her salary was $10,000 a ye
ar. This was not a huge investment: in the late 1970s, a full-time editor at a major publishing house would probably have been earning double that, though a beginner starting with as little experience as she had might have expected to be paid even less. Jackie posed next to Guinzburg for a photograph on her first day and looked happy with what she’d been offered.

  (photo credit 3.1)

  She spent two years at Viking, and though she was associated with only five or six books, she was immediately assigned to work on a book celebrating women’s role in the history of early America, Remember the Ladies. She was also working on biographies of Thomas Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemings and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, as well as In the Russian Style and Boris Zvorykin’s illustrated The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales. She recalled being involved with a book on the nineteenth-century photographer Mathew Brady’s photos of Abraham Lincoln. All this was interrupted in 1977 when Guinzburg decided to publish a novel by Jeffrey Archer, Shall We Tell the President? Archer was a British thriller writer, who served as a member of Parliament, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, and was admitted to the House of Lords before he was convicted of perjury and sent to jail. In the novel, a figure clearly modeled on Jackie’s brother-in-law Edward Kennedy is the target of an assassination attempt. It is unclear how much Jackie knew about the book when it was acquired. Doubleday editor Lisa Drew had told Jackie and Nancy Tuckerman at a lunch that she had turned down Archer’s proposal for Doubleday as she thought it was particularly unsavory trash, but that it had sold to Viking. This may well have been the first Jackie heard of it, and she approached Guinzburg for reassurance. According to Guinzburg, when Jackie was told it might be profitable for Viking, she decided she didn’t want to stand in the book’s way.

  However, when the novel was published, the influential critic John Leonard wrote as the last line of his review in the New York Times, “Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.” In comments to the Times, Guinzburg waffled about how much and when Jackie had been involved with the project. She always claimed that Guinzburg had acquired the book without consulting her. After Leonard’s review, and under pressure from the Kennedy family, she resigned from her job at Viking and released this statement: “Last spring when I was told about the book … I tried to separate my lives as a Viking employee and a Kennedy relative. But this fall, when it was suggested I had something to do with acquiring the book and that I was not distressed by its publication, I felt I had to resign.” Sixteen years later, when she agreed to a rare interview with Publishers Weekly, the magazine’s editor, John F. Baker, remarked, “It is clear that memories of the incident are still upsetting to her.” The truth of the matter is that Guinzburg probably got a little greedy. For a long time afterward, Jackie told her friends that she had not forgiven Guinzburg for what happened. Guinzburg had probably given her some advance warning of the book, but she had not anticipated that Leonard’s review would blame her, or the wrath of her former husband’s family. She got caught between her own publicity value to Viking, on the one hand, and the Kennedy family, on the other.

  Once in a Lincoln Town Car going down to the Morgan Library after lunch with one of her favorite authors, Olivier Bernier, Jackie confided, “You know, in the 1960s dealing with the Kennedys wasn’t easy.” Bernier remembered that she said this as they passed Grand Central. It surprised him, because it was not the sort of thing she usually discussed and he would not have dared to raise it with her himself. “I’m sure it wasn’t,” he replied neutrally. “I’ll tell you about it sometime,” she said. She never raised it again. Dealing with the Kennedys in the 1970s was not always easy either, and the Viking episode was one way in which the sleeping volcano of her old life could still occasionally erupt to destroy her new one. Guinzburg did not have a happy ending either. He sold his family firm to Penguin, and the new company summarily fired him the next year.

  A Rare Bird in a Common Nest

  In the autumn of 1977 Jackie found herself again without a job, but she had had a taste of a world she liked very much. Dorothy Schiff recalled of Jackie that year that “she had never been so happy, and I must say she looked it.” The famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who often worked for Life magazine, took her picture for Viking on her first day in the office. He said she resembled “a kid straight out of college,” younger-looking than he had ever seen her before, “all excited about her first job.” One more fringe benefit, Jackie confessed to Schiff, was that her fourteen-year-old son found her more interesting after she went to Viking. She was not about to give that up.

  Much of her work at Viking had been with Bryan Holme and the Studio Books division, which specialized in large-format illustrated books. Jackie was friends with the ballet critic Francis Mason when he was also the assistant director of the Morgan Library. She asked Mason to introduce her at some small publishing firms that specialized in illustrated and art books. They went downtown several times for a number of informational interviews. That is why Mason was “shocked” when a few months later, early in 1978, Jackie took a job as an associate editor with Doubleday. In the era after the Second World War, Doubleday was the biggest publisher in the world, known for producing poor-quality books for a middlebrow readership via the Doubleday book clubs. Doubleday did not specialize in the sort of illustrated book Jackie loved. The company had also acquired a bad reputation in the industry for having tried to suppress Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel Sister Carrie because the owner’s wife objected to the heroine’s adultery. Edna Ferber, a Pulitzer Prize winner, once remarked that the main achievement of the founder’s son Nelson Doubleday, was “devising schemes for putting books in the hands of the un-bookish.” In Jackie’s era, the grandson of the firm’s founder, Nelson Doubleday, Jr., preferred baseball to books. His father once remarked, “I sell books, I don’t read them.” In the publishing world, Doubleday books were known for being physically ugly, at their worst looking like “rubber stamped on newspaper.” It is hard to imagine Jackie going to a publisher more at odds with her own personal style.

  Nevertheless, what counted more with her was that Nancy Tuckerman was doing some work there for Nelson Doubleday, Jr. She was a built-in safety net, someone to whom any problems at the company could always be submitted first. Another mark in favor of the firm was Jackie’s friend John Sargent, the president, who was married to Nelson Doubleday’s sister. Sargent asked Tuckerman whether she would object to having Jackie join the firm. When Sargent asked Jackie why she had selected Doubleday when she could have gone anywhere, she replied, teasing her old friend a little, “Why, Nancy’s having such fun there.”

  Early in 1978 Jackie joined Doubleday and was assigned a windowless cubicle, the sort of office that most assistants had. Immediately Nelson Doubleday came to call on her and in a friendly way proposed that the company should find some artwork for her cubicle walls. “I don’t need any artwork,” Jackie answered. “I like my office as it is.” Jackie’s main work was not with the grandson of the company founder but with a series of skilled younger editors who made it their job to show her what they were doing, to teach her what they knew, and to provide major assistance with the practicalities of book publishing. Among them was a cadre of younger women, such as Lindy Hess, Lisa Drew, and Shaye Areheart, who provided a loyal and protective phalanx around Jackie. Of course, following the Viking debacle, Doubleday was anxious to assure Jackie the utmost privacy. It was an unspoken rule that no one should speak about her, and the company undertook not to publish anything remotely connected to Jackie’s life or to the Kennedy family. Jackie also had an expert way of her own to line up protection. She had a way of seeming to confide in some of her coworkers that made them anxious and willing to protect her. Scott Moyers remembered, “She immediately brought you into a sense of complicity with her. She managed, without being overt about it, to make you feel protective of her privacy, make you shield the outside world.” The young Texan novelist Elizabeth Crook also thought that
Jackie had silently reposed a large trust in her. Jackie trusted her, for example, not to ask her anything remotely connected to her fame or private life: “I felt that in a small, implicit way I had been enlisted as another guardian of Camelot.”

  Jackie had a slow start at Doubleday. Although her combined list at Viking and Doubleday would later grow to include nearly a hundred books, those books are concentrated in the period after the mid-1980s. In the ten years up to and including 1985, she was connected with the publication of about twenty-five or twenty-six books. She was not solely responsible for all of them. On some projects she helped to acquire the book, while colleagues did the technical work of bringing it to press. Or she merely assisted other editors with projects they had acquired. In the ten years after 1986 she was connected with almost seventy books, and with the majority of these she took some significant share in the work herself.

  Sandy Richardson, a Doubleday editor in chief during Jackie’s time there, saw her as not accomplishing very much early on but confirmed that she began to do a lot better later in her career. He characterized her job objective as bringing in books by other celebrities, and he noted that she continued to take on visual projects that seemed like a continuation of her time at Viking. Herman Gollob, another editor in chief, thought Jackie lacked business smarts. Her books had small print runs and seldom had a major impact on the culture. He conceded that she was of public relations value to the firm and that she was a magnet of some note for authors who wrote books of which the company was proud. Not understanding the business side of publishing, though, was “a major flaw in an editor,” said Gollob.