Reading Jackie Read online

  Nevertheless, by the mid-1980s Jackie had significant books in the pipeline which gave her the confidence to gather forward momentum in her career. Books often take a long time to make it into print. They frequently come in to the publisher as promising but half-baked ideas which the editor has to tease out, or as proposals, or as half-completed manuscripts, so it is hard to pinpoint exactly when Jackie could look back on what she had done and feel that she had accomplished something significant. There are groups of her books whose publication dates cluster from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s where it is clear that she was doing a good deal more than merely bringing in celebrities. Perhaps she left the business side to others, but there are certainly five significant kinds of books that emerge as landmarks of her publishing list.

  Making a List, Checking It Twice

  In reflecting on Jackie’s list, Nancy Tuckerman observed that she liked “things of a scholarly nature.” Jackie brought out a new edition of the Marquis de Custine’s famous nineteenth-century journal of his travels in Russia, and his notes on the Russian national character. Custine’s notes on Russian despotism showed the tragic, illiberal continuities between the tsarist and Soviet systems. Jackie also republished the rare diary of a French soldier on Napoleon’s march to and retreat from Moscow, unusual in providing the point of view not of the officer class but of the ordinary fighting man wearing poor boots, hungry, and cold. Jackie commissioned the memoirs of a distinguished art historian, John Pope-Hennessy, for many years the director of several of London’s top museums. She may not have been a PhD herself, but she had a certain genius in identifying scholarly subjects that might have crossover appeal to a broader audience.

  Another group consists of works of considerable prestige that brought the company some welcome publicity, and in some cases money, too. These included memoirs by Martha Graham and André Previn, as well as a trilogy of novels by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. In each case Jackie was the sole figure who had enough weight to bring the author to Doubleday. She made the personal connection that encouraged each author to sign the contract. Alberto Vitale, one-time CEO of the group of companies that included Doubleday, remembered that his initial collaboration with her on contacting Mahfouz led in time to the company’s acquisition of the rights to more than a dozen Mahfouz titles of considerable commercial value. Because Vitale has sometimes had a reputation in the publishing world for valuing cash over culture, this is a significant tribute to Jackie.

  The third group consists of works of particular artistry, beautifully produced books that were works of art in themselves. These include two books by Naveen Patnaik on India, one by the interior decorator Mark Hampton with his own watercolor sketches, and another by the photographer Toni Frissell, for which Jackie personally selected and arranged the photographs. These remarkably designed books justify Jackie’s claim to having achieved something tangible while working as part of a creative team, and working against the grain of Doubleday’s reputation for book design that “used to be quite bad,” as she herself put it. Particularly at the beginning of her career, she liked working on large-format illustrated books, such as Diana Vreeland’s Allure and Deborah Turbeville’s Unseen Versailles. “These are the books I most love to do,” she wrote in 1980. They can be dismissed as mere coffee-table books only by missing the fact that the images in them were as striking and unusual as she was. Although her list became more varied as her career lengthened, these illustrated books were certainly one of her trademarks.

  The fourth group consists of works of political passion. Among them is a book by Carl Elliott, the first recipient of the John F. Kennedy Library’s Profile in Courage Award. Elliott was a southern congressman who stood up for the rights of his impoverished constituents. His career ended in a political contest with the South’s most notorious racist, George Wallace. Jackie also championed a biography of Judge Frank Johnson, a civil rights hero of the 1960s, who was responsible for important decisions striking down segregation laws and forcing Wallace to permit Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Writers have often described Jackie as not interfering in White House politics, but her publishing record shows that she was deeply committed to some of the causes both JFK and Bobby Kennedy also cared about.

  The last group consists of bestsellers. By the late 1980s, Jackie already had three: a tell-all memoir by the ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, a first-ever book by Michael Jackson, and a book fashioned from television interviews conducted by Bill Moyers. Any editor lives and dies by the sales figures of books on her list. Jackie could show with these three authors that she had added significantly to the company’s bottom line, independently of her unquantifiable publicity value to Doubleday.

  Today when publishing professionals look over her list they point to its variety and eclecticism, its combination of arcane, highbrow interests, which were uniquely hers, and crowd-pleasers, which spoke to her instinct for sales. The British editor and author Ion Trewin said he was “amazed” at the range of high and low in it: her list went from an earnest tract by the town planner Raquel Ramati, How to Save Your Own Street, to a book on how to set the table in The New Tiffany Table Settings, from Mahfouz to Michael Jackson. People who rode on horseback with Jackie in the hunt country of Virginia were surprised at how competitive she could be. She did not necessarily have to win, but she wanted to compete with distinction. Similarly, Steve Rubin, the head of Doubleday during many of her most productive years there, recalled that “she hated to lose money.” He found that telling her a project she was enthusiastic about might lose money was a way of causing her to pause and think. Her list was put together out of this combination of considerations: subjects and authors that caught her fancy and a determination that she would not just be a spoiled socialite who always published books independent of commercial calculations.

  Her longtime assistant Bruce Tracy sometimes filtered the proposals that came across her desk. He reeled off a list of the subjects that would usually interest her: ballet and modern dance, India, French and Russian history, anything by Bill Moyers and others whom she had known from her days in Washington, design and interior decoration, and photography. Another editorial colleague, David Gernert, now a literary agent, described her list as “high culture and famous friends.” Steve Wasserman, one-time editor of the book review section of the Los Angeles Times, who briefly overlapped with Jackie when he was at Doubleday, characterized her list in a different way. He identified the concentration of works by dancers, on courtly life, on Hollywood, and on myth in her list. He thought that many of her books were about being the exotic bird in a gilded cage. The bird in the cage wishes to escape but makes its peace with being always on view. Her books are about the discipline, the rigor, the ritual it takes to perform in the gilded cage, as well as about the secrets that are not on view. He regarded the most significant theme in her list as the hard work that went into an effortless, stylized appearance. The theme in her list, Wasserman said, was also a theme of her life.

  Working Girl

  There are also themes in her daily office life that show us a side of Jackie that is unfamiliar. The single most repeated recollection of her as an editor has her down on the floor laying out photographs and illustrations to see how they look in sequence. It was something she had learned from Diana Vreeland, who liked to lay out a prospective issue of Vogue by placing the feature pages and advertisements on the floor along the office corridors and in conference rooms. In her interview with Publishers Weekly in 1993, Jackie said, “I want my books to look as beautiful as possible.” She took a larger role than many other editors not only in selecting the illustrations for the interior but in choosing the image for the cover. She showed Publishers Weekly the image that she had found for Edvard Radzinsky’s biography of Nicholas II, The Last Tsar, a gloomy picture of the former tsar sitting on a tree stump, seemingly aware of the horrible murder that the Soviet revolutionaries had in store for him. She compared it with the less moving image of the ent
ire Romanov family Ion Trewin chose for the English edition of the book, noting that that edition had not sold as well as Doubleday’s.

  Jackie did not regularly interfere with the work of Doubleday’s designers; rather, she encouraged them by enjoying and appreciating what they produced, and occasionally by buttering them up. Olivier Bernier went down to one designer’s office once with her in order to ask for wider margins and better paper on his next book. He watched the designer “melt” when she told the man, “I’m sure you’re just going to surpass yourself” on the design of Bernier’s book. Peter Kruzan, a designer whom she singled out for particular praise in her interview with Publishers Weekly, could remember only one time, though he worked with her on dozens of books, when she suggested a change to him. On Radzinsky’s Last Tsar he had proposed a baroque filigree around the border of the book’s cover. “Do you think it might be a little too fanciful for so sad a book?” she asked him. Kruzan recalled her delicacy in pointing this out to him: “She made it a question” rather than a change she wanted made. Her celebrity may have been a factor in persuading these designers to take the work in a direction she wanted, but above all she loved the books they worked on together and enjoyed being a part of the shared enterprise of putting them together.

  When Whitney Cookman came on as a senior creative director at Doubleday, he was surprised that Jackie never summoned him up to her office. Instead she phoned him up herself and asked if he had a minute so she could “lope on down” to see him. Cookman thought of her less as an editor and “more as a curator.” She “assembled a book as if it were an exhibition.” While working together on The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, they went to the New York Public Library to examine nineteenth-century illustrations. Cookman also thought Jackie was like a patron of the arts. Though she could not do all the layouts and design work herself, “she did love to be around those who could.”

  Marysarah Quinn was another designer whom Jackie admired. She was part of a new regime introduced by Nancy Evans, who when she became head of Doubleday decreed that the books should look better. Quinn was just a young woman in her twenties, but Jackie made a point of going to her office, welcoming her, and saying that she looked forward to the design department’s having its shackles removed. Jackie also felt that it was her job to introduce this new recruit to a senior designer who worked independently for Doubleday on occasion. She and Quinn got in a cab to go uptown to meet him. The women discovered that neither of them had enough cash to pay the taxi driver. As Quinn put it, “I was only twenty-five and had no money.” Neither did Jackie, because … “Well, because she was Jackie O.” They pooled the small change from the bottoms of their purses, paid the man what they had, and then got out early to walk the rest of the way. Quinn felt instinctively that it was her responsibility to guard Jackie as they walked up Broadway and was relieved when passersby only smiled at her.

  Quinn also recalled Jackie’s friendly rivalry with Nan Talese. Talese had acquired and edited The Hat Book, by the photographer Rodney Smith. Quinn had designed a large red grosgrain ribbon that tied across the cover of the book, an unusually expensive flourish. “How did she get to do that?” Jackie said as she held the book up enviously in her hands. The woman in the pillbox hat remained visually alert and tuned in to questions of book design throughout her publishing career. The nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater, who inspired Wilde and the other fin-de-siècle artists Jackie admired, observed that there was a point to enjoying art, poetry, and beauty in the world: it was to live always at a high pitch of intense artistic experience, “to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.” Whether she was stroking a grosgrain ribbon or selecting a picture of a deposed Romanov, Jackie also believed in that elevating, transfiguring effect of a book’s design.

  Of course, she did many of the humble things that all editors have to do. She held the hands of nervous authors while they produced their manuscripts. Elizabeth Crook was, like Quinn, a young woman for whom Jackie had a protective maternal instinct. Crook wrote two novels for Jackie. As she was writing the second one, Promised Lands, a historical novel set during the Texas war for independence from Mexico in the 1830s, she asked Jackie whether she would like to see each chapter as she wrote it or groups of chapters. Jackie replied that it was probably better to show her groups of chapters. “But if you need some hand holding through the forest,” she wrote, “you must do whatever makes you feel best.” When Ann Waldron, whom Jackie had commissioned to write a biography of Eudora Welty, asked whether she should send in research reports, Jackie replied, “I want to be the kind of editor that you want me to be.” She was a book geisha. She cultivated the art of charming and pleasing the people who wrote for her, trying to sense what they wanted from her so she could provide it and they would produce their best work.

  She got those who outranked her at Doubleday to approve money to offer authors as advance payments on royalties. She did this somewhat less often than other editors, but still she was involved. When Doubleday wanted to make an offer to Jackie’s friend and Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Carly Simon, Herman Gollob gave Jackie instructions on how to proceed. Gollob recalled, “We told her to offer $150,000, and go as high as $250,000 if necessary, but if it goes beyond that come back to us and we’ll discuss it.” Jackie talked to Simon’s lawyer. Then she went back to Gollob and said, “He took the one-fifty—what do we do now?” “We make a contract. Nice work, Jackie.” “But,” she said, “you told me we could go as high as two-fifty.” Gollob replied, “But only if he continued to bargain. He took the first offer.” She said, “Then we’re screwing Carly.” Gollob concluded in mock exasperation, “It was hard for her to understand the negotiating process.” She had to learn the job, like everyone else, and she did not like preventing her friend from earning the full amount the company had considered paying her.

  Stories like this are relatively few and far between. It seems that in later years, Shaye Areheart or the deputy publisher, Bill Barry, did a lot of negotiating for her. Barry, for example, was the person who discussed the amount of the advance with Radzinsky’s agent, Lynn Franklin, when it came to buying both The Last Tsar and a biography of Stalin that appeared after Jackie died.

  Sometimes, even when Jackie felt passionate about a project—about the autobiography of Judge Frank Johnson, for example—she was not able to get enough money to give the author the time off he needed to write the book. In fact, the book on Judge Johnson came into being only many years later when a journalist, Jack Bass, proposed writing about him. Judge Johnson, having had earlier contact with Jackie and suspecting that she was still interested, told Bass cryptically, “Jackie Onassis would like to edit this book”—an amazing revelation to Bass, who thought he might be writing what another editor had called merely “a regional book” on an obscure southern judge.

  Above all, Jackie’s job was to spot talent and acquire books. She was expected to be the hunter: to bring in big game in the way of high-profile names and celebrities. She did do some of this, as Michael Jackson, André Previn, Martha Graham, and Carly Simon all demonstrate. But it is perhaps more revealing to see the names that got away. She wanted to do something with Ken Burns, the producer of such famous PBS documentaries as his film on the Civil War, but never quite succeeded. She learned that the director and producer Oliver Stone had written some novels before his Hollywood success with the film Platoon in 1986. She asked if he would let her see them. He said, politely, no. Stone asked Jackie in turn whether she would come to the premiere of his new film, Wall Street. She also said no. Jackie asked General Norman Schwarzkopf to consider Doubleday for his memoirs at the height of his fame following the first Gulf War. He thanked her, but he took his project to a higher bidder. Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra, and George Cukor all eluded her.

  Rather, her usual sources for books were elsewhere. A number of books came to her via her contact with the Metropolitan Museum, the city’s main public art gallery, just across Fifth Avenue from her apartment. There was h
er work with Diana Vreeland, but also with the museum’s director, Thomas Hoving; with Leonid Tarassuk from the department of Arms and Armor; with the museum’s special curator of Islamic and Indian art, Stuart Cary Welch; and with Karl Katz, who headed up a division intended to take the museum’s collection to a broader audience via film and television. Another source of projects was the New York Public Library. She attended the library’s annual literary lions dinner, which honored prominent writers. She relied on the library’s special expert in Slavic studies, Edward Kasinec, who helped her with several of her books. Jackie also got ideas from the press. Some of her books originated in articles written for Rolling Stone, whose editor, Jann Wenner, was a friend. Others came from Vanity Fair, People, and the New York Times. She relied on contacts from the White House years, too, and in addition to her books with Bill Moyers, she published books with LBJ’s press aide Jack Valenti, who was on the plane back to Washington from Dallas in November 1963, when she was photographed next to the new president at his swearing-in, and with JFK’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall. Above all there was a small group of writers with whom she repeatedly published books, because she trusted them, admired them, and had fun working with them. In that group is the Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott, a Chicago writer who left the priesthood to teach psychology, Eugene Kennedy (no relation to her first husband’s family), and Tiffany’s design director, John Loring.