Greg Lawrence

Jackie in the offices of Viking Press, January, 1977. (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Introduction

Jackie’s Secret Garden

“If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life.” – JKO

Norman Mailer once called her "the Prisoner of Celebrity," aptly characterizing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the ultimate object of media-mythmaking; but Mailer was unaware that by the time he wrote those words in 1983, the world’s most famous woman had already masterminded what was to be her escape from the constraints of fame. After two chapters of Jackie’s life had been defined by two extraordinary men, after she had been venerated by the world as the widowed First Lady and then vilified for marrying the unworthy Greek, after being portrayed as an extravagant, gold-digging spendthrift in the thrall of jewelry and couture fashion, she was going to find fulfillment on her own terms, and she would do so for the most part comfortably outside the media glare and public awareness.

Whatever else she may have been during her storied lifetime – tragic heroine, elusive sphinx, reluctant icon – Jackie also distinguished herself as an intensely dedicated career woman who left behind a wondrous legacy of books. While Mailer described her as “a princess lighted by a million flashbulbs," he underestimated how artfully Jackie had arranged her private and public lives, an instinctual survival strategy she perfected over time that would ultimately enable her to accomplish her own liberation. Jackie found a professional sanctuary in the world of publishing that was virtually unassailable, even for the paparazzi who staked out her office and boorishly delighted in stalking her.

Jackie’s literary bequest has been all but hidden in plain sight since her death, even with a sensational Sotheby’s auction that included much of her enormous personal library, because Jackie rarely allowed herself to be credited for her work as editor. Her name appears on the covers of just a scant few of the titles that she published, only occasionally turning up buried in her grateful authors’ acknowledgments. Yet Jackie’s books, along with her personal writings, are perhaps the best window we will ever have into her heart and endlessly inquiring mind.

In the aftermath of Aristotle Onassis’s death, despite the obstacles and intrusive indignities of celebrity, Jackie managed to transform her public image – what she once dismissed as “a little cartoon that runs along the bottom of your life ... one that doesn’t have much to do with your life.” By devoting herself to her career and role as mother, while carrying on with her commitments to the arts, the preservation of historic landmarks and JFK’s memory, she reinvented herself, adopting a more reserved style, while at times displaying the panache of a postmodern saloniste.

Contrary to the Greta Garbo mystique with which she was identified, Jackie was never reclusive. She possessed a grand spirit of adventure and harbored a sense of irony about life that served as a kind of armor, whether jogging in her beloved Central Park, mingling in society, or pursuing quixotic book projects that would take her all over the world. Determined to define herself by her actions, she was well aware her every move would be scrutinized. During the last two decades of her life, photographs of her on horseback at shows in Virginia and New Jersey began to replace reports of indulgent shopping sprees and lunches at Orsini’s and La Cote Basque. The public sightings eventually included her entrances and exits at the publishing houses where she worked. She was more likely to be seen visiting the New York Public Library rather than attending glitzy parties or traditional society events. There were many nights when she dined at home with her kids, who she often described as the most important responsibility in her life, and then spent the rest of the evening diligently at work in her library.

A savvy witness to the last century’s golden age of publishing as it gave way during her career to megaconglomerates and rampant commercialism, Jackie managed to create an impressive body of work, shepherding more than one hundred titles, despite the undermining corporate culture of at least one of the two publishing houses that employed her. As the bottom line exigencies of marketing triumphed over the traditional domain of editorial discretion and power, she championed books that were dear to heart and fought fiercely for them. She recruited her own private army, enlisting her authors and collaborators as guardians of Camelot, as it were—that lofty Arthurian conceit, which she suggested to historian Theodore H. White for his JFK eulogy that appeared in Life magazine after the tragedy in Dallas. Although Jackie was exercising poetic license with her reading of history, she quietly continued to nurture the concept of Camelot through the books she helped create, with many of them hearkening back to themes from her White House years.

By design, Jackie’s editorial efforts were to be anonymous. Regardless of how much work she did on a manuscript, she was old school and adhered faithfully to the self-effacing credo espoused by the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins: “The book belongs to the author.” She was part of that tradition of editors who established relationships with their authors that went beyond the formalities of collaboration and commerce. In a publishing world that no longer exists, these editorial stewards of an earlier generation took an interest in the lives of their writers and established lifelong friendships with them, which meant more than simply breaking bread or lending them money when they were in need. Like Perkins, Jackie held fast to the belief that there could be nothing more important than books, and she revered their creators.

A former publisher of Rolling Stone, New York and New West magazines, Joe Armstrong was a trusted friend of Jackie’s during her later years and recounted a telling moment with her. “I remember being with her at the Vineyard the last summer she was there. She had just had turned 64. I remember in her living room she had all these books, and she said, ‘These are my other best friends.’”

Extreme modesty as much as natural shyness contributed to her much publicized penchant for privacy. As an editor, Jackie displayed a playful mastery of the publishing arena, while acting as advocate for her authors. Her writers and books were the means through which she would express by proxy her ideals in the world of belles lettres, ideals she forged in the personal and historical realities of her own past, even as it was transformed into myth before her eyes.

Jackie, like most of us, had her share of idiosyncrasies, foibles, and character flaws, and there was to be contention along the way with some of her authors and colleagues. But after committing a personal affront or gaffe, she was humble enough to offer apologies, often with flowers and handwritten notes. It should come as no surprise that, as she was an immensely coveted figure in the social marketplace, people would attempt to take advantage of her, and at times she felt compelled to banish some erstwhile friends and collaborators from her world. Anyone who betrayed her confidence to the press was to be “thrown out of the palace,” as she put it to one of her colleagues. It wasn’t so much ego that led her to cut ties as the insecurities and emotional burdens she carried with her. Having to inure herself to a past that had been devoured by the first television generation was no easy feat. Jackie’s step-cousin, the esteemed author Louis Auchincloss, put it simply: “It's very hard to be the most famous woman in the world.”

Referring to Jackie's early career as editor, Gloria Steinem asked on the cover of Ms. Magazine in March of 1979, "Why Does This Woman Work?" Jackie provided clues in what was to be, aside from a few cryptic public utterances, her last interview for nearly fifteen years. She recalled, “I remember a taxi driver who said, ‘Lady, you work and you don’t have to?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He turned around and said, ‘I think that’s great!’” With touching eloquence, she went on to describe the reasoning that led her to resume a career in midlife, at the age of 46. “What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown – watch the raindrops coming down the window pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised? Of course women should work if they want to. You have to do something you enjoy. That is the definition of happiness: ‘complete use of one’s faculties along the lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.’ It applies to women as well as to men.”

The quotation Jackie cited was one that JFK also cited on occasion, with various translated formulations attributed to Aristotle and Epictetus (without pinning it down, Edith Hamilton identified the passage simply as “an old Greek definition of happiness”). Steinem applauded Jackie’s break with her past and those domineering men she had endured. “Given the options of using Kennedy power or living the international lifestyle of an Onassis, how many of us would have chosen to return to our own talents, and less spectacular careers?” Jackie herself confided to a friend at the time, “I have always lived through men. Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.”

Jackie’s books would afford her the perfect venue and visionary scope to achieve a discreetly understated measure of excellence in her chosen field. Steinem told me, “As for why she chose to be an editor as opposed to some other profession, I think it's quite simple: She loved books. They were windows into hearts, minds, ideas and the world. Books were powerful. If my memory is right, her son John commented to the media that she died surrounded by the books and people she loved.”

The views expressed in this book, let it be clear from the outset, will necessarily reflect the affection of those who shared their reminiscences about a part of Jackie’s life that has been overlooked. A number of her friends decided to speak about her for the first time because they felt her professional endeavors had not been adequately chronicled or appreciated, while a few others felt bound to silence, as they weighed confidentiality and issues of privacy even in the workplaces they once shared with her. With her steadfast commitment to secrecy, Jackie would surely never have allowed these pages to be written during her lifetime. But, hoping to pay tribute to her memory fifteen years after her death, more than 125 of her former collaborators in the publishing world have come forward with their tales of Jackie, yielding a complex Rashomon that could only have been inspired by such a unique and enigmatic principal player.

One of Jackie’s sympathetic allies in the press, celebrity columnist Liz Smith reported on Jackie’s Manhattan life for many years and suggested to me, “I never underestimated her. I quietly, simply admired the hell out of her. She was struggling in New York always against great odds, the great odds of her own fame and notoriety. Onassis had been the blot on her escutcheon.”

A longtime curator at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, Katell Le Bourhis, recalled a day when Jackie visited her at the museum and revealed some of those qualities that by nature and pedigree she sought to cultivate in her life and in her books: “One day I remember very correctly, I was like sad, mad, too much work, not much help; I was in a bad mood, the world seemed to me very hostile. She said that day, ‘But Katell, you are very privileged, you have your books. You are here at the Metropolitan Museum; you have your beautiful objects.’ And then I realized that probably for her, that world of literature, history, French culture, humanist culture, as probably being a secret garden in her life, but also something that helped her go through life as something very private to her. But through remarks like that, you could feel that she was talking about herself. I was very touched when she said that.”

Of course, Jackie touched so many lives, her fate having led her onto the pages of history, her public persona magnified almost to the point of grotesque caricature in the Andy Warhol era, only to be further distorted by our collective imagination. The third act of Jackie’s saga, which began after her two marriages played out on the world stage, has for the most part been minimized by her biographers, even though it spanned more than nineteen years—almost a third of her life devoted to a calling that became a fervent mission. Jackie regarded books as pathways to enlightenment, each a journey of intellectual enchantment, each affording her the opportunity to interact with people who shared her love of literature and passion for knowledge.

A renaissance woman grounded by her professional endeavors and sustained by the bonds of family – that was the Jackie whom I came to know as one of her authors, fortunate to have worked with her over the last decade of her life. I have my own lasting impressions, one in particular shared by most of Jackie’s authors, friends and colleagues who graciously offered up their memories for this book. While Jackie always carried with her the burden of her history, she was not one to flaunt or finger the scars of her life. When working, she conducted herself simply as a professional. The inescapable phantoms of her past were there when we began our exchanges, but they quickly receded, overshadowed by her good will and charm, which were displayed with every gesture and, as many observers have noted, delivered with seemingly effortless grace. She could conquer all with just a parting wave and that beguiling, luminous smile, even with her eyes concealed behind the signature dark glasses.

As Senator Ted Kennedy noted in his eulogy, delivered on May 23rd, 1994, “Jackie would have preferred to be just herself, but the world insisted that she be a legend, too.”

In Jackie’s secret garden, guided by her heart’s compass over a lifetime and by her love affair with books, the legacy lives up to the legend.