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.
“If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life.”
—Jacqueline Onassis
Whatever else she may have been during her lifetime—tragic heroine, elusive sphinx, reluctant icon—Jackie also distinguished herself as an intensely dedicated career woman who left behind an impressive 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. 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 books, more than 100 titles, 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, in March 1975, Jackie managed to transform her public image. Photographs of her on horseback at fox hunts in Virginia and New Jersey began to replace reports of indulgent shopping sprees and lunches at Orsini’s and La Côte 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 than attending glitzy parties or traditional society events. There were many nights when she dined at home with her kids, whom 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.
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?” In the form of a written essay, Jackie provided clues in what was to be, aside from a few cryptic public utterances, her last interview for nearly 15 years. With touching eloquence, she described 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.
“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!’ ”
—Jacqueline Onassis
Jackie confided to a friend at the time, “I have always lived through men. Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.” 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 19 years—almost a third of her life devoted to a calling that became a fervent mission. A complex, 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 on three books over the last decade of her life.
During the summer of 1975, after entering her second widowhood, Jackie resumed her life in Manhattan with her children, hoping somehow to establish some normalcy in their lives. At the time, Jackie’s friends noticed that she seemed to have fallen into a malaise, with fitful bouts of boredom and restlessness. More than just an episode of midlife ennui, it was to be a prolonged period of mourning that sometimes found Jackie listless and lingering for hours over breakfast and the morning newspapers in her apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue.
While picking up the pieces and avoiding the media as much as possible, Jackie soon fell back into her familiar Manhattan routine. Caroline, then 17 years old, was planning to go to London to take art courses at Sotheby’s, while 14-year-old John was attending Collegiate School, on the Upper West Side, the last member of the Kennedy family to have Secret Service protection. With her children requiring fewer hours of attention, Jackie had time on her hands.
During this down period, as she tried to come to terms with her losses, grieving for Jack again as well as for Ari, she was visiting a Shiatsu acupuncturist, Lillian Biko, and a psychoanalyst. Biko later told Cosmopolitan magazine, “Jackie’s tension is the result of her anxiety. She has problems because she’s so secretive. Which is why she sees me.”
Aware that Jackie was floundering that summer, Letitia (Tish) Baldrige, who had served as White House social secretary for the former First Lady, suggested the idea of pursuing a career as a way for her to lift her spirits and challenge herself. Baldrige, then running a public-relations firm in Manhattan, told The New York Times, “I really felt she needed something to get out in the world and meet people doing interesting things, use that energy and that good brain of hers. I suggested publishing. Viking was my publisher, and I said to her, ‘Look, you know Tommy Guinzburg—why don’t you talk to him?’ ”
“It has helped me to be taken seriously as an editor, for my own abilities.”
—Jacqueline Onassis, Viking Conquest
At an afternoon tea with Tish, Jackie initially responded to the idea of entering the workforce with lighthearted skepticism: “Who, me—work?” Jackie had not had a paying job since 1953, when she was a $42.50-a-week “inquiring camera girl” for the Washington Times-Herald. But by the fall, she was seriously contemplating the prospect of embarking on a career. Hard-boiled journalist Jimmy Breslin offered his outspoken advice to her: “You should work as an editor. What do you think you’re going to do, attend openings for the rest of your life?”
Jackie had known publisher Thomas Guinzburg for at least 20 years. At Yale he roomed in the same hall as her stepbrother Hugh D. Auchincloss. In the 1950s, Guinzburg had been part of the original Paris Review circle, a group that included writers George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, and he later inherited Viking Press from his father, Harold K. Guinzburg. While Tom was initially “thunderstruck” by the prospect of having Jackie join his house, he discussed the idea of her becoming an editor over lunch one afternoon at Manhattan’s Le Périgord Park restaurant.
Guinzburg (who died last September) later recalled that he had told Jackie, “ ‘You’re not really equipped to be an editor. It’s not that you don’t have the talent for it, the ability for it, but you don’t have the background and the training, and you, I think, would suffer in a publishing house because that would set up some kind of competitive atmosphere with the other editors. But what you can do is to be a consulting editor … somebody who doesn’t have what we call line responsibilities. They’re not assigned books—they don’t even have necessarily to work out of the office. Their primary job is to acquire books.’ ”
Guinzburg continued, “I then explained to her that as she became more familiar with publishing procedures she could work on the books and with the writers to whatever extent appealed to her. She could create books and so on.”
“I’ve been a reporter myself and I’ve lived through important parts of history. I’m not the worst choice for this position.”
Hired by Guinzburg at the end of summer 1975 as a consulting editor at Viking, Jackie was to be paid $200 a week, working part-time—four days a week. She didn’t need the money—she had inherited a substantial trust from J.F.K. and eventually settled with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, for $26 million.
Jackie told a writer for Newsweek what she anticipated her new job would entail: “I expect to be learning the ropes at first. You sit in at editorial conferences, you discuss general things, maybe you’re assigned to a special project of your own.” Even before the press and public had accepted this sudden change of employment status, Jackie felt compelled to defend her career move, explaining, “It’s not as if I’ve never done anything interesting. I’ve been a reporter myself and I’ve lived through important parts of American history. I’m not the worst choice for this position.”
Jackie’s editorial assistant Becky Singleton recalled the stir that Jackie caused when she joined Viking: “To jump-start her apprenticeship, Jackie’s plan was to be at her desk most mornings by 9:30, to read the circulating file of editors’ correspondence and make some calls while she sipped coffee, then spend the rest of the day immersed in ‘learning the ropes.’ Unfortunately, to many people, both rabid fans and many others whose motives seemed less sentient, Jackie’s entry into publishing had made her tantalizingly available
“To give you some idea of the frenzied level of public interest that Jackie had to navigate through in order to begin her career in publishing, I will describe a portion of the events that occurred on a fairly typical morning: At about 10:00 A.M., Patti Rizzo [the receptionist] called to summon me to the visitors’ waiting area, where a person who wanted to see Jackie was causing a bit of a commotion. I went out to the lounge area and found there a very large gentleman who had managed to capture the attention of everyone else in the visitors’ lounge by announcing that he had sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. After an interesting discussion, I managed to persuade him to leave the manuscript he’d brought for Jackie with me, then made sure he wasn’t actually wired with explosives before I began steering him towards one of the elevators
