Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (39 page)

Directly, she flew to Paris to meet up with the Met’s director, Thomas Hoving, who was to accompany her to the Soviet Union. On their way to dinner that first night in Paris, Jackie seemed in high spirits, “bubbling with enthusiasm” for her impending journey to a nation she had never visited before. But their cab had hardly reached the Left Bank restaurant where Hoving had reserved a table when everything changed. The doorman at her hotel had informed the press about her evening plans. “Jackie! Jackie!” the cameramen shrieked as they rushed in on all sides. “Somehow, we made it into the restaurant,” Hoving remembered, “and the proprietor guided us into the back and flung himself against the door to stop the full horde from rushing in. Flashbulbs were popping; people were screaming. I thought Jackie was going to crawl under the table. She was shaking.” Briefly, it seemed as if the Russian trip would have to be canceled, when Jackie protested that she would not go if this was the kind of reception she could expect to receive. Hoving assuaged her concerns when he pointed out that the one nice thing about a Communist state was that the government-controlled press would take a single picture when she arrived and another when she left.

Jackie’s ability, for good or ill, to draw a crowd fascinated the museum director, who was known, not always favorably, for his Barnum-like skill at luring great numbers of people to the Met. Hoving reflected that were Jackie to parachute into the wilds of Madagascar, Murmansk, or Mozambique, crowds would have gathered in advance of her arrival in hopes of securing photos and an autograph. He well understood that her status as possibly “the most famous face and personality on earth,” though not without its drawbacks, might also be used to significant advantage. Never was that clearer than during Jackie’s nine-day Soviet sojourn, in the course of which, Hoving’s protests notwithstanding, their hosts persisted in addressing her as “Mrs. Onassis Kennedy.” That peculiar appellation no doubt reflected the glamorous aura of the Kennedy era in Washington that still hung about her, but also perhaps the Russians’ understanding, though it might already have been largely forgotten in the United States, that the easement in Soviet-American relations known as detente had had its origins in the first major postwar East-West agreement, the partial test ban treaty. Shortly before President Kennedy was assassinated, he had spoken to David Ormsby-Gore, as he was then, of his intention to visit the Soviet Union following his reelection, in hopes of sustaining the momentum toward the further contact and agreements at the heart of his strategy of peace.

Fittingly, now it was Jackie who had come to the Soviet Union to pursue the sort of cultural contact that Churchill had envisioned as marking the beginning of the end of the closed Communist society. As Macmillan liked to observe, many Russians longed as much as, if not more than, anyone in the West to see the barriers brought down. Thus the ambivalence with which Jackie’s requests for the release of certain treasures from the Soviet archives were met. On the one hand, when she asked for the costumes of Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra, both of whom had been slaughtered on Lenin’s orders, the Communist bureaucrats were adamant that that would be impossible. On the other hand, there was on the bureaucrats’ part a certain palpable, even impish, desire to make an unprecedented gesture to Jackie. Finally, the Soviets surprised and delighted her by agreeing to send over the green-velvet-upholstered sleigh and lap robe of Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I. Hoving wryly called Jackie’s triumph “a thrilling moment in detente—and for the Russian costume show.”

Shortly past 8
P.M.
on the evening of December 6, 1976, Jackie, attired in a white strapless Mary McFadden dress that contrasted markedly with the workaday image she cultivated at the office, was the focal point of attention on the receiving line at the opening-night party for the
Glory of Russian Costume
show at the Met, for which she served as chairman. Tapes of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky blared, and pungent clouds of Chanel’s “Russian Leather” perfume filled the air, as Diana Vreeland, at the top of her lungs, implored the many social figures in attendance—Lee Thaw, Françoise de la Renta, Marella Agnelli, and C. Z. Guest among them—to buy a copy of Jackie’s new book, which had been released that day. Soon after this, Viking hosted a small press luncheon at the Carlyle Hotel to publicize
In the Russian Style
. Lest any of the journalists violate his stipulation that all questions for Mrs. Onassis be confined to the book and nothing but the book, Tom Guinzburg hovered protectively about the fledgling editor, who wore a black turtleneck sweater, checked trousers, and a soupçon of makeup. Her bald, broad-shouldered boss scoffed at suggestions that she had had little role in the production of the volume. “Jackie wouldn’t have allowed her name to go on the book if she hadn’t been the prime mover behind it,” Guinzburg broke out. He added pointedly that she was not merely “a Hollywood type of star, with a double doing the hard part of the job.”

All in all, the publication of
In the Russian Style
was a supremely happy moment for Jackie. The book’s very existence testified to the success of her latest effort to try to fashion a new life, as she said, out of the “old anguish.” As far as Jackie was concerned, her career was well launched. She was involved in the preparation of various other Viking titles as well. Her books there would include a novel about Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, an anthology of Russian fairy tales, a biography of Mayor Richard Daley, a celebration of American women’s lives in the eighteenth century, and a collection of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln. Under the tutelage of Bryan Holme, head of the Studio Books imprint, she would develop an expertise in the production of illustrated volumes. Meanwhile, Tom Guinzburg’s robust remarks at the press luncheon, along with his gentlemanly determination to shield her from inquiries about any subjects that might prove distressing to her, can have left Jackie in no doubt that she enjoyed her publisher’s approbation and support. Thus perhaps the magnitude of the blow when, a month later, Guinzburg told her of a novel Viking planned to publish that depicted a conspiracy to assassinate a newly elected President Teddy Kennedy, who has managed to unseat President Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries. The plot was the stuff Jackie’s nightmares were made of.

There were times when Jackie’s abiding revulsion at the idea of a presidential run by the surviving Kennedy brother was palpable without her needing to utter so much as a word. When the previous year Carter had emerged as a contender for the 1976 Democratic nomination, Teddy had oscillated wildly between imagining that he would or would not challenge the Georgia governor whom he and other party liberals feared and distrusted. In the end, Teddy, exuding a melancholy sense that history might finally have passed him by, had decided to stay out of the race. After Carter became the nominee, he appeared to seize every opportunity to distance himself from the family of JFK and RFK, as if to demonstrate that he could win the election without them. The Kennedys in turn were pointedly disdainful of him. In the course of an October 1976 telephone conversation with Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie was treading familiar ground when she spoke of her displeasure with the Carter candidacy. Schlesinger commented without thinking that should Carter lose they could at least console themselves that Teddy would likely be the Democratic candidate in 1980. Immediately, upon hearing the eloquent intake of breath on the other end of the line, Schlesinger recognized his mistake.

Four months later, when Guinzburg entered Jackie’s office and shut the door after him so that they might speak in private, she responded instantly, viscerally, involuntarily, to his account of the assassination plot in the British author Jeffrey Archer’s new novel
Shall We Tell the President?
“It was just as though I hit her,” Guinzburg remembered years afterward. “She winced.” In that moment, all of the control that Jackie had painstakingly begun to retrieve in the course of her brave apprenticeship at Viking seemed to shatter. To make matters worse, such episodes, reprising as they did her sense of helplessness at the time of the trauma, were not anything she cared to experience in front of other people. She had long taught herself to flee before anyone could observe her like this. But in the present instance, escape was hardly an option. Jackie muttered something to the effect of “Won’t they ever stop?” Then, as the publisher looked on, she “visibly collected herself,” before posing a few quiet questions about the book. At a later date, Jackie would speak of what had been her own conscious efforts at the time “to separate my lives as a Viking employee and a Kennedy relative.” Perhaps, but somehow the phrase has the sound of a therapist’s retrospective advice. In any event, Jackie’s professional arrangement with Viking afforded her no veto power over which titles the house chose to put on its list, and eventually she accepted that if she wished to go on working there she had little choice but to endure the publication of the Archer novel. But, the question would soon arise, had she thereby countenanced it as well?

When in the fall of 1977
Shall We Tell the President?
appeared in print, at least one prominent reviewer held Jackie directly responsible for a “bad thriller” that crassly exploited “a terrible fantasy—a continuing American nightmare,” the prospect of a third Kennedy killing, in order to boost book sales. “There is a word for such a book,” John Leonard wrote in
The New York Times
. “The word is trash. Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.” The conspicuous pronoun at the end of that wickedly well-crafted last sentence emitted sparks. No feminist gesture, it was widely read as an indictment of Jackie, who of course had been accused of callousness and cold-bloodedness before. Leonard, whose excoriating review drew a good deal of attention, soon publicly confirmed that he had indeed been referring to Jackie. In the past, she had been castigated for her efforts to block the Manchester book. This time, the complaint was that she had failed to obstruct
Shall We Tell the President?
“She could have stopped its publication if she wanted to,” Leonard maintained.

Nor, her employer chimed in, had she even tried. Interviewed by
The Boston Globe,
Guinzburg insisted that she “didn’t indicate any distress or anger when I told her we bought the book in England several months ago.” Jackie’s reply to Guinzburg’s published account was to quit her job on October 13, 1977. Guinzburg had witnessed her intense bodily reaction to news of the book; he knew the pain his words had caused her. Now she simply could not abide the fact that he had chosen to tell the world a very different story. “When it was suggested that I had had something to do with acquiring the book and that I was not distressed by its publication, I felt I had to resign,” Jackie said in a public statement. But just as her announced reasons for coming to Viking in the first place had been greeted with broad public disbelief, so too were the reasons she offered for her departure. Thereafter, suspicions abounded that she had exaggerated or altogether fabricated her upset about the assassination novel, and that, in truth, she had quit her job solely due to pressure from her first husband’s family. To be sure, the Kennedys were far from delighted about the Archer novel, but in view of what Guinzburg later revealed about Jackie’s response when he first spoke to her of the book, her explanation rings true. In the wake of her departure from Viking, Guinzburg continued to publicly avow that he had observed no distress on her part: “My own affection for the Kennedy family and the extremely effective and valued contribution that Mrs. Onassis has made to Viking over the past two years would obviously have been an overriding factor in the final decision to publish any particular book which might cause her further anguish. Indeed, it is precisely because of the generous and understanding response of Mrs. Onassis at the time we discussed this book and before the contract was signed which gave me confidence to proceed with the novel’s publication.” In short, the man who only recently had defended Jackie’s genuineness now sought to call it into question.

Three weeks later, at a time of broad public curiosity about her post-Viking plans, Jackie, wearing an Oscar de la Renta sequined skirt and chiffon top, limited to a mere five minutes her visit to the Louis XV–style limestone town house on East Sixty-fourth Street where a private preview of the exhibition
Paris–New York: A Continuing Romance
was in progress at the Wildenstein galleries. Clutching champagne glasses, Givenchy-, Adolfo-, and Halston-clad socialites inspected French and American paintings and drawings at a benefit for the New York Public Library, organized by Brooke Astor, Mary Rockefeller, John Sargent, and others. As it happened, the full-bearded, sturdily built Sargent, president of the mass-market publishing giant Doubleday & Company, had been Jackie’s cohost at a small preliminary dinner party earlier that evening, where the guests had included Louis Auchincloss, the
New Yorker
writer Brendan Gill, and the historian Barbara Tuchman, whose book
The Guns of August,
about the First World War, President Kennedy had much admired. Despite the literary tone of the Onassis-Sargent event, Tom Guinzburg, though he too had purchased a ticket to the art gallery preview, had been conspicuously relegated to another hostess’s dinner table, leading to talk, apparently not without factual basis, that Jackie wished to avoid him. Her pairing this evening with Sargent, who in addition to being one of the nation’s premier publishing executives had the richly earned reputation of a ladies’ man and society reveler, spurred the fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard to wonder in print whether Jackie might already have made some sort of arrangement with Doubleday.

Neither then, nor three months later when Doubleday announced her appointment to the post of associate editor, did the firm known for producing more books per year than any of its rivals seem a likely haven for her. Jackie was meticulous about matters of book design; Doubleday titles tended to be shoddily produced. Jackie had highly cultivated aesthetic tastes; Doubleday’s target audience was middlebrow, the firm’s objective being, as Edna Ferber once remarked, the placement of “books in the hands of the unbookish.” So why did Jackie choose Doubleday rather than one of the small New York firms specializing in art and illustrated books with whom she also had had talks in this period? John Sargent’s record in the matter of an earlier assassination-themed book whose publication had threatened to be painful to Jackie was surely no impediment to his efforts to sign her. Doubleday had been scheduled to bring out the American edition of a new book by the British writer J. G. Ballard,
The Atrocity Exhibition,
which featured fantastical riffs on the murder of JFK that the author billed as “pornographic science fiction.” Prominent in the work was a section titled “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” which when it appeared as a stand-alone piece in the British literary magazine
Ambit
in the late 1960s had prompted Randolph Churchill, who was personally devoted to Jackie, to militate to have the journal’s London Arts Grant canceled. Presently, when John Sargent learned that the offending work was on Doubleday’s list of upcoming titles—indeed, that finished books were ready to be shipped to stores—he had the entire print run pulped. At so cost-conscious a publisher, the destruction of all those books—a gesture of respect for Sargent’s old friend Mrs. Onassis—was a huge deal. Eight years later, when Jackie accepted Sargent’s invitation to come to Doubleday, she was choosing a firm whose chief executive had emphatically put her sensitivities first in a way that Tom Guinzburg, for all of his public posturing, had simply failed to do.