Jackie After O (19 page)

“If the two women do not want Skorpios,” he wrote, “it should first be offered as a resort for the head of the state. If again turned down, it should be given to Olympic Airways as a holiday resort for the company's employees.”

Onassis signed his will, “With my last kiss, Daddy.”
¹⁷

I
f 1963 was a horrific year, then 1975 was a close second. After months of sadness, anger, uncertainty, backbiting, and press scrutiny, Jackie sought comfort in her old friend Tish Baldrige. After her stint as White House social secretary in the Kennedy administration, Baldrige had stayed in Washington, started a family, and launched an eponymous public relations firm with clients such as Cartier, Tiffany, and Elizabeth Arden. Baldrige had spoken with Jackie on a few occasions since Onassis had died about three months earlier and had heard the sadness in Jackie's voice. She had also read the headlines about Grand Central, the divorce threat, the estate battle. They needed to catch up in person. As always, Baldrige executed the plan.

Naturally, Baldrige knew just the place to have an important lunch with Jackie—the Sulgrave Club, in Dupont Circle. And there she waited, at a corner table, where they would meet in quiet and safety in a city full of journalists and power lunchers. And while it was not Baldrige's intent, the restaurant, a women's club, was also a poetic choice for the conversation the two were about to have. The club was part of what had once been a grand home on Massachusetts Avenue owned in the early 1900s by a wealthy couple, Herbert and Martha Wadsworth. Martha Wadsworth, like an earlier version of Jackie, had been an exceptional horsewoman, a prolific photographer, a presence on the social scene, and had more than an eye for architecture, designing, and furnishing her Beaux-Arts style house, built of light-yellow Roman brick and cream-colored, molded terra-cotta.
¹

Sitting there alone before her famous friend arrived, Baldrige remembered the various aspects of Jackie's life—many of them lived in public—that had shaped her, and led her to this crucible of middle age, with no husband, no career, no real agenda beyond her newfound preservation work. Jackie had decided to keep John in school in New York, at Collegiate, before releasing him to boarding school. Come September, Caroline would be gone, studying in London, and Jackie would be much more alone. And then what?
What was she going to do with the rest of her life?
The point of the lunch was clear, at least to Baldrige. Jackie needed to find meaningful employment, both to engage and distract her.

Although the two of them had precisely the same education—Miss Porter's and Vassar, followed by time in Paris, the outcomes so far had been different. Baldrige, tall, forthright, and tireless, had delayed starting a family during her around-the-clock White House career, despite what she was taught at Miss Porter's. Jackie, even without a career, was always hungry for knowledge and found it instead in her social interactions, soaking up history at the opening of the races at Longchamps, sitting in the Bibliotheque National, walking the ruins on an island. Jackie never wanted to be trapped in that life—but she wasn't going to be trapped at work, either. And in reality, she never really needed to be.

Jackie had been astounded after graduation when Baldrige had chosen a career, something Tish believed was necessary for happiness. Jackie had respected her friend's decision—but then lured her away from a position as a public relations executive in Milan by asking her to work in the White House, where Baldrige enjoyed having lunch in the mess hall so she could argue with men. Jackie respected her friend, but was “exhausted” by her.
²
When Baldrige left her White House job in 1963, JFK told her she was the most “emotional” woman he had ever met.
³
Fine if Tish wanted a job, but “working” was not for Jackie.

By 1975, the world had changed significantly. Burning bras was no longer new.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, one of the first on TV to portray an independent career woman (Mary was a producer at a television news station), was already in its fifth season, and had just won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series a few weeks before Jackie and Tish met for lunch. But Jackie still belonged to a different generation and social class in which ladies of good families apologized for being at work—if they worked at all. Jackie had always been protected by men. But now she had a daughter about to launch on her own trajectory. Perhaps Jackie thought that Caroline would have to be the one trying to figure out this strange new world, this thing called feminism, where women, even those who did not have to, pursued a career—and not just for the money, but for their own self-worth.

Baldrige, her napkin in her lap as she waited for Jackie to arrive at the Sulgrave Club, continued an internal dialogue to hash through her friend's options.
⁴
The corporate world was definitely not for her. Jackie was not the kind of person who would punch a clock at a specific hour every day. But maybe Jackie would like a job in the nonprofit sector? Something where you could keep your own hours? At the time, Jackie was being deluged with requests from people asking to lend her name to committees, especially ones involved in preservation, as well as from endorsements, particularly in fashion. To Jackie, most of those requests were about what a cause could get out of her, rather than what she could get out of it.

Years before, in 1964, Dorothy Schiff, the longtime owner and publisher of the
New York Post
, had met with Jackie in Manhattan. It was one week after the release of the Warren Report, which declared that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination. Jackie was very emotional with Schiff, her eyes brimming with tears when she explained that she had forgotten to cancel her newspaper and magazine subscriptions that week and had been forced to see the coverage of the report when the shooting was still so fresh.

“There is only one thing to do,” Schiff told her. “And that is to find a substitute in work that is all-absorbing. It will never be the same thing, but you can lose yourself that way.”

Jackie told her that she knew that was true and would like to do it.

“I don't want to be Ambassador to France or Mexico,” she told Schiff. “President Johnson said I could have anything I wanted. I would like to work for somebody, but the list is … One is expecting someone to come home every weekend, but no one …”

Schiff was sympathetic and admitted that a job was a poor replacement for the void in her life.

“You know, you are the most famous and admired woman in the world,” Schiff said. “It is quite a responsibility.”

Being a political wife, that had been her job, a job that left her tired and hoarse at the end of the day. After a pause in her conversation with Schiff, her mind wandered back to the White House.

“All that furniture …”

Before she left, Schiff offered Jackie a job as a columnist.

“You could just write about things you go to and anything you like,” said Schiff, who had been a columnist herself.

“Oh, I can't write,” Jackie said, reflexively reverting to her old-fashioned demure ways. But she also huffed that she had received lots of requests from magazines to write about what one might expect—gracious living or fashion—not about the space race or civil rights or global affairs. After all, she said, her voice growing indignant, “I am interested in the same things Jack was interested in!”
⁵

As Jackie finally entered the room at the Sulgrave Club—eleven years after that conversation with Schiff-—Baldrige was struck by how impeccably dressed her friend was and how depressed she looked and sounded. Even her voice was “drooping.” After settling in and ordering lunch, Baldrige was blunt, as old friends can be.

“You're so smart and so bright and you've hidden all that under a bushel,” Baldrige said. “It's time to step out with it. Go to work and get a job.”

“Who, me—work?” Jackie asked. “And do what?”

They discussed foundation work but that didn't seem right.

“Well, you care about publishing, you've been doing things, advising people on their books, you should get a job as a publisher.”
⁶

Publishing was not the nonprofit world, but it was close. Baldrige, who was in the process of completing a manuscript called
Juggling
, about balancing work, marriage, and motherhood, suggested her publisher, Viking Press.

“Look,” Baldrige encouraged, “you know Tommy Guinzburg. Why don't you talk to him?”

Thomas Henry Guinzburg was president of Viking, the distinguished New York publishing house. He had known Jackie's stepbrother in college. They knew each other from the days of Lee's marriage to Canfield. And they inhabited similar New York social circles. Viking had published some heady work: D. H. Lawrence, Steinbeck, and Kerouac, whose novel
On the Road
Jackie had read while on the presidential campaign. Viking was still a small publisher, and it had a niche in art books, which Jackie was always collecting. She made no promises to Baldrige about Viking, but Jackie's sad eyes briefly sparkled at the idea of looking for work. Before the lunch ended—it was a quick fifty minutes as they both had other obligations—Baldrige could see that Jackie was motivated to change her life, to be her own person. Jackie wasn't a feminist. In fact, she would have balked at the term. But whether she knew it or not, she was following a feminist path—as well as her heart, and her talent.

Jackie was always reading—Proust on the lawn in Hyannis Port, de Gaulle's memoirs in French at home in the White House, or Greek poetry on the
Christina.
⁷
She had majored in French literature. She had been there for the birth of
Profiles in Courage
. Jack did not give her candy or flowers. He gave her books, serious ones at that, such as
The Raven
and
Pilgrim's Way.
⁸

She had been related to a publisher. She was related to authors (Gore Vidal and Louis Auchincloss) and she surrounded herself with other writers—inviting French novelist and minister of cultural affairs André Malraux to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, George Plimpton to parties at Hammersmith Farm, and Truman Capote, before their relationship cooled, to 1040 Fifth. She had always dreamed of writing a novel,
⁹
and had produced a couple of books of her own. Her first was
The White House: An Historic Guide
, for which Jackie chose every item, read every word, looked at every layout, and chose every typeface. The book went on sale to the public for a dollar apiece on July 4, 1962. Within six months, 350,000 copies were sold. The first book was presented to the Kennedys on June 28, 1962. As they walked out of the Fish Room in the West Wing, Jackie said to J. B. West, the usher, “Now J. B., I want it understood that everyone has to pay [the cover price of] $1, even Ethel.” Now in its twenty-second edition, it still funds White House museum work.
¹⁰
The other was
One Special Summer
, the scrapbook (that Lee found while working on her own memoirs) that had just been published in 1974.

Jackie loved words, stories, poems, and pictures, and how they fit together. She devoured not only books but also magazines, such as
Paris Match
, a sort of French version of
Life
. In addition to her love of reading, she also possessed two other elements that could make her a fine editor. First, she had a love for writing. Despite what she told Schiff, she
could
write and it was a talent that she kept mostly private.

She could also pack a punch with short essays, such as one she submitted to
Look
magazine on the one-year anniversary of the assassination. “Now I think that I should have known that he was magic all along,” she wrote. “I did know it—but I should have guessed it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together. So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man … His high noon kept all the freshness of the morning—and he died then, never knowing disillusionment. ‘He has gone/ … Among the radiant, ever venturing on,/ Somewhere, with morning, as such spirits will.'” The final quote she pulled from John Masefield's “On the Finish of the Sailing Ship Race.”
¹¹

The second talent that could make her adept as a conceptual editor was her ability to stagecraft, knowing how to pull together characters, backdrops, dialogue, and stay true to a theme. She had accomplished this with so many elements of her life—grand funerals, her fashion image, even the Camelot myth that she had seemingly made up on the spot during an interview with
Life
journalist Theodore White a week after JFK was shot.