Jackie After O (28 page)

Guinzburg went to see Jackie about it.

“I have a manuscript and a problem,” he told her.

“Is it good?”

“He's a good storyteller … but it's an assassination plot.”

“Of who?”

“Ted Kennedy.”

Jackie winced. “It doesn't succeed?” she pleaded.

“No.”

“Will someone else publish it if we don't?”

“Yes.”

“Do I have to work on it?”

“No—not at all.”

She told Guinzburg that she appreciated that he had turned down other commercial books to protect her. And she was not going to stand in his way this time.

The trouble came when the
New York Times Book Review
panned the book and used a reflexive pronoun like a weapon directed at Jackie, saying: “Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.”

With that one final word in one of the most important publishing outlets, Jackie flew into a rage. And, as Guinzburg recalled, the whole Kennedy tribe came down on her, causing her to panic and cave. She was so used to being protected; she couldn't handle the implication that she had had something to do with the book, even if it was fiction, especially because the Kennedys were also upset about it. She cleaned out her desk and resigned through Nancy Tuckerman, who was pressed into action as her spokesman when necessary, even though she worked at Doubleday. Guinzburg was devastated. In the months before he died in 2010, he could still grow visibly sad when discussing why Jackie quit and said her leaving Viking remained one of his great regrets in life.

Not long after severing her relationship with Guinzburg and Viking, Jackie accepted another editing position—at Doubleday. There she edited about ninety books over the span of her career, including ones about Marie Antoinette, Louis XV, Napoleon, and Stalin. She also worked on books about American royalty: Princess Grace, John and Yoko, Fred Astaire, and Michael Jackson. Her interest in preservation continued through books such as
How to Save Your Own Street
, a collaboration with Urban Design Group of the Department of City Planning in New York, by Raquel Ramati; as well as
Stanford White's New York
, a biography of the leading Beaux-Arts architect by David Garrard Lowe. Jackie had first met the author in 1981 when they were both fighting to save another lovely building in New York, St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. Stanford White had been murdered in 1906 by an obsessed person who shot the architect three times during a performance at Madison Square Garden. At the author's book party, attended by one of White's grandsons, Jackie asked Lowe, “How did your father turn out?”
⁶
She clearly wondered about the effects an assassination could have on a surviving son.

In between, the books were eclectic: A Carly Simon children's series; an Egyptian trilogy by a Nobel Prize—winning author; literary fiction by up-and-comers, whose edits she would send back with the notes signed
“Bon Courage!”
⁷

She worked at Doubleday until she became quite ill, dying at 1040 Fifth of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on May 19, 1994. “My mother died surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, and the people and the things that she loved,” John Jr. told the media camped outside her home. Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond merchant and financial adviser she first began seeing in 1975, did not divorce his wife. But he remained her loyal companion, arms linked as they strolled through Central Park, together for the holidays and for Jackie's transition into grandparenthood. He was there when she took her last breath.

On the day she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery—not just next to her first husband but among many other legendary men—the Municipal Art Society set out a memorial book made of parchment for mourners to sign inside Grand Central Terminal. Since that January morning in 1975 when she called the MAS office asking to get involved, Jackie had been the face of the fight to save the station, popping up publicly every time the issue was back in court. On July 12, 1976, anticipating Penn Central filing a brief to upset the Appellate Division's ruling, there was Jackie, participating in a stunt to light the station's facade for the first time, saying, “It's a beautiful building. And I think a city that's proud of itself should accent its beauty and make its people proud.”
⁸
The following year, when the New York State Court of Appeals was about to begin hearing Penn Central's case, she participated in press conferences and a massive public lunchtime rally on the terminal's Park Avenue ramp with other celebrities, including Steve Allen (the first host of
The Tonight Show
) and Alistair Cooke of
Masterpiece Theatre
. The court, once again, ruled against Penn, which decided to take the case to the US Supreme Court. In her final and most memorable public relations feat for Grand Central, Jackie rode the “Landmark Express,” a train from New York to Washington, to drum up support for preservation.
⁹
The justices sided with Jackie and the Municipal Art Society, 6 to 3, saying they did not believe that “land-marking” Grand Central constituted a “taking” of the property requiring the city to pay Penn Central.
¹⁰
The decision affirmed that it was good for cities to protect their old buildings and it led to the creation of historic preservation laws across the country. The reverberations for this Supreme Court decision are still felt today;
Penn Central v. New York City
remains one of the most frequently cited cases in constitutional law.
¹¹

In the days after Jackie's death, a line of a thousand people waited inside Grand Central to sign the memorial book in front of a steel plaque that read, in part:
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS LED THE FIGHT TO SAVE THIS BEAUTIFUL TERMINAL
. Janet Feldman of Manhattan was among them. She gripped a pen and wrote, “Dear John and Caroline, she taught us how to mourn; she taught us how to live; she taught us how to die. May her memory continue to inspire us all.”
¹²