Jackie After O (5 page)

On men's fashion, she wrote that
Vogue
should direct their coverage toward educating women on the subject, because they did the buying. She said the articles should explain what is a “sack back” jacket, show various collar types, how to “convert” men to wear French cuffs, and why a guy should have a pair of suspenders with every set of pants “so he won't have to switch them when he is in a hurry.” “Tell women that well-dressed men are bound by convention and good taste to a limited field,” she wrote, “but that within this field a great deal can be done to obtain color, variety and elegance.”
²⁹

Another feature she wrote as part of the contest entry proposed pictures of perfume bottles shot next to close-ups of famous noses. As an alternative, she suggested bottles set next to open books, accompanied by quotes from Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare such as:

A violet in the youth of primy nature

Forward, not permanent sweet, not lasting

The Perfume and suppliance of a minute
.

—
Shakespeare
, Hamlet

She showed her own literary flair in another part of her
Vogue
submission, a fictional short story—ominously about a wake, the death of her grandfather, during which a friend of the deceased places violets on the coffin. When the visitor leaves, a relative huffs that the violets do not belong there, and moves them to the floor. Jackie wrote:

The Prix de Paris's winner would be entitled to a year working as a junior editor—six months in the Paris office and six months in the New York office. Jackie won first prize out of 1,280 entrants from 225 colleges. Winning meant she would report to
Vogue
in September 1951, after graduation from George Washington with a degree in French literature.

First, however, she would spend the summer traveling in Europe with Lee, who had just completed high school. The sisters boarded the
Queen Elizabeth
, and immediately began documenting their trip with a scrapbook of their mischievous adventure. They called it
One Special Summer
, wrote it in longhand, and embellished it with drawings—Jackie had a talent there, too—as well as snapshots and flowery handwriting. The scrapbook, rediscovered many years later in an attic by Lee when she was sorting through memorabilia for a book she was writing, was eventually published in 1974, “without a word or pen-stroke changed,” according to the dust jacket.

“We split the fun,” Lee wrote in the forward. “Jackie did the drawings, the poetry and the parts on Rome and Spain. I described most of our adventures—on the
Queen Elizabeth
, in London, Paris, Venice, Rome and Florence.”

Jackie's poems, like the one below from the scrapbook, had become wittier with time, and her French was excellent.

Aside from the wonderful memories—and charming book—the trip had a profound impact on Jackie in ways that she may not fully have understood until almost a quarter century later. Late in their trip, in Venice, the sisters dropped in on Bernard Berenson, a legendary art historian who had grown up in Boston, attended Harvard, and written volumes of criticism. He had served as an adviser to Isabella Stewart Gardner, helping her buy European art that hangs on the walls of her villa-museum in Boston today.

The meeting with Berenson was an occasion at least three years in the making. At fifteen, Lee had written to him from Miss Porter's, where she had become immersed in Italian Renaissance art history. When he replied to her note, she was determined to meet him. As he lounged, wearing a three-piece suit and tie, in a well-stuffed upholstered chaise, propped up by a velvet pillow with a madonna-and-child oil painting hanging on the wall behind him in his sitting room, Berenson told the sisters: “Never follow your sense—marry someone who will constantly stimulate you—and you him.” Indeed, what the white-bearded man with hands like “silky polished marble” and a brown hat said to them on their grand tour seemed profound, telling them there are two kinds of people—those who are “life diminishing” and those who are “life enhancing.”

And then he told them, “The only way to exist happily is to love your work.”

Lee was moved by the meeting. “He has loved and loves beautiful women and beautiful things and above all his work,” she wrote in the scrapbook, “which is the one thing that makes life worthwhile and complete … We left almost feeling depressed as our visit had seemed so incomplete. We had hardly said a word and every word of his was so great and so true that if we only could have listened longer—then gone away and contemplated all of it, and choose the path from there. He set a spark burning. It was the difference between living and existing that he had spoken of and both of us had simply been existing in our own selfish ways for far too long. Maybe that was why it was so upsetting but more because you longed to reap out of life what he had but knew you never could.”
³²

Later in life, Jackie would remember Berenson as one of the two most impressive men she had ever met.
³³
(The other was Charles de Gaulle.)

After feeding pigeons in Saint Mark's Square and getting a taste for the good life's long lunches at outdoor cafés, her first days on the job at
Vogue
in New York were not what Jackie expected. Her special desk was next to editor Bettina Ballard. She was dark haired and stern looking, like a mother bird perched in her big pale-green office at the end of a long hallway on the nineteenth floor of New York's Graybar Building. Jackie watched various editors pay homage to Ballard, and propose ideas for photo shoots or a story.
³⁴

“Bettina, dahling, thees is you!” one affected male editor said, dramatically draping some sage-green velvet over Ballard's desk.
³⁵
Jackie quit. Neither Shakespeare nor an eligible bachelor was in sight. In fact, in her
Vogue
entry, she had written that after she had spent a summer in Paris the first time, she realized she “should not be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide.”

She disguised the reasons for her resignation in a letter to
Vogue
, blaming it on her mother “feeling terrifically strongly about keeping me ‘in the home' [in Virginia] … But I would rather work at what interests me than have a home base and so we have reached a compromise. I will stay here next fall—and learn to type I guess—and then in January if I still want to work for
Vogue
I can move to New York.”
³⁶

Jackie settled into Washington looking for another job. “Real journalism” seemed a better fit than fashion editing especially for someone who would later publicly admit to having dreamed of writing the great American novel.
³⁷
And she knew it would be good training. For help, she called her stepfather, Hughdie, who, in turn, called his friend Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of the
New York Times
. Krock, who was also rumored to help Joe Kennedy “fix” stories in the press and get paid for that work,
³⁸
picked up the phone and dialed Frank Waldrop, the editor of the
Washington Times-Herald
, which was then the most popular paper in the capital.

“Are you still hiring little girls?” Krock asked.

Although journalism was then a man's world, there were certain types of low-wage jobs—like covering society teas and reporting on fashion—that women of Jackie's pedigree were hired to do, often still being financially supported by their parents. The
Times-Herald
in particular had a reputation for hiring attractive young women.
³⁹

Waldrop wanted to hear more of what Krock had to say.

“Well, I have a wonder for you. She's round-eyed, clever and wants to go into journalism. Will you see her?” Krock asked.
⁴⁰

They agreed to have her come in for an interview, meeting first with city editor, Sid Epstein.

“I want to be a reporter,” she told Epstein.
⁴¹

“We only hire experienced people,” he said.

“I'm also a photographer and used a Leica at the Sorbonne.”

Epstein laughed at the combination of her sophistication and naïveté.

“Kid, we don't have anything that fancy.”

But Epstein looked at this beautiful young woman and told her the paper could use a new “inquiring photographer,” a person to snap headshots and invent questions posed to a handful of people on the street. The position was about to be vacated by a stringer leaving for law school.

“If you can use a Speed Graphic by tomorrow, I'll hire you,” he told her. The column would need to be renamed as the Inquiring Camera Girl.

Jackie in her first job, as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” at the
Washington Times-Herald. (Copyright unknown, courtesy of JFK Library)

Epstein assigned a staff photographer to help her with such things as understanding what the best distance would be to snap head shots. The photographer, six feet tall, lay on the ground and had her stand at his feet so she could gauge the proper spacing.
⁴²

Jackie came back the next day to meet with Waldrop.

“Do you want to go into journalism, or do you want to hang around here until you get married?” he asked her in his office shortly before Christmas 1951.

“No, sir! I want to make a career!”

“Well, if you're serious, I'll be serious. If not, you can have a job clipping things.”

“No, sir! I'm serious.”

“OK, then come in after the holidays. But don't you come back to me in six months and say you're engaged!”

“No, sir!”
⁴³

At the time, Jackie was dating John Husted, a tall blond Yale graduate who had fought in the war, worked on Wall Street, and whose sister had gone to Farmington with Jackie. Husted's social-register family was friendly with Black Jack, as well as Hughdie.

But when she arrived in the newsroom just after the New Year to begin her $42.50 per week job,
⁴⁴
Waldrop was surprised by her confession.

“I guess you won't want to hire me,” she said. “I did get myself engaged over the holidays.”

“How long have you known the guy?” Waldrop asked.

“Just a few weeks,” she said.

“That won't last!”
⁴⁵

Jackie dove into work, asking a topical question of eight to ten people—from housewives to Senate pages, cabinet members to congressmen—and recording their answers and photographs for a piece that ran once a week.

Epstein noticed that the column improved immediately. The kid seemed soft-spoken and shy, but she wasn't afraid to go out and talk with people, unlike her predecessor, who would just go into a bar and interview the guy sitting on the first stool.
⁴⁶

Outside of work, things were not going as well. Jackie was having second thoughts about marrying Husted.

Louis Auchincloss, a relative of Jackie's, learned of the engagement at a dinner, during which Jackie talked with him about a novel he'd written called
Sybil
—“a sad little girl who has a dull little life,” as he described the character.