THE LITERARY LIFE OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS
TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums – lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.
There's a legendary story that in his first campaign for the United States Senate in 1962, Ted Kennedy was accused by his opponent of never having worked a day in his life. The next morning, greeting potential voters at a factory gate, a worker consoled him, "Don't worry, you haven't missed a thing." [laughter]
In March of 1979, Ms magazine featured a photo of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on its cover with a headline, "Why Does This Woman Work?" In the story, Mrs. Onassis explains her decision: "I remember a taxi driver who said, 'Lady, you work and you don't have to?' And I said yes. He turned around and said, 'Well, I think that's great.' What has been sad for many women of my generation," Mrs. Onassis stated, "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 their children were grown? Watch the raindrops coming down the windowpane? Leave their fine minds unexercised? Of course, women should work if they want to. And you have to do something you enjoy; that is the definition of happiness: complete use of one's faculties along the line of excellence and a life affording one's scope."
This evening, we've assembled a wonderful panel of writers and publishers who knew Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an editor, work she viewed at midlife as her calling, which allowed her a different kind of independence than she had ever known before. The first insights I had into this world was from my friend and former colleague Betty Sue Flowers when she was still the director of the LBJ Library. We had dinner out one evening when Betty Sue recounted the marvelous tale of how she first met Mrs. Onassis. I won't tell that now except to reveal one image of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis crouching on the floor of her office, surrounded by images for the book they were working on together, an image much like the conversation we're about to listen to that helps humanize someone who too often we view as an icon in photos and film frames etched in our minds.
Dr. Flowers is a poet, editor and business consultant. She worked with Mrs. Onassis as well as Bill Moyers on the book and TV series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.
Betty Sue has a fellow Texan on the stage tonight, Joe Armstrong, who proudly launched his career as a busboy at the Dixie Pig in Abilene, Texas [laughter] and later spent four decades in New York City as, among other things, publisher of Rolling Stone, editor-in-chief of New York magazine, and as an advisor to the president of ABC News, where he worked closely with Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer. It is said that Jacqueline Onassis first invited him to lunch after hearing of his fondness for the song, Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life. [laughter] In listening to that tune that was unfamiliar to me on my computer this morning, one blogger suggested it was Tim Tebow's favorite song, and I couldn't help but wonder if the Baltimore Ravens might have benefited from listening during halftime at yesterday's championship game. [laughter]
David Stenn began his career as a TV writer, first for such popular programs as Hill Street Blues and Beverly Hills, 90210. He went on to author acclaimed biographies of the 1920s film icon Clara Bow and Hollywood legend Jean Harlow, both edited by Mrs. Onassis. He credits encouragement he received from her as helping to inspire his first film, Girl 27. He is currently supervising producer of the HBO Series Boardwalk Empire.
Harriet Rubin is the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, a title that one imagines would have piqued Mrs. Onassis's interest. In that book, she implores young women to eschew traditional business rules and instead employ a decidedly feminine strategy for getting ahead. She's also the author of Mona Lisa Stratagem, in which she contests the idea that women lose power and vitality with age. Again, an idea likely embraced by the first person ever who used her knowledge and her charm to convince the French government to loan the Mona Lisa to another country when it traveled to New York and DC during the Kennedy Administration.
Our moderator today is Greg Lawrence, whose book, Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is on sale in our bookstore, and Mr. Lawrence will be happy to sign your copies at the conclusion of the Forum. He writes with great admiration about the woman who edited three of his books. And let me read a brief passage. I hope it's not the same one you were going to read.
"By design, her editorial efforts were to be anonymous. Regardless of how much work she did on a manuscript, she was old school and adhered faithfully to a self-effacing credo espoused by the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins – the book belongs to the author. She was part of that tradition of editors who established relationships with their authors that went beyond the formalities of collaboration and commerce. Like Perkins, she held fast to the belief there could be nothing more important than books, and she revered their creators."
As you may know, Maxwell Perkins was Ernest Hemingway's editor, and I would be remiss if I did not note the critical role that Mrs. Onassis played in convincing Mary Hemingway to donate all of her late husband's papers to us, one of the great treasures in our collection.
In this Library, we honor the role that Jacqueline Kennedy played in the White House, advancing American arts and culture and famously traveling abroad to Paris, Mexico, India and Pakistan.
We attempt to focus here on President Kennedy's life and accomplishments, but of course in our Museum there's no way to escape mention of the tragic events in Dallas and the manner in which a young widow buoyed the nation with her dignity and strength.
In those moments and in the years after, as a loving and protective mother, founder of this Library and other institutions dedicated to her husband's legacy, preserver of cultural icons like Grand Central Station, and as a dynamic and creative literary editor, Jacqueline Kennedy demonstrated to the world her own profile in courage.
Please join me in welcoming our distinguished panel to the stage of the Kennedy Library. [applause]
GREG LAWRENCE: Thank you all for coming. I want to thank Tom and Amy Macdonald and the Library staff for arranging this lovely evening. And how appropriate it is that we're here in this magnificent place that Jackie so loved. I'm just going to wing it a little bit and read some material that I think will help get us going, and reading will help me not ramble too much.
It's fitting perhaps that Jackie's daughter Caroline came here last year for a Forum about the interviews that her mother gave to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1964. Those interviews were broadcast and published, and they reveal the vulnerable young woman who was still reckoning with the aftermath of the Dallas tragedy. By contrast, all of us on this panel knew Jackie during her happier, fruitful years when she was working in publishing. We each came to know her after she became a senior editor at Doubleday in the early 1980s. By then, she was at the top of her game professionally. She championed books that in some ways reflected personal ideals that traced back to her time in the White House, which she had famously likened to Camelot as a tribute to her husband's Presidency.
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 tycoon, she was going to find fulfillment on her own terms, and she would do so for the most part far from the media glare and public awareness.
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 sanctuary in the world of publishing that was virtually unassailable, even for the stalkerazzi who staked out her office. Jackie's edited books -- more than 100 titles -- along with her personal writings may be the best window we will ever have into her heart and her endlessly inquiring mind.
After Aristotle Onassis's death in 1975, Jackie transformed her public image, what she referred to as the cartoon that had little to do with her life. Photographs of her on horseback at fox hunts in Virginia and New Jersey replaced reports of indulgent shopping sprees. 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 society events. There were many nights when she dined at home with her beloved kids, then teenagers, and spend the rest of the night reading and working in her library. As she told one of her authors, "If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life."
As Tom mentioned, referring to Jackie's early career as editor, Gloria Steinem asked on the cover of Ms magazine in 1979, "Why Does This Woman Work?," I think we'll probably discuss that. There were quite a few reasons why she decided to become an editor, not an architect, not a lawyer, not a public relations person, but an editor.
This third act of Jackie's saga, which began after her two marriages, took place mostly in private, 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 who I came to know. I was fortunate to work with her on three books over the last decade of her life.
My co-author was the ballerina Gelsey Kirkland and our first book was Gelsey's controversial memoir, Dancing on My Grave, which Jackie turned into a bestseller. She had been a fan of Gelsey's for years. From our first lunch meeting, Jackie embraced both the poignant and scandalous aspects of Gelsey's story, her struggles and triumphs as an artist, her demons that led to bouts with drugs and eating disorders. Jackie realized that a book showing that all was not beautiful at the ballet would be shocking and illuminate that world, which had been one of her passions since her early years when she studied dance.
As Gelsey and I worked on our book, we would turn in chapters every couple months and then Jackie would write or call and meet us for lunches. She would read passages from the book back to us, and she became very effusive, her voice sometimes cracking with emotion. Her letters were beautifully handwritten on powder blue stationery. After reading one of our early chapters, she wrote, "The reader is with you, heart in throat, as you unfold your story. You have a great ear for dialogue. Whatever your characters speak, it rings so wildly true. Oh, boy, some of those lines will go down in history. You were overly conscientious starting out. You weren't going to leave out any step in a story, any anecdote, and you were too intent on showing what you had learned through study. That part shouldn't show. As in dance, it's great when it looks effortless. The most important thing I have to tell you is that your book is truly great. Soon the world will agree. Much love, Jackie."
Without telling us, she knew that before the world would agree or not, the book would have to undergo major revisions. When we turned in a rough draft of the manuscript at about 600 pages, Jackie cut it in half and judiciously pruned the rest. In the margins, she would write what I think was her favorite word, "concision," followed by exclamation points. Though she was right, the cuts were hard to accept at first. We waited for her to call, prepared for an argument. But after hearing that disarming voice, all I could say was, "Jackie, we'll do whatever you want." [laughter] When I told that story to Jackie's stepcousin, Louis Auchincloss, the distinguished author who worked with her on several books, laughed and said, "When you have an editor who's a former First Lady, you lose those arguments, don't you?" [laughter]
Like Jackie, Gelsey was extremely private and avoided publicity. Jackie managed to convince us to do a 60 Minutes interview with Diane Sawyer, and after the book was a success tried to prevail on Gelsey to do more interviews. That led to a squabble with Gelsey hanging up on her.
The next day Jackie sent a glorious bouquet of roses and offered her an apology saying, "I remember when Jack was running for the Senate and they wanted me to do more publicity, and I finally refused. That's exactly what you did, Gelsey. I'm so sorry I tried to push you."
Jackie made all of her collaborators feel special. It was like she enlisted her authors into a conspiracy directed at times against the hierarchy of the publishing house. At a certain point, Gelsey and I were running out of our advance money and appealed to Jackie. She called in the middle of the night and whispered to me, as if someone might overhear, "Don't worry, Greg, I'm going to get you more money. Just don't tell anyone." [laughter]
After our book came out in 1986, there were mixed reviews, some of them quite fierce in defending the sacred cows of the dance world, like Baryshnikov and Balanchine. In an effort to console Gelsey over lunch, Jackie made reference to her past, saying, "Oh, you just have to ignore the critics. Don't let them hurt you. They're all fickle and they will eventually change their minds anyway, you'll see. When Jack and I were in the White House, it was Camelot to everyone. But later, after I married Ari, I was the traitor. People couldn't understand why I needed that sanctuary. And now, suddenly, I'm the world's greatest mother." [laughter] We took those lessons to heart.
Jackie was old school, as Tom mentioned, in that tradition of the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. She believed that there could be nothing more important than books and revered their creators. She took an interest in the lives of her authors beyond their writing and establishing lifelong friendships with many of them. As Louis Auchincloss put it, she was a writer's dream as an editor. Where would you find her today in a world of megapublishers?
The day after Jackie died, John, Jr. announced that she spent her final hours "surrounded by her friends and her family and her books." Each of us will have something more to say about the place that books occupied in Jackie's life, and the place that Jackie occupied in our lives.
And just to touch on a personal note, the way that she took an interest in conversations over lunch often, or on the phone, she wanted to know what was going on. Not just what chapter are you on now and how many pages did you write today, but what's going on with your lives. Now, Gelsey and I were married during the time we worked for Jackie, and we broke up just as we were probably almost finished with our final book for her. I was the one who had to call and tell Jackie that we were going our separate ways and I remember Jackie, there was a pause, and she said, "Oh, drat." [laughter] And then she very graciously volunteered – and I know she has done this with other authors and friends as well – "Please call me if I can help." And she said something -- I can't remember the exact words -- but what she was saying was, "Listen, I know something about loss." And it was just the most touching thing in the world. That was the kind of bond she created with her authors, which impressed me as I was doing this book because I talked to so many of them.
While we were living through the experiences with her, I always thought, “Oh, my god, we're just so lucky, we're so special.” But no, she treated everyone that way. She knew how to make you feel like you were the one person in the world and your book, at that moment, was the most important thing in the world.
Now, because all of us up here worked with her while she was at Doubleday, which was about the last 15 years or so of her life, I want to read one excerpt from the book from a woman who was Jackie's first assistant at her first publishing house, which was Viking Press, a very prestigious press, where she was given her chance to work as a consulting editor in 1975 by the president and owner of that company, Tom Ginsburg, who was an old friend of Jackie's going back to college days.
Well, when Jackie began work there, it was a big media phenomenon and to some extent that never stopped. Becky told me:
"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., our 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 and found there a very large gentleman who had managed to capture the attention of everyone else 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, and then made sure he wasn't actually wired with explosives before I began steering him towards one of the elevators. As I loaded him into the car, a familiar figure emerged from the other elevator. This gentleman, who always dressed in clerical garb, was mild-mannered but distinctly eerie. He had arrived several minutes before, always with the same request, which was to see Jackie before he died. After another very interesting discussion, I was able to turn him around and send him home for the day and then quickly return to my cubicle, where all of the phone lines were ringing. In rapid succession, I took calls from Mike Wallace, who was determined to get Jackie to do a 60 Minutes interview and professed to be amazed I wasn't interested in helping him out; a woman who called daily to ask what Jackie was wearing that day; another woman who called regularly but was much easier to deal with, as she simply wanted Jackie to know that Clive Barnes, a noted theater critic at the time, had parked a van in front of her apartment building and was engaged in the process of stealing her furniture, one piece at a time. [laughter] That was the kind of pandemonium Jackie inspired. Most of it was created by the media and by fanatic but harmless eccentrics.”
Well, now we can try to take some of these ideas and recollections a little bit further. Joe, I thought I would start with you because you shared a number of Jackie's last years with her. You were very close with her and shared quite a few lunches with her, as I recall. I thought maybe you would fill us in on how your relationship with Jackie began, and we'll take it from there.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Okay. I think that the book that Greg had done is a phenomenal book because, as he said, Jackie did over 100 books over 20 years, the part of her life that she really picked for herself. The range of subjects that interested her was phenomenal. If you read this book, you're going to find out that she was far smarter, far more human, far funnier and far more magical than I think anything else has ever shown her to be. All of her friends and all of her associates have always sort of taken a vow of privacy for her, and we never talked about her before. But I think there's something very important to talk about, the achievements that she had these last 20 years, because they are so unknown.
She did put so much effort into being a wonderful editor, but also to being a wonderful friend. I'm amazed at how inspiring her life really was. I had the blessing of going to the Vineyard the last summer that she was there, which would have been the summer of '93. She had just turned 64. I took her a gift of the Beatles' recording of "Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm 64?" [laughter] When they recorded that that was an old age. She had never heard the song, and she just laughed and laughed. She gave me a tour. We walked the beach, we walked all over the grounds. There was a little rowboat out there and I said, "Oh, what's its name?" She said, "Oh, that rowboat's named Beauty School Dropout." [laughter] She had that kind of a sense of humor. I said, "Oh, these trees in this orchard." She said, "Well, John says those trees get shorter every year."
We went into the kitchen and on the wall in the kitchen she had all these snapshots up on a cork bulletin board, and so many of the pictures were unflattering of her; she'd have her eyes closed, but everybody else would look great. And some where she looked her magnetic self. But it showed me she was trying, even with her family and friends, to be treated as if she were a regular person. The fact that she put up unflattering pictures, along with the good ones, in this potpourri was so interesting to me.
Then we went into the library, and I think that was her soul, because she looked up at all these books and she said, "These are my other best friends." They were mostly the books of her authors. They were books that she was cherished. And I think that really, because she did do a lot of solitary things, whether it was riding a horse … She taught me how to kayak. I mean, I think that she did get such pleasure from reading. She got such pleasure from knowing her authors, and I think Greg touched on that.
So how did I know her, as Greg asked? Well, I'd been a publisher and an editor, in fact ran that piece in 1979 in New York magazine that Gloria Steinem wrote. But I never even mentioned that to her. I kept running into her at parties. Bill Moyers was my friend from Texas; I've known him for 40 years. I'd run into Jackie there. I'd run into her at Marietta Tree's. I even ran into her one night at the weirdest dinner I've ever been to that Mayor Koch gave, and I think he cooked it. [laughter] It was so weird. There were like 20 people there, and everybody looked like just people off the subway. It was 100 degrees outside, his air conditioner wasn't working, the electricity went off and on again and he said, "I want everybody to go around the table and tell who you are." I thought, Jackie Onassis is sitting at this table. She has to tell everyone who she is. [laughter] And it finally came to her and she said, "I'm Jacqueline Onassis and I'm a senior editor at Doubleday. I love to do books that preserve the heritage of story-telling." And it was quite fun that night.
So I kept running into her over and over. One of my assistants, when I was publisher of Rolling Stone, was doing children books with her and she said, "What is this guy, Joe Armstrong, like?" So my friend, my assistant, talked in a little girl voice and, I don't know, she said stuff. Then Jackie said, "Well, if something bad happened, what would he do to help morale?" And Claudia said, "Oh, I remember once something bad happened and on the loudspeaker in everybody's office on 56th Street he blasted out the song Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life. [laughter] Jackie said, "What?" She said, "Give me his number."
Well, she called and asked me to lunch. Well, I would have loved to have lunch with her; I would never have had the confidence or the spunk to call her; it was so intimidating. So we went to lunch and, I told Greg, I had a three-by-five index card on my lap with things that we could talk about. [laughter] But I never looked down because we were the first people in the restaurant and the last people out. She had so much to say and asked me so many questions, and had so many things to share that I never looked down. And that just says everything in the world about her.
I asked Bill Moyers one time, “Why is it that her presence is so intimidating? Even though she's so normal, she works so hard at being a regular person, she's so unaffected by attention, I said, why is this intimidating to us?” And Bill, who'd been a presidential press secretary at 30 and helped start the Peace Corps, said, well, it sort of intimidated him, too, and he said the reason is her place in history. She held our country together during those four awful days, something she was never asked to do, but she became a unifying force. And there with her two little children, and she had lost a child just a few months before. It was just her place in history. But she worked so hard to be a regular person.
I remember at Doubleday she told me that she maybe was the only editor that went out to the lobby to get her guests; she didn't send an assistant to do it. Please don't correct me if that isn't true, I like the story. [laughter] But Jackie went out to get all of her own guests. She once told me, "I make" … Did she go get you?
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: She made coffee for me.
JOE ARMSTRONG: She told me she made coffee for people to make them feel comfortable.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: It had the opposite effect. [laughter]
JOE ARMSTRONG: You thought, "How much do I owe her?"
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: No, no, she just said, "Do you want coffee," and I thought …
JOE ARMSTRONG: She was sending out for it.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: … I should say yes because she'd send for it, because she wanted coffee. It's one of those things where you're reading between the lines. So she gets up, goes out and she comes back having made the coffee for me.
JOE ARMSTRONG: That's her. And you know what? She placed all of her own phone calls. She'd call and say, "This is Jacqueline Onassis, may I speak to Betty Sue Flowers." And half the time people would say, "Oh, really, you're Jackie? [laughter] I'm the Pope!" And they'd hang up on her. So she'd call back again and say, "This is Jackie." And they'd say, "Oh, oh."
Because I was a publisher for many years and an editor, there are so many egomaniacs in New York, and there are so many people that act so much more important than they really are. Jackie worked so hard to be less important than she really was, and she was so human. I think you'll get that, I mean how real she was as a human being. And the fact that she loved Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life, I would be remiss if I didn't read you just a few of the lyrics. Because at one point I got her the album and she made cassettes, and she sent them over to me and on the outside of the envelope it said, "Religious material enclosed." [laughter] I think back in the '50s there was a discount if you mailed religious materials, before we had ACLU. So she had written on these tapes, "Drop Kick Me Jesus by Bobby Bare." And this is from the album, Bobby Bare's Greatest Hits, which were, of course, on the Bareworks label.
"Drop kick me Jesus through the goalposts of life
End over end, neither left nor to right
Straight through the heart of them religious uprights
Drop kick me Jesus through the goalposts of life."
The second stanza was:
"Make me, oh make me, Lord, more than I am
Make me a piece in your master game plan
Free from the earthly temptations below" –
And this was Jackie's favorite line:
"I've got the will, Lord if you've got the toe." [laughter]
One time she called me on the telephone and she said, "Joe, you made me a hero." And I said, "What?" She said, "I was sitting in Carly's gazebo with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and I just started reciting all the lyrics to Drop Kick Me Jesus." She said their mouths just fell open and they just thought, where did this come from? [laughter] And she loved it. So anyway, those were just a few stories about Jackie.
DAVID STENN: Tell the airplane food.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Oh, my gosh. We had lunch all the time, so I would always figure out the restaurants and a lot of times she said, "Let's just get a hamburger." I think that was her favorite food. Mine, too.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: Yes, absolutely.
JOE ARMSTRONG: The Yale people say they did.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: I know, but what do they know?
JOE ARMSTRONG: They lie.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: They lie.
JOE ARMSTRONG: And Harvard wouldn't. Sometimes we'd go to the Four Seasons because it was the most public restaurant in town, but they'd give you a corner hole and nobody would come up and bother you. So one time I said to her, "Why don't you name the restaurant?" And she said, "Okay," and she called back and she said, "We're going to the Top of the Sixes." And I said, "What's that?" She said, "Well, they serve airport food." [laughter] And I said, "They serve airport food?" She said, "Yes, it's on the top of my building." So we went and had airport food. [laughter] I think she got a kick out of that. She was a very real person. I hope that comes through enough from that.
GREG LAWRENCE: Yes, that was great.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Somebody else talk, please. [laughter]
GREG LAWRENCE: Harriet, you're the one person who can really give us a picture of Jackie at work in that office and what that culture at Doubleday was like, what the routine was like being an editor, because you were one yourself and you distinguished yourself with your own imprint. She certainly admired you. How did she comport herself, to start with? And what was your impression when you first met her?
HARRIETT RUBIN: Well, it's interesting, Joe, that you talk about Jackie as a very real person. As an editor, she was sort of, well, superreal, supersmart. And she had tastes that were unbelievably sophisticated. Everybody at Doubleday was a little frightened of what she would say at editorial meetings. Every Wednesday the editors would assemble with the editorial assistants and we would present our projects, one by one. The first editorial meeting at which she was present, and I was there as well, she brought in projects that were just astonishing. She wanted to publish – and I hope I'm going to pronounce this right – an American Pléiade, which would take all the great classic American authors and publish them in uniform hardcovers, which of course then became Library of America. But she had the idea to do this, ten years at least, before the Library of America got started.
When she would describe these projects at the meetings, people would just sit there like -- Who has the courage to bring up literary works at Doubleday? I mean, we used to joke about the paper Doubleday books were published on as beaver lick, because the beavers just sort of licked them loose off the trees. [laughter] The paper was so thin and shabby.
Another project that she brought up one day was to do a children's book based on one paragraph of Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the chapter on Leonardo da Vinci, where Leonardo is experimenting with flight and blowing up bladders of birds that he had sewn together to see how they would fly in the air by themselves with just human breath motoring them. I hope I'm remembering this right. She wanted to do a children's book based on this wisp of an idea, but compelling.
We all had the sense that she was the unofficial policewoman at the publishing company, that she was upholding standards that the bean counters in all the other corner offices – she had one of them – she was keeping them at bay. Because as long as we had Mrs. Onassis on the staff, we had to comport ourselves. At least, we had to try to sort of aspire to her lead. We couldn't do anything to embarrass her for fear that she might leave.
I was with Betty Sue, we were in Germany the day we learned that Jackie had died. When I got home and went back to the office, the editors were sort of sitting in their chairs, kind of whiteknuckled, thinking that this is going to be the end, not just of the standards that we had tried to aspire to at Doubleday, but in a way the end of publishing. Because the conglomerazation had already begun, and it was as though there was no one to remind us of what we could be. So her death stole a lot of the spirit and the drive of the company.
GREG LAWRENCE: It's interesting that you mention her place in that way. And I think you were the first one who told me about, because of her place in the company as a woman. Now admittedly, this was not any woman, this was a very special woman beyond belief. But there was a history at Doubleday when it was the family company under Nelson Doubleday, Sr., who owned the New York Mets, who was a boy's boy, and there was a lot of carousing; the chauvinist attitude was very much present. And you mentioned to me female editors who were referred to, in a disparaging way by the men, as the Brides of Doubleday. Now, who were they, and how did Jackie relate to them?
HARRIETT RUBIN: Well, this goes back to Doubleday, even before … At some point in Jackie's career at Doubleday, Bertelsmann, the large German producer originally of Bibles, bought the company. And it's almost unimaginable today, but there was such a controversy raised of how can an American publishing company suddenly fall into the hands of the Germans? It seemed like another world war was! It's really preposterous today, but in those days there were three great women editors at Doubleday – Betty Prashker, Lisa Drew, who founded and cultivated Alex Haley in the epic long creation of Roots, and Kate Medina, who is now the president of Random House, another brilliant, amazing editor. These three women were known as the Brides of Doubleday because they took their jobs very seriously. They had an almost votive, an almost nun-like or self-sacrificial habit of working. They would be there at six in the morning. They would leave at nine at night. And they would lug home shopping bags of manuscripts every night and lug shopping bags of manuscripts back in every morning.
This was the world into which Jackie entered. It was a kind of world that was already on a decline. Soon after Jackie started, the Brides all dispersed; they left Doubleday. The presence of the Mets, I think, deterred them -- the fact that Nelson Doubleday was spending more of his time on sports.
So this idea of Jackie as an ordinary person, I never knew that Jackie. I knew the superordinary person. Once I was in the restroom with her – and I will confess, I used to try to dress like Jackie. [laughter] I shopped Chanel in those days. Because why? Because of all the gorgeous photos of Jackie. I loved the fact that she described herself once as an Ionic column, that she never tried to look too feminine; she just tried to look commanding.
So one day I ran into her in the ladies' room and I was wearing a red Chanel suit with gold buttons up and down. Everywhere you could imagine there were gold buttons. And she came out of a stall and she did a double take, which is what people usually did with her. And she said, "Harriet, you look like the Daughter of the Regiment." [laughter] And it stopped me cold, because she was right both visually and, in a way, I was mentally the Daughter of the Regiment; I was this orphan sort of kid at Doubleday, trying to make my way in the world, doing their bidding. When she had a comment to make, it went on and on; I mean, it had layers of meaning.
And that's the Jackie I knew. She was sort of a poet in that world.
JOE ARMSTRONG: And Harriet has worn black ever since. [laughter] This is her uniform now.
HARRIETT RUBIN: It's true. I've given up the Jackie look.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: No, she wore black all the time.
HARRIETT RUBIN: That's true, she did in those days.
JOE ARMSTRONG: She wore slacks and a sweater at work.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: Slacks and sweaters. I never saw her in anything but slacks and sweaters.
HARRIETT RUBIN: And little ballet shoes.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: And ballet shoes, yeah.
GREG LAWRENCE: Another aspect of that change that took place at Doubleday, and for Jackie, since you mentioned the editorial meetings, when she started out at Viking, she was a great buddy of Tom Ginsburg. They later had a falling out and she moved on to Doubleday, but while she was there she worked on about ten books. If she wanted to undertake a project she would go to Tom, and it would have to be something really off the wall for him not to have given her support.
Now, when she moved over to Doubleday, the scale changed. In fact, I interviewed Tom before he passed away and he said, "Well, we at Viking, we had kind of a PT boat and Doubleday was like a battleship." It was a change in scale, but it also was a change in the way of doing business, because you have those editorial meetings and where in the past, let's say the first half of the 20th century, the editor was at the top of the pyramid. The editor was going to guide a book and determine how it was going to be distributed, how it was going to be promoted, the editing of the book itself, and the concept of the book, all of that. And that changed when the marketing department entered the picture in such a big way, and the bean counters, as you say. That was a world that was changing right around Jackie. So I'm just wondering, was that your sense reflected in these meetings? I know one editor there said they were like Gong Shows. Every once in a while Nelson Doubleday would show up or John Sargent, the publisher, would be there. But otherwise, it was this group. In fact, Tom told me this story because after he gave up Viking several years later – it must have been about '84 – he came over to be a consultant. And even after Jackie had had a falling out with him, Tom told John Sargent, "Listen, I'll come, but Jackie has to approve this because we had a real falling out." And Jackie said that's fine.
So Tom was at the meeting where Jackie presented the Michael Jackson book as an idea that would be worth pursuing. And various editors told me they didn't know who Michael Jackson was. The marketing people, who were out of a different background, they had no idea and Jackie was making the case, "Oh, this is Thriller. This is going to be a huge seller." She finally did get approval, but she got the idea from her kids. Jackie didn't know either. [laughter] She was a quick study. But it was probably Caroline and John, Jr., who told her.
Then that began an ordeal. Michael actually signed that book a year before I signed my first book, and he finished his book two years after. So it went on for, like, four years. I remember having lunch with Jackie and asking her about it, because we were all curious. She said, "Don't ask. It's an embarrassment." It went on and on, and Michael Jackson was apparently not easy to deal with and adored her and would call her incessantly to compare notes about being a celebrity. Jackie was just so bored by it all. Then at the last minute he threatened to pull the plug on the book, not to publish it. I mean, he went through one ghostwriter after another. He threatened not to do the book unless she wrote the introduction. So she finally complied, though she complained about it for months – "I don't know what to write." Finally she wrote a twoparagraph introduction, which began with the line, "What can we say about Michael Jackson?" [laughter] Which I'm sure was her way of putting the needle in.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Can I add one thing about that?
GREG LAWRENCE: Sure, yes, because you remember.
JOE ARMSTRONG: I remember her mentioning to me that she had done that book, but she said she did it to be a good solider. And she did it because she knew it would be a big hit, and then that would allow her to do some of her smaller books, which she really believed in. So I thought that was a very shrewd business decision, really.
HARRIETT RUBIN: I have to say one thing. After Thriller came out, she actually presented to the editorial meeting a translation of The Complete Pushkin. [laughter] Nobody in the room but the two of us knew who Pushkin was. And she had to explain.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Did they say yes?
HARRIETT RUBIN: No, they said no. So Michael Jackson was not enough to buy her Pushkin.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Maybe she got some other ones in.
GREG LAWRENCE: But that was her thinking. She told me one time, she was so thrilled that Dancing on My Grave had been a bestseller, and the Michael Jackson was a bestseller for about two weeks. And she said, "Well, those books that have that success give me the freedom to do the books that I really love." Which were, many of them, very lavish, illustrated books. The Tiffany books, which were a series of -- oh, it must be ten books -- devoted to the department store, the jewelry, and so forth. She loved that as a social document, because she loved the store. A lot of money went into them, they never made any money, but she enjoyed doing it. The curator of Tiffany, who helped her on all those books, was a man named John Loring, who worked with Jackie on more books than anyone else. He described her attitude about approaching the company, approaching the hierarchy to get her books done, the ones that she really wanted to do -- because they would turn her down unless she really, really fought for the books she wanted -- and he said, "I remember on the first Tiffany book, we went into a meeting - one of these editorial/marketing meetings -- and Jackie made the case and she plotted this carefully. She told me, 'Look, I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to turn to you and you're going to say this. Then you're going to come back to me and then I'm going to say this.'" So she had it all orchestrated. She had scripted it. He said, "Then, at a certain point in the meeting, she leaned over to me and whispered, 'Can you believe what these people are saying? We couldn't dream anything this horrible.'" I mean, she knew who she was dealing with. It was a corporate world. It was very different than the political world and that part of her past; it was different than the whatever you want to call the world she was in when she was with Onassis. But she adjusted to it.
This brings me to a question, which I'll just put to all of you. Going back to what Louis Auchincloss said, where would we find her today in this world of megapublishers? And I think it was Ted Sorenson who said to me, "How do you think she would have adjusted to the Internet? Would she have had an email address?" Because when I worked with her up until she died in '94, email wasn't anything at that point. Ted said, "No, she would have just continued to use her typewriter." And I said no. The reason I said I didn't think so is because the first meeting I had with Jackie when we essentially, verbally agreed that we were going to do a book, Gelsey and myself, at the end of the meeting, it was just over lunch with Lisa Drew, who we've mentioned, and Jackie said, "Greg, I've been taking a course on computers." She said, "Do you think you might want to borrow a computer once you start working on the book?" I was about to say, well, sure, and Lisa Drew reached over and grabbed Jackie's hand and said, "Jackie, they'll be able to afford one once we give them the advance." [laughter]
But the fact that she would take a course always made me think, well, she'd be open. But on the other hand, I don't think she would ever have stopped writing those letters, the notes, because they were gifts, and they were very personal. Later, when we get a little further along, Joe will read you one that was very special. They were beautiful. Her calligraphy was marvelous.
JOE ARMSTRONG: I bet Betty Sue got so many because you and Bill Moyers had many bestsellers with her.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: That was special.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Three books?
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: Three, uh huh.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Was the first one Joseph Campbell?
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: Yes, that's a funny story because I was a professor at the time, and I'd been working with Bill. I was a series consultant for this series with this 85-year-old mythologist, and nobody wanted to support the series; Bill put his own money into it, because they said, "Moyers, you're crazy. A mythologist? Six hours with a mythologist?" So there was so much we had to cut from that series just to get it all in that I started making a book that was edited in a different way from the series. Bill was against the book, but I started putting this book together and then Joe died before the series came out. So I had this manuscript and his publisher, who had agreed very reluctantly to set this up, suddenly it was radio silence, didn't hear a word from him.
So I flew to New York, got the manuscript back, and I had this manuscript and no publisher, just sitting there. So I'm grading papers and -- she made her own calls -- the phone, "Hold for Jackie." She comes on the line and I thought it was one of my students playing a joke. But the voice -- you couldn't mistake the voice -- and she said, "Two of my heroes are Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. I hear you have a manuscript. Can you be in New York in 48 hours with 100 black-and-white illustrations and 75 color illustrations?" [laughter]
Now, I was doing this book on the cheap -- illustrations? And because this book had to be published – I don't know how she convinced Doubleday to do this, because it's very expensive to do that and also this obscure subject – it had to come out, the book had to be on the bookshelves in order to be advertised by PBS when the series came out. That's why there was such a huge rush.
But she had this magic. I just said yes and then hung up and thought, how the heck am I going to do this? Of course, I didn't come up with … but I came up with what the picture should be, but it would take someone who really knew a picture of Daedalus and Icarus with the emphasis on Daedalus, but she knew what that was. So I wrote all the captions and the descriptions of what the pictures would be, showed up there to this meeting. She had these designers and she said, "I'll have to get an art person to have someone there to actually do this on the ground."
She had such an amazing instinct for people, I think. She really did. Because the first time I was at Doubleday – this is a slight digression, but you'll see where I'm going with this – she literally had this idea, took my hand, and I would say dragged -- because I didn't know where I was going -- me to Harriet's office and said, "You have to meet this woman." Then she just left us, and we talked for four hours, or something?
HARRIETT RUBIN: Yeah. I don't think we took a breath until the cleaning lady knocked on the door to take out the trashcan. We've been lifelong friends because of Jackie Onassis.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: So she had this kind of instinct about people and about what would work. She had chosen this woman. I thought, how is she going to find someone to do this? They'd have to be a clone of me with this very peculiar Texas background – mythology, that's how Bill got it – this Texas background in a program that would know about Daedalus and Icarus at the University of Texas. So there was this woman who had graduated from the same little arts honors degree program I had at the University of Texas the year before I had. She knew all the allusions that I made. It was just phenomenal. She just had this unerring, this amazing instinct. And this book came out, and it was on the bestseller list for a long time when I did the next book, World of Ideas.
Now, here's the point about cutting. She wanted me to cut it in half. She put me in a closet, literally in a closet and said, "I'll come back for you when you cut it in half." I spent all day in that closet. But she came back and I said, "Jackie, I am so sorry. I have been through this, and my instinct is that anybody who would buy this book in the first place will not mind if it's twice as long as it should be because it's a world of ideas, and these people were so interested." Because I knew she would have to defend this in the editorial meeting. She took a deep breath, she looked at me and she said okay. It, too, was a bestseller, and I had the pleasure of seeing Joseph Campbell, both books on the bestseller list at the same time.
JOE ARMSTRONG: At the same time?
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: At the same time. This is Jackie's instinct. Because I think she had this … It's not that she wanted to do books like that. She wanted to do Pushkin. But she had this instinct of what would touch people, what their deepest feeling would be about something, what belonged with something. I think that's the secret to her amazing style, is that she knew what went with something, especially when it came to matters of the heart. I think that's why she held us together during those terrible days because she knew that we needed, in a time of great emotional confusion and fear – there was a lot of fear – we needed ritual. So she orchestrated as a high ritual, she orchestrated the funeral, the horse. Do you remember all those things that were not like anything we had seen before? She had this feeling for the deepest part of human beings when they had emotion, but also had to work in the world and she had that ability to be so present.
Looking back -- I was just thinking of this today -- looking back I thought, this is weird. I never thought of her, when I worked with her, as a former First Lady. I never thought of her as former anything. She was totally present right then in who she was. And it just is a big blessing in my life to have worked with her.
JOE ARMSTRONG: All of us feel that way. And think how young she was. I mean, the fact that Jackie died at 64. When her husband died she was 34. He starts running for President, she's 21. That she was able to do these things, like redo the White House, save Lafayette Square, start the Kennedy Center Arts Program in the East Room with Pablo Casals that became the Kennedy Center. This place, this great Library. Save Grand Central.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: Amazing.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Amazing the things that this woman did.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: You know, that's one reason she was so close with Bill Moyers because they were two young people. He told me that when Johnson and Kennedy would be walking along – this is when Kennedy was President and Johnson was Vice President and Bill was working with the Peace Corps – that he and she would be out at Camp David or something, and they connected because they were so much younger. Which I thought was kind of interesting.
DAVID STENN: I think one aspect we haven't touched. We've talked about how much she loved books, but when you love books, when books are your passion, you love writers, and writers are really interesting to you. My experience was really very different from everyone else's because I was too young to know Jacqueline Kennedy; I had no back story on her. All I knew was … I was working in Hollywood, where writers couldn't have been more disrespected, and writers were the least important people, and yet the script is the backbone of any good movie or television series. They still haven't figured out how to fix that. [laughter]
Then you go into a situation where someone who you don't know from history, but you do know is venerated, and all you have to do is walk down one block of Fifth Avenue with her and see people's reactions, and you know something's going on. She's listening to you, and she's talking about books, and she's talking about authors, and there such a deep respect for what you do, and what you're going to do together.
I'd never written a book. I think I was 24, and I had this person who clearly has the respect of everyone around here telling me, "This is going to be great." So you start to think, well, maybe she's right, maybe this can work. One of the myths I'd like to dispel about her is this idea that she only did books that she cared about, or topics that were of interest to her. I know in my case that was not true. Jackie told me a story once about going to Hollywood in, I guess, the late '50s when Peter Lawford was her brother-in-law, and she went on to the movie set and she said, "They spent the whole afternoon on a bar scene with a glass that was sliding down the bar. The whole afternoon shooting that." She said, "That was it for me."
She wasn't interested in Hollywood, and here was someone coming to her and saying, "I want to write a book about this actress who's now the butt of every dirty joke and whose worth has been forgotten." My feeling was, I want to write a book about someone whose life has a lot of scurrilous aspects, but I want to do it in a serious way. I want to take a genre that's been completely disreputable and treat this figure as if it were a military or religious or political figure in terms of the responsibility. I think that's what she probably, in hindsight, connected to, was this idea that you could do something respectfully about someone and yet still tell the truth. I think that's what your book did as well, this idea that you could tell the truth about a world -- and the truth isn't always pretty -- but it's still the truth. You do it to serve your subject.
In my case, I know she wasn't familiar with Clara Bow. But I think one thing Greg was mentioning that you don't see any more in the book business, and the reason I've never done a book after the books I did with Jackie, was she cultivated voices, she cultivated authors. Maybe this wasn't going to be her favorite book of yours, but you had a voice that interested her. Or you approached things in an interesting way. And that just doesn't happen anymore because you have to move copies.
This idea that you could find someone who was young and green and really shape them and help them and, like all of you – it's like Tennessee Williams said, “You kill all your darlings.” Cut 100 pages of your manuscript! Well, there goes your arm. But she made you understand. What she said to me is similar, as a metaphor, as to what she said to you, which is she said, "Be like Fred Astaire: don't let the hard work show. His shoes were soaked in blood." That's the best advice as a writer I've ever had because of the simplicity of it and the truth of it.
That was something that she really made you feel. She told me that her sister had married a publisher, I guess when they were very young. She said, "Even then, I was interested in that world, in the world of being an editor." It wasn't something she discovered in the 1970s as something to do to pass the time. Books had always been her passion, the world of publishing had been her passion.
But she was, as strange as this may sound, a deeply humble person, and she drew a distinction. I don't know if she ever did this with you, but I remember this really vividly because I had never thought of this before. I mean, you knew this person was the most famous person on the planet. She called herself well-known. She didn't call herself famous, because a famous person achieved things and was famed for their achievements. And a well-known person, to her, was someone who was almost famous by proxy, because she was connected to a famous person. Given what Joe just said about all of her achievements, she certainly is entitled to be considered a famous person, and yet her innate humility made her feel like, "Well, no, I didn't save Grand Central Station, Mayor Beame did, because Beame is the one who actually made sure it happened."
She was very content to be sort of the person behind the scenes who was helping. She was really comfortable in that role because she was somewhat shy, and she was also, like I said, deeply humble. I can't stress that enough. There was a modesty and a sense of,"I'm not a writer, I wish I could write like you." Well, your letters are pretty … You're no slouch. She had that. And it was not only charming and captivating, but it put you at ease because it made you feel like you were working together, rather than you were working for someone that you almost were in awe of. As a writer, that's really important; you need to be able to talk to your editor and dialogue with your editor and have discussions about the work.
For me, as someone who didn't know her as Jacqueline Kennedy, I wanted someone who was going to protect my book, because I knew the subject I was writing about, most editors, maybe under pressure from the publisher, would have said, "Well, can you sex this up a little bit? Can we be more graphic here?" I knew with Jackie that that would never happen, and it didn't ever happen. That's why that book is still in print. She gets the credit for that because she had the vision of what that book should be, and she protected me from anything that was going to deviate from that vision.
GREG LAWRENCE: Just to support the idea, she never liked to have her name in the book. Not even in the acknowledgement. In the early days, I think her name was on the cover of one or two books, "edited by." She hated that. Gelsey and I wanted to include a little moment in our book when she and Maurice Templeton came over to London to see Gelsey perform, which was a tremendous gesture of support. She said, "Oh, no, please don't put that in. Don't let them know. Keep that between us."
It was one of the things I thought about when I undertook this book about her editing. But enough years had gone by that the secrecy, which everybody respected, really there's a statute of limitations on that. I think people really deserve to know about this part of her life which was so special to her. I think if she's looking down, she'd just smile. "Okay, the secret's out of the bag now. I really did those books, didn't I?"
DAVID STENN: She had probably come to terms with her celebrity, at least by the point I knew her because she could have some fun with it. I think you were saying that she would walk you to the elevator and she was the only person. She did that, but what she would do is at Doubleday there were those big elevators that opened, and she would walk you and then she'd stand smack in front of the elevator, and you'd get in the elevator. The elevator would be crowded, and she'd be standing there and so, collectively the jaws would drop and she would say, "Goodbye, David. I can't wait to see you again." [laughter]
GREG LAWRENCE: Yes, she did that with me, too.
DAVID STENN: And the doors would shut and every neck would swivel, trying to figure out who is this guy, why did this happen. And that was clearly like she was having a good time. [laughter]
HARRIETT RUBIN: We were in an elevator once and she started talking to me about her children; she just adored them. She was talking and the people in front, you know elevator etiquette, you look up. They just swiveled back. They were one inch in front of our faces. She just reached inside her purse, put on her dark glasses and kept talking to me. [laughter] Didn't miss a beat.
GREG LAWRENCE: I think we've reached the point where we want to introduce an absentee person on our panel, which Joe will take care of.
JOE ARMSTRONG: Carly Simon did a bunch of children's books with Jackie. Carly is such a fascinating person. She has such literary genes; her dad started Simon & Schuster. Carly is a great poet, she's a wonderful writer, she's a wonderful musician. She writes all of her own songs, writes all the words, writes all the melodies.
We had lunch with Jackie. It was April the 14th, about five weeks before Jackie died. And I remember, we were going to have this … We hadn't seen her in two months and we wanted to have a lunch to cheer her on. It meant a lot to me to see Jackie, but also that day was the 50th anniversary of my first dad dying in World War II, and I thought I've never honored this every year, but the 50th anniversary of him being a reconnaissance pilot. I had this picture of him with my mother, and me in the tummy of my mother. I was going to take that and I thought that the only two people that I'd really ever want to be with on a day like this would be Jackie and Carly. But when I got to Carly's house, I knew it wasn't appropriate. We got there early and Jackie obviously was suffering a lot, more than she would even admit. But she was very positive. She had this kind of courage that still, I guess, got her through everything. Here she is, 64 years old and she said, "Only four more weeks and I get my life back." She said, "I'm going to spend the summer at the Vineyard."
Jackie then had some other people come in after we visited with Jackie for about an hour. Then she had Ken Burns come in because he was doing a documentary about baseball and they'd never met. So Carly thought she'll be able to talk to him about baseball. Peter Duchin, who was a bandleader who she'd known forever, who's so much fun, she had him come in.
As we were leaving that day, Jackie and I are walking out to the elevator – the elevator again – and Carly put this song in her hand and said, "I wrote this for you." It was called Touched by the Sun. It's quite a beautiful, beautiful song. Are we going to play it in a minute? Okay.
I wanted to tell you because I found something that Carly wrote me about it way back. I think what inspired her was a poem that Stephen Spender wrote, and it was Jack Kennedy's favorite, Carly said. It was a poem called, "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Great." And in this poem Kennedy quoted Stephen Spender saying that the words allude to that group of people who landed in a certain place through an accident of destiny and are determined to get as close to achievement as they could, that they would land even in danger's path because that was always the way they tested themselves and climbed the rung higher.
The last two sentences of that poem -- the last sentence, really -- says, "Born of the sun" – and that's the name of the song, Touched by the Sun – "Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun and left the vivid air signed with their honor." It's quite a beautiful song about wanting to be with artists and dreamers, and those lyrics really did speak to Jackie. She called Carly twice the next day to say how touched she was. She called me to tell me how touched she was. I think the next day she went to the hospital and we never did hear from her again, and she was 64.
So look at all this woman did in 64 years. To be such an incredible person, to have seen such loss, to have seen such triumph, and to have been such a witness to so many things in history, and to have helped so many people. She's the most thoughtful person I ever knew.
So where's Amy? She's going to play the Carly song.
[Carly Simon's Touched by the Sun played] [applause]
JOE ARMSTRONG: It's some beautiful song.
GREG LAWRENCE: We have time for some questions from the audience. So there are two microphones up here, if you want to come up. We went a little over time.
QUESTION: It was always my father's contention that if Jack had made it to a second term, Jacqueline would have made certain that there was a cabinet level minister of culture. There's no great nation in this world that doesn't have one except the United States. Did she ever express anything of that to you?
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: She never talked about the past with me. She was always totally in the present.
JOE ARMSTRONG: I once said to her, "You're the only First Lady who hasn't written a book. And you're the only First Lady who's an editor." And she said, "I only want to look ahead." I think also it made her sad sometimes to look at the past., although she seemed to have such a great sense of duty about the past. She would still write letters when someone died who had been in her husband's cabinet, or children of. I think she spent a lot of time honoring the past, but I think she wanted to always look ahead.
HARRIETT RUBIN: But I think she became the de facto cultural minister. She did. I mean, in those days as a publisher, you contributed to the greater conversation. And certainly that's true of the Campbell projects and her work in architecture. She became exactly what your father prophesied.
JOE ARMSTRONG: The Kennedy Center, Pablo Casals, and all those entertainment things, I remember being a little kid in West Texas reading about it. Well that's what really became the Kennedy Center for the Arts. And that was her.
GREG LAWRENCE: And also, back in 1962, I think it was, she was very close to Andre Malraux, who was the cultural minister for France, and they conspired together to bring the Mona Lisa to New York and to Washington. So she certainly was aware, and she was such a lover of French culture and politics and history, that she was certainly aware that that was something that was missing in the government, in our own ministers of everything. So it stands to reason that that would have been something she would have talked to Jack about. Who knows if it would have happened? But I can see her supporting that kind of initiative, sure.
DAVID STENN: And she had a deep, strong sense and passion and knowledge for and about history. It informed President Kennedy's funeral, it informed many decisions she made when she was a First Lady. But it also informed her love of books. She did say to me once she was very concerned that if people stopped reading, it would be like the Middle Ages again, and that there would not be an exchange of ideas. And that's interesting, I find, in light of the current sort of Presidential campaigns, because it has devolved into name-calling.
QUESTION: That's my question, what that legacy would have meant.
DAVID STENN: I think so, because that was … As long as people were reading, they were thinking, and that is a cultural event. To read a book has become like a cultural event. [laughter] But that idea, I think it would have been interesting, the point I raised earlier, about how she would have fared in the Internet age, because the Internet has opened up vast vistas of knowledge to people in an immediate way on one level, but it's taken away a deeper level of thinking that was very important to her.
I know I told this to Greg in his book, I remember this book, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, we were both reading it at the same time. I said, "What do you think about it?" She said, "I like it." It was all about college students. And she said, "I like it because they're all Classics majors." [laughter]
HARRIETT RUBIN: I've asked myself this question, what she would make of publishing today. I think she would be saddened by the fact that the Internet is more about service than about content, and that Internet providers have just made that their emphasis. I wonder what she would make of this frenzy to give famous people imprints with their names on them – Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain. It's the big trend now. I can't imagine her wanting that for herself.
QUESTION: I was wondering if you would like to comment about her editorial style, whether there were things that set her apart from other editors. And how she was in terms of … what level did she kind of leave her fingerprints on your manuscripts? Did she really make specific suggestions, or did she say, "I'm leaving it here until you cut it half?" [laughter]
DAVID STENN: I'm really glad you asked that question, because that was the single-most common and offensive inquiry you got when you said who your editor was. Because the response was always, "Oh, does she really edit?" And that was such an insult to your book, because it kind of was saying, oh, do you care about your book being edited. The answer is that she was a line editor. She read the entire manuscript thoroughly. I still have the manuscripts that she edited, and there are notes in the margins all the way through, and then there's a long analysis at the end. So she thought small picture and she thought big picture. I know all of us have touched on this tonight: cut, cut, cut, concision, concise, cut.
She was always aware of how you had to really hook your audience, and that's always a problem, I know, especially when you write non-fiction. You want to show up. You've done a lot of hard work; you've done a lot of deep research. You have to show people what you've done. And what she, at least in my case, had a very specific skill level saying, "You don't need all that. You're telling a story. And this is great that you found this, but if you lost it, it wouldn't really make a difference." I've never had another editor, so I have nothing to compare her to, but I know I've certainly had to deal with a lot of network and studio executives. She was completely professional. Everything you'd want in an editor, just editorially.
GREG LAWRENCE: Exactly. With certain authors who I spoke with she would play a role of more the conceptual editor. She would have a discourse with the author about points in the book that interested her, that she felt needed clarification, that she wondered if that was really substantiated or this and that. And then with other books, such as mine, she really was a line editor. She not only hit every point in the book, she hit the grammar, she hit the way this paragraph needs a transition to get to here; this chapter needs a transition so we want to turn the page. "Now please don't tell me anymore about childhood, we've all had childhoods. That's the most boring part of any biography or autobiography."
She had an agenda which she had created for herself for years. I think there was a slight mention was she really prepared for the job. I mean, go back to Profiles in Courage and the William Manchester book and the White House book, and all of her studies and education and the time she spent in Paris. The reading she did in French and how she kept up with literature all over the world. She would find the Nobel Prize winner in Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz, and suddenly bring him into Doubleday, and suddenly it's bestsellers from this man that no one had ever heard of here.
She had a great instinct. I think it was Ted Sorenson, because there was some question, well, did Jackie really contribute anything to Jack's work. He said she was a natural editor, and they had a relationship where she was consulted all the time. So I think that's part of the brilliant gem that she really was in terms of publishing.
Harriet, it was one of the things that you first told me about -- the way that you looked at her as a saloniste in that 18th century French tradition. There was a kind of style that she brought in terms of her own feminist intent, and a larger intent to really bring the books into a discourse that would touch the elites of the world, as well as the citizenry of the world. That was a huge motivating factor for her; that was her literary Camelot, was really what she undertook.
QUESTION: Hi, I just wanted to say I long held many of her values in deep admiration, so this was just so nice, really, just so, so nice. I can't thank you enough. I just wanted to expose myself to say is it a misconception for me, now that I'm talking with people that might have a much better way of thinking about it. I used to think that she used her status within this industry and the book group, the publishing group to kind of launch or to make more exposed African American, whatever you want to say, people that might not have gotten, if they were just a regular person like me saying, "Hey, this is a great book, you really need to do something about it." Do you think of her as having that kind of thing? I know there was a fiction writer from Martha's Vineyard that she brought out to the publishing public. Then I thought maybe the Michael Jackson book was an example of that. But maybe I'm completely just making up something. I'd like to know if you had any opinions.
BETTY SUE FLOWERS: You would know more than …
HARRIETT RUBIN: I'm afraid I don't know. I think that she published a novel about slavery.
Didn't she publish a Sally Hemings novel?
GREG LAWRENCE: That was very early. That was at Viking.
HARRIETT RUBIN: Barbara Chase-Riboud.
GREG LAWRENCE: Yes.
HARRIETT RUBIN: Which was a great, great novel.
GREG LAWRENCE: But I think the book that was referred to is Dorothy West. Dorothy West had been a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance, and so forth. This is the kind of devotion she had to her writers. Dorothy was very on in years and was having difficulty getting to the end of her novel, which was the first one she had written in probably 30 years. Dorothy lived on Martha's Vineyard, and Jackie obviously had her home on Martha's Vineyard as well. Jackie would drive over and spend the afternoons with Dorothy and hold her hand and guide her through her own book. I mean, that's sort of beyond line editing and more conceptual. But it's a heart editing, I suppose. And Dorothy was most appreciative. I think she was very eloquent in her praise and her gratitude. So yeah, I think there's a lot to Jackie being a subversive in subtle ways, a champion of ideas and books that harkened all the way back to her childhood. My god, she was reading Chekhov at the age of eight.
QUESTION: I was just curious, with the tapes coming out this past November, if any of you had heard them and if you could reconcile was that the woman that you knew in your time and associations with her working as an editor?
Jackie was my neighbor on Martha's Vineyard, in Gay Head. I was the finance commissioner, and once a year we would have, of course, the annual town meeting in which all the townspeople – we had 150 registered voters – would enter town hall and we would vote on how to spend our budget, which was just about a million dollars. We ran a town on a million dollars. This would be in the late '80s. This was really democracy writ small, and it was classic American democracy. I would face the room and conduct the meeting with the selectmen, and at one annual town meeting I looked and I saw Jackie standing in the doorway watching the meeting, just as a witness to democracy in action in a small New England town.
Because this was a town of maybe five surnames – we were Cousins McDozens – there would always be a problem, and we would have to adjourn the meeting early. I remember – this was always in May, our annual town meeting – and I remember one meeting got out early because there was chaos, and I ran out because I knew Jackie was present. Our police chief, who was the nephew of the chief of the Wampanoags, Douglas Fortes, because we had in town, of course the Wampanoag; we had town government and tribal government; we had the Wampanoag Indians. Jackie was just silently walking out, down the steps of town hall, and Doug Fortes reached into his police car and gave Jackie a Gay Head cap, and she put it on her head and then she started … People were leaving in their cars and she started to direct the traffic. [laughter] She's waving the arm, she stuck the cap on her head and we're all watching, and she's spinning around. And we were silent there on the steps.
Then she said, "I always wanted to do that." [laughter] Then she said, "Do you think I could get a job at the ferry terminal?" [laughter] And when you were talking about how down-to-earth she is and how natural, how funny that she would just pick up on that, well, I can agree with you 100% on that. She was marvelous. [applause]
JOE ARMSTRONG: Just to say one thing. I love that story. At one point she said to me, "We've got to find more projects we can do together." Then she called me and said, "Would you help me save the American Ballet Theatre?" I said, "Well, why do we need to save them?" She said, "Well, they do all the classics, it's wonderful, I love ballet." I said, "Of course, then, we'll do it." So she said, "Okay, will you figure out who we go see? And we'll go and ask them for money." She said, "I'll have them to my apartment, or they can come to your apartment, or we'll go to their office, or we'll meet them in a restaurant. You just decide who we see."
So we went to see a series of people, and of course some of them really wanted to come to her apartment, and that's fine. But I made sure that they knew that they were to make a substantial investment before. [laughter] She didn't tell me to do that, but I was overprotective of her, like she was protective of all of us. So we ended up raising a whole bunch of money to save the American Ballet Theatre, and this is in the early '90s. So finally one day at lunch she said, "Thank you so much for helping with the Ballet, and we saved the Ballet." I said, "It's really funny, in my hometown we never could dance." She said, "What?" I said, "Well, we were Baptist Church of Christ and they thought dancing could lead to neck massage. [laughter] So we could never have a senior prom." She said, "Why didn't you tell me this? I wouldn't have put you through all that." And I said, "But no, ballet is now my life." And the next day, delivered to my doorman was this package. I opened it up and there's the most beautiful red T shirt, not with that dumb block letter stuff. It was in script and it said "Ballet is my life." [laughter]
Then there was this note saying, "I want you to come to Bethesda Fountain and I want you to wear this, and I'm going to wear the other one." And it said "Fundraising is my life." [laughter] And she said, "I'm going to wear that other one and we will dance around Bethesda Fountain together." I thought this is her sense of … Doing 100 books, saving the ballet … I mean, this was an incredible woman, and she was so funny and so smart and curious, and so kind and thoughtful. So what a pleasure for us that we knew her. [applause] We have one more question?
GREG LAWRENCE: Oh, yes, the interview tapes, yeah. Anybody want to tackle that?
HARRIETT RUBIN: I thought she had, still, a very cutting sense of humor and a good sense of political power. Because after I had been turned down for one sort of literary effort in these Wednesday Gong Shows, she came up to me and she said, "Well, we'll just have to start a B team." [laughter] She really knew how to get to you. [applause]
THE END
