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The other Jackie O
AP National Writer
NEW YORK
When most of us think of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we think back to the perfectly coifed first lady of the early ‘60s in a stylish shift, a string of pearls, a pill box hat. Or the Jackie O of the next decade, the rich widow in huge sunglasses that shielded her from the world.
We probably don’t think of a middle-aged working woman making her own photocopies, waiting on line to speak to the boss, or sitting cross-legged on the floor, arranging photos and puffing on cigarettes.
Yet this was Jackie’s third act — the Jackie who joined the work force in her mid-40s and spent nearly two decades as a book editor. By all accounts, it was one of the most satisfying periods of her life.
Suddenly, in a span of just a month, two new books are examining this little-known part of Jackie’s life, giving readers a new slant on a woman who has fascinated Americans like no other in our history.
“People think about Jackie’s clothes, about her marriages, maybe her redecorating the White House,” says historian William Kuhn, author of “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books,” released this month. “But her editorial career was longer than her two marriages combined.”
Jackie was 46 when she was hired by Thomas Guinzburg at Viking Press, not long after the 1975 death of Aristotle Onassis. Clearly Viking wanted her for her name. And her early efforts — she spent only two years there, before moving to Doubleday — were a learning process. But her productivity skyrocketed as the years went on. “The fact is, she amassed a list of books that publishing professionals are in awe of today,” Kuhn said, from art to European and American history to photography to fashion to religion.
And then there was her well-documented love of dance, particularly ballet, which led to the best-seller “Dancing on My Grave,” by ballerina Gelsey Kirkland and her husband, author Greg Lawrence. Working with her on the book, an account of Kirkland’s descent into drug addiction, was “a humbling experience,” says Lawrence, who next month comes out with “Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.)
In January of 1994, Onassis was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She continued to work even as she underwent chemotherapy and began losing ground to the disease. She died on May 19. The next day, her son, John Kennedy, Jr., told the assembled media that his mother had died “surrounded by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things she loved.”
Lawrence, just one of the many authors whose careers she touched, says that one of the most revealing anecdotes he’s ever heard about Jackie came from a friend, editor Joe Armstrong, who visited her in Martha’s Vineyard less than a year before she died.
“I remember in her living room she had all these books,” Armstrong told Lawrence.
“And she said, ‘These are my other best friends.’“