a theater critic is stealing your furniture

{From Jackie As Editor, by Greg Lawrence /
about Jacqueline Onassis beginning her first job as an editor, at Viking -- 1975}

----------[excerpt]
Guinzburg also described one of Jackie's first mentors, Bryan Holme, who ran Studio Books.  "Jackie loved illustrated books, and she was training under the most benevolent eyes of Bryan Holme, who specialized in them.  He as one of nature's noblemen, and a genius, and nobody could ever figure out how he did it.  I know in principle he worked backwards.  He went from a retail price and then just put in numbers for every single thing in the budget, and then when he got to the end, the agent would say, 'Well, that only leaves twelve cents for my author.'

 And Bryan would say, 'Hmm, we don't have to use that glue.  We could use another glue and save money.  And we don't really have to take the paper from the bowels of interior Japan.'  He would tinker with it to the point where everybody was happy, and Jackie worked with him on several projects.

...Unfortunately...Jackie's entry into publishing had made her tantalizingly available.  In order to clear a path for Jackie to get to her desk, Rich Barber usually had to go down to the lobby in the morning to dissuade people who were waiting there, because for one reason or another, they were determined to intercept her as she entered the building. ...

Jackie's first assistant, Becky Singleton, recalled..."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. Patti Rizzo called to summon me to the visitors' waiting area, where a person who wanted to see Jackie was causing a bit of commotion. 

I went to the lounge area and found there a very large gentleman who had managed to capture the attention of everyone else in the visitors' lounge 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, 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 one 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 times 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 returned to my cubicle, where all of the phone lines were ringing.

"In rapid succession, I took calls from (1) 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; (2) a woman who called daily to ask to speak to Jackie and, when told that this wasn't possible, would ask instead for a detailed description of what she was wearing that day...

(3) 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 that 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."

Singleton continued, "Throughout the early weeks, a mild form of pandemonium attended Jackie's comings and goings.  Most of it was created by the media and by fanatic but harmless eccentrics....

"She had been well aware that her attempt to assume a full-time position as a book editor would incite a fresh wave of public interest and that many in the media would be eager to print juicy tidbits that suggested she was falling flat on her face.  The persistence she showed during those initial turbulent months convinced me that her passion for books, which she spoke of so eloquently, was completely genuine.  She wasn't simply looking for something to do, as some had speculated.  She had sensed a vocation."

...
Jackie's first book, Remember the Ladies:  Women in America, 1750 - 1815, confirmed Guinzburg's faith that she could deliver, at least with respect to acquisitions.  The project combined her passions for art and history, and reflected her awareness of an emerging women's market.

...For the nation's bicentennial, a landmark preservation committee in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was mounting an exhibition about the role of women in the eighteenth century.  The committee included Mabel H. 'Muffie" Brandon, who spearheaded the effort, and would later serve as social secretary in the Reagan White House.

...Brandon's idea was a publish a companion book for the exhibition.  She told The New York Times, "My appointment at Viking was with Tom Guinzburg, and when I walked into the meeting, I was quite surprised to see Jackie there -- she'd only been with Viking for a few days.  As I explained the idea, I saw her eyes begin to light up....She caught the idea immediately, and for the next two hours, she asked the most penetrating questions.  She wanted to know what proportion of the text would be devoted to black women -- to working women, to Indian women....Finally, Tom Guinzburg turned to her and said, 'What do you think?'  She said, 'Oh, let's do it.'

...[Remember the Ladies co-author Conover] Hunt described the watershed moment of history that gave birth to the book and informed the collaboration.  "Remember that was nineteen seventy-six -- the ERA, the whole nine yards, Betty Ford, the conference in Houston to get it passed, and so on.  So that was a movement that was gaining....

The whole Remember the Ladies project came together in nine months, like birthing a baby.  And then it traveled for two years.  It was one of the official bicentennial exhibitions by the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.  And Muffie raised a million dollars.  She got the most incredibly diverse group together.

 If they had all ever been in the same room, they would have killed each other.  She had the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and the National Organization for Women, the Kennedy clan, and hard Right Republicans as sponsors -- it was just a hoot.  And it was a very big success.

...Released after resounding victories by crusaders for civil rights and women's rights, it was a sign of the time that the book and exhibition celebrated not only colonial pioneer women but also enslaved women of color and Native Americans.  While incorporating a minimum of text, the book achieved considerable impact through the [captioned photographs of] artifacts it displayed....

Remember the Ladies is an early example of how history was being transformed by advances in alternative scholarship, and Jackie was to play a leading role in this enlightened revisionism.  The proliferation of slave narratives that were hardly known by earlier generations would become a recurrent theme in several later works that she undertook to develop and publish. 

She knew very well that history can only be accurate if all peoples are included.
-------------------- [end excerpt]

{Jackie As Editor, The Literary Life of
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.  by Greg
Lawrence.  Copyright 2011.  Thomas Dunne Books,
St. Martin's Press, New York.}

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