left, right, and center

Paris After the Liberation:  1944 - 1949
written by the London-based married couple Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper;
published at Doubleday by Jacqueline Onassis.

{excerpts, Jackie as Editor by Greg Lawrence}--------------------- At the time much had been written about the Nazi occupation of France and the efforts of the underground Resistance.  Less well known were the chaotic postwar years during which France conducted its..."legal purge" of French officials who participated in or cooperated with the detested Vichy government.  This period, which Jackie had studied extensively, also saw a three-way struggle for power in France,

with the communists on the left,

the Gaullists on the right, and the

social democrats defending the fragile center.

Paris After the Liberation reads like a novel, with the familiar names of de Gaulle and Malraux, Sartre and Camus, Picasso and Cocteau, Koestler and Céline popping up in the most unlikely of combinations.  Of course, this was another historical sojourn for the book's dyed-in-the-wool Francophile editor, who had known many of the major figures who were a part of this era.  Beevor and Cooper not only tell this complicated story in fascinating detail but also paint a portrait of a devastated Europe struggling for subsistence after five years of aerial terror, and they describe the intellectual machinations that the intelligentsia put themselves through in order to remain allies with the devious communists and the naive but gung-ho Americans.

...The book was already set to be published in England when Jackie acquired it.  [Author Beevor]:  "That was all fixed up with Hamish Hamilton here.  I think Jackie got to hear about it -- I'm not sure how that came about -- and she grabbed the book when at Doubleday, which obviously for us was absolutely wonderful.  She turned out to be a superb editor with excellent judgment.  Her comments were extremely subtle and elegant, but also clear at the same time.

"One little story quite amused me:  I remember getting terribly excited in a French archive -- it's part of the Ville de Paris archive -- where I found what I thought was the absolutely perfect jacket photograph.  I sent this with huge excitement to Jackie.  And back came the most elegant putdown I've heard in my life.  On one of her pale blue cards decorated with a white cockleshell, she simply wrote:  'Dear Antony, I think you should understand that over here choosing a jacket is rather akin to a Japanese tea ceremony.'  It was a very, very elegant way of saying:  'Stay out of it, because designers here do not like authors messing around with jacket selection.'"

...Beevor continued, "By the time we'd more or less finished the book, we were really under very heavy pressure because the fiftieth anniversary was looming and we had to get the book finished in time.  I showed the last chapter to my wife, Artemis, and she had to come back, saying that it did not work.  I was exasperated, but I knew she was right.  Then, our English editor, who was highly admired, also could not see what was wrong.  So we sent it over to Jackie -- this was literally about three weeks before she died, and she must have been already very ill by then.  Yet she put her finger on the problem in a second. . . . And as soon as she said it, everything was clear and we were able to finish.  And then to our horror we heard . . . that she had died."

-------------------------------------
Jackie celebrated her sixty-fourth birthday on Martha's Vineyard on July 28, 1993.  She was in good cheer when Joe Armstrong [of Rolling Stone magazine] visited her the following month and was her houseguest for a week.  He said, "I took her a cassette of the Beatles' 'When I'm Sixty-Four,' and I played it on her stereo and her knees just buckled she started laughing so hard.  I said, 'You never heard this?'  And she said, 'Never!'  The Beatles made that thirty-five years ago, when sixty-four seemed like ninety.  All of the sudden sixty-four is no longer old, so she thought that was hysterical."

{Jackie As Editor:  The Literary Life Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Greg Lawrence.
Copyright, 2011.  Thomas Dunne books.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.  10010.}

When I get older, losing my hair,


Many years from now...

Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.
If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.

You'll be older too,
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride,

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage,
In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view...
Indicate-precisely-what-you-mean-to-say
Yours sin--  cere--  ly --
Wast - ing away!

Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four.

{Lennon-McCartney, 1967.  Sgt. Pepper}
on Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)

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