he was skeptical; they were nervous

 

------------- [excerpt from Jackie as Editor, by Greg Lawrence] -------------------- Deborah Turbeville said, "Jackie Onassis had a very special way of working, as you probably know, as an editor.  And she always liked to connect her books.  And so she'd been doing books on Atget, or Atget's Versailles, things like that.  

So she yearned to do another book about Versailles, and she was taken by--I think his name was Howard Adams, who was the head of the bicentennial--on a tour of the private rooms in Versailles....

And she fell in love with these rooms, and had the idea to do a book on the petits appartements, and to convey through text and evocative photographs what it could have been like at that time.  So she thought of me to do the pictures.  

And it was kind of connecting Atget's Versailles with a young photographer who Vreeland had used in Allure, bringing about another book with this new photographer on Versailles....

And then she and I flew over to Paris to get the permission to shoot from the curator...which wasn't easy.  It was a lot of protocol, and he was skeptical, and they were nervous.  It was very bureaucratic....She of course went separately, and she stayed at the Crillon, and I stayed at my apartment....

So we went out the next day, and the whole thing was like a fairy tale.  The whole fairy-tale quality of Louis XV's Versailles was what captivated both of us.  And then, I mean, Jackie in the limousine was leaning out of the window when the driver pulled beside the guard.  It was like a Monty Python thing.  

We proceeded into the inner sanctum of Versailles and then we had the meeting with the curator.  He was so charmed by her that he said, 'Okay, okay, okay, you can do it.'  And that was it.  It was unbelievable!"

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On You Tube type in:

Half Moon, Janis Joplin

and play.

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