Santa Claus brought me a special gift this year, special because it came from someone near and dear, and because it was thoughtfully selected with care to coincide with my new career in writing, coming long past the usual time when career choices are solidified.

It turns out that Jackie (the one and only Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) chose hers late in life, as well. Or rather, it was what finally won her acknowledgement for achieving something separate from her glamorous role as, arguably, our most famous First Lady, long-suffering wife and then the widow leading the rest of us through the darkest days of our collective grief.

When Jackie moved home to New York and joined Viking as an editor, people wondered why. However, her literary roots really ran deep, to her final days at Vassar when she penned the winning essay for Vogue’s prestigious Vogue Prix de Paris that also awarded a summer internship in New York. Unfortunately, her mother, like many mothers of yesteryear, quickly put the kibosh on her dream, fearing she would fall in love with Paris and never come home, and not so subtly implying that men do not like smart women. In Jackie’s day, to move forward without her mother’s approval simply wasn’t done.

Instead, she married well and, ultimately, tragically, as every one on the planet now knows. The humiliation suffered because of her husband’s peccadilloes was swathed in the glamour of Camelot, an image she carefully orchestrated after Jack’s assassination. When she shocked the world by marrying Aristotle Onassis, ostensibly to escape a particularly ugly time in America, she quickly discovered that even that marriage was no panacea.

Only after Ari’s death did Jackie find her voice, first, at Viking Publishers, and then, after a falling out with them over their decision to publish a novel only thinly disguised as yet another Kennedy family fable, she departed to Doubleday to spend the next nearly 20 years racking up a roster of respectable titles and managing to make some money for them in the process. And herself, parlaying her $10,000 starting salary at Viking into well over $100,000 during the Doubleday years. A 10-bagger, in Wall Street parlance, is pretty impressive, no matter whom you are or what your pedigree.

A successful editor’s job is to acquire moneymaking books, and Jackie struggled with the business side of publishing. Her path to her success among New York’s literati was not smooth. Being Jackie meant that no one took her seriously, at first. Except for the New York City taxi driver who recognized her and said, “You work when you don’t have to – I think that’s great!” Indeed, it was.

Her books have a common theme—history, art, stories of fascinating people and beauty. Yes, there were one or two she would have preferred not to edit, but many more that are in her literary canon.

She sought no special treatment. Her cubicle “office” had no window, was totally devoid of artwork and her desk was standard-issue metal finished with a faded linoleum top. She learned from the ground up, relying on junior editors to teach her. Quite a comedown for the former Queen of Camelot, once noted for imperiously giving orders that none but the brave dared disobey. Yet, the most oft-quoted memory of her co-workers was that of her sitting on the floor arranging layouts, while the society pages seemed never to tire of depicting her in glamorous regalia. She did duty at Doubleday clad in slacks, a simple (but silken) shirt, understated, beautiful jewelry and flats. She also smoked, and was not above bumming cigarettes.

She also was kind to her co-workers. Once, when Doubleday proposed a miniscule raise for her assistant, Jackie proposed to pay for a more substantial raise from her own pocket. Doubleday quickly acquiesced. Imagine the fallout in the press had they not. She greeted her guests herself in the reception area, while quietly requesting that her assistants refer to her as “Mrs. Onassis,” rather than “Jackie.”

It took her some time to hit her stride. Her early years at Doubleday produced but a few books, but by the mid-80s, she was on her way, attracting authors of books on Russian and French history, the personal memoirs of artists such as Martha Graham and Andre Previn, beautiful and tasteful art books, a few on politics, some delightful children’s books and even a few best sellers, including authors Gelsey Kirkland, Bill Moyers, and, yes, Michael Jackson. It was the latter that caused her much consternation. In Moonwalk, according to Bill Barry (Doubleday’s deputy publisher), Jackie “took one for the home team”; the book was “an exercise in pure for-profit responsibility”; and a book he “suspected she came to regret.” But Jackie was both smart and savvy: she knew Doubleday would more likely support her more speculative projects, about which she was passionate, if she returned the favor by agreeing to commission the occasional commercial book to generate a significant profit.

Like those of us who are blessed with doing what we love, Jackie was no exception, but for different reasons. Books allowed her, perhaps, to reconcile her past with the present. One of her favorite titles was the Russian playwright Radzinsky’s Last Tsar, a biography of Nicholas Romanov, whose dynasty was another one marred by tragedy. Was editing it her form of therapy? We may never know for sure. But isn’t that the mystique of Jackie?

Her carefully cultivated Camelot rendition of the Kennedy White House began simultaneously to crack its shell as she grew into her own, even as JFK’s antics were aired publicly in the press. For example, Jackie promoted a biography of Judge Frank Johnson, who made landmark anti-segregation rulings in the 1960s, and who forced Governor George Wallace of Alabama to allow the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches. Few knew that Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s arranging to have Martin Luther King released from jail (where he was held unjustly because of a minor traffic violation) had less to do with promoting civil rights than because it would help JFK’s election prospects in 1964. Jackie learned this fact while editing the manuscript in the early 1990s, and appears to have accepted that Jack and Bobby were not always the heroes that myth made them out to be.

Kuhn’s book is full of some less-famous photos of Jackie with many of her authors, and it is refreshing to view her from the vantage point of a working girl. A particularly pretty one shows her clad in a swan’s down cape and hat, taken while she was editing the Romanov biography.

She went to bat for her authors at every turn, even comforting one in the wake of a bad review. When the New York Times panned Sarah Giles’ book on Fred Astaire, Jackie took the time to call her at home on Sunday morning to say, “Sarah, I just want you to know, whatever you’re feeling at the moment, that it is fantastic. Listen! It’s going to sell books.”

Her son John’s following in her footsteps by founding and editing the political magazine, George, seemed to be a silent tribute to his mother, or so said another renowned author, the late John Updike. Jackie was most proud of being a good mother, and confessed in the mid-1960s to Britain’s Prime Minister Harold MacMillan her fears of passing along her post-JFK-assassination depression to her beloved children. Instead, she seems to have passed along to them her love of reading, and her daughter Caroline commented, “My strongest image is of my mother reading, whether on a winter afternoon in the city or a summer evening by the sea.”

Perhaps John’s poignant remarks to the press the morning after she died serve as proof. She was “…surrounded by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things that she loved…” His mother would have loved those words had she been there to hear them.

Reading Jackie
By William Kuhn
Pulisher: Nan A. Talese

Photos:
Ted West, Getty Images
Jackie an ICP Director Cornell Capa, Courtesy of the International Center of Photography
Jackie, 1957, courtesy of Toni Frissell–Sidney Frissell Stafford
Jack and Jackie on their wedding day, Courtesy of Yousuf Karsh