Book Review: Jackie as Editor
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The life story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis may be divided into four periods: her early years before marrying John F. Kennedy; marriage to the statesman until his assassination; the post-assassination years until the death of second husband Aristotle Onassis; and the final 19 years in which she came into her own as an editor at two of the world’s premier publishing companies.
Jackie as Editor (St. Martin’s Press) is about that last period. Author Greg Lawrence worked with the former First Lady at Doubleday, where she edited three books he wrote with ballerina and ex-wife Gelsey Kirkland.
Like last year’s Reading Jackie by William Kuhn, Jackie as Editor is based on the idea that the books she edited yield special insights into her personality and intellect.
The thesis would be dubious at best if applied to an ordinary editor, but it has merit in this case because of Jackie’s unique position. Viking and Doubleday gave her more latitude than other editors, so she got to choose and pilot projects that she liked even if they lacked obvious commercial appeal.
There were some bona fide bestsellers, to be sure – such as Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings novel and Michael Jackson’s autobiography. But those were mostly taken on by Jackie to prove that she could pull her weight and contribute substantially to her employer’s bottom line.
More indicative of her tastes and interests were such highbrow and high-society fare as In the Russian Style, The Eighteenth-Century Women, The Tiffany Wedding, I Remember Balanchine, and a richly illustrated George Plimpton tome on fireworks.
Whether Jackie as Editor interests you will in good part depend on your interest in the East Coast elite that was the late Ms. Onassis’s social circle. In addition to often boring descriptions of books in her editorial oeuvre, Lawrence uses a lot of ink going on about this or that high-society mover or socially connected author or darling of the New York arts community. It’s hard to determine if he’s fawning over them or smugly comfortable in the knowledge that he’s connected to them.
Not everyone’s cup of tea.
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Being a working class chump with a big working class chip on my shoulder, I would rather have my scrotum pierced than read something like this. . . did you really read it Stimpy?
I was going to review it for a newspaper. The review got nixed (mostly my fault) after I’d read nearly the whole book, so I decided to review it here.
I can’t think about the Kennedys without thinking of Ollie Stone’s Nixon movie and how Nixon carried all that resentment toward the family of rum-runner’s kids. His resentment was understandable, even if Nixon was a mega-asshole.
Always liked Jackie, wouldn’t read the book, glad you read it for me.