Jackie did not know what to make of Hamill’s struggles with his conscience and his rebellious daughters, who were now eighteen and sixteen, and were showing signs of being troubled kids. Jackie was touched by Hamill’s confessions of guilt, but parenthood meant a great deal to her, and she found it hard to forgive Hamill for having been such a bad father. His candor did not evoke her sympathy; it only made her realize how angry she must have been at her own father for letting her down as a child.
For his part, Hamill was a writer who had fashioned himself as a voice of the workingman. He had once written a scathing denunciation of Jackie for selling herself to Onassis for a few pieces of gold. He eventually thought better of publishing his intemperate words, and had put the column away in a drawer. But when he started dating Jackie, the column resurfaced and was printed by his rivals at the New York Post as a way of embarrassing him.
He was surprised to learn that Jackie was very different from Shirley MacLaine, Faye Dunaway, and his other self-absorbed celebrity girlfriends. Jackie was much more open, and seemed genuinely interested in him and his work. All of Hamill’s writer buddies assumed that he was sleeping with Jackie, but he was always too much of a gentleman to confirm their suspicions.
Jackie sat down on a bed next to a journalist who was so smashed that at first he did not recognize her. He offered her a toke, which she politely refused.
“A couple of people were ripped to the tits, they were so drunk,” said Patsy Denk Powers, an actress and producer who was co-hosting the party with the Scanlons. “And I thought, please, God, don’t let them go back there into the bedroom and say anything to Jackie.”
By now, however, people had heard that Jackie was in the bedroom, and they were wandering back to take a look.
On the TV screen, Dustin Hoffman leaned over the shoulder of the Oscar statuette, paused, then observed wryly to the billion people who were watching: “He has no genitalia, and he’s holding a sword.”
The loft exploded in rowdy laughter. When it subsided, two words could be heard repeated over and over again: “That’s Jackie That’s Jackie ”
“SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT”
Pete Hamill embodied many of the bad-boy qualities that had attracted Jackie to John Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. But Hamill also represented a break with Jackie’s past. He was both masculine and sensitive, a bang-it-out-on-the-typewriter kind of reporter and an accomplished novelist and painter. He was a liberal New Yorker whose consciousness had been raised by the women’s movement. He was not threatened by strong, independent women, and he had no qualms about treating Jackie as an equal.
As a working journalist, Hamill lived a hand-to-mouth existence. He had neither the money nor the desire to insulate Jackie from the real world, where he got the material for his columns and novels. His love affair with Jackie, who was notoriously press shy, surprised a number of people, who could not understand her attraction to a poor, ink-stained wretch.
But it did not surprise the author of this book, who had the chance to observe firsthand Jackie’s fascination with members of the fourth estate. In 1981,1 was the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine and was bringing out a new novel at Doubleday, where Jackie had recently taken a job as a part-time editor. She liked my novel well enough to make one of her rare public appearances at my book party. She wrote me a note shortly after the party, praising my book, and I called her a few days later for lunch. We became friendly, and that Christmas she invited me to a party at her home on Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, Ed,” she told me at one point during the party, “I’m so glad you could come. Journalists are the most interesting people in the whole world!”
Given her ambivalence toward journalism and true confessions, it was fascinating to see what Jackie had chosen as her life’s work. She spent three days a week—Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—at Doubleday, where she attended editorial meetings and gained the respect of her fellow editors as someone who knew how to shepherd her projects through the editorial bureaucracy, and get her books approved.
“She telephoned me one day from Doubleday,” said John Loring, the former design director of Tiffany & Company, who worked with Jackie on a series of six Tiffany lifestyle books. “Some people had called an editorial meeting to get us to do certain things that she and I did not want to do with the book we were working on. And she said, ‘We have to psych them out on this one. You know, we’re not going to argue. We’re just going to psych them out.’
“She did her homework thoroughly before the meeting,” Loring continued, “and she knew what every man and woman was up to, and what they were trying to put over, and who was siding with who and who wasn’t. And she knew how to tip the balance at the right moment in a meeting to get it the way she knew it should be done.
“And we were sitting across the table from these people who were proposing these unacceptable things, and she leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Look at them! Look at them! They’re all so vile, so vile! They think of things every minute that we couldn’t imagine in a lifetime.’ ”
At Doubleday, Jackie occupied a cramped, nondescript corner office on the twentieth floor.
“There were a lot of books and paintings around her office,” Loring said. “But there was no decoration, no personal
