“And for the first number of years, she did not want to go out to a restaurant,” Loring went on. “So we would end up with a brown paper bag full of Styrofoam containers—iced tea, cole slaw, potato salad, and some kind of sandwich—sitting on the floor of Jackie’s office, eating out of these containers. We rather liked the floor because you could spread out a great many photographs, and just make this great accretion of paper and stuff all around you in every direction. We could crawl across the floor, and grab a photo and put it there, and I would have this photograph, and Jackie would have that one, and we had a lot of fun. And one time Jackie turned to me on the floor and said, ‘Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous should cover this event. That would give people out there something to think about.’ ”
At the beginning of a project, Jackie and Loring would each make a list of about fifty stylish people they thought should be included in the book.
“About fifty percent of our lists were identical, so there was no discussion,” Loring said. “If there was someone who I didn’t know but who Jackie particularly wanted, she’d just say, ‘Believe me, John, this is the right person to put there.’
“And then I would make most of the phone calls. Jackie would say, ‘If you need me to step in, I will, and make it happen.’ And one time she said about someone, ‘If I have to go and beat them up, I will, because with their social pretensions, they wouldn’t dare say no tome.’
“Once, we wanted to do a cookbook, but the marketing department at Doubleday said, no, you’re not going to do that until you write a book on American weddings. Thank God, that was about the time that Caroline was getting married, so Jackie was suddenly interested in weddings. She said, ‘Let’s just get all the books we can on weddings.’ So we got all these books, including Martha Stewart’s, and decided that it was too dogmatic, because it attempted to tell people exactly how to do the checklist and countdown to the terrifying event. Jackie’s attitude was, ‘Let’s try to liberate the American girl from this nightmare.’
“While we were doing this wedding book, we came across a photograph of asparagus from a market with red rubber bands around it, and it was just beautiful. And Jackie said, ‘Asparagus is so beautiful. It’s more beautiful than the pictures of flowers. I don’t see why American girls don’t just carry bunches of asparagus at their weddings. But I guess that would be too close to the truth.’ ”
Much of Jackie’s time at Doubleday was spent alone in her office, whispering intently into the telephone, trying to persuade famous people to tell all in their autobiographies.
“I remember Jackie’s presentation of a book to be written by a fellow named Michael Jackson,” said an old publishing hand who had watched Jackie in action. “She’d done all the financial projections, but what was impressive about it was that she was explaining to a roomful of older people why this book could be immensely successful and why it was worth paying a lot of money to get it. And she was right: it became an immense bestseller. She was not someone who backed down when she thought she was on the right track.”
A number of other celebrities, including ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, succumbed to Jackie’s persuasive editorial charms. But the biggest prize of all, Frank Sinatra, continued to elude her. This made Jackie all the more eager to snag Sinatra for a Doubleday autobiography. In her dogged pursuit of the famous crooner, she went so far as to invite him to have dinner with her in New York. They were photographed leaving the restaurant together, looking as though they were out on a date, which gave rise to the inevitable tabloid rumors of a hot romance.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Jackie had never liked Sinatra, and had discouraged John Kennedy from having anything to do with him when he was President. “Jackie hates Frank,” Kennedy told his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, “and won’t have him in the house.” Sinatra might be the greatest entertainer of his generation—and a sure-fire bestseller as an author—but Jackie considered him to be tacky and low class. He was not a candidate to share her bed.
“THE DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS”
As a single working mother and a woman of a certain age (she was now in her early fifties), Jackie became increasingly confident of her ability to make decisions on her own. But maturity also brought with it some unwanted changes. She was buffeted by the hormonal storms of menopause, which in her case seemed to be more severe than in most women. Her gynecologist prescribed Premarin, an estrogen replacement made from the urine of mares, and Provera, a progesterone replacement. Although these drugs were also supposed to help a woman maintain her youthful appearance, Jackie’s face began to sharpen and show signs of age. In the mid 1980s, she had the first of three face-lifts. And she started seeing a psychotherapist.
Jackie had always believed strongly in psychotherapy, and was open to ideas that could help people cope with their lives. She was responsible for Doubleday’s publishing Out in Inner Space: A Psychoanalyst Explores New Therapies, by Dr. Stephen Appelbaum, the Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austin Riggs Center, one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the country.
“Jackie and I had a sort of friendship,” Dr. Appelbaum said, “and met a time or two in New York for social reasons, and corresponded and talked on the phone. She had an interest
