Vanity Fair.To my extreme annoyance, neither author of the Jackie-as-editor bios (see one, Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, excerpted in the January issue) interviewed me for her book. After all, I worked a mere heartbeat away from Jackie (if not actually in the same building) in the early 1980s when I was an associate editor at The Dial Press, which had been acquired by Delacorte before being subsumed by Doubleday, where Jackie got her second job as an editor. True, I have no actual first-hand stories about the former first lady as Max Perkins, but I hungrily collected other people’s Jackie stories, which, it must be admitted, were sometimes more than a few generations removed from the actual event by the time they got to me. These stories may not be accurate, but they are here.
Despite many attempts over the years (including getting on my knees and begging), I never could get the two people I knew who were closest to Jackie to tell me a single thing about her. These would be Lisa Drew, who was a distinguished Doubleday editor in the Jackie era and later editor-in-chief of Scribners, and the infuriatingly discreet Scott Moyers, who had been Jackie’s editorial assistant and now works at the Wylie literary agency. Actually, Lisa did tell me one story: Jackie had piped hot water into the toilets of her Martha’s Vineyard vacation house. (Don’t hate me, Lisa.)
On her first day at Doubleday , Jackie, like every new employee, was given a voucher worth three or four bucks toward the price of lunch at the cafeteria. To everyone’s amazement, Jackie actually used hers. She went to the sandwich counter and waited patiently while Maisie (probably not her real name, but it should have been), the famed Doubleday hash-slinger, finished whatever she was doing. Maisie had her back to Jackie and did not rush, while the lunchtime crowd collectively held its breath. Did Maisie not know who was waiting? Would she embarrass herself and the whole publishing house by an unseemly reaction when she recognized the new employee? Would she—shudder—ask for an autograph?
Finally Maisie turned. “So, Jackie,” she said nonchalantly in her trademark hash-slinger accent. “What’ll it be?”
For a time, Jackie’s boss at Doubleday was Phil Pochoda, who had been my first boss at Pantheon Books. Phil had bolted the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Princeton to become a book editor. Brash and irreverent by nature, he still had a bit of the scruffy grad student about him, and was probably not properly awed by Jackie, or, more likely, liked to pretend he wasn’t. He sent her a bouquet of flowers once, but then ruined it all by responding to her thank-you with, “I like to take care of my people!” Jackie later told a colleague she did not think of herself as “his people.”
Phil particularly infuriated Jackie at an editorial meeting, at which a proposal for a book called The Rolling Stone Book of Teenage Sex was being considered. The editors were weighing the pros and cons, and Jackie spoke up to offer her opinion. “If I were writing this book…” she began, and Phil jumped in with, “If you were writing this book, we’d make ten million dollars!” Jackie didn’t find this terribly funny.
My friend, the literary agent Joy Harris, owns what surely must be the most valuable eBay item of all time: a copy of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk inscribed to Joy, the book’s agent, by the author and by Jackie, who was the editor. It was quite a coup for a literary agent to sell a book to Jackie. Roz Targ, famous for her big hats, would mention she had done so in virtually every conversation she had for decades. She might still be talking about it, for all I know. Joy actually got to go out to lunch with Jackie, to Billy’s, a now-defunct chophouse in the east 50s, where they ate hamburgers and chain-smoked. To Joy’s astonishment, Jackie paid not with a credit card but in cash. Joy also remembers talking to Jackie on the phone once when Jackie was trying to eat a sandwich. Finally the former first lady said, “This [trying to chew and talk at the same time] is just awful. Excuse me a minute.” She put down the phone and chewed away while Joy listened.
I have more Jackie stories, like the one involving the nun, the naked man, and the elevator, but I’m saving them for my memoirs.
Related: The Books That Jackie Edited—a cover gallery of her literary projects.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário