There are dueling books about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s years in publishing: “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books,” by William Kuhn; and “Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” by Greg Lawrence.
The first, from Doubleday, is a departure from the company’s rule of not publishing anything about Mrs. Onassis, its former employee. The other is from Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press.
The books both contend that Mrs. Onassis’s two decades in publishing reveal much about her as a person: the intellect behind the fashion plate, the analytical mind behind the famous face.
The little girl who loved books grew up to spend more years as an editor than as first lady and the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon combined.
In 1975, Mrs. Onassis had just arrived at Viking , at a weekly salary of $200. Each book recounts how in 1977, after a break with Viking over the publication of the assassination- plot thriller “Shall We Tell the President?,” she joined Doubleday. Its “Jackie” book is under the imprint of the editor Nan Talese, who knew Mrs. Onassis when the former first lady was starting out in publishing. “Jackie would line up just like everyone” to see the publisher in his office, Ms. Talese reports.
In both biographies, colleagues remember Mrs. Onassis’s small office, her big glasses, and her hair smelling of cigarettes. Her editorial tastes ran to cultural histories of court life, the power of myth, biographies of unconventional women and civil rights heroes, and books celebrating past gilded ages.
She got the singer Carly Simon to write children’s books. She signed up Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalk.” Ms. Talese remarked that Mrs. Onassis displayed her intellectual credentials early on.
But “we also grew up in an era when women weren’t taken seriously, and you never get over that. I think it’s why she took a job in which she was able to use her mind.”
Mr. Lawrence depicts Mrs. Onassis as a crusader against the conglomeration of publishing - in 1986 Doubleday was acquired by the German firm Bertelsmann - and budget-cutting. But, Ms. Talese said, “she signed up a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and told me, ‘Sometimes you have to do something for your soul.’ ”
But Mrs. Onassis, whose salary eventually rose to $100,000, understood the value of her name . “She once said to me, ‘Well, I’m the hunter, and I do it when they want me,’ ” Ms. Talese said of a period when Alberto Vitale was head of Bantam Doubleday Dell. When the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988, “ Alberto asked Jackie to call, and she knew why - because she would elicit a response.”
By CELIA McGEE
