Jackie O, Edited

It was at a table within the dimly-lit interior of the Le Périgord restaurant, formerly located on the Upper East Side, where Jackie Kennedy first came to discuss the possibility of a career in publishing. The pressed white tablecloths, waistcoat-clad servers and dessert cart quietly circulating with poached pear carpaccio, provided a calm and gently imposing setting. The lunch had been arranged with Thomas Guinzburg, who had originally inherited Viking Press from his father and who, despite having known Jackie for over 20 years, was 'thunderstruck' by the idea of having her join them.

His misgivings resided with her lack of training and just what recruiting Jackie Kennedy Onassis would do to his carefully cultivated in-house dynamics, 'You're not really equipped to be an editor', he told her. These early reservations would give way to two decades in publishing for Mrs. Onassis, far outstripping her seven years as first lady and a further seven as the wife of a Greek shipping magnate.

One of the first books Jackie was credited as editor of was In the Russian, a lavishly illustrated title on the clothing and artifacts of Czarist Russia. What followed were numerous other esoteric choices, many of which didn't make it through the publishing meetings: an American edition of the Pléide, a collected Pushkin, an illustrated children's book based on a tale in Vasari of Leonardo crafting artificial insects. Colleagues at the time report that for anyone else, such uncommercial proposals would have been greeted with a cardboard box and a reminder not to pilfer any stationary on their way out but Jackie's influence, coupled with a calm tenacity, triumphed.

These characteristics, along with various other idiosyncrasies, were observed by colleagues with a hawk-like avidity and as a result they came to discover an easy-going and unaffected individual.
Whippet-thin, she would move through the office's corridors, her beautiful ensembles and meticulously styled hair faintly exuding the smell of cigarettes and patchouli. At lunchtimes she was known to crack out carrot and celery sticks and do lunch rounds, 'Would you like a tuna fish sandwich?' she once asked Gael Towey, a mechanical artist working for Viking Press at the time.

The shadows of scepticism would lighten over the years as Jackie celebrated the books that sold and mourned for those that didn't, managed demanding authors, befriended the sales staff, had proposals turned down and questioned in-house bureaucracy. She edited.

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