Jackie After O (22 page)

As it does every August, New York's center of gravity shifts east, to Long Island. And Andy Warhol's oceanfront compound in Montauk was a special draw for celebrities. He had rented the property, known as the Church Estate, a cluster of bleached-out cottages, to Lee Radziwill beginning in 1972. This summer, he had kicked off the season by inviting the Rolling Stones to come and stay, to practice “Angie” and “It's Only Rock 'n Roll” for “The Americas Tour.” They blared their music beyond the bluffs and then took off. The estate, called Eoönen, or dawn, was located—conveniently for Lee—next door to the artist Peter Beard, whose place overlooked the very tip of Long Island. Beard, a handsome Yale graduate, spent time on Skorpios with the sisters and had been working on a book called
Longing for Darkness
about meeting
Out of Africa
author Isak Dinesen. When Random House had declined to publish the manuscript Jackie asked him what she could do to help. “Have a dance with Africans around a campfire in Newport?”
¹³
Instead, she wrote the afterword for the book, giving it an extra boost when it was finally published that summer:

Now, here they were, in Montauk, celebrating Beard's success and marveling over the fact that Jackie's body was a major spread in
Hustler
. There was only one thing to do with the centerfold. She pulled it out and signed it for Warhol:

Leaving the beach behind for the city, Jackie wanted to check out a new Broadway production called
Chicago
. She went to the show with an old friend, the diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. He had first met her in the 1950s, when he had arranged a meeting for then senator Kennedy to discuss business interests in South Africa. During her White House years, Jackie had made frequent trips to New York, attending the theater with UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been Tempelsman's lawyer. Sometimes Tempelsman would tag along with them for dinner.

This time, it was just the two of them. But hardly anyone paid any attention. In many ways, Tempelsman was like many of Jackie's escorts, who fell into one of three categories: gay, married, or old. Tempelsman could appear a bit frumpy, but was merely middle-aged, born the same year as Jackie into a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in Belgium. He was definitely not gay. But he was married—with three kids.
¹⁴
That important fact aside, Jackie enjoyed him. Having fled Europe to America with his parents during World War II, he was fluent in French. He was also wise about finance and politics. He had joined his father's diamond business as a teenager, and now he was brokering deals directly with entire African governments. While Jackie was grappling with Onassis's declining health earlier in the year, Tempelsman was in Zaire (the former Belgian Congo), the biggest producer of diamonds in the world, negotiating with its corrupt President Mobutu.
¹⁵
Although he was no billionaire, Tempelsman—short and balding, with an elfish twinkle in his eye, an easy smile, and rosy cheeks—was wealthy and alluring.

Now that Onassis was dead, Tempelsman was keenly aware that Jackie was lonely, in need of some financial advice, and maybe even a date or two.

A
fter Labor Day, Tom Guinzburg finally had to reveal to his staff the secret that he had carried all summer: he had hired the most famous person in the world. Like Epstein, he knew that there would be some editors and young employees who would view Jackie as competition, a distraction, an insult, or an unapproachable icon. He knew that some of them would inevitably think,
How could this chronic shopper, this socialite, this woman who has not had a real job in more than two decades, simply waltz in here and do what I'm doing
—
or take the position I wanted?

Before he told them, he turned to a young, friendly editorial assistant, Rebecca Singleton, who had arrived at Viking two years before, straight from college in Georgia, where she had majored in literature. She had impressed her colleagues from the start and Guinzburg had been nurturing her talent and ambition by allowing her to originate two nonfiction projects. He liked her ideas. He saw her potential and had noticed how grounded she was, a rare trait in the hothouse, sometimes backbiting atmosphere of New York publishing. Unlike many of her Ivy League coworkers, Becky, as many called her, was uninhibited by ideology. She was a single working girl in the big city, just like Mary Tyler Moore, but she approached her job with eagerness and practicality, not the feminist zeal that some of the other editorial assistants had, the kind that made them refuse to get coffee for anyone, or admit that they did not know something. There were already three female editors at Viking at the time, in Singleton's eyes a sign that the workplace “war” was over. Singleton stood out from the pack for other reasons: she already had had other job experiences, as a bookstore clerk, a waitress, and a nurse's aide in a psychiatric ward—all of which, oddly, would prepare her for what was about to happen.

Guinzburg knew that in order for Jackie to be successful, she needed an amanuensis to help her in the office. Singleton was resilient, had a sense of humor, and she was pretty well liked in the other departments. Perhaps she could help the staff warm to Jackie, too.

He called Singleton into his office.

There's a new editor about to start, he told her. Jackie Onassis. I want you to work for her. I know the last thing you want is another editor to report to. It won't be easy, but you have the qualities needed for such a challenge. You're going to have to handle a lot of stuff.

Guinzburg understood what that meant more than Singleton did.

While the young employee was shocked, she also knew immediately that there was no way she could turn down Guinzburg's request. It was not because she wanted to work for a famous person, but because she liked
him
. Period.

I understand, she told him.
¹

She returned to her desk as Guinzburg called the rest of the editorial department into the conference room, hoping his publishing family would accept a new in-law.

When the meeting ended, two of the other editorial assistants came by Singleton's desk.

“Well,” said one, “I guess you're going to have a lot of extra work.”

That night, Singleton called a friend to tell her who her new boss would be.

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone as her friend contemplated the reason for someone so rich and famous to go to work at a publishing house.

“Why?”

On the fourth Monday of September, Jackie woke up and ate a boiled egg, fortifying herself for an important day. Over the weekend, as if it were one last fling before it was time to get serious, she had attended a Frank Sinatra concert—with Frank Sinatra. It was she who received the standing ovation.

Montauk was only a few weeks ago, but its memory was fading fast, overpowered by Manhattan's energized transition to fall. Instead of heading straight to Radcliffe, Caroline chose to break free of Massachusetts for a while and enrolled in a ten-month decorative arts program, which would start soon, on October 1, at Sotheby's in London. John was back at Collegiate, the exclusive boys-only day school on the Upper West Side, close enough to keep an eye on. Jackie had been putting the finishing touches on her country house in New Jersey and had signed on to the Shriver for President committee. It was a new beginning for her, too, and she must have had a few butterflies in her stomach that morning. She pulled on a gray shirtdress, grabbed her glasses, and allowed the doorman to hail her a cab.

“Six-twenty-five Madison Avenue,” she told the driver.

It was her first day on the job—her first day “working” since Jack had proposed. She was forty-six and, as the nastier gossip columnists like to point out, her face was starting to show it.

Besides Dorothy Schiff's proposal in 1964 to make her a columnist, Jackie had had other job offers. While she was still mourning JFK's death, some even joked that her “job” should be to marry Adlai Stevenson in order to turn him into a viable presidential candidate. Publicly, she shrunk from any suggestion about a second act, saying, “I'll just retire to Boston, and try to convince John Jr. that his father was president.” Understandably, her children became her sole focus.

September 18, 1975. Frank Sinatra escorts Jackie out of the Uris Theater in New York via the stage door, where he was performing, on their way to dinner.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

In 1973 she had considered taking a lucrative gig anchoring an NBC television show about Venice and Angkor Wat. But Onassis had vetoed the idea.

“No Greek wife works,” he huffed.
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