Jackie as Editor by Greg Lawrence

Author:Greg Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

Bon Courage

One cannot help wonder how Jackie, as such an accomplished editor and woman of letters, would have organized her own memoir and recounted her life and her literary endeavors had she been inclined to write an autobiography. She was often encouraged to do so and steadfastly demurred, though of course she probably could have garnered a record advance from any number of publishers. She once told Pierre Salinger, “I want to live my life, not record it.”

Investigative journalist-author David Wise discussed the subject of a memoir with Jackie more than once. Better known for his nonfiction, Wise wrote a political thriller, The Samarkand Dimension, published in 1987, that was the first spy novel Jackie edited. Dealing with intelligence conspiracies, CIA and KGB intrigues, and psychic phenomena such as telekinesis, it does not seem like the kind of book that would have appealed to Jackie. Several of Jackie’s former colleagues expressed their doubts about the extent of the role she played with the book. Wise’s fanciful plotline didn’t touch on any of the delicate issues of her past, and the story may have held a certain appeal for her in the way that Wise characterized intelligence operatives during the Cold War as bluff-prone poker players in a world where very little was what it seemed.

Interviewed by Newsweek, Wise recounted a lunch that he had with Jackie at the ‘21’ Club: “I reminded her that several years before, in her mother’s house in Georgetown, I had asked her when she would write her own book. She had laughed and replied. ‘Maybe when I’m ninety.’ This time, she said more. People change, she said. The person she might have written about thirty years ago is not the same person today. The imagination takes over. When Isak Dinesen wrote Out of Africa, she left out how badly her husband had treated her. She created a new past, in effect. And why sit indoors with a yellow pad writing a memoir when you could be outdoors?”

Jackie may at least have been tempted by George Plimpton, who said, “She witnessed so much history, and she was such a marvelous writer. I felt it would be a terrible shame if she didn’t get it down on paper.” Plimpton was willing to help and made his appeal while Jackie was summering on Martha’s Vineyard. “I knew Red Gate Farm [Jackie’s summer home] was the kind of place where one could get inspired. I sat down and wrote Jackie a letter—the best letter I ever wrote—offering to come up and work with her on her memoirs. She would tell me whatever she wanted to tell me, we would walk along the beach and talk it through in that marvelous setting, and then I would go away and type it up and give it to her. No one would need to know it ever existed. She could just put it away, and when they needed to, her children could refer to it, and her children’s children.” When George next

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