Synopses & Reviews
An absorbing chronicle of a much overlooked chapter in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life--her nineteen-year editorial career
History remembers Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the consummate first lady, the nation's tragic widow, the millionaire's wife, and, of course, the quintessential embodiment of elegance. Her biographers, however, skip over an equally important stage in her life: her nearly twenty year long career as a book editor. Jackie as Editor is the first book to focus exclusively on this remarkable woman's editorial career.
At the age of forty-six, one of the most famous women in the world went to work for the first time in twenty-two years. Greg Lawrence, who had three of his books edited by Jackie, draws from interviews with more than 125 of her former collaborators and acquaintances in the publishing world to examine one of the twentieth century's most enduring subjects of fascination through a new angle: her previously untouted skill in the career she chose. Over the last third of her life, Jackie would master a new industry, weather a very public professional scandal, and shepherd more than a hundred books through the increasingly corporate halls of Viking and Doubleday, publishing authors as diverse as Diana Vreeland, Louis Auchincloss, George Plimpton, Bill Moyers, Dorothy West, Naguib Mahfouz, and even Michael Jackson. Jackie as Editor gives intimate new insights into the life of a complex and enigmatic woman who found fulfillment through her creative career during book publishing's legendary Golden Age, and, away from the public eye, quietly defined life on her own terms.
Review
"A fascinating window into an aspect of Jackie Kennedy Onassis that few of us know."
--USA Today
"Greg Lawrence, whom the first lady edited, interviews her former colleagues and authors to paint a fascinating portrait of a woman who found a life in that most private of activities, reading."
--Town & Country
"Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote her memoirs, but you can tell a lot about the late first lady's life by the books she loved, and those she edited in her nearly two decades as a publishing executive."
--O Magazine
"Charting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's impressive legacy as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, Lawrence draws on a wealth of sources, including interviews with more than 125 of her former publishing collaborators, and hundreds of notes left to the author by Onassis. He was also one of her authors, co-writing three books with his former wife, ballerina Gelsey Kirkland (including the controversial bestseller Dancing on My Grave). . . . This Onassis appreciation appears almost simultaneously with William Kuhn's misleadingly titled Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books, and while both will appeal primarily to publishing and media insiders, Lawrence's perceptive, impressively researched, book is the better of the two, presenting a woman with 'a grand spirit of adventure and... a sense of irony about life that served as a kind of armor' for this courageous, gifted woman."
--Publishers Weekly
"One of Jacqueline Onassiss authors dishes kindly on her impressive editorial record ... [and] fleshes out the editorial career of the enigmatic icon who was the subject of inflated tabloid coverage throughout much of her life yet who proved in her later years to be a surprisingly humble, hardworking team player, first at Viking, then Doubleday. . . . Lawrence lets rip the first-person reminiscences from those who knew and worked with her . . . [and] demonstrates how Onassis grew in confidence and professional stature in promoting books and authors she truly cared about. Chatty without being vulgar, a deeply admiring portrait of a lady the world is just now getting to know."--Kirkus Reviews "Jackie as Editor is a fascinating insider account of her fulfilling final years as a book editor in publishing. A must for Jackie fans."
---Sarah Bradford, author of Americas Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy, and Diana
"For Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the role of editor was just another version of her role as Americas muse. She created the Camelot story in the JFK histories, and years later she wrought the same magic upon the books she edited. I kept wondering as I read Greg Lawrences book what Mrs. O would have made of this delicious biography. This is a great story about a woman who had everything—men, money, power—and all she wanted was more to read. I bet she would have loved Jackie as Editor. Every book lover and fan of Jackie will be caught in its magic."
---Harriet Rubin, author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women and Dante in Love: The Worlds Greatest Poem and How It Made History
“Jackie appears (as she was) a well-liked, respected colleague, often slyly funny and not given to showboating…. If were going to have a myth, why not one with her nose in a book?”
--The Washington Post
“Lawrence, who was one of Jackies writers, argues convincingly that the first lady was no dilettante.”
--The Week
Review
"The #1 nonfiction book to look out for this spring."
Review
"An enduring group profile of three influential yet completely different American women, for each of whom Paris played a short but transformative role, over three tumultuous decades. . . . The much-admired Kaplan focuses sharply on three women of successive generations, providing a keen feminist-cultural picture of Pariss enduring, if varied, impact."
Review
"A fascinating group portrait of three different women from three different generations whose trajectories nevertheless converge in one surprising yet significant place: Paris. In this lively, original
biographie à trois, Alice Kaplan shows how time spent living in the French capital and learning about its culture gave each of these sui generis heroines 'her own ideas of what counted'—and how those ideas in turn became an indelible part of the American political and cultural landscape."
Review
"An eloquent, brilliant, and often moving portrayal of three remarkable women whose personal and intellectual engagement with France transformed them, and by extension America as well. These intimate narratives of Jaqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis feel not only vital, but also necessary to our understanding of their moral, aesthetic and political development, and just as importantly, to our understanding of each as a remarkable, flawed, and complicated human being."
Review
"Superbly perceptive. . . . Kaplan is a master at . . . selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make. . . . Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you've underscored choice lines. Dreaming in French is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations."
Review
"Lively. . . . The links Kaplan makes between these cultures and these women deliver fascinating insight to the conditions and changes surging through not only these particular lives, but those of Americans in general."
Review
"Gossip is one of the key pleasures--but far from the only one--to be found in Alice Kaplans absorbing new book. . . . It's a book, to some extent, about the desirability of abandoning or attenuating ones Americanness."
Review
"Dreaming in French is, in essence a collection of three short, stand-alone biographies. But Kaplan is a talented historian, journalist, and storyteller, and so she's crafted a book greater than the sum of its parts. . . . An informative, well-written work of biographical nonfiction."
Review
"An elegant and entertaining work."
Review
"In this well-written triple biographical bite of a magical time in the lives of three ambitious women, Alice Kaplan plumbs the cultural vein that enticed a debutante, an intellectual and a political activist to the same smoky streets of Paris."
Review
"Elegantly written."
Review
"Compelling and well-observed portraits."
Review
"'We will always have Paris': Bogart's classic line from
Casablanca could easily be applied to the three American women woven into a highly original triple micro-biography. Beyond their nationality, what could Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis have in common? Each of them spent a year studying in Paris and left the city transformed by it. Documented and written like a novel, this womanly and erudite walking tour is as gratifying as a Woody Allen movie set in Paris."
Review
"Kaplan follows these women's singular trajectories in lively and brilliantly lucid prose."
Synopsis
History remembers Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the consummate first lady, the nations tragic widow, the tycoons wife, and, of course, the quintessential embodiment of elegance. Her biographers, however, tend to skip over an equally important stage in her life: her almost two-decade-long career as a book editor, publishing authors as diverse as Diana Vreeland, Louis Auchincloss, George Plimpton, Dorothy West, Naguib Mahfouz, and even Michael Jackson.
Greg Lawrence, who had three of his books edited by Jackie, draws from interviews with more than 125 of her former collaborators and acquaintances to examine one of the twentieth centurys most enduring subjects of fascination through a new angle: her previously untouted skill in the career she chose. Away from the public eye, Jackie found fulfillment and quietly defined life on her own terms.
About the Author
Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator, The Interpreter, and Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, and the translator of OK, Joe, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, A Box of Photographs, and Palace of Books. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Table of Contents
List of Photographs
Introduction
1. Jacqueline Bouvier: 1949-1950
2. Jacqueline Bouvier: The Return
3. Susan Sontag: 1957-1958
4. Susan Sontag: The Return
5. Angela Davis: 1963-1964
6. Angela Davis: The Return
Conclusion
A Note on Sources
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index