Jackie After O Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€œSix-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.
    â€œNo Greek wife works,” he huffed. 2
    She was no longer a Greek wife.
    Fashion houses asked her to be a spokeswoman or design her own line. Once she had told a reporter, “I was reading Carlyle and he said you should do the duty that lies nearest you. And the thing that lies nearest me is the children.” 3 Now, the kids were practically gone. As Jackie’s cab pulled up outside of Viking, being an editor was the duty nearest her.
    Singleton, upstairs in her cubicle awaiting Jackie’s arrival, was having a fashion emergency. She usually wore jeans to the office but on this occasion had chosen a denim jumper with a shirt and stockings, which had just snagged and run. She hastily shellacked her leg with clear nail polish and dashed down in the elevator, trailing noxious fumes.
    Guinzburg had warned Singleton that there would be photographers, but she was utterly unprepared for the pandemonium on the other side of the elevator doors: fifty journalists—cameras, TV crews. There was Mrs. Onassis sailing in. As Jackie crossed the threshold, her transformation into a working woman was symbolic of one of the greatest shifts in American life since the Industrial Revolution, with 40 percent of women then in the workforce, a number that was increasing every day. That first step inside the building transformed her into a working woman, a new breed that was being celebrated, questioned, and picked apart in magazines, at cocktail parties, and on playgrounds across America.
    Jackie did not seem to be weighed down by the history she was dragging behind her. She wore her glasses and her smile as a perfect mask. Singleton saw that this was not exactly a rescue mission she had to perform. Jackie was used to being mobbed. But Singleton—in her first of many protective acts—pushed her way through the crowd, introduced herself, grabbed Jackie by the arm, and led her to the elevator. Jackie ignored the media, never stopped to pose. She acted as if Singleton were her best friend and the only person in the lobby. And she started to babble. Jackie talked and talked and never stopped as they waited for the elevator, a monologue that did not cease on the ride up to the sixteenth floor. The chatter seemed to be a nervous reflex, or perhaps a defensive one. If she kept talking, no one would interrupt her with an inane or awkward question—the kind