Jackie After O Read Online Free PDF Page B

touring the Louvre with André Malraux. She was a cultural force for a whole generation—and she can be again.”
    To Newsweek , he offered this understatement: “One is not unmindful of the range of contacts that lady has.”
    Jackie was also low-key, telling a reporter: “I expect to learn the ropes at first. You sit in editorial conferences, you discuss general things, maybe you’re assigned to a special project of your own. Really, I expect to be doing what my employer tells me to do.”
    On Jackie’s second day on the job, Barbara Burn, a special projects editor at Viking, took Jackie to lunch at Guinzburg’s suggestion to explain to her exactly what the role of a consulting editor was. Burn had made a reservation at the Carlyle Hotel, a location that would have made it easy for Jackie to head home after lunch, which Burn assumed she would. 6
    â€œBurn, [party of] two,” she told the host, when they arrived. The staff immediately cleared a large table and sat the women. Jackie ordered a salad. But the staff was so unnerved trying to respect her space that she had to eat her lunch with an iced tea spoon because no one saw her looking for a fork.
    Jackie got down to business. “Look,” she said to Burn, “the only other consulting editor at Viking is Malcolm Cowley. I couldn’t begin to do what he does.”
    Cowley had covered World War I for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , was part of the literary scene in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1920s, and chronicled the expat scene. He had written a couple of acclaimed books and at Viking had pushed to publish Kerouac’s On the Road .
    â€œSo I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do,” she told Burn.
    â€œStart by reading manuscripts and writing evaluations,” Burn told her.
    When the check came, Jackie paid for it. But Burn, still in the mode of teaching Jackie the ropes of publishing, told her to “be sure to keep the receipt.”
    â€œOh, never mind, I paid in cash.”
    â€œNo, no,” Burn said. “You’re supposed to charge it and keep the receipt.”
    On the walk back to the office, Burn was struck by how the masses of people parted before them, staring. Jackie never made eye contact, but did not complain. 7
    Once the world knew where Jackie worked, the office was deluged—with manuscripts, forty to fifty unsolicited ones per day; crazy phone calls from people asking her for money; adoring mail containing locks of hair; and new interpretations of the Kennedy assassinations. One woman sent in a portrait of her grandchild—dead, in a casket—because she said she had remembered when Jackie lost a child. Singleton intercepted such things. 8 But she was becoming increasingly nervous about it and told Jackie what was happening.
    â€œThrow it away,” Jackie told her. “Rose Kennedy responds to every card, every letter she gets about Jack or Bobby. She sends back a prayer card … You just can’t encourage that kind of thing. I know it sounds cruel but it’s better not to encourage it.”
    Singleton appreciated that there was no sense perpetuating the myth. But not every request was so easily dispatched.
    One morning, around 10:00, the receptionist called Singleton to the visitor’s waiting area because there was a large man there who wanted to see Jackie. When Singleton saw him, he told her he had dynamite strapped to him. Singleton could thank her psychiatric nursing experiences for being unflappable at that moment. She patted him down, was relieved to find nothing alarming, and accepted the manuscript he had brought for Jackie before loading him onto an elevator. Just as she did that, another elevator opened, disgorging a man dressed as clergy, who had also shown up a few times before saying it was his wish before he died to see Jackie. Singleton had a persuasive conversation with him and ushered that man back around