Norman Mailer once called her “the Prisoner of Celebrity,” aptly characterizing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the ultimate object of media mythmaking. But Mailer was unaware that by the time he wrote those words, in 1983, the world’s most famous woman had already masterminded what was to be her escape from the constraints of fame. After two chapters of Jackie’s life had been defined by two extraordinary men, after she had been venerated by the world as the widowed First Lady and then vilified for marrying the unworthy Greek, after being portrayed as an extravagant, gold-digging spendthrift in the thrall of jewelry and couture fashion, she was going to find fulfillment on her own terms, and she would do so for the most part comfortably outside the media glare and public awareness.

Whatever else she may have been during her lifetime—tragic heroine, elusive sphinx, reluctant icon—Jackie also distinguished herself as an intensely dedicated career woman who left behind an impressive legacy of books. While Mailer described her as “a princess lighted by a million flashbulbs,” he underestimated how artfully Jackie had arranged her private and public lives. Jackie found a professional sanctuary in the world of publishing that was virtually unassailable, even for the paparazzi who staked out her office and boorishly delighted in stalking her. Jackie’s books, more than 100 titles, along with her personal writings, are perhaps the best window we will ever have into her heart and endlessly inquiring mind.

In the aftermath of Aristotle Onassis’s death, in March 1975, Jackie managed to transform her public image. Photographs of her on horseback at fox hunts in Virginia and New Jersey began to replace reports of indulgent shopping sprees and lunches at Orsini’s and La Côte Basque. The public sightings eventually included her entrances and exits at the publishing houses where she worked. She was more likely to be seen visiting the New York Public Library than attending glitzy parties or traditional society events. There were many nights when she dined at home with her kids, whom she often described as the most important responsibility in her life, and then spent the rest of the evening diligently at work in her library.

Referring to Jackie’s early career as editor, Gloria Steinem asked on the cover of Ms. magazine in March of 1979, “Why Does This Woman Work?” In the form of a written essay, Jackie provided clues in what was to be, aside from a few cryptic public utterances, her last interview for nearly 15 years. With touching eloquence, she described the reasoning that led her to resume a career in midlife, at the age of 46:

What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the window pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised? Of course women should work if they want to. You have to do something you enjoy. That is the definition of happiness: “complete use of one’s faculties along the lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.” It applies to women as well as to men.

Jackie confided to a friend at the time, “I have always lived through men. Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.” The third act of Jackie’s saga, which began after her two marriages played out on the world stage, has for the most part been minimized by her biographers, even though it spanned more than 19 years—almost a third of her life devoted to a calling that became a fervent mission. A complex, Renaissance woman grounded by her professional endeavors and sustained by the bonds of family—that was the Jackie whom I came to know as one of her authors, fortunate to have worked with her on three books over the last decade of her life.

During the summer of 1975, after entering her second widowhood, Jackie resumed her life in Manhattan with her children, hoping somehow to establish some normalcy in their lives. At the time, Jackie’s friends noticed that she seemed to have fallen into a malaise, with fitful bouts of boredom and restlessness. More than just an episode of midlife ennui, it was to be a prolonged period of mourning that sometimes found Jackie listless and lingering for hours over breakfast and the morning newspapers in her apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue.

While picking up the pieces and avoiding the media as much as possible, Jackie soon fell back into her familiar Manhattan routine. Caroline, then 17 years old, was planning to go to London to take art courses at Sotheby’s, while 14-year-old John was attending Collegiate School, on the Upper West Side, the last member of the Kennedy family to have Secret Service protection. With her children requiring fewer hours of attention, Jackie had time on her hands.

During this down period, as she tried to come to terms with her losses, grieving for Jack again as well as for Ari, she was visiting a Shiatsu acupuncturist, Lillian Biko, and a psychoanalyst. Biko later told Cosmopolitan magazine, “Jackie’s tension is the result of her anxiety. She has problems because she’s so secretive. Which is why she sees me.”

Aware that Jackie was floundering that summer, Letitia (Tish) Baldrige, who had served as White House social secretary for the former First Lady, suggested the idea of pursuing a career as a way for her to lift her spirits and challenge herself. Baldrige, then running a public-relations firm in Manhattan, told The New York Times, “I really felt she needed something to get out in the world and meet people doing interesting things, use that energy and that good brain of hers. I suggested publishing. Viking was my publisher, and I said to her, ‘Look, you know Tommy Guinzburg—why don’t you talk to him?’ ”

At an afternoon tea with Tish, Jackie initially responded to the idea of entering the workforce with lighthearted skepticism: “Who, me—work?” Jackie had not had a paying job since 1953, when she was a $42.50-a-week “inquiring camera girl” for the Washington Times-Herald. But by the fall, she was seriously contemplating the prospect of embarking on a career. Hard-boiled journalist Jimmy Breslin offered his outspoken advice to her: “You should work as an editor. What do you think you’re going to do, attend openings for the rest of your life?”

Jackie had known publisher Thomas Guinzburg for at least 20 years. At Yale he roomed in the same hall as her stepbrother Hugh D. Auchincloss. In the 1950s, Guinzburg had been part of the original Paris Review circle, a group that included writers George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, and he later inherited Viking Press from his father, Harold K. Guinzburg. While Tom was initially “thunderstruck” by the prospect of having Jackie join his house, he discussed the idea of her becoming an editor over lunch one afternoon at Manhattan’s Le Périgord Park restaurant.

Guinzburg (who died last September) later recalled that he had told Jackie, “ ‘You’re not really equipped to be an editor. It’s not that you don’t have the talent for it, the ability for it, but you don’t have the background and the training, and you, I think, would suffer in a publishing house because that would set up some kind of competitive atmosphere with the other editors. But what you can do is to be a consulting editor … somebody who doesn’t have what we call line responsibilities. They’re not assigned books—they don’t even have necessarily to work out of the office. Their primary job is to acquire books.’ ”

Guinzburg continued, “I then explained to her that as she became more familiar with publishing procedures she could work on the books and with the writers to whatever extent appealed to her. She could create books and so on.”

Hired by Guinzburg at the end of summer 1975 as a consulting editor at Viking, Jackie was to be paid $200 a week, working part-time—four days a week. She didn’t need the money—she had inherited a substantial trust from J.F.K. and eventually settled with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, for $26 million.

Jackie told a writer for Newsweek what she anticipated her new job would entail: “I expect to be learning the ropes at first. You sit in at editorial conferences, you discuss general things, maybe you’re assigned to a special project of your own.” Even before the press and public had accepted this sudden change of employment status, Jackie felt compelled to defend her career move, explaining, “It’s not as if I’ve never done anything interesting. I’ve been a reporter myself and I’ve lived through important parts of American history. I’m not the worst choice for this position.”

Jackie’s editorial assistant Becky Singleton recalled the stir that Jackie caused when she joined Viking: “To jump-start her apprenticeship, Jackie’s plan was to be at her desk most mornings by 9:30, to read the circulating file of editors’ correspondence and make some calls while she sipped coffee, then spend the rest of the day immersed in ‘learning the ropes.’ Unfortunately, to many people, both rabid fans and many others whose motives seemed less sentient, Jackie’s entry into publishing had made her tantalizingly available

“To give you some idea of the frenzied level of public interest that Jackie had to navigate through in order to begin her career in publishing, I will describe a portion of the events that occurred on a fairly typical morning: At about 10:00 A.M., Patti Rizzo [the receptionist] called to summon me to the visitors’ waiting area, where a person who wanted to see Jackie was causing a bit of a commotion. I went out to the lounge area and found there a very large gentleman who had managed to capture the attention of everyone else in the visitors’ lounge by announcing that he had sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. After an interesting discussion, I managed to persuade him to leave the manuscript he’d brought for Jackie with me, then made sure he wasn’t actually wired with explosives before I began steering him towards one of the elevators

“In rapid succession, I took calls from (1) Mike Wallace, who was determined to get Jackie to do a 60 Minutes interview and professed to be amazed I wasn’t interested in helping him out; (2) a woman who called daily to ask to speak to Jackie and, when told that this wasn’t possible, would ask instead for a detailed description of what she was wearing that day (no to that as well); (3) another woman who called regularly but was much easier to deal with, as she simply wanted Jackie to know that Clive Barnes, a noted theater critic at that time, had parked a van in front of her apartment building and was engaged in the process of stealing her furniture, one piece at a time.”

Longtime friend George Plimpton told People magazine in 1977, “I sense a change in her. She’s very much more like the girl I first knew, who had a great sense of fun and enthusiasm. It must be an electrifying, extraordinary thing for her to be on her own—she was always somewhat diminished by the men around her.”

Jackie’s old friend bandleader Peter Duchin also witnessed a change in her outlook that he attributed to progress with her career. “I think it gave her a lot of self-confidence … a kind of a peace within herself, because, I mean, it’s one thing having lunch with Louis Auchincloss, but another thing to work with him. When people praised her, it wasn’t just because she was Jackie Onassis or Kennedy. People praised her seriously because she’d done something constructive, and she loved that Don’t forget, people on that level—well, there are very few people on that level—most of them that I’ve met are dying to be taken seriously.”

Shall We Tell the Editor?

While Jackie devoted herself to various Viking projects that first year, including the books that she had under way with writers such as Barbara Chase-Riboud (Sally Hemings) and Eugene Kennedy (Himself! The Life and Times of Mayor Richard J. Daley), there was one project that she stayed away from. This work was a novel titled Shall We Tell the President?, written by former British M.P. Jeffrey Archer, a controversial figure who was to achieve enormous success as an author of commercial fiction. Archer’s book for Viking was inspired in part by Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 best-selling novel, The Day of the Jackal, which featured an assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle. Archer constructed a similarly fanciful story line, set in the then uncertain future of 1983, involving a plot to assassinate a fictional American president explicitly based on Jackie’s brother-in-law Ted Kennedy. In the book’s published form, Kennedy’s role had been reduced to a cameo, with most of the plot revolving around a junior F.B.I. agent and his efforts to foil the assassination plot. Nevertheless, the premise alone was enough to raise the Kennedy family’s eyebrows and arouse ire.

There are at least two contradictory versions of this particular episode, a classic he-said/she-said tale that would bring Jackie into collision with the Kennedy family and her employer. When Archer’s book was published, in October 1977, critic John Leonard’s New York Times review ended with a not-so-subtle indictment of Jackie for her implied involvement with the project. “There is a word for such a book,” wrote Leonard. “The word is trash. Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.”

The critic later confirmed, “Of course, I was partially referring to her. She should have objected. She could have stopped its publication if she wanted to.”

The churlish review caused all hell to break loose and set in motion a series of events that quickly led to Jackie’s resignation. In a statement provided to reporters during the week just after the review appeared, Jackie said, as quoted by her longtime secretary and spokesperson, Nancy Tuckerman, “Last spring, when told of the book, I tried to separate my lives as a Viking employee and a Kennedy relative. But this fall, when it was suggested that I had something to do with acquiring the book and that I was not distressed by its publication, I felt I had to resign.”

“Tucky,” as she was called by Jackie, had been a friend since their prep-school days at the Chapin School, where they first met, and at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut. Jackie brought Tuckerman into the White House as her social secretary, and Tuckerman later landed a job at Doubleday as an assistant to the publisher. While Jackie was at Viking, Tuckerman continued to serve her part-time in a secretarial capacity, even though they were working at rival publishing houses. No one suggested there might have been a conflict of interest as the Archer scenario played out.

Jackie had to endure Michael Jackson’s eccentricities for four years before his 1988 memoir, Moonwalk, was finally published.

Doubleday editor Lisa Drew, who in 1976 published Jeffrey Archer’s first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was also a friend of Jackie’s at the time Archer’s second book was acquired by Viking—after Drew had rejected it for being “totally tasteless,” as she put it. After the novel was published and Leonard’s review appeared in the Times, Drew recalled, “Jackie called me at home that night and said, ‘I don’t know what to do, but I think I’m going to quit. Nancy said you were outraged.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m quite outraged because, frankly, a week or so after Viking bought the book I mentioned this to you at lunch, and you’d never heard of it.’ And she said, ‘Oh, is that the book you mentioned? … I went to Tom Guinzburg after our lunch, and I said I just had lunch with Lisa Drew, and what is this book by some guy named Archer that’s about Ted Kennedy. He said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not anything you’re going to have anything to do with.” So I thought, Fine. I’d known Tom a long time, and I thought he was looking out for my interests with respect to this, so I paid no attention. Now here he is on the front page of the New York Times saying that I knew all about exactly what happens in this book, and I didn’t know about it at all!’ She felt awful. About two hours later, Nancy called and said, ‘She’s resigning, and sending a handwritten letter to Tom Guinzburg by messenger tonight.’ ”

Drew’s recollections and Jackie’s statement related to the press became the official version of the story. While Drew insisted, “The truth of the matter is she first heard about it from me—after they bought it,” there were some inaccuracies in the account that circulated, including the assertion that Guinzburg was quoted on the front page of The New York Times. The only relevant article to appear on the front page was the subsequent report on Jackie’s resignation. Moreover, Guinzburg never suggested in that article or any other that Jackie “knew all about exactly what happens in this book”; rather, he said she had been apprised of the novel’s subject matter but played no part in its acquisition or editing.

Jackie’s interpretation of events later appeared in a story by Jack Anderson and Les Whitten in The Washington Post on December 14, 1977. While the subhead declared, “Jackie Speaks,” the writers stated in the article that Jackie spoke only through her spokeswoman, Tuckerman. Published two months after the resignation, this article appears to be an effort by Jackie to distance herself from Viking once and for all and further placate the Kennedy family. Jackie found herself in a position where she had to denounce the book and its publisher in order to maintain her delicate and guarded relationship with the family.

Anderson and Whitten wrote that Guinzburg “insisted to us that he would never have purchased the novel without her explicit consent. That necessarily would have been before Feb. 13—the date Guinzburg agreed verbally to purchase rights to the thriller. But Mrs. Onassis—who has remained virtually mute on the controversy—informed us through a spokesperson that the first she heard of the book was on March 2, when two luncheon companions disclosed the existence of the novel. Not until then, Onassis recounts, did she ask her boss, Guinzburg, about the book. Only then did she learn that the novel portrayed the last of the Kennedy brothers as an assassin’s target. His comment to her, she remembered, was ‘we have a great story.’ Mrs. Onassis ‘categorically’ denies approving the book or that Guinzburg even asked for her approval. She described his claim of a ‘generous and understanding response’ as simply untrue.”

He Said, She Said

The Kennedy clan had given Jackie plenty of flak—more than enough reason for her to feel compelled to repudiate the book and discredit Guinzburg. It may well be that Jackie acquiesced to the book’s publication in an initial conversation with her boss without even wanting to know the details, not even giving the initial exchange with Guinzburg enough import to recall the name of the author at her subsequent lunch with Drew and Tuckerman. Nevertheless, the allegation was that Guinzburg had essentially published the book behind Jackie’s back. His story remained consistent through the years up until his death in September 2010. He was adamant that he consulted with Jackie about the book before he agreed to the deal. Former Viking insiders all agreed that Guinzburg had adored Jackie, and they found it hard to believe that he would have risked her displeasure over such a questionable book.

Guinzburg stood by the version of the conversation with Jackie that he gave to Jeffrey Archer’s biographer, Michael Crick, and repeated it to me almost verbatim, as follows: “I said, ‘I’ve got a problem with a manuscript.’ ‘How?’ she asked. ‘It’s a caper-thriller novel by an Englishman named Jeffrey Archer.’ She said, ‘Tell me about it.’ I said, ‘Like many of these things, this has a gimmick—an assassination plot.’ ”

Jackie asked him, “What are you getting at, Tom?” Guinzburg told her, “In this case it’s Ted Kennedy, and the year’s 1983.” Remembering that exchange, Guinzburg said, “It was just as though I hit her; she winced. She muttered something about, ‘Won’t they ever stop?’ And I didn’t say anything. Then Jackie visibly collected herself and said, ‘Is it really a pretty good book?’ I said, ‘It could be, if he does some rewrites. There’s a lot of extraneous Kennedy stuff and we can move it out, but it depends on that situation; it really does.’ She thought again for a few more seconds. ‘Will somebody else take this if we don’t?’ I said, ‘Oh, sure they will, but that shouldn’t be a consideration for you.’ ”

According to Jeffrey Archer’s literary agent, Deborah Owen, “There’s no way he would not have thought of her first Tom, because of his deep affection for Jackie, would have been, if anything, overly protective of her. And I would bet my last dime on Tom’s version.”

As Jackie’s brother-in-law (married to Jean Kennedy) and the Kennedy family’s point man on such issues, Stephen Smith told The Boston Globe that he had informed Guinzburg the book was an “act of venal commerce and in basic bad taste.” Guinzburg confirmed to me that Smith, whom Tom had known over the years, had contacted him and expressed that opinion, but Smith did not respond until after the book’s publication and the Leonard review. For Jackie’s part, she had months before the book’s publication to voice her strong disapproval of it, but had not done so. Meanwhile, Guinzburg was desperate to speak with Jackie, but other than one brief telephone conversation during which he pleaded with her to meet, he was put off from further contact by Nancy Tuckerman.

Guinzburg then told The New York Times, “After being friends for more than half our lives, I more than ever deeply regret Mrs. Onassis’s decision to resign from Viking Press without a personal discussion of the incident which resulted in her decision My own affection for the Kennedy family and the extremely effective and valued contribution that Mrs. Onassis has made to Viking over the past two years would obviously have been an overriding factor in the final decision to publish any particular book which might cause her further anguish.”

Guinzburg told members of his staff that he had discussed the book with Jackie as a courtesy before agreeing to its publication. Rising editor Amanda Vaill had a meeting with him in his office just after he had agreed to purchase the Archer novel. Now a successful nonfiction author, Vaill told me, “When I was interviewed by Tom at Viking in February of ’77 before I was hired … and he told me about this book called Shall We Tell the President? that’s coming up, and he explains that he has spoken to Jackie about it and gone through the whole thing with her and asked if it was O.K. if he published the book. And this interview was in February of ’77, and he told me … she said, ‘I don’t want to know anything about it. Don’t ask me—you wouldn’t ask anybody else here if it’s O.K. if you published this book or any book. If you wanted to do it, you would just go ahead and publish it. So don’t treat me any differently than you would treat anybody else. I don’t want to know anything more about it than what you’ve just told me.’ And that’s what he told me in February before there was any reason for this to matter.”

Not only was Jackie informed about the subject of the novel, at least in general terms, by both Guinzburg and Drew, but, prior to publication, copies were sent to Ted Kennedy (whose office reported to the Times that he had “flipped through the book”) and to Stephen Smith, with whom Jackie had a cordial relationship. As spokesperson, Smith would have put her on the defensive as far as the role she had played in its publication.

Of course, memory can be a traitor, especially with emotionally charged events in the distant past. Years later Jackie suggested in the last interview of her life (with Publishers Weekly in 1993) that she had never been consulted by Guinzburg about the Archer novel. As she was not specifically quoted on the subject but paraphrased, it may be that she miscommunicated during the interview or was misunderstood. Whatever she may have said, it was clear that Jackie was distressed by the memory of her ungraceful exit from Viking for the rest of her life.

Becky Singleton told me, “On the morning that Jackie left the firm, Tom called me into his office and gave me a brief description of what had transpired But she had been at Viking for nearly two years. In many ways, what was now being said and what was happening—it just didn’t make sense.”

Singleton was troubled by the circumstances under which Jackie tendered her resignation, without saying good-bye to her colleagues: “The lack of civility in her departure had shaken me to the point that I was second-guessing a lot of my previous assumptions about our relationship At the time, I interpreted the breach of etiquette as evidence of a mass indictment that suggested little had been valued during her time at Viking and much was now disdained. If I had been older and more seasoned in the ways of the world, I might have considered the possibility that she simply felt embarrassed about the way things were being done. In hindsight, this does make sense. I wish I’d thought of that at the time.

“The blow that may have struck hardest at Tom was the fact that she chose to resign through her social secretary. She must have known that to many this deliberate slap would appear to be an act of justified retaliation made in response to reprehensible conduct on his part. So, in many ways—in what was being said and how things were being done—Jackie’s exit from Viking wasn’t a traditional parting of the ways. It was more like a blowtorch ending to a personal relationship.”

Regarding the allegation that he had betrayed Jackie, Guinzburg said, “Well, this is Jackie Onassis. It was her word against mine, and it was just as much my fault. I was pretty staunch for a while that morning with all these reporters calling, but The Boston Globe was the one who got me.”

The Globe, publishing in the heart of the Kennedy-family homeland, left out Guinzburg’s explanation that Jackie had not been in any way involved with the book’s acquisition or publication, though the article did quote the publisher as saying that when he first informed Jackie about the book she “didn’t indicate any distress or anger.” That quote was enough to put the Kennedys on the warpath. Jackie’s relationship with the family had been strained ever since her marriage to Onassis. Intent on maintaining her relationship with Ted and the family, Jackie apparently caved in to that pressure with her blanket denial that she had been consulted.

In his defense, Guinzburg said, “Do you really think I would have taken the chance of losing Jackie’s friendship and her participation at Viking, which was of inestimable value … over one silly book? I mean, we can always find another book. Any publisher can.”

One of Jackie’s editorial colleagues at Viking, Elisabeth Sifton, agreed that it was a deplorable situation and might have been avoided but for the over-reaction caused by Archer’s novel. “It would have been published no matter what Tom wanted to publish Archer and keep Jackie. He did the correct, open, transparent, straightforward thing. And she agreed with it. But both of them had neglected to take fully into consideration the wrath of the Kennedys and the way the press would distort it.”

Archer’s book received mixed reviews around the country, and the publicity about Jackie’s role spurred sales to some extent, although the book spent only one week on the Times best-seller list.

Jackie did not entirely forget her Viking friends, but the episode had surely been traumatic, and she kept her distance from Guinzburg and her former colleagues in the aftermath. She was soon making plans to land on her feet by changing houses, with encouragement from her friends Tuckerman and Drew.

Working Up to a Window

The October 24, 1977, issue of Time reported that Jackie was now unemployed, with a headline that read, situation wanted, references available. The following year she would join Nancy Tuckerman and Lisa Drew at Doubleday as an associate editor, working three days a week for approximately $20,000 a year, double her starting salary at Viking. Drew remembered meeting Jackie for another lunch date and encouraging her to make the move: “We talked about Doubleday. She gently raised the question about working there. I said it would be a safe haven. Nancy was there, and Jackie had known John Sargent Sr. [who was married to Nelson Doubleday’s daughter, Neltje], the C.E.O. She felt there were enough people there to protect her, that it was safe to risk exposure one more time. I asked her later why it took her a few months to decide. She said, ‘I just really wanted to be careful. I’d made some mistakes in my life by reacting too quickly, and I really wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing.’ ”

Jackie reported to work the week of February 11, 1978, at the company’s offices at 245 Park Avenue, just a few blocks from Grand Central Terminal, which she had been crusading to preserve as a landmark and architectural treasure—a successful campaign that culminated with her leading a delegation to Washington, D.C., on the famous “Landmark Express” train in April of that year. At her new publishing house, she again worked hard at being a team player with her colleagues, eventually blending seamlessly if not quite invisibly into her new workplace. She was given a very modest windowless office, and told Sargent, “Oh, that’s all right, John. I’ve got lots of windows in my home.” She later told author Eugene Kennedy, “Like everybody else, I have to work my way up to an office with a window.”

Commenting on Jackie’s initiation at Doubleday, John Sargent once said, “At first there was some resentment—a feeling that perhaps Jackie wasn’t all that serious. She was not full-time, and she had everything in the world, so naturally there was that perception among the troops that this was just a diversion for her. But she was so relaxed and so unaffected—not at all the wildly extravagant, ultra-glamorous figure she was made out to be—that her co-workers couldn’t help but be charmed.”

With her office as a shelter a few days a week, Jackie settled into a routine that ensured her a modicum of privacy against the continual barrage of publicity. The move from Viking to Doubleday was a major change in scale and corporate culture for Jackie, with a marked shift in publishing-company policies. According to Tom Guinzburg, “It was like going from a P.T. boat to a battleship.” Viking had 200 employees, while Doubleday was one of the largest and most successful houses, employing three times that many, with bookstores and book clubs under its umbrella, though its book-sales division had been suffering, as was the case at many other houses. Doubleday’s books were viewed as schlocky in terms of the quality—cover, paper, typography, etc.—as its printing operation cut corners. (It was the only publisher with its own printing press at the time.) Jackie was going to face a serious challenge as she demanded the highest production values for her books.

John Sargent Sr. was a frequent escort of Jackie’s, and there were rumors of a romantic affair. His son, John Sargent Jr., who also went to work at Doubleday and is now the head of Macmillan, told me, “They were friends. My dad will no doubt take it to the grave with him; if they were anything more than friends, none of us ever knew it. He was a very popular guy in those years. He dated tons of women, and he was always on the list of New York’s Top 10 bachelors, and this, that, and the other. We could never figure out what exactly the Jackie relationship was. But I believe she was simply a friend and confidante; Dad hired her at a moment that was important for her.”

Despite her friends and gracious welcome at Doubleday, Jackie did not make an easy transition to her new corporate family. Former Doubleday V.P. and executive editor Patrick Filley recalled, “In the early months, they came close to stifling her enthusiasm.” Carolyn Blakemore, one of Jackie’s early editorial colleagues, told me that Jackie once lamented, “ ‘I suppose I’ll have to do what they want me to do for that’—for some function. And I said, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.’ ”

There was one routine task Jackie would have to do. In order to win approval for acquiring a book for the house, she now had to face weekly meetings with an editorial and marketing committee. This was a relatively new modus operandi in the publishing world with its emerging mega-conglomerates. Former Doubleday executive and senior editor Betty Prashker described these changes in publishing for Al Silverman, who chronicled the period in his book The Time of Their Lives: “In the beginning, in the forties and fifties, the editor was at the top of the pyramid, supported by the administration, the art department, the sales department, the promotion department. There was basically no business department But gradually over the years that pyramid ended, and the editors wound up at the bottom.” This was to be an increasingly adverse environment for Jackie.

Bride of Doubleday

Doubleday was very much a boys’ club in those days, as well as a family enterprise under the ownership of Nelson Doubleday Jr., who also owned the Mets baseball team. The men in the house sometimes referred somewhat derisively to those distinguished female editors such as Prashker as “the Brides of Doubleday.”

Harriet Rubin, who would later become one of Jackie’s editorial colleagues and is now a successful author, described her impact on the company: “Her becoming an editor was a tremendous vindication of the struggling book business. I think she regarded books as a form of magic. Temples are built upon scrolls and sacred texts, and she was going to produce modern magic formulas for opening people’s minds, for revealing hidden wisdom.” Rubin included Jackie as “one of the Brides of Doubleday,” noting that “they shaped the cultural conversation through the books they edited. Editor is a formidable stealth position: an editor can launch 20 books a year into the culture; a writer, maybe one every few years. Bloggers need reminding that books change lives and societies I think that Jackie found she could have a conversation with the elite or leadership class, and sometimes the rest of us, through her books.

“What I most remember is how she would operate in weekly editorial meetings. She attended maybe once a month. When her turn came to present her ideas, she trilled about projects that would have gotten anyone else fired for being ridiculously uncommercial: a collected Pushkin, an American edition of the ‘Pléiade,’ an illustrated children’s book based on a tale in Vasari of Leonardo crafting artificial insects. She lost these battles.”

Describing the weekly editorial meetings, another former Doubleday editor, James Fitzgerald, told me, “Jackie didn’t have a billion projects lying around. But as an editor she was one of us. We had these kind of Gong Show publishing boards that you had to go to. And there would be a line of people up on a dais, and sometimes Doubleday would come in, and other people who were way upstairs, and you didn’t even know who they were. But she would go into those things and she’d get shut down and cut down on some projects. She was just like the rest of us. There was total democracy on that floor.”

Former editor in chief Sandy Richardson said that when Jackie first went into editorial meetings “she turned to the person next to her and in that famous little-girl whisper asked what she was supposed to do.”

It is not unusual when an editor changes publishing houses that he or she will take certain favored authors along. When Jackie left Viking, she took Diana Vreeland to Doubleday for a book of photographs titled Allure. Her grandson Nicholas Vreeland described the collaboration of Jackie and Diana as a shared labor of love. “She would come over to my grandmother’s apartment, and they would sort of put things on the floor and just go through the maquette of it, and decide how to do it. They really did it together. What’s astonishing is that it was not really designed by a designer; it was designed by them.” (A new edition of Allure was published by Chronicle Books in October 2010.)

At Doubleday, even after becoming a senior editor, Jackie lost more battles than she won running the editorial and marketing gauntlet. Over the course of her career, there were countless books she proposed for which she was unable to win support. She never had complete freedom in choosing her books, though she was at times coddled by the powers that be, who realized she was a considerable asset for the house and didn’t want to risk losing her. With some of her projects, they simply acquiesced in order to placate her.

In the case of Michael Jackson’s 1988 memoir, Moonwalk, Jackie had to endure the pop star’s erratic eccentricities during the more than four years before the book was finally published. She once told me it was “a professional embarrassment.” Joe Armstrong, a former publisher of Rolling Stone, New York, and New West magazines, was a trusted friend of Jackie’s during her later years, and he said of the Michael Jackson project, “Jackie wasn’t involved in that because it was an interest of hers, or a passion of hers, or a curiosity of hers. She said she did it ‘to be a good citizen’ at Doubleday. Those were her words. Because she said if she helped with that, it let her have the ability to do the kind of special books she truly loved.”

Renaissance Woman

Most of Jackie’s authors were unaware of the chain of events that began in November of 1993, after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and led to her death, six months later. Like the rest of the world, most of her friends and authors heard of her illness only when it was announced by Nancy Tuckerman in February of the following year. After visiting Rose Kennedy in early 1994 at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port—the ailing matriarch was then 103 and would outlive her—Jackie returned to work. She had informed her colleagues about her condition shortly after she was diagnosed. “She never once complained of any pain,” said Scott Moyers, her assistant at the time. “She never once let anything show. She kept coming in. She was so indomitable. She was so upbeat. Sometimes, she had Band-Aids on, and bruises from the therapy, but she carried on with her projects until the end. And then there was the day that she was rushed to the hospital the first time. When she came to consciousness in the hospital, she realized she had an appointment with children’s-book author Peter Sís, over whose work she had so lovingly labored, and the first thing she thought about and said was ‘Please call Peter Sís and tell him I won’t be able to make it.’ ”

Several of her authors soon left Doubleday for other houses simply because they couldn’t bear the idea of working there without Jackie. Biographer and screenwriter David Stenn said, “She cultivated authors, not subjects. In today’s publishing market, it’s all about what you’re writing about, not that you’re writing—and unless you’ve got an author who sells, you don’t keep publishing someone simply because you believe in them. Jackie nurtured, and thought long-haul It was like the Renaissance guilds—and Jackie was very much of a Renaissance woman.”

Jackie died at 10:15 on the night of Thursday, May 19. The following day John junior made the announcement to the press, saying that she passed away “surrounded by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things that she loved. And she did it in her own way and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that, and now she is in God’s hands.”

A year later, 14 of Jackie’s authors said their farewells by composing tribute essays for a slender blue hardcover book that her publisher distributed as a private, limited edition for family and friends. Such a modest volume was a fitting, elegant gesture, even while it omitted reference to many of the works her legacy comprises. The vision Jackie brought into editing embraced the recognition that every life has its own riches and meaning, waiting to be revealed by what she called “the hard work of writing.” Over the years Doubleday and Viking allowed many of Jackie’s books to go out of print. They were no longer deemed commercial, though perhaps in this Google age of wonders, we can hope they will somehow survive, along with the wisdom she imparted by the example of her own beautiful voyage.

Excerpted from Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to be published this month by St. Martin’s Press; © 2010 by the author.