LETTERS FROM LEGENDS and the Incredible Interviews that Inspired Them

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LETTERS FROM LEGENDS

and the Incredible Interviews that Inspired Them

By celebrity journalist Marian Christy

(COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL)

From Chapter 4

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS

(accompanied by letter)

September 1, 1980

Celebrity journalism is magic. Dependable, everyday magic that is boundless in scope. One door opens into another and yet another....

....This particular saga began one September day when I was rummaging through a small mountain of letters and discovered one from Herself, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Yes, Jacqueline, the Queen of Elegance, who’d become a big-time New York City publishing editor with Doubleday.

She didn’t need a title to underline her enchanting name. It stood on a splendid marquis of its own. Bright and shiny as new gold. Only, in my letter, she’d dropped the Kennedy part to sign it, simply, Jacqueline Onassis....

....At the time, she was inviting me to interview Diana Vreeland, the infamous Vogue editor who looked like an old-fashioned wooden cigar store Indian—but reigned like a despot over the world of fashion....

....Mrs. Onassis, or Jackie-O as she became known, had the guts to stand behind her projects. One of them centered on Vreeland’s new book, Allure. I have no idea how Jackie-O managed this nutty genius, Vreeland, much less edited the Editor who was known to fly into rages for the least of reasons.

Jackie-O’s choice of subject, allure, was timely in 1980.

The word allure, like the word pizzazz, which Vreeland purportedly coined, alluded to a woman’s enduring charismatic ability to entice, in a refined way, her personal sense of her “style....”

....Who doesn’t remember Jackie-O subliminally setting the highest standard of the allure? Who doesn’t remember that women everywhere wore pillboxes, gloves and sleek suits? And let’s not forget that the Secret Service’s code name for Jackie was “Lace.” Is there anything more alluring than lace?

Jackie-O’s allure book was, thank goodness, poles apart from the modern vulgarities that have bastardized current “fashion” instigated by Britney Spears’ belly baring pants that tend to display derriere cleavage. Too often women who shouldn’t expose bellies that also have no resemblance to Britney’s do. That’s not allure.

Jackie-O believed in classic allure, styles and signatures that transcended time. Her letter seemed to be offering to arrange an interview for me with, how shall I put it? Her newest protege.

I imagined that in the process of said interview I would meet Jackie-O at Doubleday. Establish a working relationship with her. Let her get to know and trust me. I dared to think ahead. She had, via the letter, sought me out. Extended a “handshake.” This was proof. I had her letter.

It was an “open secret” that Jackie-O had no one-on-one dealings with the press at the time. None whatsoever. Getting close to her, a runaway figment of my imagination was, in reality, a long shot.

Bets laden with great odds sometimes produce miracles. Anything could happen as a result of this magnificent letter.

On the third read, perusing beyond the names of the star fashion photographers she mentioned, like Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn, I stumbled over a strange Jackie-O phrase.

She referred to the book’s “intriguing paparazzi shots.”

When did Jackie-O begin to find the paparazzi intriguing? Was it when she viewed paparazzi work from an editorial point of view? How I would have loved to ask her that question. Supposedly she despised the paparazzi. Loathed them. She even brought an expensive lawsuit against one camera-touting stalker, the infamous Ron Gallela, to force him to keep his distance. She won. After that, when he snapped her, he had to stand back, way back, at least 100 feet away.

However, when I was a rookie at Women’s Wear Daily and she was First Lady, Jackie had her social secretary occasionally telephone the newspaper’s New York City headquarters, the news desk, to report, casually, where she’d be lunching that day.

The messages always included the approximate time she’d arrive and the name of the designer who’d created her outfit. Jackie never spoke to the surreptitiously summoned photographers. She simply posed. Alluringly, of course. She offered the paparazzi a brief opportunity to take her photo, now referred to as a “photo op.” The woman secretly loved to have her picture taken, that is, when she’d arranged it.

Jackie-O also knew that when one photographer was apprised of a forthcoming (planned) Jackie-O sighting, the whole gang knew. Hence the mass gathering of that notorious group. Jackie-O was a smoker. But I don’t think she was ever caught smoking on-camera (unless Galella clicked it?)

Once, when I covered a top-tier social event at Boston’s Symphony Hall, I saw Jackie-O pull out one cigarette, just one, from her minuscule evening bag. She moved far away from the slew of hovering photographers, disappeared into the maddening crowd, turned her back and took a few puffs. She was smart about her smoking.

***

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