new Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis book

[elvis4life]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2646535/Exclusive-I-spending-rest-life-Jack-Kennedy-Jackie-wanted-divorce-serial-cheating-husband-Marilyn-Monroe-straw.html

EXCLUSIVE: Jackie Kennedy wanted to divorce her philandering husband and was given $1m to stay - but then came Marilyn Monroe and she was the last straw, claims sensational new book

'Bobby seems to show more romantic interest in me than Jack does…and Teddy lusts after me like a lovesick puppy dog,' said Jackie when she and JFK began courting, according to a blockbuster new book

'Jack is no Burt Lancaster. He has a funny body, skinny, with toothpick legs,' Jackie said

Jackie was tormented by JFK's philandering and she had affairs of her own

After Marilyn Monroe's humiliating tribute song to her husband, Jackie decided she couldn't remain in the marriage

She had also been prepared to divorce JFK while he was senator but Kennedy scion Joe offered her $1 million to stay

Jackie countered staying with JFK would rise to $20 million ‘if he brings home any venereal disease from any of his sluts'
By Caroline Howe
Published: 11:13 EST, 3 June 2014 | Updated: 13:50 EST, 3 June 2014

Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to JFK was headed to a divorce when his life was cut short by an assassin's bullet in November 1963. She was about to become the only First Lady to divorce a sitting president.

That's the shocking bombshell in a new book Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince from Blue Moon Productions publisher.
Jackie had had enough. Fed up with his constant womanizing, and having her own dalliances that fueled the fire of her desire for liberation, Jackie told her confidantes that she wanted out. Her anger amped up after Marilyn Monroe's humiliating 'Happy Birthday Mr. President' performance

And it wasn't the first time Jackie threatened to divorce Jack.
By the late 1950s, Jackie was too demoralized by Jack’s sexual philandering to continue the public charade. Her father-in-law, Joe Kennedy knew all too well the profound problems and stepped in to warn her. ‘There is danger facing you as a divorced Catholic woman’, he told her. ‘I suggest you put divorce out of your mind’, according to the revelatory new book.

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Trouble: Jackie was prepared to divorce Jack and become the only First Lady to divorce a sitting president, say the authors of a blockbuster new book about Jackie

Kennedy scion Joe Kennedy offered his daughter-in-law a check for one million dollars to stay in the union. Jackie allegedly told him that the cost of her staying with JFK would rise to twenty million dollars ‘if he brings home any venereal disease from any of his sluts’, according to the authors.

If Jackie had divorced Jack while he was a U.S. Senator, the old man’s dreams of having a son in the White House would have gone unfulfilled. And he was more concerned about those political ambitions then he was about Jackie being ostracized by the Catholic Church.
Jackie didn't know what she was getting into when she first met the dashing senator from Massachusetts.

Single Jackie returned to Washington, DC in the early 1950s, leaving a string of lovers behind after a whirlwind trip to Europe, and she was hired as an ‘Inquiring Photographer' for the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald.

By night, in her little apartment, she was writing a screenplay on Dolley Madison, the 4th U.S. President’s wife, who reportedly was a snuff tobacco addict.

No film studio showed interested in Jackie’s writing efforts, so she abandoned that to pursue finding a rich husband.

‘I don’t plan to marry a reporter, but perhaps through their connections, I might meet a beau who’s rich,’ she said.

Charles Bartlett, a journalist who started the D.C newspaper bureau of the Chattanooga Times, is credited with setting up a blind date with Jack and Jackie after dating her himself.

‘I became a historical footnote as the man who brought Jack and Jackie together as the 20th Century’s most famous couple. But first I tried to score with Jackie myself.

‘She was very cute, very sweet and unsullied – or so I thought at the time’, he is quoted by the authors.

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Ambition: Jackie became the Inquiring Camera Girl of the Washington Time-Herald newspaper in 1952. But by that that time she had already decided that her real goal was to become a rich man's wife

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Go Fish: The future first Lady photographs Dale Chestnut feeding goldfish on the roof-top pond of the Washington Times-Herald building

Before hooking up with Kennedy, Jackie also dated John White, employed by the State Department and once madly in love with Kick Kennedy, Jack’s younger sister who tragically lost her life in a 1948 airplane disaster.

‘When I first dated her [Jackie], she decided she was the reincarnation of Madame Recamier’, a famous French socialite and hostess of salons for the great and near-great in politics and the arts.

That dream quickly faded and Jackie confessed she now just wanted to marry a rich and powerful man, and be the power behind the throne. ‘I prefer him to be American, but I would settle for a British man, perhaps even a Frenchman. If a Brit, I would want him to look like Prince Philip’, Jackie is quoted as telling White.

Bartlett knew that Jack was a skirt chaser and he also knew that Jack had to settle down if he wanted to become president. Jackie just might be the one to do it.

'I prefer him to be American, but I would settle for a British man, perhaps even a Frenchman'
-Jackie Kennedy‘

They did seem to like each other, but it was so very casual. At least, Jack was intrigued enough to walk her out to her car which was parked outside my house’, Bartlett said.

Jackie was secretly dating John Husted, Jr., a stockbroker from a banking family. But Husted knew he wasn’t rich enough to fulfill her desires, despite being locked in each other’s arms for months. He did propose and she accepted – until she started dating Kennedy.

She surreptitiously slipped the ring in his coat pocket and said good night and goodbye.

At the time, Jack had been seeing Inga Arvad, nicknamed ‘Inga-Binga,’ a reporter for the Washington Times Herald who wrote the gossip column on movers and shakers in D.C. She was rumored to have had a lusty affair with Hitler’s Reichmarschall, Hermann Goring.

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Body language: Women went gaga over the handsome president but when jackie saw him in swim trunks for the first time she remarked, 'He's no Burt Lancaster'

‘From the beds of Berlin, the brilliantly multilingual Inga had migrated to the mattresses of Washington’, write Porter and Prince. Powerful men fell in love with the Mata Hari of Washington.

It was the first of a long list of Jack Kennedy’s scandalous affairs Jackie would learn about, and not an auspicious beginning for the couple who married in 1953.

On Jackie’s introduction to the Kennedy clan in Hyannis Port, she wrote in her diary, ‘Jack is no Burt Lancaster. He has a funny body, skinny, with toothpick legs. His best feature is his handsome face.

'Actually, Bobby seems to show more romantic interest in me than Jack does…and Teddy lusts after me like a lovesick puppy dog. So far I have avoided being alone with Bobby. I think if I went out alone on a boat with him, he’d rape me’.

'Actually, Bobby shows more romantic interest in me than Jack does'

‘Old Joe was the only one with table manners’, she said. ‘The rest of the Kennedys are like pigs. Teddy almost cried when he claimed that Bobby took more than his share of the mashed potatoes’.

She viewed the clan as being bourgeois.

Jack courted Jackie in the backseat of his 1950 two door Plymouth. One evening, Kennedy friend and Cape Cod neighbor, TV comic, Morton Downey Jr., snuck up on Jack’s car thinking he’d catch Jack and Jackie necking.

‘With her panties down, Jackie was lying on her back…her left leg slung across the seat back and her dress riding high above her waist’, according to the authors.

Their engagement in the late spring of 1953, a headlined story in the New York Daily News, ‘Senator Loses Bachelorhood to Camera Gal’, read: ‘Hopeful debutantes from Washington to Boston, from Palm Beach to Hollywood, can begin unpacking their hope chests’.
Nothing was farther from the truth.

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A courtin' we will go: Jack was a skirt chaser, but he knew that he had to settle down if he wanted to become president. Jackie just might be the one to do that

Before they were even married, Jackie confessed in her diary, “Jack and I had a few romantic moments. He has never yet told me that he loves me. As for his family, they are a pack of barbarians except for Joe’.

Jack bought the engagement ring for Jackie – a 2 carat, twinned, square cut diamond and emerald band at Van Cleef & Arpels in Manhattan. His wedding gift was a $10,000 diamond bracelet.

‘Jack and Jackie, at least in the press, became one of the most written about romantic couples of the 1950s’, said Kennedy friend, Chuck Spalding. ‘Little did they know what was in store for them’.

On their wedding night, Jackie slipped into a sexy, see-through French negligee. Jack stripped off his clothes and headed into the bathroom where he stayed for a long time. Finally back in bed, he plopped down and complained of a terrible pain at the base of his spine so she would have to get on top. The lovemaking didn’t last long. He turned over and said, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep’.

The honeymoon in Acapulco wasn’t much better – quick passionate sex finishing early.

It was in Mexico that Jack told her about his Addison’s disease -- a rare, chronic endocrine disorder causing the adrenal glands to produce insufficient steroid hormones resulting in abdominal pain and weakness. His condition required constant injections.

Kennedy also suffered from prostatitis that caused chronic pelvic pain and urinary infections.

But the worst was Chlamydia, a sexually transmitted infection of the urethra that had never been cured. And there was the slim possibility that he could transmit it to her – a daunting thought that was a turnoff in bed. She was glad his lovemaking was so quick.

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Wedding belle: Senator John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, leave a Newport, Rhode Island, church following their wedding ceremony in 1953. An estimated one thousand people waited outside the church for the newlyweds. One of them was Bobby Kennedy, who would eventually become Jackie's lover

The following night when Jack told her he was meeting with business associates of the Mexican President, he was actually with the exotic and glamorous Anglo-Indian screen legend, Merle Oberon, who had starred with Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.

‘Because of my father, I was used to infidelities, but Jack’s womanizing hurt me greatly’, Jackie told William Walton.

From Mexico, the newlyweds flew to Los Angeles for three nights. Jack took off and drove to Palm Springs to spend the weekend with Marilyn Monroe saying he had to meet with business associates of his father.

Santa Barbara was the couple’s next stop but Jack was clearly bored and called his brother, Bobby to admit it. During dinner, Jack read the Atlantic Monthly while Jackie picked at her food and stared into space.

Paul Fay, a buddy of Jack’s from their Navy days during World War II and later Under Secretary of the Navy, wrote in a book proposal that he predicted the couple would be talking divorce by 1954, one year later.

‘Of course, Papa Joe will do anything, pay out anything to keep her married to Jack. Divorce would destroy Jack’s chance of moving on to a higher office’.

Fay’s prediction came true.

Back in their home in Georgetown, Jackie was not adapting well to married life. She couldn’t cook and she hated Jack’s friends just dropping in at any time. Her new husband was rarely home. He had a habit of leaving her at parties, and his friend, Lem Billings had to drive her home.

Lem told Jackie she had married a compulsive womanizer. ‘No one woman can ever satisfy Jack’, were his exact words to me,’ the authors quote Jackie.

One day Jackie decided to surprise her husband at his Senate office and take him to lunch. She entered without knocking to see a look of panic on his face. He was getting oral sex from a woman under his desk. It was Peggy Ashe, an office temp employed in the Senate Office Building who later tried to sell an expose to Confidential magazine for $500.

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Unhappy: Jack had hooked up with 'Dr. Feelgood' in the summer of 1960 for his infamous injected cocktails of steroids and amphetamines that made Jack's back pain disappear. Jackie was slowly becoming unglued

They weren’t buying. In her proposal, she claimed that Jack was a ‘fast shooter and had an average size, uncircumcised penis with a crooked slant to the left’.

Orgies in Kennedy’s suite at the nearby Mayflower Hotel continued where he allegedly bedded film stars Audrey Hepburn, Betty Grable and Marlene Dietrich.

Until Jackie became pregnant in early 1956, she talked about a divorce, write the authors.

Attending the Democractic Nominating Convention in Chicago in August 1956, when Jack was campaigning for Vice President on the Democratic ticket with Adlai Stevenson, Jackie was very pregnant and expecting the next month.

He and Stevenson were defeated and an enraged Kennedy took off on a sailing expedition with Teddy. Jackie went to stay with her mother in Newport, Rhode Island, and told her that she was still seriously considering a divorce.

'I can't see myself spending the rest of my life with Jack Kennedy...it's not going to happen'‘I just can’t see myself spending the rest of my life with Jack Kennedy. It’s not going to happen’, she confessed, write the authors.

In Newport, Jackie collapsed hemorrhaging and was rushed to the hospital. The baby was stillborn, a girl they named Arabella. Jack could not be reached because he had avoided giving Jackie the transatlantic phone number. He didn’t want her to call him.

While in the hospital, a crazed fellow had planted four sticks of dynamite outside her window of the room that was on the ground floor. A gardener luckily spotted him and hit the would-be assassin over the head with a shovel, knocking him out. He was carted off to jail.

Jackie woke up in the hospital to see Bobby Kennedy standing by her bedside, holding her hand. He had been there for hours. He leaned over and kissed her lips. He handled all the arrangements for the infant’s burial. Jack arrived home two days later.

Jackie and Jack had been living at Hickory Hill, the Virginia mansion overlooking the Potomac Rover bought for them by Joe. But she had no interest in returning. She couldn’t face the baby’s nursery that she had decorated.

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Chemistry: 'So far I have avoided being alone with Bobby,' Jackie wrote in her diary. 'I think if I went out alone on a boat with him, he'd rape me'. Ultimately, they had a steamy affair

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A backward glance: If looks could tell, Ethel Kennedy, Bobby's wife, would have been very unhappy

Instead, she flew to New York to see her sister and meet with the family patriarch Joe at Le Pavillion in the Ritz Tower Hotel in Manhattan. She wanted out of the marriage. She told her father-in-law that she wasn’t like Ethel knocking out babies and she didn’t like football.

Here he made his famous one million dollar offer to her to stay in the marriage that was reported in Time Magazine. He also agreed to get the couple a house in Georgetown and move Ethel and Bobby into Hickory Hill.

But the move did not change Jack’s nearby hotel seductions and on arriving home one night, Jackie ignited a fight that fell out into the street. Jack had her committed to Valleyhead Clinic in Carlisle, Massachusetts where she underwent three barbaric electroshock treatments.

Chuck Spalding, Jack’s friend drove her home. It had not altered her depression over the state of their marriage. She considered suicide as a way out.

Paul Mathias, New York correspondent for Paris-Match said at the time, ‘From the beginning of her relationship with Jack, she knew about his other women. It pained her a great deal. It sinks into me more and more, just how irreversibly unhappy she is’.

Caroline was born on November 27, 1957 bringing joy into their lives. But Jack’s required use of cortisone for his Addison’s increased his libido and didn’t stop his sexual infidelities. He was hanging with Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford, who basically functioned as his pimps.

Film and TV actress Lee Remick, starring in Anatomy of a Murder and Days of Wine and Roses, was sleeping with Peter Lawford, before moving on to Bobby and Jack to follow.

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Serial cheater: Marilyn Monroe was just one of the women on a long list of JFK's conquests--and Bobby Kennedy's as well. But she was the last straw for Jackie

Pamela Turnure, a Georgetown dubutante, who had dated Prince Aly Kahn once married to screen goddess Rita Hayworth, often received Kennedy late at night at her Washington apartment. Her landlady recognized him and was intent on exposing the senator.

She photographed him and mailed it to every newspaper in the city. Only the Washington Star made a reference to it. Jackie selected Turnure her as her press secretary when she became First Lady in 1960 so she could keep an eye on her, she told friends.

Ravishing and sexy film actress Hedy Lamarr stated she had sex in a bathtub with JFK. He always liked the woman to be on top because of his bad back. ‘In an impulsive move, he pushed me backward. My head was under water, and I felt I was drowning. This caused a vaginal spasm. But he had his orgasm’, she told her literary agent Jay Garon. She refused to speak to Kennedy ever again.

Lem Billings, a school friend of Jack’s from early days at the private boarding Choate School for boys in Connecticut in 1933, described Jack and Jackie as withdrawn, bitter people.

Jackie confessed to Lem they were like icebergs. She never wanted to confront her husband about his adultery and Jack hated confrontation.

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Cold shoulder: By the end of their marriage Jackie was fed up with Jack and his cheating, say the authors

When John was born prematurely on November 25, 1960 at Georgetown University Hospital, Kennedy was in Palm Beach with Lem Billings. He flew back to Washington when he heard Jackie had given birth.

Jack’s brothers were around Jackie more than he was during critical times.

During Jack’s campaign for President, ‘Teddy confessed to Jackie that he’d always been in love with her ever since that day she’d arrived on JFK’s arm at Hyannis Port’, the authors write. She was in the early stages of her pregnancy with John and had campaigned with Teddy in Wisconsin.

The only Kennedy who wasn’t paying her much attention was her own husband.

Jack had hooked up with Dr. Feelgood, German-born physician Max Jacobson, in the summer of 1960 for his infamous injected cocktails of steroids and amphetamines that made Jack's back pain disappear, but also sent him to the moon with soaring energy and sexual desires.

Jackie, a chainsmoker all her life, continued the habit out of the public’s eye – temporarily alleviating her own anxiety over the state of her marriage. Jack claimed it contributed to her miscarriages. She hated being a politician’s wife and was slowly coming unglued.

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Spicy: The new biography pulls no punches when it comes to the much beloved Jackie O

It was all over when the shots rang out in Dallas in November 1963.

In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Jackie contemplated suicide one more time, according to Richard McSorley, a Jesuit professor of theology at Georgetown University. He had become Jackie’s confidante and recorded details of their meetings in his diary that would be leaked to the press after his private papers were donated to University following his death in 2002.

Initially she told the priest that she wanted to be with her husband in death. He advised her to live for the sake of her children. ‘Don’t mourn the dead, but get on with the living’.

On their last meeting, she stated she was still contemplating suicide but would give it serious thought before making such a rash decision. In a subsequent phone call to McSorley, Jackie confessed she was better because ‘love had entered my life in a way I never expected’. ‘It isn’t a love of which the Catholic Church would approve. In fact, the love I’m experiencing now would be called ungodly in the eyes of the Church. I wouldn’t even dare to confess it to you’, she is quoted by Porter & Prince.

‘At that point in her life, she was seeing Bobby Kennedy almost every day’.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince and published by Blood Moon Productions is available on Amazon

[drjohncarpenter]

Quite an excerpt there.

The whole idea of a divorce is amusing, and will no doubt help sell the book, but will forever exist in the realm of speculation.

On a side note, I found the magazine cover debut of photographer Ron Galella's most famous single celebrity candid. It's an indelible image of a very striking Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, crossing a New York City street. She was just 42.

720200_TV Radio Mirror.JPG

TV Radio Mirror - February 1972

711007_Jackie Onassis_Madison Avenue_NY.JPG

Jackie Onassis Sighting at Madison Avenue in New York City - October 7, 1971
Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage
http://infocus.gettyimages.com/post/ron-galella-windblown-jackie

[debtd1]

I can't see Joe 'ever' allowing her to leave Jack.....and it does state in the America's Emerald Kings book I'm reading that Joe bribed her into staying...

[elvis4life]

https://nypost.com/2019/04/13/why-jacqueline-kennedy-onassis-spent-her-final-days-in-an-office-instead-of-a-yacht/

Why Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent her final days in an office instead of a yacht

By Eric Spitznagel

April 13, 2019 | 2:04pm

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Getty Images

In 1979, an issue of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine featured Jackie Onassis on the cover with the headline: “Why Does This Woman Work?”

At the time, it was a question that had confounded much of the country. Jackie’s starting salary was just $200 a week, so the former first lady, now in her late 40s, clearly wasn’t doing it for the money. (She’d inherited $26 million from her late second husband, Aristotle Onassis, so paying the bills wasn’t a concern.)

Even though she could have been whiling away her time on a yacht, she spent almost two decades as a book editor, first at Viking (from 1975 to 1977) and then at Doubleday (from 1978 until her death in 1994), leaving behind a legacy that still isn’t especially well-known.

A new novel, “The Editor” by Steven Rowley, brings to life this time, imagining Jackie in the title role in early 1990s New York. Yet even Rowley was only vaguely aware of her publishing career before he started writing his book.

“But the more I learned about it, the more it seemed like the most interesting part of her life,” he told The Post. “It’s the only part where she’s not defined by her relationship with a man.”

Her desire to work was, in fact, rooted in something very simple.

“She was bored,” said historian William Kuhn, author of “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books.”

“Especially during her marriage to Onassis. He was a very traditional Mediterranean male who forbade his wife from working. When he died, she realized she needed something more.”

In 1975, Jackie told Newsweek that she was perplexed by the public’s fascination over her new career. “It’s not as if I’ve never done anything interesting,” she said. “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.”

She’d nursed a passion for books since childhood and was such a ravenous reader that she was poring over Chekhov short stories at just 6 years old. At 21, she was hired as a junior editor at Vogue magazine — although she quit on her first day, concerned that the female-heavy staff would hinder her dating prospects — and shortly after became a columnist for the Washington Times-Herald.

In 1962, she wrote and edited her first book, “The White House: An Historic Guide,” a room-by-room photographic tour of the historic residence.

The book sold for $1 each to tourists, which helped fund her White House restoration project.

When she joined Viking as a consulting editor in 1975, she was adamant that she receive no special treatment. As the fictionalized Jackie in “The Editor” explains, her office was “a regular size and stacked high with manuscripts. I get my own coffee and wait in line to use the copier, same as anyone else.”

Rowley got it exactly right in his novel, Kuhn says. “She tried hard to blend in. Her office was small, with just one window. She answered her own phone. She didn’t want to be seen as a grande dame.”

But she wasn’t a complete workhorse. “She was only at the office three or four days a week and didn’t often stay beyond lunch,” he says. “And then she disappeared for three months during the summer. I don’t think that’s typical for most people’s first jobs.”

She may have kept irregular hours, but she was more productive than editors half her age. From her brief two years at Viking — she quit after learning that they were publishing a novel about the assassination of her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy — to her tenure at Doubleday as an associate editor, where her annual salary ballooned to $100,000, she acquired and brought to publication over a hundred books.

Her tastes ranged from Egyptian author and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz to “Cartoon History of the Universe” illustrator Larry Gonick. She coaxed best-sellers out of Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West and recovering drug addict and ballerina Gelsey Kirkland and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, who wrote about Thomas Jefferson’s affair with slave Sally Hemings.

One of her biggest successes was Michael Jackson’s 1988 memoir “Moonwalk,” which sold half a million copies. It was a hard-won victory for Jackie, who only closed the deal after begrudgingly agreeing to write the book’s forward. (She penned a three-paragraph intro that reads like jury duty.)

Stephen Davis, a career rock biographer, signed on to ghostwrite “Moonwalk” before realizing who was editing it. “I called the publisher and Jackie picks up,” he told The Post. “I’m stuttering like an idiot, and she’s like, ‘I’m really excited about this book.’ How do you make small talk with a woman like that?”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis during her time working for the Viking Press, Inc. book publisher.
Getty images

When Davis submitted a draft, which he says was a mess, he expected to be fired. But he never received editing notes and only learned months later, when the book was finally published, that Jackie loved his draft. “I have no idea what happened,” he says. “I thought it’d be the end of my career, but I guess Jackie saw something.”

She lost as many big names as she landed. Diana Ross and Frank Sinatra never returned her calls. Oliver Stone declined to let her read his unpublished novels, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf took his memoir elsewhere.

Though she once claimed she would “give up food to publish Hunter Thompson,” she never had the chance to work with the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ” author.

Author Elizabeth Crook sold her debut novel, “The Raven’s Bride,” to Jackie in 1991, and she remembers dreading her first meeting with the larger-than-life American icon. “But she was thoughtful and put me at ease right away,” Crook told The Post. “I was thrilled when she turned out to be a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of person.”

Jackie’s notes were unsparing — she had no patience for melodrama or unnecessary exposition — and even her constructive criticism could be hilariously ruthless. Crook remembers one note that read, “Baby Samuel is so over-described it could turn one off babies.”

One of her more infamous notes to a young author, written on the margins of a manuscript: “You know, you remind me of those little terrier dogs at fox hunts … They’re just so nervous and anxious to please.”

Though Jackie could be “motherly” (Crook’s word), not all of her authors had personal relationships with her.

Davis says he met her only once, years after “Moonwalk” was published, at a party hosted by Carly Simon on Martha’s Vineyard. “I introduced myself to her as the guy who wrote the Michael Jackson book,” Davis remembers. “She gave me a look and then turned to her boyfriend Maurice (Tempelsman) and said, ‘ “Moonwalk.” Oy.’ That was it. That was the end of our conversation. Then I slunk back to my table.”

Jackie continued to edit after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1994. She was marking up manuscripts in her Fifth Avenue apartment through chemotherapy and even up to her death that same year. When her son John Jr. informed reporters of her passing, he said that in Jackie’s final moments she was surrounded by friends and family “and her books, the people and the things that she loved.”

What makes her editing career so remarkable — besides that it lasted longer than her two famous marriages combined — was how it shed new light on a woman whose name is synonymous with 20th-century glamour.

“It’s not only counter to how we remember her, but it’s also counter-intuitive to our own instincts,” says Rowley. “We all stare out the office window, daydreaming about floating away on a yacht. But Jackie was on the yacht, daydreaming about the office. The very things that we find so oppressive about working in an office, those were the experiences that finally set her free.”