Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway, Daily Beast.
Thursday, July 6, 1989
Quogue
I love how New York changes so completely in the summer. It’s my favorite time of year here, sitting at my wooden desk before the open window with the cool sea breeze.
The August issue arrived by FedEx. The Jackie O cover story, and Michael Milken’s rise and fall by Marie, is a much more commercial combo than July. To generate some summer heat I assigned Ed Klein to do Jackie to mark her sixtieth birthday. I asked him because he was always going on about how she liked him when he edited The New York Times Magazine. “What did she say when you called her?” I’d asked.
“She said, ‘Oh, Ed, give me a break,’” he replied. Ed is so totally impervious to social temperature that he took that as his cue to barrel ahead. But then again that’s probably his value. Jackie has every writer in such a stranglehold of sycophancy and terror, it takes a journalistic Clouseau like Ed Klein to get a cover story that everyone nonetheless will want to read at the beach. Just before we were going to press I glimpsed the Life August issue and was dismayed to see they had a very similar cover image of Jackie and it was too late to change ours. But not too late to change our cover line. Originally we wrote, “The Other Jackie O,” which was such a lazy, predictable effort I don’t know how it survived our critical disgust. The tension of necessity can often produce more creative solutions. In a surge of irritation with all the Jackie hagiography, I changed it to “Jackie, Yo! You’re rich, you’re gorgeous, and along comes Maurice!” (Tempelsman, her boyfriend.) It leapt out of the FedEx bag with good attitude.
To read the entire excerpt, please click here.
Tina Brown
Years ago, my mother was trying to get a book about her WWII Navy experiences published. To her astonishment, Jackie turned out to be her publisher’s rep. My mother remembered Onassis’ incompetence, lack of follow-up, failure to return phone calls or do anything at all productive.