On a spring afternoon in the late 1980s, aspiring novelist Darcey Steinke sat across from her editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at Doubleday. Jackie, ever the Francophile, leaned in and asked, “Do you know the French word fleur? … Your novel needs more fleur.”
This Monday, July 28, would have marked Jackie’s birthday. And while her legacy as First Lady, fashion icon, and White House preservationist is well known, her life in publishing is often overlooked. Yet for nearly two decades, Jackie worked quietly—and seriously—as a book editor, acquiring nearly 100 titles and shaping manuscripts with a rigor and lyricism all her own.
In her 2005 Vogue essay “The First Lady of Letters,” Steinke recounts the surreal experience of working with Jackie. A woman with a degree in French literature from George Washington University, Jackie sent editorial notes on pale-blue stationery signed Bon courage. She made Sunday calls to discuss character arcs, advised that rewrites be done on pink paper (a Truman Capote trick), and described one fictional heroine as “an undine, who swims with the fish and sleeps with any sailor.”
Jackie could be dazzlingly kind or cuttingly precise. “You remind me of those little terrier dogs at fox hunts,” she once told Steinke, with both affection and instruction. “They’re just so nervous and anxious to please.” But more often, she elevated those around her with insight, warmth, and belief. “You owe it to yourself, as well as the world, to make yourself happy,” she said—a note to a young writer that reads, now, like a quiet philosophy.
Read on to celebrate not just her legacy of style, but her love of story. |
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