Jackie and Me(32)

The topic of freedom reminds me of another Sunday we

spent together. She’d phoned me a few days prior to beg off because she’d been called into work. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll tag along.”

She wasn’t an easy sell on this point. Probably she was

thinking of the time Johnny Husted had dragged after her

like a thousand tin cans. I assured her I would be discreet, wouldn’t look her way, wouldn’t let anybody know we were connected. Her final condition was that I couldn’t laugh.

We met at the corner of Fifteenth and K. She was already

in position with her new Leica, so I repaired to the nearest newsstand, where I made a show of buying the Times-

Herald’s chief rival, the Post, and reading it in public view.

Only then did I realize that the newspaper formed a perfect blind for tracking her as she sauntered down K Street,



JACKIE & ME

115

curling her gaze north and south. To this day, I can’t be sure what she was looking for in that trout run. Maybe just a flicker of kindness before she reeled in the line.

A celebrated journalist once told me that, when he went

to interview people in their homes, he always brought the

chunkiest, clunkiest reel-to-reel tape recorder he could find and spent the first ten or fifteen minutes being completely defeated by it. His object, he said, was to bring himself down to the level of his interview subjects so they would lose whatever inhibitions they had. Jackie, of course, wasn’t famous in those days, but there was still something about her that needed, like fame, to be disarmed. The extreme feminin-ity, for instance, by the ponderous masculine camera. The satin gloves by the not-entirely-unfeigned look of panic in her dilated eyes. Who, they must have wondered, was this gentlewoman fallen on such hard times? What did she want

of us? At first, they would have no way of knowing for the

voice was scarcely audible. In the usual manner, they would lean forward and keep leaning until the hook was in.

The hardest part, she told me later, was getting the photograph because, in those days, strange to relate, one paused at the prospect of being in the paper. The older women, especially, had to be coaxed along, but if they were still of a certain age, Jackie could seal the deal by murmuring: “You know who would love to see this? Your mother.”

Before she threw in the towel that day, she must have

interrogated a good two dozen people about what they

thought a woman desired the most. I remember asking her

why she went to such trouble when the column only had

116





LOUIS BAYARD


room for five. “Oh,” she said, “most people don’t even know what they think. About anything.” That principle must have been in particular force that day because she wound up

falling back on the doormen and taxi-stand drivers, whose

occupations she loved above all others because they didn’t

allow for movement. The Alexandria hack, for instance,

who shouted from his rolled-down window: “I know what

my wife desires most! Another husband.”

We took that same driver’s taxi back to her office, and I

planted myself in a chair between the cuspidor and the water cooler. The Times-Herald was then just a few years away from being swallowed, and I’ve always believed that the closer a newspaper is to its grave, the more gaily it gleams.

The New York Times, then as now, was a gray lady, but Jackie’s paper was Camille, fluttering all the way to its last cough. Phones squealed, typewriters hammered, editors bellowed for the rewrite man, the copy boy. There was a tattered coverlet of cigarette smoke; ink rose up like swamp mist; you smelled glue and soot and despair.

The only remaining question was where Jackie fit in. The

lone woman in the city newsroom, she sat hunched over an

Olivetti manual, stabbing at each key as if to drive it back to whatever fen it had bubbled up from. It occurred to me then that this was the same paper Kick Kennedy had made a

go of during the war, reporting for the Did You Happen to

See? column or reviewing the occasional play or movie. She

used to stuff her fur coat into a paper sack before she came upstairs, where she was welcomed, perhaps, in the same respectful spirit as Jackie and, by respectful, I mean they



JACKIE & ME

117

didn’t hit on her in public and didn’t blow smoke directly

into her face. Jackie carried her two hundred and fifty words of copy to the assistant city editor, then disappeared down a corridor. Came back a half hour later, with the smell of darkroom chemicals wafting from her skin.

“Don’t you like my manicure?” she asked, extending her

hand.

I stared down at her fingernails, bilious green from the

developing solution. The words were out of my mouth before

I considered the implications.

“This is a real job.”

She angled toward me, as if I were just another man on

her street.

“You don’t think freedom comes free, do you?”

FIFTEEN

F reedom. What a word. Even now I grapple with what it means. Looking at myself in a full-length mirror, for example, I see a body that was once vigorous enough

for heavyweight crew and now sits, a scuttled hulk, on