Jackie and Me(9)

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LOUIS BAYARD


her daughter, it was probably in the spirit of larkishness, for she forgot all about it. Jackie nearly did herself. She grasped how many thousands of college seniors would be applying— many, if not most, of them more qualified.

But a curious thing happened. As soon as she convinced

herself she had no chance, the application process became

not an ordeal but a game. She fairly sprinted through the

application, free to follow her whims because who would

read it anyway? Why not slip in an autobiographical short

story about her grandfather’s funeral? And under the heading of “People I Wish I Had Known,” why not park the names of Baudelaire, Wilde and Diaghilev? In a rush of exuberance that almost made her giggle, she declared herself ready to be “Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century.” Then she

mailed it off and forgot all about it.

Months went by. Then, on the cusp of spring, came a letter from Mary Jessica Davis, editor in chief at Vogue. Jackie was one of the twelve Prix de Paris finalists. Would she be so good as to come up for the final round of interviews?

The effect, she later told me, was of sitting in a séance,

perfectly agnostic about the whole enterprise, only to have a ghost whisper in your ear. The only question was how to get to New York. She spent two days furiously sifting through stratagems, only to fall back on the simplest one.

“I think I’ll go see Daddy,” she announced over breakfast.

Without dropping a stitch, her mother said, “Is he still

alive?”

The two days in Manhattan were blurred by her own terror. She remembered her hands actually shaking as she applied



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31

her nail polish. She remembered the official Vogue photographer pausing before he snapped her to ask if she really wanted to part her hair down the middle. She remembered sitting for the final interview in Schrafft’s, sweating through her silk blouse and tweed skirt, barely able to eat her chicken salad and then being told to make room—room!—for a hot fudge sundae with almonds and ladyfingers. She prattled, there was no other word, and it was here, surrounded by lady editors in boxy suit jackets, that she had the first intuition of herself as a man’s woman. All her innate (or perhaps learned) responses to stress—the grab-bag of murmurs and demurrals and sudden feinting smiles she had been building up from childhood—the bag of tricks, a cynic might have said, only to her they were just helpless confessions of herself—all seemed calculated to enrage the females of Condé Nast, who had risen on much more than cow eyes and weren’t about to reward

the girl who apologized every word back into her mouth. Her only forthright moment came when she was asked who had been her prime stylistic influence.

“Oh,” she answered, without thinking. “My father.”

She relived for them then the days of window-shopping on

Fifth Avenue, hour seeping into hour as Black Jack stopped

before each mannequin to comment on the cut or the fabric,

all of it building to the hushed moment when she would try

on a frock of her own—a frock that her father, out of his

accumulated wisdom, had chosen.

Oh, you’re right, Daddy, it’s lovely.

As Jackie warmed to her tale, she could feel the Condé

Nast women regarding her in a changed light—as if she were

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LOUIS BAYARD


a mannequin herself, sputtering into life. When she was done, the personnel director leaned across the table and, with the tiniest signal flare of a smile, said, “Congratulations.”

In that moment, it was as if the sloth and confinement of

the past months had been only an apprenticeship, training

her toward this moment. She had only to say yes, and it

would begin.

Well, this was the journey that Janet Auchincloss had

unknowingly launched but, upon hearing the news, she was

in no hurry to claim authorship.

“Darling,” she said. “Be a dear and tell us when you were

going to tell us.”

“I was coming around to it.”

“And that was going to take how long? Two days? A

year?”

“I don’t know.”

“While we were busy calling in every favor, prostrating

ourselves before Allen Dulles’s shrine?”

“I didn’t know you were—”

“No, you were embroiled in the tortuous act of coming around.”

“Mummy . . .”

“The only thing I want from you now is an explanation

for your duplicity. Your sin of omission, if you like, and don’t you dare tell me it’s a lesser sin than commission. In a daughter, it’s rather worse.”

Mrs. Auchincloss had yet to raise her voice, but the baro—

metric pressure of the dining room was mounting all the



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33

same. The server held back, the cook bided her time in the

kitchen, and Jackie’s younger stepsiblings consulted their

napkins with deep intent. It was Hughdie who, in keeping

with his conciliatory character, ventured the first softening notes.