Wayne Koestenbaum - Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon

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Contents

for Steven Marchetti

Acknowledgments

I especially wish to thank Jonathan Galassi, my magical editor; Faith Hornby Hamlin, my peerless agent, who gave this project the benefit of her enthusiasm and energy; and Elaine Pfefferblit, who inspired me to write this book, and passionately followed its progress.

For commenting on early drafts, I am grateful to Gary Luke, Jeanne Schinto, and Jacqueline Osherow. For providing the clarity that makes composition possible, I thank Lisa S. Rubinstein.

Clifford Chase, Lynn Enterline, Joseph Gordon, Kevin Kopelson, and Glenn Ligon extended precious solidarity. Julie Bertles and Paul Elie at FSG expertly handled countless details. Natalie Goldstein indefatigably tracked down the photographs. A fellowship from Yale University gave me time to write.

And I could not have completed this book without the sustaining table talk of Bruce Hainley, my partner in reverie.

JACKIES DEATH

I BEGAN TO WRITE about the allure of icon Jackie in May 1993, while the real Jacqueline Onassis was alive and well. I addressed my sentences toward her, in tranced apostrophe: Dear Jackie, for a long time I have wanted to tell you about your frequent appearances in my dreams. I had a mad notion that she would read my book and understand my desire; that she would acknowledge the legitimacy of public curiosity; that we might become friends. It was a hopeless quest, doomed to fail. Brashly, I wanted to effect a truce between Jacqueline Onassis and icon Jackie. I wanted to findto liberatemy inner Jackie; somewhere in my body was trapped a mimic Jackie O, and I wanted to afford her some room to breathe. But my plans to scale Mount Jackieto give voice to Jackies charismawere foiled. Her cancer was announced; with sad suddenness, she died. I cant address Jacqueline Onassis anymore. But icon Jackie remains, a baffling array of images still requiring interpretationnot because interpretation is a panacea for loss, but because Jackie darkly captivates, and captivation fumbles for a foothold in speech. Dare I find words for why Jackie mesmerizes? Even while Jacqueline Onassis was alive, icon Jackie had a life of her own, obeying comic-book laws; we could no more explain the icon than we could avert war, bewitch our neighbors, or reverse time.

The real Jackie may have been impatient with her icon; she may have wished her icon, her troublesome twin, would go away. But the icon refused to vanish. Millions felt that the icon was virtually part of their own flesh, indispensable as an artery. Millions felt warmly toward Jackie, not because theyd met her, but because her face and story had become part of mass consciousness, and had shed illumination helter-skelter across the globe.

We called Jackie an icon because she glowed, because she seemed ceaseless, because she resided in a worshipped, aura-filled niche. We called Jackie an icon because her image was frequently and influentially reproduced, and because, even when she was alive, she seemed more mythic than real. We called Jackie an icon because her story provided a foundation for our own stories, and because her face, and the sometimes glamorous, sometimes tragic turns her life took, were lodged in our systems of thought and reference, as if she were a concept, a numeral, a virtue, or a universal tendency, like rainfall or drought.

It is easy, and tempting, to forget that an icon is an idea, not a person. Sometimes the twoicon, personconverged; most often they diverged. Say, once, that the real Jackie smiled, and that someone took a picture of Jackie smiling. The real smile, and the photo of the smile, occupy two separate spheres. The photo contributes to the formation of the icon, the colossus; the photo gives us a paper smile, a likeness, a representation, which necessarily deviates from its source. To those of us who never met Jackie, she remains mostly a figment; we may have wished that Jackie would grow more substantial, that she would step out of the photograph and intervene in our quotidian livesbut even to daydream about the real Jackie meant that we were deep in the throes of the icon.

When I began to dream about Jackie, years ago, she seemed public property, a shared figure, everyones: a universal entity. What a safe celebrity to contemplate! Shed never contradict me. Shed never materialize, to prove my fantasy invalid. Then, with her death, the space of Jackie contemplationwhich had seemed large as a carnivalshrank again to the size of a single, mortified body. Where I had previously felt great freedom contemplating Jackiewhere, previously, Jackie had represented a zone of prairie space and unchecked ruminationsuddenly Jackie was once again real, dying, dead, personal, absolute, her own. Thus I felt ejected from the premises on which Id tried to build a dreamers shaky home: the grounds of icon Jackie, which had seemed the most anonymous and grand of any public space Id known, were suddenly, once again, off-limits. I write these sentences from an ambiguous moment in the history of Jackie: her size always changes, and its difficult to know what size she is right now. Soon she may expand again. I cannot control the ebb and swell of Jackies spectral media body, even though it is a body in which I have a considerable investment.

Despite the intense media coverage of Jackies death, the fulsome tributes, the commemorative issues, she resists language. To speak about her has always seemed either tasteless or trivial. During her life, Jacqueline Onassis enforced silence: friends and family never spoke about her to the press, for they knew the consequence would be banishment. The night after her death, however, Brooke Astor and George Plimpton, among others, appeared on TV, offering reminiscences, braving the disapproval of Jackies shade. About Jackie, all speech is unauthorizedincluding, of course, these words.

Jackies funeral in St. Ignatius Loyola, the church where shed been baptized sixty-four years before, was private, so with other fans I stood across the street on the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan, behind a police cordon. We Jackie lovers were pressed together behind sawhorses; police presence made us seem like revolutionaries or radicals, needing containment. I thought, What do I want to see? Jackie is dead. But I needed to be present, to glimpse, at least, the casket; to experience an atmosphere that was, though generically sepulchral, also Jackie-specific.

We were many and restless, a crowd stirred by vague emotions. Next to me a black woman my age sipped a Coke while she listened to the funeral on a Walkman. Another black woman, middle-aged, addled, but with the charming gregariousness of New Yorkers unafraid to display their eccentricities, said to her, Cant drink while you hold a radio. Youll be electrocuted. Lay off, the Coke-sipping woman barked. This altercation might have been going on for some time.

As if on a crowded subway, I couldnt help but lean into the Coke-sipping woman. The older woman said to me, Youre touching her! Youll get electrocuted! When a maid or mother emerged from a Park Avenue apartment house, wheeling a baby in a stroller (she tried to make her way through our throng, without success), a gay man with a fashionable goatee said, Choose another morning to take a walk, lady. How easily we mourners expressed pique! An argument ensued between two pale women with stiff hair and an ineffable air of wealth. One of themthe more elegantsaid, Fuck you, or Move the fuck out of my way, to the other, and attempted to enlist the intervention of a nearby policeman. In response to the obscenity, the electricity-fearing woman scolded, Jackie O wouldnt approve of your mouth! Meanwhile I heard a crazy derelict wandering through the crowd, yelling, Jackie was a slut! She slept her way to the top! For the first time I comprehended Jackies dread of the public; I understood the not so latent hostility of fans.