From the Archives: Vogue Revisits Jackie Kennedy's Literary Legacy as Doubleday Book Editor

Vogue

27-07-2025

'The First Lady of Letters,' by Darcey Steinke, was originally published in the February 2005 issue of Vogue.
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'Remember, just like you, Jackie Onassis puts her pants on one leg at a time,' my father reminded me as he helped me into the cab that ferried me up to the Doubleday offices in midtown Manhattan where Jackie was an editor. It was 1987, and I was 25 years old and still in graduate school at the University of Virginia. Dad's advice was meant to bolster my confidence, but it didn't really calm me as I sat under the harsh fluorescent light in Doubleday's waiting room.
'The wrrrrrriter!' Jackie said enthusiastically as she came through the door and took both my hands in hers. In person the tremendous symmetry of her face was startling; her cheekbones protruded, and her eyes were far apart. Jackie's dark hair was pulled back in a low ponytail held with a tortoiseshell clip. There was a skeletal elegance about her; she wore blue slacks, a tailored white shirt, and patent leather pumps. Her office was smaller and shabbier then I'd imagined, her metal desk piled high with white manuscript pages; she was in the process of collaborating on Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. She asked me about my trip. I said the flight from Charlottesville had been bumpy and I didn't really like to fly. The corners of her mouth turned down, and she leaned forward. Unlike my mother, or any other older lady I knew, Jackie wasn't cautious or fearful. She thought you should try everything. 'Oh, Darcey,' she said in her lilting voice, which was famously feathery and very feminine, 'can't you have a little white wine on the plane? If you don't fly, you'll miss out on so much.' My cheeks flushed: I said I would try. I felt an odd intimacy with Jackie. She had become my editor after my writing teacher George Garrett, himself a Doubleday author, suggested I send her my first novel. Though we'd never met before and talked on the phone only once, I knew the outer structure of Jackie's life, and I wondered if she didn't feel exposed. Everyone who met her had seen footage of her in Dallas in the rawest moment of her life.
We talked about my novel. Like many a young writer, Jackie said, I digressed too often. Flashbacks appeared on almost every page, and I used metaphors like drinking water. Up Through the Water takes place over a single summer on Ocracoke Island, on North Carolina's Outer Banks. I had waitressed there summers while I was in college, so I knew the general rhythms of a beach resort, but I didn't know much about narrative structure or motivation. Jackie was most interested in my character Emily, a promiscuous 35-year-old prep cook. 'She is an undine, who swims with the fish and sleeps with any sailor,' Jackie said. 'How will she deal with aging? Will she be able to be faithful to her boyfriend?' At 25, I'd never thought of promiscuity or taking one's youth for granted as something that might have tragic repercussions. As I listened to her I thought, How can the most elegant woman in America identify with a profligate prep cook? But Jackie found Emily mesmerizing. 'What is wrenching about her is that one of her loveliest facets, her animal nature, carries with it her doom.'