Rebecca Buchanan (2:08)

Could you start a little by talking about how this book came to be and how you started to sort of explore and want to write about the one and only Jackie.

Oline Eaton (2:18)

Whew. How many days do we have. So I got interested in her when I was 12, so, you know, many millennia ago, and wrote about her in my journal after she died, about how I was so interested in her and I didn't understand. And so that was kind of the start, that was my first bit of writing about Jackie was this horrible journal entry about how I can't stop thinking about Jackie Kennedy and Richard Nixon. And then it was about 10 years later when I was doing my MA at the University of Chicago. We had to do a thesis. I had done a couple. I was in an art review class, and I'd done a couple of book reviews of, like, really obscure biographies of, like, her mother, a cousin. Like, really, they were like, what is going on here? And so I wound up. Someone suggested that I do something with her, and I wound up writing a middle chapter of a hypothetical biography of Jackie that I figured was. Would be impossible to write. And then I just kind of stuck with that and kept doing it. I. All my lunch breaks at work would work on writing this book. And I mean, it was horrible. And 2005, I thought I was. I was done. I finished it. It was as good as it was ever going to be. I printed out copies at Office Max for everybody I knew. And then it was done. And then I just kept working on it because it clearly wasn't done. And so finally, in 2013, I decided to get a PhD at King's College London, because I was like, this is the only way. I felt like I wasn't a good enough writer to write the thing that was in my head. And so through the PhD program, which is often quite a baptism by fire, I wound up kind of figuring out how I wanted to do it and had the time and the space to do it, while also being extremely anxious about money and poverty and living in London and all of that. That was very motivating. And so the book that you read now actually was finished in, like, by March of 2016 and has not changed substantially since then. And because I completed it for my PhD, it was a part of that, and that was really the thing that got it done. But, yeah, so it was. It's been a long slog from the summer of 1994 when I announced to my parents in the Taco Bell that I wanted to start collecting Jackie magazines to where we are now.

Rebecca Buchanan (4:43)

So. And before we get into sort of what the book is about, you. You mentioned Jackie magazines, and you've done this really fascinating thing with how you've sort of structured it and talked about it. So can you talk a little bit about how you kind of envisioned and set this book up?

Oline Eaton (5:00)

Well, like originally the focus was these mag, these movie magazines from the 1960s and 70s, which are kind of. They're not like People magazine. They're kind of more like Life and Style and In Touch, but like lower tier. They're basically fan fiction based on truth, probably is what we should think of. But also they were hugely impactful in the. In the beginning of the studio system in Hollywood. And then by the 60s and 70s, they were kind of losing their power. And they shifted from looking at people in Hollywood to like the stars of Life, which is how Jackie was kind of branded and people on tv, people in music. And it became a little bit more diverse what they were covering and stuff as sort of their death rattle into the 70s and the invention of People magazine and Us Weekly and all of that stuff where it kind of shifted. And I originally was going to collect the 16 life magazines that Jackie appeared on the COVID of. So it seemed totally reasonable hobby, not obsessive at all. And then I kept seeing these magazines and I was like, what are the. Because you see in the book, the covers are bananas. They're just completely crazy. And I was like, this is a wild world I want to go into. And started finding them. And they were pretty cheap at the time. And we went on antique stores and we traveled. My parents and I, we. We're collectors, we have lots of hobbies. And so it was like a family thing. And they'd be in a booth in an antique store and I'd hear a scream from my father that all the Jackie magazines are over here. I would go, go and just collect them. And they were like a dollar or $2 at the time. Now they're on eBay for like $15. And so I, I really, when I started this, thought they had some role to play. And I would love to do more on the history of them and things, particularly in the 60s and 70s. But when I was doing my PhD, I had collages of them in the manuscript and that got taken out and now it's just fake covers throughout for each year to kind of capture the tone of what was how her life was being portrayed at the time. But the articles themselves are amazingly interesting historical documents because they're often in particular, I think, looking at it with grief the way they. In the mainstream press, she was portrayed as very stoic, very, you know, you got to get on. There's no PTSD diagnosis available yet. And in the movie magazines, there Are like these melodramatic portrayals of her grief and her crying and like, how does a mother raise her children without a husband? And digging into those sort of granular issues of widowhood in a way that just was not really available elsewhere in culture that would have been hard to find in a culture that's so like death is off stage and we don't talk about that much. It's very, it was very taboo at the time, as it still often is. So.

Rebecca Buchanan (7:53)

Yeah, yeah. And so you use these magazines sort of as the, the, the focus in some ways and looking at this and, and you don't, as you say, throughout it, there's so much written about Jackie. Right. Like we say Jackie, we most, most everyone knows who we're talking about. Right. And so you pick this specific time frame and time period to really delve into and look at and a little bit about that and that choice and, and why you chose to look at the sort of, you know, you do a little bit about before and what happens with jfk, but really focusing on what happens after that.

Oline Eaton (8:30)

Yeah, I think so much of this goes back to being a 12 year old in 1994, because when she died it's. And people wrote about this at the time, they were like, why do we keep using these same words? But she was really eulogized as like dignified, a gracious host. Dignity and grace were in classiness were repeated so much and that deeply bored me. Honestly, I didn't care about that at all. What interested me was there were these. She had this name Onassis that no one explained. There were these references in the coverage in the magazines. They're usually like, people did a commemorative. And I think it was like four pages on this time that she spent in Greece and the 70s. And then suddenly she was a book editor and she was in New York again. And so it felt like there was this huge thing that no one was talking about and there were little references to it. So when Maurice Templesman and her funeral read Ithaca by CP Cavafy, they talked about sensuous perfumes. I was like, what is that? Like, this is not grace, dignity, sensuous perfumes. It didn't match up. And I think Wayne Kostenbaum in his just extraordinary book Jackie Under My Skin, says that in the wake of her death, the media collaborated in this rehabilitation where they erase the, the Onassis years. Like Soviets banishing dissidents from the historical record. Like it would just did not fit the story they were trying to pitch of this ideal white Womanhood, which I think was directly a response to Hillary Clinton being First lady and being this sort of feisty feminist. And they were like, Jackie wasn't a feminist. Jackie was well behaved. Jackie was smart, but, you know, she knew her place. She. She was gracious and beautifully dressed and all that. They didn't talk about how she was in Capri, braless and in barefoot, and, you know, just doing. Got so much controversy and stuff. So the. The part of her life that I felt was really the time, like, of peak exposure, the time that would have had some. That ordinary, everyday people would have read about on the front page of their newspaper, bizarrely, that had really been kind of erased. And that was what I saw, and that was what I wanted to know more about. And so, honestly, JFK doesn't interest me that much. So I struggle with that part. And I also, I think as a kid, like, the. When the Time magazine came out in May, we had quite a big front yard, and, like, I literally couldn't make it to the door before I had to pause and, like, sit on the grass and read it because I was so, so just desperate to know more about this person. And there was a part where they talk about. I think I put it in the book where they talk about her hand being at Parkland after the murder of her husb and handing the doctor a piece of his brain. And so that. That image, that was such a graphic image and it really lodged in my brain of like, how do you then live after that? Like, how do you have a life? Because that is so traumatic and so horrifying, like, how do you do that? And so that's partly why I think that kind of drove the questions that drove how I was structuring the book as well, and why I cared less about them before, though obviously it matters deeply. But that kind of framed of, like, I want to know about Onassis, I want to know about how she left, which she never really did, but that gap there was so glaring to me that I just really wanted to burrow into it. Not for 20 years, probably, but.

Rebecca Buchanan (11:59)

But, yeah, no, but it is really interesting because, yes, we hear this, like, when we think of Jack Kennedy, we think of Jackie Kennedy, right? And then we've got this Jackie Kennedy, Onassis, but it's this blurry kind of time period. And then we get to Jackie Kennedy, right?

Oline Eaton (12:17)

Did we forget?

Rebecca Buchanan (12:18)

Right. Like, that's what it becomes. And. And it's this point too, where we don't see. One of the things I thought was really interesting is you talk about being a mother too at that. Like she was raising two children during this time. And we often look at them as these like full fledged adults. Right. And don't think about them and what that meant and how she kind of navigated and negotiated like raising her children and how important that was to her as well, which I think you at. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like looking at these magazines, looking at what you saw in this, this. How she sort of created this new life for herself or this space for herself.

Oline Eaton (13:01)

Oh, I mean, I think it was extremely difficult. Just like extremely difficult. And one of my research techniques was that I, I went through the newspapers day by day at certain points because I was trying to track. I'd read all the biographies and I was trying to track where quotes came from and where particular stories originated because they like, it's. They get picked up and they morph and it's like this weird passing down of stories and the quotes change and it's not clear like what the origins were and they get chopped up. So I was doing that and I, I was struck by. I just, it's. I don't even think the book captures it. It is astonishing how much press coverage this person got. And looking particularly like the Newspapers.com database is amazingly useful. But thinking about like syndicated stories and regional papers and like the placement in different regions of the country, in each individual newspaper, the placement of a story would be different. It would be on page 34 in the new York Times. It would be on page one in Newark. Like it was the way that was being transmitted was different in different places, but it was also like constant. I mean I would have to, of course, have to search for Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis, Jackie Bouvier. You have to do the whole parade of names. But there was so much coverage. And I think she lived her life as, as we all do and stayed at home some days and went out sometimes. And so you really have to think about what was like she was covered when she went out and sometimes she stayed home and sometimes she. So when we think about if someone were writing a book of my life, I go to the grocery store a lot and they would be like, this woman obviously has a shopping addiction. She goes to the grocery store. So much so thinking about like non events and events. And I think that's useful when we remember we're not ever getting the whole picture of someone's life. And it's probably a lot more, a lot quieter, a lot of things are going on off stage. We never have access to all of that. But I think I did gain a better. I tried to be like ruthlessly chronological and in doing that, I recognized how so many of the other biographies that were out there, didn't they flip around in time a lot. And I think that distorted the picture we got. So one passage that I think draws that out is that there was around the dedication of the Kennedy center here in D.C. and I think it's 72. Just before that there was this. Her sister's. This always sounds like Spaceballs, but her sister's husband's brother had died in Poland and she went to the funeral to support. She was very close to her brother in law and her sister, so she went to support them and they. There was this horde of people that came that showed up at this funeral to gawk. And there's this story that was widely reported at the time that I had never heard. I think it does show up in one or two of the biographies, but I. It was not something that was covered very. With very great detail where she obviously got spooked at this funeral because people were. There were like a thousand people and she left for whatever reason and tried to get away and they chased her through a potato field on the outskirts of Warsaw and like a. A streetcar person stopped and picked her up and took her to the police. And then subsequently she didn't go to the dedication of the. The Kennedy Library, which was like the following month. And I think in the press that often got portrayed as like, oh, she's had a falling out with her mother who was. Who was kind of orchestrating it. But when we look at it in that context, this is someone who feared for their life and who'd gone through very extreme trauma that. For which there was really. No, not. I mean, she was in therapy and stuff, but there wasn't a PTSD diagnosis. There wasn't an understanding of all of the ramifications of traumatic experiences at that time. And so it makes a lot of sense that she would stay away from. From that after that. And also thinking about just how triggering all of these Kennedy events must have been every time she went to anything. That's a lot. That's a lot to have to, you know, have that brought up. And so I think writing with reading her story and writing, I was trying to do more trauma, informed biography, because I think her trauma is taken very lightly in a lot of the books that are out there. And how does her story look when we actually frame it in Terms of that. This. This horrible thing, this extremely horrible thing that she witnessed at very, very close range that has a lasting impact. And how did that shape her life? So it's kind of how was she living with trauma and also in this incredible public layer that was in and of itself traumatizing, I think. And I think, you know, what an extraordinary job she did of surviving all of that.

Rebecca Buchanan (18:10)

No. So when you talk about that, one thing I thought I really appreciated was how you did structure the book. So you do it by years, but then within, at the end of each chapter, each year, you date November 22nd of that year. So that we know that is so central. What happened is so central. I think we often take light of it. There's this idea that we need to see this approuter. Tate. Right. But we don't think about, like, that there was a real person there, and then that person had to continue to live after that. And so I appreciated that reminder. And then you also. And I'd love for you to talk about this because you. You situate her in this space of everything else that was happening during the 60s and 70s and the additional trauma to her and to the country and how that sort of what was going on at the time. So isn't just like, here's Jackie, it's also like, here's Jackie in relation to these larger events that are happening.

Oline Eaton (19:21)

Yeah. Yeah. I felt that the dateline partly because I really wanted to get, like, the texture of newspapers into the book somehow. So that was part of it was like doing actual screenshots from newspapers and including them and like, the day of the week. And I think there's one that's on Thanksgiving and there's a prayer or something. Like, just that texture of the newspaper was really important. But then also that, like, the intrusion of grief and the intrusion of memory. So as someone who's had people very, very close to me have died, and, like, every time the day comes around, like, I'm always. Whether it is conscious or not, sometimes at the end of the day, I'll be like, oh, yeah, that's today. It intrudes and it's. It shakes you up, I think, every year. And it's really hard to prepare for. And even if you're having a wonderful time and you're doing all sorts of other things, then it's that. That moment of, like, that loss is reminder. And I know she took great pains to emphasize his birthday and not the day of his death, but obviously every year it came around and she would, like, cancel the newspapers and the magazines and stuff and try to avoid it, but it was such a central part of history that it's, you know, it's impossible to avoid. So I wanted to kind of capture that. And then this felt very groundbreaking in 2015. I feel like after Trump and after the pandemic, it really feels less groundbreaking. I think we're all more aware of how history intrudes on our lives. At the time, I was like, I've really found something new. But I. I think part of that, that came from reading the newspapers day by day and seeing how it would be like, you know, 500 troops. Not 500 troops, 5,000 troops, 50,000 troops. However many troops sent to Vietnam. You know, Jackie went to a garden party, like, right next to it, and it was like, that's weird. In the physical space of a newspaper. And I think this. Still, we get this online. Like, you'll be reading something and then there's a link to click on or something, and you see it and it's like totally disconnected. And you. You go from one to the other, and they're like the high lowness of the news, the celebrity news on top of significant historical stuff, and especially on Twitter and social media feeds, I think there's that juxtaposition of events occurring simultaneously. But with her, I felt. I think one thing I've always. I've been aware of for quite some time is that women's biographies, particularly of this kind of like the mass market books and the books that are. Jackie, Biography in general is very divorced from it's domestic drama. It's very divorced from the historical goings on. And I think that's a trend in her. In writing about her. It's also a trend in writing about women in general. Men's lives have meaning and they, you know, are historically significant. And women's lives are gossip. I fought tooth and nail for the. The book cover on the back with the ISBN and the barcode it was originally filed for women. And I was like, there is no man subject in. In publishing. It cannot be women. There's absolutely no way I will allow this. It's it. They made it famous. And I was okay with that. I was like, not women. No, that is, you would not put JFK in men. He would be history or something like that. And so I really was. I wanted to bring that in because I felt like it was critical to the story, but also because it's not typically how we write women's lives. And I think it's. It's very important to her life. Like, as we all know now, we live with these things. These things inform the way we live our lives and like the way we improvise and the decisions we make and stuff is like, is there going to be a nuclear attack? Is there, you know, who's going to be the president? Is, should we be worried about this virus? Like, these are the things that dictate our day to day lives. And even though they're like big picture things that affect a lot of people, they affect you on an individual level as well. And I felt, I mean like her, her story has very direct connections to a lot of these things. But then there were other things like Watergate doesn't really seem like an obvious thing that you would talk about in relation to Jackie, but looking at the newspapers, it came up regularly and the nuclear bomb is casually cited at random times in relation to her. And I felt like that was, that's become critical to my understanding of how celebrity operates in culture in general. But certainly in writing her story, it seemed like that historical those, those intersections that I would think felt very forced and then they would pop up in the reporting of the time. It felt very important to get those in as well.

Rebecca Buchanan (24:02)

Yeah, it's interesting. There was one point, I think, where you were talking about like Jackie is taking front and center and then like. But then in this like tiny newspaper somewhere there's something about water. Right. And we really kind of see how, how. I don't know if you like, I think you've said it, but like how you can really explain how famous she really was or how, how much she appeared every day everywhere. And it didn't matter sort of what the newspaper was. It didn't matter sort of what it was. And also you also sort of bring in the paparazzi and what that means and, and how that sort of influen this idea. Right. We think of paparazzi and we think about them as they're just sort of there. Right. They're always there today. But this was something new as well that she was kind of dealing with and what that meant. And so can you talk a little bit? I thought that was really interesting. So can you talk a little bit about that and that sort of experience she had with these, well, these men who were taking photos of her and writing books about her and what that kind of was like for her?

Oline Eaton (25:11)

Yeah, I think to come back to the exposure thing for just one second, the. Is it so students in a middle school or high school or something had a, had to nominate like, who were the most loved people and who were the most hated. And she's on both lists. Inexplicably, she's the only woman that's mentioned. And she's up there with, like, John Wayne and Jesus Christ and, like, Gandhi and stuff. And it was like, oh, my gosh, like, wow, that's. That's astonishing that that would be the list she's on and that she would be on both of them. Yeah, I think it is really hard for us to. Or. I always struggle with, like, that. I think one thing with paparazzi is we often see still photos versus video. So I always. When I teach classes on celebrity, I tell my students, like, we need to watch some videos. We need to see how this is. When we see a still image, it's, like, drained of sound. It's drained of sensation. Watching actual videos of her, often they don't have sound, but you can see, like, the flashbulbs and all of that. And especially when we're thinking about someone who's traumatized, I think think that's an important thing to keep in mind of, like, the sensory experience of having. Of arriving an event and having this whoosh of people gasping that you've arrived and all of the photographers taking pictures of you and stuff. I think in the day to day, it did seem like there were more. There were. Usually it was Ron Galela, and there weren't like hordes of photographers following her all the time necessarily, but there was basically Ron Galella doing stakeouts and dating her chef and, you know, trying to. Trying to find ways to get to her and figure out where she was and just kind of surveil her a lot. And I. Obviously they sued and countersued and had this whole big battle and stuff. And it's. It's difficult sometimes to. Because he was sometimes shooting with telephoto lens and. And often they were. It's difficult, especially when they were on Scorpios. It's difficult to get a sense of how close he was to her. But there's a pict picture of them of her and I think her sister were walking through. I think it's Capri again in the early 70s. And, like, he looks like he's a security detail. He's that close to her. And when you look at the pictures, like, you can see it's hard to tell if, like. I think I always thought he was shooting with the telephoto lens because, like, you can see the texture of her skin and stuff. He seems really close. But when you look at the picture, somebody. There was another paparazzo there who took pictures of him with her. And it's like, wow, that man is. Is so close to her, but he looks like he's in their party of people. And so it's really like, it. It must have been extremely intrusive. And she said she was afraid. And I don't think in the press at the time that that was taken very seriously again, because there wasn't. There wasn't just really any empathy for people who'd experienced trauma. But, I mean, he was. He was. He did. He took some beautiful, iconic photographs of her that are used a lot in magazines and things. But also the way that he went about them is quite ethically problematic, I think. And so this was not something that was typical, I think, in America at the time that there would be that many photographers. And it did really kind of ramp up in the mid-60s and into the 70s. And then when she came back, I think it was much less of a problem because once she got a job, she was seen as less interesting. And once the initial wave of Jackie Goes to Work pictures were taken, it kind of calmed down a bit. But, yeah, it was, I think. And I'm not even. I'm not sure I've done it justice in the book. I think it was probably very scary and very intense and unrelenting during this period of time. And it must have felt like a siege sometimes. But also, sometimes she went out and seemed to be okay getting her picture taken. So there's that tension as well.

Rebecca Buchanan (29:03)

Well, and another thing that comes up that I thought was really interesting, especially since you're sort of looking at this, you know, every year as sort of in real time, quote, unquote, is how people are writing, like, what people are writing about her at that time, too. Right. These unauthorized biographies that are coming out, these serialized magazine pieces. And so how her life is being portrayed as if she's not like. And you said it earlier and you say it in the book, this idea, this fan fiction about her. And so can you talk a little bit about that? That kind of ways in which she had to live in this space where everyone else was deciding who she was and sort of creating this imagery of who she was as she tried to just be.

Oline Eaton (30:00)

Yeah, I think this is something we have a little bit more information about and than. Thanks to the JFK library, bless their hearts, they have been extremely slow to open to process files related to Jackie. But while I was writing this for my PhD, they opened the Nancy Tuckerman files Which were just a trove because they had some stuff from the 70s, and they had. It gave a fuller sense of what. Like the. The office conversations around or just the office conversations, what she was doing, what she was writing about. It was very, very helpful. And I think it gave me a little bit more insight into her efforts to control. Not. Not control even, but just try to put out a narrative that was more true to her. And. And some of this, like, in reading the newspapers, I was. I was initially struck by how, like, they would. There would be a rumor in Europe and they deny it in New York. And I was like, why are you doing this? You've brought it over to New York. You've just imported the rumor. Thank you. Like, denials are not helpful.

Rebecca Buchanan (31:05)

But.

Oline Eaton (31:06)

So there was a lot there, I think, during the Onassis marriage in particular, there were more denials of, you know, no, this is not true. Obviously, she doesn't have this much money. And then, particularly starting around Mary Gallagher's memoir about her time with Jackie and then rolling on. But earlier, even with the Manchester book, there'd been an interview that she gave to two reporters. I can't remember who they were with. And like, 66, 67, after the Saturday evening Post published an article about her life and included a map of Jackie's New York that showed where her kids go to school and stuff. In response to that, she. She gave an interview and was like, why did they do this? Like, this is. This is clearly gonna, you know, jeopardize my children, my family's safety. And so they were often. I think when she died, there was this. She was a silent goddess. She never spoke, she never talked. She never gave interviews. We have no idea what she sounded like. That's a bunch of bunk. She gave very strategic interviews. And so there was that one. There were. In the 70s. There were. There were several. And I think there was. There was. In the archive, we can see evidence of her trying to figure out when to intervene. So there were some comments that. There were drafts of things. There was a draft of things, I think, in response to Fred Sparks $20 million honeymoon reporting that everyone in America seems to have read, because it was published in every newspaper for, like, four months. It was bananas. But she thought about putting out a response to that, apparently, and then decided not to. But I think there were strategic leaks. And especially in response to the Mary Gallagher book there, Mary Van Rinsler Thayer, who wrote a book that nobody read that came out in, like, the 70s. She had access to all of Jackie's White House files. And there was a. Somehow, I think it's Mary McGrory or Betty Beale. Somehow they had access to those at that time. And that had to be coming from. That had to be authorized. It had to be coming from her. So I think there were moments of trying to just inject some sort of reasonableness into the situation and be like, wait a minute, like, this is out of control. This is not accurate. And I don't know that they. They always kind of landed with a thud, it seems like where the reporters were like, oh, this is really interesting. And then the story just kept rolling on. So I think she. It was. I don't. I don't get the sense that she was like, calling up reporters and being like, that their office was leaking where she was going to be or anything like that, which some celebrities do. And I don't get the sense that she was just constantly on the phone with people trying to manipulate the press coverage. It more. More likely seems that when things would just get ridiculous or when there was a story that just had a lot of fuel to it and. And was going to harm her friends. So, like, the Roswell Gilpatrick stolen letters and all of that. Like, her. Her spokesperson came out and was like, no, this is not. Those were not love letters also. They were not written on her honeymoon. They were written the month after. Like, no, I think there was strategic engagement with that. But it wasn't just this constant, like, draining material out to the media, which was, I. I guess how she was trying to navigate her life. To try to be like, I. It's got to be horrendously frustrating to have everyone think you're this thing. And, and as a human being, of course you want to intervene and be like, no. And explain yourself, because you're way more complicated than that.

Rebecca Buchanan (34:44)

Right. And you cannot spend 247 doing that. Even though people spend 24. 7 following you around.

Oline Eaton (34:50)

Exactly, exactly. That's a life project, right? It's you living your life for sure. I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven.

Rebecca Buchanan (35:07)

Because he's so evil, I do think he is misunderstood.

Oline Eaton (35:10)

You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick ya. There's always a twist in this show. It's nothing you would expect. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. Now streaming and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

Mint Mobile Ad Voice (35:29)

Good morning, Crust. It's a great day to be a bread brother. Mornings are not my jam or jelly. Oh, come on, stop loafing around. I just woke up feeling hollow inside. Just grab one of the new morning uncrustable sandwiches like bright eyed berry or up an apple filled with 12 grams of protein and tons of deliciousness crust.

Rebecca Buchanan (35:50)

What are you eating?

Mint Mobile Ad Voice (35:52)

It's just granola.

Rebecca Buchanan (35:54)

Not even yogurt. No crust, no fuss. Uncrust your mornings. And I did I really love too that we got to see like. Like she did have to live her life, right? She was independent. She thought about that like she had. She negotiated like you talk about, like she sort of releases some things. Like she was behind the scenes. She negotiated a life and a marriage and these things that the American public or the press might not have completely agreed with. But it worked for her, right? And we get to see that the sort of complexity of what it means to. To. To live in the public eye the way that she did and how she had to figure out for herself. Right? When everybody's second guessing why you've decided to marry this Greek man, right. And what that means for you. So did you have like, as you were doing this, are there specific sort of stories or thing, you know, anything that you found? I mean, there's probably many things, but is there something that you want to share that you found that you were like, I never knew about this. You found it really interesting. The angle or the perspective on it.

Oline Eaton (37:11)

I mean, it was one of my goals and it has been difficult was to include more of her words, like her actual writing and words than we've been. We've. And I was helped in that because there were these new files that were opened. I also the JFK library encouraged me to go look in the archives of her friends and find her letters to them them which was extremely expensive and extremely time consuming. And again, you have to go through the name parade to find everybody. And all of her friends were named like Muffy and Puffin. And they all had married, multiple marriages. And you had to like, this is the problem of writing about women is that everyone's names change and they've all got nicknames and there's no standardization in the archives across institutions. So that was a big complaint. But like just getting to sit in archives and like, I think I remember when I was at Harvard and I. There was a letter she'd written to Robert Lowell and just being like, like they didn't make. I'm trying to remember there was some of them where you didn't have to wear gloves. And it was just like, oh, touching a paper, these people touched. Other times they made you wear gloves, and you felt like Mickey Mouse because they're like the white ones. And every time you take notes, you have to take them off, and they stretch, and you're like, oh, my gosh, this is not elegant. But, yeah, there were those moments of just like. And I also. I was able to go on the Christina because. Because I wrote the real estate agent and asked. And like, a year later, he was like, I'm gonna show it off to some people. They're doing a viewing, so if you want to come and wander around, you can do that. I was like, yes. And so I spent, like, two hours just wandering this boat alone, which was very funny. And again, like, I. I had an English teacher in college who wrote about Sylvia Plath and T.S. eliot was like, you have to go there. You just have to walk in the foot of these people. I think Richard Holmes has written a whole book about this. But I. So I. That just was a natural thing for me to do, was to go to these places and just try to be places she'd been or see things she'd seen. And I think that really the shame of my life is I didn't go to Greece until after I'd written this. But, like, doing that and kind of get. Just cultivating a spirit of adventure in my own life, I think was very, very helpful. Was something. Was like a gift I took from her. I. But was also very helpful in writing the book and just kind of creating that sense of movement to it so that the research process had a movement that I definitely wanted to kind of put in the texture of the book as I wrote it. But having all these encounters with her words and with letters was just amazing. It was such a privilege. And also interviews with people. So I became. I became really close host to the. The. To Sister Joanne, who taught Caroline Kennedy's catechism course. And we wrote letters and we would talk on the phone. And I went to see her in Baltimore. And there were several other people that I was able to interview. Gloria Steinem and you shocken Claas. So I went out to Hammersmith Farm a couple times and talked to him. And just having those convert. Like, the privilege of having those conversations with people and hearing their stories and staying in touch with some of them was just really, really lovely and such an important part of the research process and such a gift as well. So that's like, all extra textual stuff that really. I think at points where I was very low during writing it. I think it was very galvanizing to have those moments and be like, okay, yeah, this is worthwhile. This is a valuable thing. Everyone in my PhD program thinks I'm nuts, but this is valuable. I'm doing something that's going to matter to people at some point and they're gonna have some sort of experience with it. So I think as a writer, especially as a writer writing about some really traumatic stuff, like it's very replenishing to have those moments that kind of bring you back to the real person. I think of like, yeah, this is someone who was someone's sister and someone who live. Inhabited this space or was in this city or did this thing or these are their words. I think that was really, really useful and comforting and restorative for me when I was doing this.

Rebecca Buchanan (41:25)

Yes, right. And especially with someone like Jackie, who is this larger than life image, this larger than life person who like there were times I would sometimes just shake my head reading when, you know, when you talk about like she goes to the movies and someone will come up and just yell in her face or whatever it might be in this idea. Like this is a. And it's like so much has changed, so much stays the same. Right. Like we often have to remind ourselves and I that like this was a real person. And like you said, she had been through something really, really traumatic. Like I can't. Unimaginable to most people the trauma that she went through that the whole world witnessed and continues and continues to talk about. Right. In this somewhat cavalier way.

Oline Eaton (42:15)

In such a cavalier way, I think even like historians and stuff. There was somebody who put on Twitter some casual thing about the assassination and I was like, no, I can't remember what it was, but I think it's having. Having spent way too much time watching. This is a Pruder film. I think to try to understand and just to recognize that like it was edited when it was released. Like people didn't see the removed portions for quite some time. And also just to have this be a moment, the worst moment of your life is a moment that everyone else feels like they own and that. And they feel like you're trying to control by wanting a particular story, wanting the story to be handled in a particular way in a way that's humane. That's just like I think it's. And then, I mean there was, there was the murder of her husband. There's also the murder of her brother in law. She wasn't there for that, but that was re Triggering and just all of the. I think partly one of the things that I've only recently come to realize that I think I was also interested in her story because there was so much death, and I'd had death early in my life, and that was something that I didn't get talked about much in the culture I come from in evangelical Christianity and fundamentalism. And so this was a narrative in which there was just death throughout it. And you get to see someone surviving grief. And even though the portrayals were not particularly generous to her or to the lived experience of grief, I think there, it provided a template, which I think celebrity stories do. It provided a template for how. How do you deal with this. How do you deal with these. These mom. These incredibly traumatic moments that have occurred that, you know, do reshape your brain and. And impact hugely the way that you live your life. But then on top of that, to have everyone else, like, not take it, the fact that there was a cousin who was like, Jackie seems to have been really bothered by this, and you're like, oh, my gosh, of course. Course. Of course. And in their defense, they hadn't seen the movie. They'd maybe seen the Life magazine pictures. But yes, of course. Of course she was impacted. This is a horrifying thing to have seen.

Rebecca Buchanan (44:26)

And, like, this idea, like, she doesn't want to return to the White House, or she doesn't want to go here. She doesn't want to bring her kids. And, like, accusing her, you know, for not wanting to bring her children there or return to that space. And, like, that idea of, like, I want to protect these children. I want to protect sort of this space, and I want them to remember their f. Because she knows that their father is always going to be right. Like, you know, her grandchildren are not known as themselves. They're known as her grandchild. Right. You're the grandchild of, like, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and jfk. Right. Like, and so they're always going to be known by that. And so how do you create some semblance of normaly. Right. In that. Like, in that kind of space?

Oline Eaton (45:13)

Yeah. And I think. I think she worked very. I think that's incredible work, and it should be recognized as work that she did that and. Yeah. Just incredibly important that she was able to. Important and end up astounding that she was able to live as she did.

Rebecca Buchanan (45:31)

So we could probably talk about this forever because there is so much. Right. But I'll ask you. Because there is. There's so much. And it was really, for Me, I will just say I love, like, looking and framing it in that timeframe, in that, like, sort of like when she's Jacqueline Onassis. Right. Like, it's something we don't often look at. So there's all these things that you're. Like, that. For me, I was like, oh, that makes so much more sense now. Right.

Oline Eaton (45:58)

Yes. Yes. I remember I went to a conference in, like, 2010, maybe 2011, and I. People would ask me what I was writing about, and I said, jackie Onassis, and they would roll their eyes. But then it also felt incredibly deviant to say Jackie Onassis instead of. And sometimes I'd have to, like, go through. Oh, you know, Jackie kept rename her because they'd forgotten. But it felt super taboo to be like Jackie Onassis because that's a very particular story that doesn't feel particularly welcome. Didn't at the time. Feels a little bit more so now, but didn't feel welcome in the way that we talk about her as Jackie Onassis, which is wild.

Rebecca Buchanan (46:34)

Yeah. So. So this. The book comes out at the end of the month, so end of January. So. So is there anything with the. So my final, like, promotion question. Is there anything you're working on that you want to promote with this book or anything else you're working on? So what do we need to know?

Oline Eaton (46:51)

Oh, goodness. I. I'm. I'm working on recovering and teaching as well. So it's time to come out as the semester starts, which is a lot. But, yeah, I would just. I would love for people to buy it, obviously, and read it, and I'd be. I'm. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter and everything. I'd love for people to. To let me know what they think of it. Like, I think I. I feel like it's kind of like I took a kaleidoscope and I tried. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and I tried to record what I could see. And now I'm handing the kaleidoscope to other people. And everyone's. It's not a book that I don't. I don't know if you have. Can I ask you a question, having read this? Who is Jackie to you?

Rebecca Buchanan (47:38)

Well, it's really interesting because I never, like, I thought about her in this space of watching Kennedy get murdered. Right. And what that means. But like, that. And you mentioned this, too, that the whole thing, it stuck with me, that image of, like, her holding his brain and then that continued reminder of it throughout the book and to me, really. Right. And I had read about her as a writer, about some of the work she'd done in the newspaper. So I think it. It brings some of that for me to this more complex and complicated person than we often think she is. Right. And that it's important and. But, but it was, it was always like this time frame was missing. So I mean, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but like, it gives a more rounded and complex and for me, like, thinking about like that all those decisions that were sort of. And all the things she had to go through to get to the other side, to get to that sort of afterward and. Right. Like, I can't even. Like I said, like, during it, I was like, I can't even imagine having to live that way to bring my kids, to have someone like, follow them everywhere, to try and protect them and to deal with trauma and grief with them. Like, it's a wonder that both those kids were as well, like, that made it through to the other side in no huge scandals and. Right. Like that they were well rounded in, you know, in kind of a way. And the tragedy kind of continues in that. But. Right. So it gives it for me, you know, this sense of like, what she had to do to be the parent that she was and to also be. Be an independent woman. And I also kind of feel like, happy that I think she was having a lot more sex than any. Like, I was kind of like, oh, I think she is out there enjoying herself and that makes me happy.

Oline Eaton (49:47)

I don't think she was having nearly as much sex as the Daily Mail wants us to think she was because they're like, oh my gosh, they have such a laundry list of everyone she ever saw stood next to. But yeah, I think there was some sex.

Rebecca Buchanan (50:02)

She's often thought about as this person who, like, her husband is out there, like their husbands are out there doing whatever they want to do. But it's not okay for women to have that experience. And I'm like, this reads as though she really, like, like in what you've presented, she really negotiated things and she, she gotta have some fun for herself. And I think that's a good thing.

Oline Eaton (50:24)

I think it is too. Absolutely. Absolutely. To come back. Okay, so now that I threw it on you to come back to your question. Yeah, I. I'm really looking forward to seeing how to what people do with it. And I tried to there. I didn't follow every single thread and I tried to leave some because I've I've always felt, I say I don't have a messiah complex. I have a John the Baptist complex. Because I've never. I feel like I am at a point where there are a lot of archives that are not open, you know, and eventually the Manchester interviews will be available. There will be so much more in the future. And so I always feel like I'm kind of this My work is a stopgap of like trying to maintain information, trying to turn her life into art as well, which I didn't think she'd been handled in a way where writing was the focus. And I wanted to do that other than Wayne Kostenbaum's amazing Jackie Under My Skin, which everyone should read. But I also so I feel like I'm kind of a placeholder and hopefully can move Gen Z off their sheet metal meme about her. But coming out of this, I would love it if somehow this book sparks a conversation about who is writing biography. Jackie Biography has always been written by white people. I am a white person. I think there is a tremendously interesting and complicated story to be told about her important importance in the black community in the US and around the world. The coverage of EBONY and Jet about her, her about her after JFK's assassination and then also her after her death is really interesting. It's available on Google Books to anybody who wants to go look at it. It didn't quite fit in my story, but I think it's really, really there's, there's something there that should be explored more fully, but also a discussion about who tells stories of women's lives more broadly. So there was a movie that came out about Jackie in 2016. I think Natalie Portman's performance is astonishing. I absolutely cannot stand the fact that the screenplay was written by Noah Oppenheim, who concealed Matt Lauer's abuses at NBC News and also thwarted the reporting of Ronan Farrow. I am frustrated with Pablo Lorraine for continually telling the stories of iconic women by screenplays that are written by men. That was this case with the Diana Spencer movie. It appears to be the case of the Maria Callis movie that he's working on now. I think Rebecca traister said in 2017 or 18 that we that politically all the sort of the long tail effect of all of these abusive and predatory men and the people who protect them is that they told fundamental stories, like national, internationally important stories, and they got to write those narratives. And I don't think we've had a full reckoning of, of that in our culture of how the role that biography plays in that. The role that biographical film plays in that. And that kind of, like, response to this book was, well, there was a movie already made. Like, what could people possibly want? I got one offer when we were selling it, because they thought Jackie had been done so. Like, because there was this movie written by Noah Oppenheim, who found an issue of Life magazine and thought he discovered the world. So, like, I think there really, really is important cultural work to be done in that. And. And I hate the word empowerment, because it just means nothing, really, but that we are encouraging, as English professors, that we're encouraging our students to think critically about biographical narratives because it is. You know, I don't know this woman. She's kind of been like, my invisible friend and my fairy godmother for years, but I don't know her. And I've read a lot about her. I may know things her family didn't know about her, but this is a creative work of me trying to construct her life in a way that will be meaningful and important and perpetuate her story in the future and open it up for future writers. So, like, just increasing critical engagement around biographical writing and biographical narratives. In our culture, which we are saturated with them everywhere, gossip is biographical narrative.

Rebecca Buchanan (54:21)

And.

Oline Eaton (54:21)

And. And to really, I don't know how invest in storytellers who are not white men and who are not supporting predators and who are not encouraging abuse, because that does. That appears in the stories they write. And it is deeply worrying how the morays of the time. I was growing up in very conservative cultures, and I was reading biographies of Jackie from the 60s and 70s, and I was like, oh, yeah, no. To be first lady is the pinnacle of an American woman's life. I was, like, 14. I didn't question it. And that shaped what I thought I could do in weird, warped ways. And so this idea that you can read a biography from 20 years ago and it's not changed, that's entirely inaccurate because it's so rooted and the systems and the world in which the writer is writing it. So I'm sure in 20 years, people will look at this and be like, ooh, that's terrible. Why did they put it that way? Or whatever. And that's okay. That's okay. I think we should all be judged by our future times. But, yeah, I think it's critically, critically important that we have more people telling these stories than we currently do. And also that we actively work to root out the harms that are come. The people that are telling them in ways that are harmful.

Rebecca Buchanan (55:41)

So. Yes. Yes, all of it.

Podcast Host (55:43)

Right.

Oline Eaton (55:44)

There's my sermon.

Rebecca Buchanan (55:46)

We'll take it. Yeah, we'll go. Thank you so much. Oline Eden, who wrote Finding a Life Reinvented. Thanks for talking with me for New Books Network.

Oline Eaton (55:59)

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. It's been so fun.