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Not long after Bobby was assassinated, Jackie shocked the world by marrying Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon 29 years her senior. How could she stoop so far from American royalty? She was seen in all the trite celebrity camera shots: cruising the Mediterranean behind her trademark shades, sunbathing on a Greek isle, smiling broadly in nightclubs. Onassis had a magnetism that had attracted many women before her, including the great opera singer Maria Callas. But money was probably the largest motivation. Jackie had no intention of not living very well.
The union was not a success. The pair quarreled over her spending. Onassis took to calling his wife "the widow." After his son died in an air crash, he changed that to "the witch." Deeply superstitious, he blamed her for the loss that broke his heart.
But there was room in his world for many things, and he and Jackie were sometimes happy and at peace. For one thing, he liked the Kennedys. Jackie had had problems with them, especially Jack's mother Rose, mostly about life-style and religious upbringing. To the Kennedys, the Hyannis Port fracas was the only way to live. Rose nattered about the church. But despite later gossip, Jackie settled into a friendly relation with her former in-laws. An old friend recalls a dinner in Paris with Onassis and the elder Mrs. Kennedy, when the two ladies gossiped endlessly about White House days. Then Jackie insisted that Ari take them on to a nightclub. "You know," she told him, "Rose hasn't been to a nightclub since Joe took her to the Lido in 1936." Evenings like that kept the marriage going.
There was still an unseemly coda: the financial settlement. Through her lawyers she entered negotiations with her in-laws. Eventually Christina Onassis, the shipper's daughter and his only major heir, reportedly decided to get her hated stepmother out of her life with a settlement of $20 million.
And so Jackie was back in New York. Instead of endorsing a cause, as many ex-First Ladies and underemployed princesses have done, she took a job. First at Viking, then at Doubleday, she became an editor, working three days a week. Until shortly before she died, she was responsible for a dozen books a year, and she gets straight A's from anyone who worked with her. Doubleday chief Stephen Rubin says that "she was directly involved in everything -- line editing, trim size, jacket design, sales and marketing. She would call up a big book chain to push her books. And she was never grand. She would wait outside your office if you were on the phone."
She edited memoirs by Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Jackson as well as obscure books she felt deserved attention, such as Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, the manuscript of which was languishing in a Kansas library until she took an interest. She made something of a crusade for Edvard Radzinsky's The Last Tsar, getting what Rubin calls her SWAT team of assistants to promote the book. Most days she lunched at her desk on carrot and celery sticks. Says Doubleday associate publisher Marly Russoff: "It was always a shock for the first few times when you'd pass her in the hall. She's sort of an icon. But she didn't put a distance between herself and other people."