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By Root 818 0

plastic slipcovers so slippery that it was hard not to slide off the furniture. We were just toasting each other when the door opened and Irving came in with Josephine on a leash. Mansfield was a promoter and hustler and prided himself on being a tough guy, though all he was, in fact, was Jackie’s spokesman—she was the tough one, not him. His ambition in life was to be a Broadway “character,” to which end he had mastered the gruff voice, the sharp clothes, the hat cocked at a rakish angle, like Walter Winchell’s, the “don’t fuck with me” stare and the shameless chutzpah of that vanishing breed. He never quite brought it off, however—in some hard-to-define way he always looked like a small-timer, though he was deeply suspicious of being taken for one. I had the impression, then and later, that most of his life consisted of hanging around with his hands in his pockets telling people, “Jackie will be down in five minutes.”

“Did Josie do her business, honey?” Jackie asked, with genuine concern.

“Yeh, yeh,” Irving said, with the look of a man who hadn’t noticed. He put Josephine in the bedroom, came back, and poured himself a glass of champagne. “So what do you think of Jackie?” he asked. “Isn’t she great?”

As we were soon to discover, this was Irving’s refrain. Whatever Jackie said or did, Irving chuckled and, as if he were her impresario, said, “Isn’t she great?”

Great or not, it soon became apparent that as far as her books were concerned, Jackie was a pro, just as Irving had promised. The pink paper was not a whim. She typed each draft of her manuscript on a different color paper—pink was for her first, rough draft. What is more, though Irving liked to insist that she never needed nor accepted editorial advice, Jackie herself was a realist—she took what seemed useful to her and understood perfectly what her special strengths were. “I write for women who read me in the goddamn subways on the way home from work,” she explained. “I know who they are because that’s who I used to be. Remember Stella Dallas? My readers are like Stella. They want to press their noses against the windows of other people’s houses and get a look at the parties they’ll never be invited to, the dresses they’ll never get to wear, the lives they’ll never live, the guys they’ll never fuck.” Jackie—a chain-smoker—exhaled out of both nostrils like a dragon. “But here’s the catch: All the people they envy in my books, the ones who are glamorous or beautiful or rich or talented, they have to come to a bad end, see, because that way the people who read me can get off the subway and go home feeling better about their own crappy lives and luckier than the people they’ve been reading about.”

“Isn’t she great?” Irving said with a chuckle.

In fact, I soon decided, in her own way, Jackie was great. Leavis could not have put it better in all the volumes of Scrutiny. She understood exactly what she was doing. In those days, when the TV industry was still glamorous, she had elected to write a novel about television, to this day the only successful one and the best. “The love machine” was not only the nickname for Robin Stone, the fabulously successful television executive who was the book’s hero (and who was based on Jim Aubrey), but was also Stone’s name for the television set itself. Jackie already understood that the television set was like a kind of lover, always present in the bedroom, available twenty-four hours a day, establishing a new kind of intimacy with the viewer. She didn’t need Marshall McLuhan to teach her that. It was one of the reasons she was such a good promoter on television: She was, as she herself described it, “a natural on the boob tube.”

Dumb she wasn’t. She even had a theory about popular fiction that, so far as I am concerned, has yet to be bettered and that, if followed with a certain amount of energy, can hardly fail: a love story with a heroine every woman reader will identify with (in those days a pretty victim), a powerful man torn between his work and his love, and a cast of characters who are almost identifiable as celebrities.