Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [151]
Many years later, she and I briefly chatted about old times. I mentioned Dan Green’s name and her eyes blazed. “He’s the one who tried to ruin Sylvia and Leonard’s party for The Love Machine,” she said fiercely. “He invited a cripple just to spoil the mood.”
“Heh, heh,” Irving chuckled from the background. “Isn’t Jackie great? She never forgets a thing.”
TO AN outsider, the curious thing about Jackie was that she and Irving seemed to have no private life. The Mansfields were totally wrapped up in keeping Jackie famous. They were always on the telephone, Jackie selling her book, Irving making deals.
The truth was that Jackie’s big secret was her private life, and her success was in part a way of concealing it and in part a way of escaping from the pain of it. Far from being invulnerable and tough, as she liked to portray herself, she was a woman of great passion with a deep capacity for friendship, both supportive of her friends (most of whom led lives pretty much like the women in Jackie’s novels) and dependent on their support. The secret was that in 1962, the year Jackie wrote Every Night Josephine!, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. A mastectomy had failed to halt the spread of the cancer, and Jackie led the rest of her life in secret pain and on painkillers, struggling with a disease she refused to share with the outside world. Perhaps more painful still, the Mansfields’ son, Guy, was autistic, a fact that they also managed to conceal from the world at large.
That perhaps explains the feeling that their lives together appeared to be a kind of facade, put together artfully for the purpose of being photographed. To be with them was to have the feeling that these two people existed only for the outside world, but it was an illusion. Jackie and Irving were living out a tragedy as painful as any in her books and putting on a show to cover it.
“Jackie is a trouper,” Irving once told me, when she went on a talk show suffering from laryngitis, but it was far more true than he or Jackie ever revealed. She was a woman of her time, who not only believed that the show must go on but also felt that the public wanted celebrities to show happy faces, whatever might be going on in their private lives. Today, of course, the public expects to hear about all the sordid details of people’s private lives, but in Jackie’s day that wasn’t so, and she lived in fear that her public would find out she wasn’t just rich, happy, and successful. “I hear he’s got cancer,” I once heard Irving say about someone in show business, then, totally without irony: “When they hear about that in Hollywood, he’s dead.”
Jackie feared the same. The truth simply wasn’t an option.
THE MANSFIELDS were, as far as I know, the first people to plan a whole new wardrobe as part of the campaign (plum-colored sequins were a memorable feature of Jackie’s formal wear) and try to get the publisher to pay for it all, right down to the shoes. Their attention to detail was incredible. They lived and breathed “launch,” as they called it.
The launch—another concept new to publishing—of The Love Machine was accompanied by incredible ballyhoo. The Mansfields might have their comic side, but when they moved into high gear it was impressive to behold. It was Jackie, after all, who virtually invented the idea of forging deep, personal connections between an author and the people who actually sold books. Hitherto, bookstore managers, let alone bookstore clerks, had been ignored, by both publishers and authors. An author visiting a store might shake their hands, while his publisher’s sales rep whispered their names in his or her ear (“That’s Faith, that’s Angela, the