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By Root 687 0

one with the thick glasses and the pens in his shirt pocket is Ted”), but that was about it. Jackie had been around stars long enough to know that wasn’t enough. If these people were going to sell her book, she loved them, and she would make them love her. She not only remembered their names without coaching, she had a huge Rolodex, lovingly kept up-to-date by Abby Hirsch, with their birthdays and the names of their mother or husband or cat. On their birthdays and at Christmas they received loving, personal notes, handwritten by Jackie, and well before publication they got signed books, gift-wrapped and boxed, each with a personal message, not to speak of all sorts of ankh jewelry, ranging from pendants and rings to tie clasps and cuff links.

What she was doing, of course, was making the booksellers part of her team, to be used if necessary against her publisher, for she was not above mobilizing the booksellers to lobby for a bigger printing, a lower retail price, more ads, or further printings. She brought grassroots activism to the formerly staid business of selling a book, in some ways a more important contribution than the dazzle and the hype she also introduced.

Irving Mansfield was a master at the arcane art of “column planting,” almost unknown in book publishing and now a vanished art. In those days there were still plenty of important columnists, not just Liz Smith, and even those outside New York counted for something, like Herb Caen in San Francisco or Irv Kupcinet in Chicago. The Mansfields were always busy planting items. Anything one said to them was fair game, however innocently it had been shared, since the rules of column planting were simple: In return for you supplying gossip about other people, the columnist would run your own plug. The Mansfields plugged The Love Machine relentlessly, and it paid off. The book soared onto The New York Times’s best-seller list and stayed there for months.

Perhaps the high point of the whole campaign was reached at the party given for the booksellers at the ABA convention in Washington, D.C. This had been carefully designed by the Mansfields to capitalize on the affection the booksellers felt—or were purported to feel—for Jackie. Dinner was to be served at intimate little candlelit tables for ten in the big ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel, and each table was to have one empty chair, rather like that reserved for Elijah at a seder, so that Jackie could move from table to table throughout the meal. The lighting was kept low, the orchestra played romantic music, and the booksellers filed past Jackie and Irving in the receiving line, where Jackie displayed her phenomenal memory, greeting each of them by name, not to speak of remembering the names of their dog or cat. “Heh, heh,” Irving whispered to me. “Isn’t she great? She could run for president!”

The only fly in the ointment was that each bookseller, as they left the receiving line, was served a “Love Machine” cocktail, a potent, sweet concoction involving, among other things, curaçao, Pernod, vodka, crushed ice, and a lot of fresh fruit, served in big tumblers. Snyder took one look at it and growled to a waiter, “Bring me a scotch,” a wise decision, which I followed. The Love Machine was the kind of drink that is served in Florida resorts in a coconut shell or a hollowed-out pineapple, and it was predictably lethal. Very shortly, we had several hundred booksellers in various stages of inebriation, and the noise level was out of control. Dan Green, aghast, slipped up beside me and whispered, “What are we going to do?”

“Serve dinner?” I suggested.

Green nodded. We had the lights dimmed and brightened to signal that it was dinnertime. Nobody paid any attention except Jackie, who was furious.

We finally persuaded the waiters to start serving, and gradually, with many falls, bumps, and the crash of tipped-over chairs, the guests started to sit down.

“Look on the bright side,” I told Green. “At least there are no cripples.”

Nevertheless, it was touch and go. Jackie had envisioned a perfect party—a kind of Kennedy White