Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [284]
It was impossible to be around Jackson for any time and not like the man. My assistant Nancy Nicholas and I spent many, many hours together waiting for The Rev, who liked to set meetings at the last minute, usually late at night on weekends, and who was invariably hours late. We never held it against Jackson, and the pleasure of seeing him, when he finally arrived, was always genuine.
Short of Ronald Reagan, nobody staged arrivals better than Jackson—the long wait, often in hotel lobbies, or his suite, the arrival of messengers bearing news of his whereabouts and revised ETA, finally the bustle as the Reverend Jackson’s advance staff swept in, the more important ones bearing cellular telephones, others his briefcase, raincoat, even his minister’s robes, splendid in purple and black, in a transparent plastic garment bag, then, at last, Jackson himself, always on the run, surrounded by a few favored journalists and a couple of stout bodyguards.
His hotel suites contained all the chaos of a presidential campaign; indeed, Jesse Jackson’s life was like a permanent presidential campaign—the rows of cellular phones charging on the floor, the serving tables piled high with food and soft drinks, buckets full of melting ice, the television sets all switched to the news, with the sound off, and at least a dozen people packed into the living room, while Jackson himself huddled behind a closed door in the bedroom with a visitor or took a nap. The atmosphere was always one of crisis, even when—especially when—nothing was happening. When he was in good form, Jackson’s eloquence was formidable. He once came to S&S to talk to the CEOs of a couple of dozen major corporations about defense spending and what it was doing to the black community, whose needs were being sacrificed to the military-industrial machine. His audience, which began as hostile, was so mesmerized that it stayed an hour longer than intended and emerged—for the moment at any rate—converted to Jackson’s view. When he was tired, however, or when things weren’t going his way, he could be mulish, impatient, and monosyllabic, though never discourteous—his Southern upbringing prevented that.
The only time I ever saw them together, I was struck by how greatly he and Bill Clinton resembled each other, but by that time Jackson had assumed an elder-statesman stance, Clinton having preempted The Rev’s role as the party leader and communicating with blacks for himself, much to Jackson’s discomfiture. It was impossible to think of them as black and white—they were merely two Southern boys, spoiled by their mamas, gifted students who had made good just the way they were supposed to, each of them married to a woman considerably stronger than himself, and each of them sharing the same ability to charm, the same attraction for the opposite sex, and the same sense of entitlement. The only difference was that Clinton was president and Jesse Jackson wasn’t, but Jackson had managed to carve out a role that transcended the presidency, with his own foreign policy, his own constituency, and his own blueprint for the future. Still, I could see in Jackson’s eyes that he wasn’t happy. If there was one thing about him that I learned during the many years of working on various versions of his book, it was that the Reverend Jackson liked to be the center of attention.
WELL, WHO doesn’t? you might say. Indeed, in the eighties most of us fulfilled Andy Warhol’s prophecy by becoming the center of attention briefly, starting with Dick Snyder and Joni Evans. Joni’s career path took the shape of a neon zigzag. Dick decided that despite the difficulties, he needed Joni Evans as publisher of S&S again, so Linden Press (much to my regret as a Linden author) was closed down. After that, however, their marriage began to falter, and Joni left to run Random House, replacing Howard Kaminsky, a diminutive dynamo of a man. Kaminsky went to Morrow, while Joni was moved crosstown to head