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Now it’s official: The New York Times praises “JFK and Mary Meyer”
By
Published: Feb 26, 2020
Category:
Fiction
What are the odds that two writers publish books about the same subject in the same form at the same time?
Tiny.
But it happened.
And it happened because of one article.
Last fall, as the leaves were just starting to turn color, I finished my novel about Mary Pinchot Meyer, a socially prominent Washington artist who was a lover of John F. Kennedy. A year after he was assassinated, she was murdered. She kept a diary. Her family burned it. My novel was a “re-imagining” of her diary.
This was not a pure flight of the imagination. I read 100 books and created a timeline of the Kennedy Administration. I gridded the dates we knew that Mary was in Kennedy’s company over that timeline. I provided 102 footnotes that amplified or corrected those encounters. And then I wrote the novel like the screenwriter and playwright I’d become — as an easy-to-read set of conversations and brief observations.
As is my custom, I focus-grouped the manuscript; 40 Head Butler readers read it and offered suggestions. Most were loudly enthusiastic about the book’s prospects. As I prepared to send it to an agent, visions of sugarplums danced in my head.
On October 11, a friend sent me a link to a Publishers Weekly article about “The Lost Diary of M,” a novel by Paul Wolfe. It couldn’t be — but it was — the reimagined diary of Mary Pinchot Meyer. It seemed to have very little in common with my book, or, for that matter, the known facts of Mary’s life— in Wolfe’s telling, Mary took LSD with Marilyn Monroe — but that didn’t matter. Harper was publishing it… on February 25.
It is a law of media: Never be second. So I scrambled.
Skyhorse said it could get the book out in January, and you never saw a writer sign a contract faster. I found a terrific designer and located a photo for the cover, hired the publicist who had been so crucial to my Matisse play, an online publicist I’ve known forever, and an online ad guru who made a crackerjack Facebook ad, and collected blurbs. All of this was done in stealth, in whispered conversations, so Harper didn’t find out and advance its pub date. And on January 21 — a month before the other book — “JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story” made its debut. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
A sure sign of success: The book was reviewed in The New York Times. It’s not likely that a 192-page novel from a small publisher would ordinarily get this attention, but with two books to review, the Times saw something more culturally notable than mere coincidence. This was my good fortune.
Mr. Wolfe was reviewed first. He took it on the chin: “Meyer’s diary entries seem more like those of a vainglorious, overachieving high school junior trying to retain the interest of the school’s self-absorbed jock…The book is less a diary of someone’s deepest thoughts, insecurities and secrets than a carefully curated Wikipedia entry…. As she devolves into a weird hybrid of Perle Mesta and Nancy Drew, her sense of self-importance billows like a mushroom cloud. ‘Can a blonde go up against the whole world?’ she wonders.The better question is: Why would we care?”
And then the reviewer turned his attention to my book:
Kornbluth — a veteran magazine journalist and beholder of the salon set where Mary rotated — delivers a slimmer but saucier fictionalization of the diary, one that feels and sounds more bemused, on the qui vive and reflective of the intellectual charmer whom Kennedy had been flirting with since his days as a student at Choate. Meyer’s insights into her paramour are both discerning and droll (“We all pay a price for becoming ourselves, but he’s paid a high price to play someone else: a Harvard version of Cary Grant”), and her perspicacious assessments are consistent with the self-possessed woman she was. “No sense of his achievements, only of his style,” she writes at the one-year mark of his presidency. “His presidency is shallow as glass.”
Hemmed in by the construct of the diary to shape Meyer, Kornbluth has wisely given us less rather than more, and as a result his book adroitly captures the contradictions of a woman trying to balance her Jekyll-and-Hyde life as gracious Washington socialite and punditic libertine, at times muddling through the effort. Exulting in pillow talk about Allen Dulles and Khrushchev, she deludes herself into believing she’s in a different class than the silly secretaries who cavort with Kennedy in the White House pool. She knows he will never marry her, but still plays a constant game of what-if. She expresses contempt for Jackie’s icy tolerance of his rampant infidelity, even as she herself climbs the odalisque ranks. In other words, she’s messy, paradoxical, human. Even as she luxuriates in the forbidden frisson of the affair, she plays Whack-a-Mole with feelings of jealousy, guilt and a sense that this is not going to end well. “Giving a man what he wants when he wants it is always a bad idea,” she writes.
It doesn’t end well, of course. Does Kornbluth’s imagined diary reveal any truly critical insights into a complicated character whose murder has never been solved? Not really. But as poolside reading on a warm afternoon, his slender tome offers a breezy, tantalizing view of the woman who, through wiles and a complete lack of scruples, briefly transcended the role of presidential mistress — and may have paid for it with her life.
In his last sentence, the Times reviewer — Michael Callahan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair — nails the fact that is so curious about my book. Yes, there’s the happy experience of reading a breezy and conversational book: “poolside reading on a warm afternoon.” But that pleasure lures the reader deeper into a tragedy and a horror story about two unsolved murders. One murder is the cause of a national trauma that has made many of us doubt just about everything our government tells us. The second victim is a woman who is, like most murdered women, a footnote. There has never been justice for Mary Meyer. But in a book, Mary Meyer — gutsy, idealistic, impetuous, sensuous, worldly, and, for all that, so naive — is no longer collateral damage.
