So I’m ending my influential journalism series with how it all started. And it all started with this photo:
I was doing some research on writers’ fashion when I came across this photo in an article in The Cut. Immediately, I was struck. I just loved the photo. The colors in this black and white photo were so sharp to me: the grays, blacks and whites. It’s like one of those photos that would not have been better in color, and I usually prefer images in color.
When I came across this photo, I didn’t know who this woman was or what she wrote (I’ll admit, I’ve still yet to read any of her work), but by the photo alone I wanted to know. There was just so much to like about it. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, indeed this photo told it’s own story. From her eye makeup, indicative of the era in which it was take, to her shoulder bag, and the suit she wore, it all screamed, not just fashion, but style. Yet even more than all of that, what I liked most about this photo is that she was backed up against a wall full of books, yet the one in her hands she looked so engrossed in, was her own, with her picture displayed prominently on the entire back cover. I thought anyone who takes a photo like that has to be bad ass. And so I looked her up, and indeed she was.
She was the first author – not first female author, but author period – to have three consecutive New York Times No.1 bestsellers. She’s credited for inventing book promotions as they are done today – television appearances, in store book signings, that sort of thing all started with her. She and her book subject matter were ruthlessly criticized by prominent men and women of her day – a tell, tell sign that you’ve made it. If that weren’t enough, she began this meteoric rise to success in her 40s while battling cancer.
As I was doing research on her, I came across the following interview with her on YouTube. I chose this interview as my last influential journalism pick, not because the interviewer did so well – I thought she was rude and abrasive, all though she did get a hell of an interview out of it – but because of Jacqueline’s poise and composure in the face of all those darts. At the time of this interview, Jacqueline’s body was ravished with cancer. The following year she would be dead, yet watching it who could tell.
In a Vanity Fair article titled “Once was Never Enough” the writer opened the article with this amazing paragraph:
At 3:30 A.M. on December 25, 1962, Jacqueline Susann—a fading TV actress with an unemployed husband, an autistic son in a mental hospital, and a lump in her right breast—began to scribble in a notebook. “This is a bad Christmas,” she wrote. “Irving has no job. . . . I am going to the hospital. . . . I don’t think I have [cancer]. I have too much to accomplish. I can’t die without leaving something—something big. . . . I’m Jackie—I have a dream. I think I can write. Let me live to make it!”
She made it all right, and then some.
I hope you enjoyed my influential journalism series. And now, the interview:
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