![]() The story of that third act - the 20 years that Mrs Onassis spent in New York working as an editor, first at Viking, then Doubleday - is the subject of Greg Lawrence's fascinating, fizzy new book, an unabashed and enthralling celebration of one woman's unlikely reinvention. ![]() And most of the general public has entirely forgotten - if it ever knew - that Jackie's life had a third phase. The most famous example, of course, is President Kennedy, and the zeitgeist almost demanded that his beautiful young wife Jackie forego her own second act: she received a great deal of hate mail for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Americans usually ignore that third act mainly because so many of their 20th-century public figures - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Plath among the writers, but also RFK, Martin Luther King and Elvis - died before they could reach it. In reality, American lives, especially public lives, tend to have three acts: the brash beginning, the apex in the middle, and the closing clarity. No, he made that quip for the same reason he made all his quips: so we'd quote him 80 years later, and it worked. ![]() ![]() When F Scott Fitzgerald quipped that there are no second acts in American lives, he didn't mean it his own life had already had two and might have gone on to a third if alcohol and tobacco hadn't killed him before he could write the screenplay to Gone with the Wind, win an Oscar, and become Hollywood's screenwriting tastemaker for the next 30 years. ![]()
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