Stephanie Marie Thornton – Camelot Revisited

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Stephanie Thornton’s latest book, And They Called It Camelot – a fictionalized account of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s life – was being vaunted as the Book Club Pick of the Year from the day it was launched, a great starting point for any author.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Stephanie talks about the challenges in writing an intimate portrait of the former First Lady’s life, nearly 60 years after the shocking events in Dallas.

We’ve got a special Fourth of July Giveaway – three eBook copies of And They Called It Camelot going to three lucky readers. Enter the draw on our website, The Joys of Binge Reading.com or on the Facebook Binge Reading page. Offer closes July 4.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

• Why the most famous First Lady could be overlooked
• The pull of forgotten women
• The notorious White House daughter
• The woman who ruled Mongolia
• The writers she admires most
• What she’d do differently second time around

Where to find Stephanie Thornton: 

Website: https://www.stephaniethorntonauthor.com/https://www.stephaniethorntonauthor.com/

Facebook: @AuthorStephanieThornton

Twitter: @StephMThornton

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6526628.Stephanie_Thornton

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephaniemariethornton/

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Introducing Stephanie Thornton

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Stephanie. Hello there, Stephanie and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Stephanie Thornton: Thank you so much for having me.  I’m excited to chat about Jackie Kennedy and all things book related.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful.  I just love to say that you’re in Alaska and this is the first podcast interview I’ve done to Alaska, so that strikes me as being something special as well.

Stephanie Thornton: And this is the first interview I’ve done in New Zealand or anywhere in that part of the world, so a first for me as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Historic fiction is your chosen niche and you’ve got a winner on your hands with your latest book And They Called It Camelot.  It’s a fictionalized account of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s life and a best-selling author, Kate Quinn, has already called it “The Book Club Pick of the Year”.  Wasn’t that a great way to get started?

Stephanie Thornton: Yes. Kate Quinn is an author friend of mine, so I was quite tickled that she enjoyed Jackie Kennedy’s story as much as I did writing it.

Jenny Wheeler:  Readers have strong views about the Kennedys even this far past their time in office, and the research that you had to do to get this book together was monumental.  Both things made it a very big project, didn’t they? What made you decide to tackle it?

Stephanie Thornton:  Jacqueline Kennedy was a bit of a departure for me because I’m a history teacher by day, I teach high school students, and then I write about these women from history.  Typically I’ve written about forgotten women in history. Jackie Kennedy is by no means forgotten, but I think that once I started being interested in her story as a potential novel to write, I found that there’s a lot of her story that has already started to be forgotten.

Jackie’s Forgotten Legacy

There are certain things that people know.  She was very fashionable.  She was, of course, in the back of the limo on November 22nd, 1963, when JFK was assassinated.  There are the images of her dressed in her widow’s black during the funeral. She marries Onassis. 

But the pieces in between and a lot of her legacy, I felt like people had already started to forget.  That was what drew me to tell her story.  As far as the research went, I’m a history nerd, so I loved the research, and this took me about a year longer to write than my other books – there are four other books before this one.  

That’s because Jackie is so well known and so much of her life was documented that I felt like I had to get it just right.  I ended up reading so many books on the Kennedys that my husband had to build me a new bookshelf to hold all my research books.

Jenny Wheeler: You have taglined the book ‘An intimate portrait of Jackie O’ and much of the story is told from Jackie’s inner voice.  I have the feeling that you must have poured over personal papers to capture that, because there is an authenticity about that voice.

Stephanie Thornton: Well, thank you. Yes, I worked really hard because again, Jackie is so well known and she is a beloved icon, not just in America, but around the world so I felt that I had to be true to her voice.  I wanted to tell it from the first-person point of view because she led such an extraordinary life and was there for so many pivotal moments in history.  

A perfect moment of serendipity

There’s the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, the moon landing, all sorts of things that she essentially had a front row seat for, so I wanted the reader to be able to see those events unfold through her eyes.

I oftentimes joke that writing historical fiction is the closest thing that I’ll ever get to a time machine, and I wanted readers to be able to experience that.  So yes, I read anything I could get my hands on.

So everything from the tapes she recorded in the days after her husband’s assassination, I went to Arlington and the Smithsonian, there was a fabulous museum exhibit that I just happened to hit.  

It was perfect.  Perfect moment of serendipity when I was in Portland, Oregon, and they had a JFK exhibit with a whole slew of her personal papers.  The very kind museum attendants let me break the rules and take pictures because I was transcribing everything by hand so I could get it word for word, so I could get her voice, so that it would feel as close as possible to if she was sitting down and telling you about her life over a cup of tea.

Jenny Wheeler:  One of the controversial aspects of it that is hinted at in the book but not specified, is her relationship with her brother-in-law Bobby after her husband’s death.  

It’s well known that he was an incredible tower of strength to her after JFK died, but there is a hint that it might have been more than just a brother-in-law/sister-in-law relationship.  You mention at the end notes of your book how you tiptoed around that particular hornets’ nest.  Would you like to tell us about that dilemma as a writer?

Walking the author tightrope

Stephanie Thornton: That was quite the tight rope walk for me as an author, because what I found when I was doing research was there’s a camp of biographers who agree that yes, Bobby and Jackie were very close in the days and years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and there seems to be some evidence that maybe that relationship was closer than previously suspected.  

Then there’s another camp who say, no, they were just close.  But there are some telling details about that closeness and I can’t go back and ask either one of them and I don’t think I would necessarily even want to because they were both public figures, but especially Jackie clung to her privacy as much as she could.  

But, for example, Jackie and Bobby went on a vacation, I think it was to Aruba – don’t quote me on the exact spot, but they went somewhere nice and warm and tropical while Bobby’s wife, Ethel, took all of her kids with Bobby and Jackie’s kids on a ski trip. 

That’s not a usual arrangement.  They were definitely very close in that I think they both helped each other heal after JFK’s assassination, which was of course devastating to both of them.  I like to think that they were the anchors for each other in those days.

Jackie also helped Bobby decide that he wanted to run for Senator and run for President and, of course, then he ended up following in his brother’s footsteps and being assassinated, which is another one of those pivotal moments in history, those big ‘what ifs’.  What would America have turned out like had he survived and been chosen as President?  That’s something we’ll never know.

Fashionable woman taken seriously

Jenny Wheeler:  Some people see Jackie still today as a woman who was taught how to be the decorative piece on a rich man’s arm. But of course she was much more than that. There was a very self-aware aspect to her character though, isn’t there?  How do you view her after spending so much time with her?  Would you ever want to meet her and did you end up liking her by the end of the book?

Stephanie Thornton: I would definitely want to meet her, sit down and have dinner and just chat about her life.  I think my view of her, my respect for her certainly, deepened.  She was an amazingly strong woman and I think that sometimes gets glossed over because she was fashionable.  She did wear these beautiful Oleg Cassini gowns.

She was this icon.  When she first became First Lady, she was not very sure of herself.  She was married to a man who honestly cheated on her virtually every chance he got, and she had to come into her own and she did that throughout JFK’s presidency.

White House makeover

There were a number of things that surprised me when I researched things that she helped preserve for posterity.  The White House renovation, because the White House was in sad, sad shape when she became First Lady, so she renovated it to become the People’s House, to make it the living monument that it is today.

She also saved Lafayette Square which is right next to the White House. There have recently been protests there for the Black Lives Matter movement.  She saved Grand Central Station in New York from demolition, even the Pyramid.  For anybody who’s been to the Met Museum in New York, which is an amazing museum, they have a full Egyptian temple in the museum that you can see from outside because it’s thin glass. 

She’s responsible for that.  She helped persuade JFK to come out and say, hey, we should save these temples and monuments and things in Egypt that are going to be submerged by the Aswan Dam.  

Because of that the people of Egypt, the Government said, America, we have a temple that’s going to be submerged that we’d like to donate to your country, and it ended up in the Met.  She’s responsible for a lot of things that I think people haven’t necessarily remembered.

A phenomenally strong woman

And then her personal strength.  This woman had three babies who died, stillbirth, miscarriage.  Her son Patrick died when he was two days old. She survived the assassination of JFK, probably had PTSD.  One of the most telling details for me was that when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, he was on life support, and of all the Kennedy clan who were gathered in the hospital room, it was Jackie who signed the orders to take him off life support because none of the other Kennedys could bring themselves to do it.

This was a phenomenally strong woman.  I have the utmost respect for her and for her legacy and I’m honored that I was able to write her story.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now the myth of it all, the illusion to Camelot, your title harks back to that, and the book suggests that it arose from quite a coolly calculated quote that Jackie fed to the Press within weeks or months of the President’s death.  It wasn’t something that someone else said about them, it was something she cultivated about themselves and she knew exactly what she was doing when she said it.  

The origin of the Camelot Illusion

She was preserving her husband’s brand.  Do you think that’s a fair summary of how it came about?

Stephanie Thornton: Yes.  That interview she gave is recorded for posterity word for word.  She gave several interviews in the days and weeks after JFK’s assassination because she wanted to preserve his legacy.  It was painful for her to have to sit down and relive that day and go back in time, but she wanted to be able to set in stone for posterity: here was my husband’s legacy.

She did make a reference to a musical that was popular at the time, that there once was this thing called Camelot and she made the analogy that that was JFK’s presidency, that shining city on a hill type of idea, where beautiful women danced with handsome men and all of that.  She did later come to, ‘regret’ might be too strong a word, but maybe wish she hadn’t used that exact analogy, but I think it’s fairly apt.

I wasn’t around during that particular presidency, but I’ve talked to many, many people, readers, family members, who say that was the special time and we’re not sure that we’ll ever have quite that type of presidency again.  So yes, I think she definitely cultivated that image for posterity.

Creating a living museum

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned her White House make over which she accomplished in an amazingly short time – it was pretty much done within a year, wasn’t it?  I’m curious.  Has the White House had any substantial makeovers since, or is what’s there now still largely the work of her hands?

Stephanie Thornton:  The White House is interesting, it’s a living museum.  Jackie’s responsible for tracking down antiques that had been used in the White House that had been taken by private collectors, sold off, lost, what have you, and bringing them back in and then renovating the White House.

Much of what she did is still there today. They will switch out furnishings and things, so every time there’s a new administration that comes in, often it’s the First Lady who gets to say, we’d like this piece here, we’d like this piece here. 

They’ll do different carpeting in the Oval Office for every administration and different curtains and things like that, but the last major renovation of the White House, and maybe we shouldn’t use the word ‘renovation’ because Jackie preferred the term ‘restoration’, was definitely done by her hand.  We get to credit her for that.

Alice Roosevelt: America’s Princess

 It was pretty amazing in that, yes, she did it in an incredibly short amount of time and she also managed to do the fundraising as well, because she was given this teeny tiny little budget and she said, oh no! 

She was shocked to find that donors were willing to give all this money or, hey, they have this really fabulous console table that was used by James Madison or what have you, that they would donate if Jackie would sit down and have tea with them.  She was, well, of course I’ll have tea with them if it means getting back this console table or this bureau, or what have you.  She put her mind to, this is what we’re going to do, and she got it done.

Jenny Wheeler:  She’s been referred to as ‘America’s Queen’ and she almost liked that idea of herself, but you’ve done another biography about an American “royal” and that’s American Princess, the story of Alice Roosevelt, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, a daughter in the White House and a very controversial woman of her time. Tell us about her and what attracted you to her.

A Woman before her time

Stephanie Thornton:  I’m a huge fan of Theodore Roosevelt and have been ever since my student teaching days 17 years or so ago.  Theodore Roosevelt is a larger than life character and when my daughter was quite young, I think she was around three, we did a trip.

I took students to Washington DC and stumbled on this book. It’s a kid’s book called Mind Your Manners, Alice Roosevelt!  It was about this hoyden of a child, a teenager at the time, who was Alice Roosevelt, and her time in the White House when her dad was President.

From there I started researching her, and this was a woman before her time.  This is the turn of the century, the very beginning of the 1900’s. Alice came of age. She had her debutante ball at the White House right after her dad became President following McKinley’s assassination. And she broke every rule out there for young women of her time.

Washington’s other monument

She smoked cigarettes. She made bets on horses. She drove cars, raced cars, and she said whatever she thought about anyone and everyone at the time.  She had a really intriguing, fun, early life, but then she also was there because her dad was President. She knew subsequent presidents, then her cousin Franklin Roosevelt became president. 

She had a feud with Franklin and Eleanor that she resolved with Eleanor later. She essentially knew personally every president from McKinley right before her dad all the way up to Jimmy Carter, although I’m not sure she knew Jimmy Carter, because by that time she was 96 years old.

She was called Washington’s other monument. She knew the Kennedys, so she gets a little cameo in And They Called it Camelot when she gets to chat with Jackie during the Pablo Casals cello concert that Jackie hosted, and then Jackie also gets a moment in American Princess to chat with Alice, because they did know each other.

Amazing women of history

If you wanted to have entree into Washington DC society during the 50’s and 60’s, they said your ticket in was a dinner invitation to Alice Roosevelt’s salons.  She was a different type of icon in her time period, but both she and Jackie were amazing women in American history.  I loved writing both their stories.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great.  They weren’t ‘forgotten women,’ but your first three books were about women from a much earlier period, the ancient times. What drew you to writing about the ancients?

Stephanie Thornton: I love ancient history. The first book I ever wrote was about Pharaoh Hatshepsut.  It was actually the second book that was published.  I always had a passion for Ancient Egypt and Hatshepsut’s mummy was found about, I want to say 15 years ago, it might not have been quite that far, but roughly.  

We found that the accepted story about her had been completely wrong because she had always been seen as this usurper who took her stepson’s throne.  Then when she died, he destroyed her images because she was such a bad stepmother, ruler, et cetera.  

An Egyptian Golden Age

Then they found well, actually, her images didn’t get destroyed for 30 years after he took the throne after her death and she led Egypt during the Golden Age. I couldn’t get her story out of my mind because there wasn’t a historical fiction book about her that was accurate.

I started writing that and then set that one aside and found Empress Theodora of the Byzantine Empire.  I was teaching world history. She gets one line in history books about how, during some riots, she gave a speech when her husband who was the emperor wanted to run away and abdicate.

She said something along the lines of the imperial purple is the best burial shroud, meaning I’m not going to flee, I’d rather die as an empress than turn tail and run like a coward, which then galvanized her husband and his supporters to stay and save his throne.  That’s emperor Justinian who led the Byzantine Empire during the Golden Age.  So I felt like she needed her own book too, because one sentence was not enough.

Imperial wives of Ancient Times

Then I went on and wrote two more books.  The Tiger Queen is about Genghis Khan’s wife, daughter, some other women, and then The Conqueror’s Wife is about Alexander the Great’s women.  The ancient world is also fascinating.  I’ve got lots of women throughout lots of different time periods of history that I want to write about.

 Jenny Wheeler: So you still do have some more coming?

Stephanie Thornton: Yes, my next one will be out next summer.  It’s tentatively titled Clever Girl.  It’s about a woman named Elizabeth Bentley who was an American spy during World War II, who spied for Russia but when the Alliance with Russia fell apart, she became an FBI informer and took down the Soviet spy rings in America.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, wow, that sounds good.  Harking back to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, how on earth do you research women from those periods, because I’d imagine there’d hardly be anything left recorded about them, would there?

Stephanie Thornton: There’s not as much, it’s definitely like night and day from, say, especially Jackie Kennedy and Alice Roosevelt.  They are mentioned so we know things like, for example, with Genghis Khan’s wife Börte, there’s an epic poem that details essentially how Genghis grew up and became the leader of all of the Mongols. 

The woman who ruled Mongolia

She’s in there because they were betrothed early on and then his dad died and he had to leave. He found her again many years later, they did get married and then a rival clan came and kidnapped her and he had to go and rescue her.  It took nine months and then by that time she was nine months pregnant, so who was the dad for the kid?  Then we know that when he was off conquering, she was ruling Mongolia for him.  

So there’s less, which means that there was more freedom on my end to fill in the blanks.  We still have main events that we have to get from point A to point B, but I got to play a little bit more since there’s not as much source material.

Jenny Wheeler:  Moving away from the books and turning to your wider career, I gather you’re not a full time writer, you are still teaching, but how has your previous experience or your life experience contributed to your fiction?

The ideal life for an author

Stephanie Thornton:  I teach full time. And then I write full time. So I’m just inundated with history and that’s my passion.  I’m also a mom and a wife so I can sleep when I’m dead, right.  Roosevelt actually says that in American Princess and I felt like that resonated with my life too. 

I love to travel. I drag my husband and my daughter to all sorts of historical sites.  Not right now, of course.  I was supposed to be getting back from Morocco yesterday, which was not novel related but I love history, so walking where the heroines from my novels have been has been a really powerful experience for me.

 I want to be able to translate that for readers so that they can also appreciate what these women accomplished in a time when women were often not expected to accomplish anything outside of the home.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got a remarkable bookshelf of books that you’ve produced.  Is there one thing you can say you’ve done more than any other that’s the secret of your success in getting those books written?

Stephanie as reader

Stephanie Thornton:  That’s a good question. I think the key to it is just chipping away a little bit at a time.  I’m always kind of awed when the box of books comes from my publisher for the first time and I can hold my book in my hand.  But that’s a culmination of several years, oftentimes, of work.  Every little bit from the research stage to the writing stage, the drafting, editing, et cetera, it all adds up in the end.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Stephanie as reader, because we’re starting to come to the end of our time together and this is The Joys of Binge Reading. We want to inspire people with inspiration for other books they might like to read and enjoy. What do you like reading, and have you got any recommendations for listeners?

Stephanie Thornton:  I will try to keep my list short, but some of my favorite historical fiction authors.  We’ve already mentioned Kate Quinn, I was a fan of hers long before I’d ever met her or chatted with her on Facebook. Her books. She’s actually got four books. It’s a series, but you can read them on their own, that are set in Rome.  Then she did a couple in Renaissance Italy about the Borgias.  Her latest have been about World War I and II – that’s The Alice Network and The Huntress.

Some favorite authors

Chanel Cleeton writes amazing historical fiction that is all about Cuba in this century. She has a new one out this June.  That one is about the big Memorial or Labor Day hurricane. I got to read an advanced copy of that one.  It’s called The Last Train to Key West and it’s fantastic.

Stephanie Dray has some American novels that she co-wrote with Laura Kamoie.   America’s First Daughter and My Dear Hamilton, so revolutionary.  Then my guilty pleasure, Evie Dunmore, just released last year the first in a series.  It’s called The League of Extraordinary Women and they’re a little racy, but they are romance novels that are heavy in history.  It’s about the British suffragette movement in the mid-late 1800’s and they are fabulous.  Those are some of my current favorite authors right now.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. We’ve had both Chanel and Laura Kamoie on the show and I loved both of their books so we’re very much in a common mind there.  I will look up Evie Dunmore, I hadn’t heard of her.

The bumpy road to publication

Stephanie Thornton: She has another one coming out this Fall.  Like I said, they’re racy, but they are so fun.

Jenny Wheeler: Great.  Circling around, looking back down the tunnel of time, is there anything you’d change about the way you’ve proceeded, anything that you wish you’d done differently or, if you had your time all over again, would it be very much the same as what’s happened?

Stephanie Thornton: I think every writer has their own path and there’s no right or wrong paths. I do wish that I could go back to May, 2011 because that’s when I was first starting to send out query letters for my Egyptian novel, which did end up getting published, but I sent it out before it was ready and I ended up with, I forget the exact number, but I feel like it was around 183 rejections before I set that one aside and wrote about Empress Theodora.  Then I went back and rewrote the whole Pharaoh Hatshepsut book which became Daughter of the Gods. 

‘The book’s not ready yet!’

I guess if there was one thing, it would be to go back and tell prior me to save myself a lot of heartache. The book’s not ready yet, don’t send it out yet, here’s what you need to do.  But it’s a learning process so I had to learn it all somehow.  That just happened to be how I did it.

Jenny Wheeler:  You mentioned that the Egyptian book was not the first.  You had it written, but the first one published was Theodora.  But you still managed to retrieve the manuscript, so that’s really amazing dedication to keep going with it.

Stephanie Thornton: I just loved her story and I wanted readers to be able to read the more accurate version based on the archeology that was done, but I didn’t know how to tell stories properly quite yet.  A lot of novelists have novels that are under the bed and in drawers and so on and I wasn’t willing to let that one go, so I dug it out and, like I said, I tore it apart.  It’s unrecognizable from that first draft that I sent out.

Jenny Wheeler:  What’s next for Stephanie, the writer?  You mentioned that you’ve got the Elizabeth Bentley book coming out.  Has that got a title yet?

Stephanie Thornton: Right now it’s tentatively titled Clever Girl because that was the Russian translation.  Her code name in Russian was Umnitsa.  There are different variations of the translation but the most common one is ‘clever girl’.  That’s what I’m currently working on right now and I’m mulling over some ideas for other novels.

What’s coming next from Stephanie

Jenny Wheeler: So you have one going at a time, and it takes you how long to write usually?

Stephanie Thornton: Each book I look at is at least a two-year commitment.  It usually takes me a year to get it written and then sent off to my editor and then about another year for editing and revising and all of that.  Sometimes they do get overlapped with the book that’s coming either before or after them.  Right now my editor has Clever Girl and I’m coming up with ideas and playing with things for the next one and then I’ll start writing that and she’ll get my revisions back to me.  Then it’ll be a juggling act.

Jenny Wheeler:  Do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you online?

Stephanie Thornton: I definitely love hearing from readers.  Book clubs are a lot of fun.  I’m on Facebook so I have an author page there, Stephanie Thornton.  I’m also on Instagram. I checked Twitter, but I’m not on Twitter quite as much.  The website is stephaniethorntonauthor.com.

Where to Find Stephanie Online

Jenny Wheeler:  When you say you do book clubs, being in Alaska I would guess that you can’t travel too much to attend book clubs. Do you do that by remote or do you actually visit book clubs?

Stephanie Thornton:  Because I’m in Alaska, you’re correct. It’s usually Zoom or Skype, either one, but yes, I’m happy to tune in and chat with book clubs.  It’s a lot of fun to hear readers’ impressions of my stories and get to chat about some behind the scenes things as well.

Jenny Wheeler:  That’s always great to know because maybe the time zones aren’t that friendly, but there could be book clubs in this part of the world that wanted to take part if they could organize a time that was going to work for both of you.  It’s also good to emphasize that we’ll put links to all these things that we’ve talked about in the podcast show notes so that people can click on and find them after this has ended.  Thanks so much, Stephanie for being with us today, it’s been wonderful and all the very best with your writing.

Stephanie Thornton:  Thank you so much for having me. I love chatting about history so this has been wonderful. 

If you enjoyed Stephanie Thornton you might also enjoy Chanel Cleeton’s Cuban timeline fiction or Laura Kamoie’s American Mothers historicals.

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