John T. Sargent Sr., a publisher, editor and socialite who as chief executive of Doubleday worked with authors from Dwight Eisenhower to Stephen King and helped recruit his friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an editor, died Feb. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Doubleday’s parent company, Random House, announced the death. Mr. Sargent’s son, Macmillan chief executive John Sargent Jr., said his father had been in frail condition in recent years after suffering a stroke.
John Turner Sargent was born June 26, 1924, and raised in an affluent household in New York.
He started in the mid-1940s at Doubleday as a copywriter after being discharged from the Navy at the end of World War II and remained with the company for 40 years, serving as chairman and chief executive from 1963 to 1978.
Doubleday was very much a family business for Mr. Sargent; his first wife, Neltje Doubleday, was the sister of Nelson Doubleday III, grandson of the company’s founder. (The marriage ended in divorce.)
Mr. Sargent was known as a serious and eclectic thinker and an accomplished reveler who dined out most nights and was equally comfortable with authors, movie stars or socialites. John Sargent Jr. remembered his father’s annual “singles only” Christmas Eve parties, co-hosted with actress Joan Fontaine.
“A Salvation Army band would play at midnight and everybody would sing Christmas carols,” he said. “And you had to be single. There was no flexibility in that rule.”
According to the publishing history “The Time of Their Lives,” by Al Silverman, Doubleday during Mr. Sargent’s time operated under the principle MBP (Management By Party). Gay Talese, whose book “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” was published by Doubleday, remembered attending editorial meetings and watching everyone “get smashed.”
“Many of the editors and senior executives were big drinkers,” Talese told the Associated Press. “You’d go up this spiral staircase, into this private apartment, and the meetings were like a fraternity party that went out of hand. And John, elegant as he was, held his liquor with the best of them.”
Mr. Sargent edited award-winning poetry by Theodore Roethke and published such bestsellers as King’s “Carrie” (although the book was far more popular as a paperback released by the New American Library), Leon Uris’s “QB VII,” Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” and Alex Haley’s “Roots.” He also presided over Doubleday’s network of radio stations, book clubs and bookstores.
A notable addition to Doubleday came through his friendship with Onassis, who in the mid-1970s had resigned as an editor with Viking after the publisher purchased a novel that imagined an assassination plot against her former brother-in-law, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).
She soon joined Doubleday, where her authors included Harlem Renaissance novelist Dorothy West and Michael Jackson, who signed with the publisher for his memoir “Moonwalk.”
Mr. Sargent also served on numerous boards, including the New York Public Library, working with his friend Brooke Astor, the socialite and philanthropist; the New York City Arts Commission; and the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society).
Survivors include his wife, Betty Nichols Sargent; two children from his first marriage; two stepchildren; and six grandchildren.
— Associated Press
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