A story of American ‘royalty’
The writer Nancy Mitford, one of six daughters, once said that sisters “stand between one and life’s cruel circumstances.” To which the younger Jessica Mitford replied that sisters were life’s cruel circumstances. By the end of Jackie, Janet & Lee, with its riveting exposition of the relationship between the two Bouvier sisters — who became Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Lee Radziwill — one tends to take Jessica’s side.
Nancy herself was often the Lee figure of the Mitford household: A bright and stylish woman who would have been the star of almost any family on earth. She was constantly confronted by the figure of her sister Diana, a political extremist who possessed an otherworldly power of commanding idolatry. All her life, Nancy was jealous of Diana, partly for her beauty but more for the indomitable and rare self-control that enabled Diana to remain sphinxlike, serene and supremely herself no matter what befell her.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had that same defining quality. J Randy Taraborrelli presents a woman of passion, both sexual and emotional, whose facade somehow always remains in place. It is strange, in an age of female sound and fury, this enduring fixation on a near-silent woman who put forth the decorous veneer of an aristocratic hostess. But the magic of Jackie’s aura is imperishable to this day, which explains why Taraborrelli has written a third book with this one woman’s mystery at its heart.
In Taraborrelli’s account, one gets a sense of Lee’s life as a series of reactions against her sister, a hectic parade of attention-seeking antics: Three marriages (the second to Prince Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill); and brief brushes against the worlds of fashion, acting, writing. Then there were the high-profile affairs, the most infamous being the one with the Greek millionaire magnate Aristotle Onassis, who from the early 1960s had set his eye on the greater prize, Lee’s American royal-sister. Of course, Jackie herself engaged in many of the same behaviours, but to entirely different effect.
Taraborrelli is highly effective at describing this sisterly dynamic — the bond that tensed at the least provocation; the never-fully-sincere exchanges of “I love you”; even, at the height of some ghastly adult trauma, uneasy relapses into games of “You’re it.” The material, most of which will inevitably be familiar to many readers, is newly enhanced by telling, gossipy details from a satisfying bundle of interviews. The sisters’ half-brother, Jamie Auchincloss, who became persona non grata after he spoke to the author Kitty Kelley about Jackie circa 1977, provides a running commentary that portrays a society whose tastefully presented aim is to keep its chalice of wealth and privilege filled to the brim. “Money is power,” as Jackie once said to Jack Warnecke, the lover she took after Kennedy’s death — the architect who designed the gravesite memorial at Arlington, and whom she later left for the unassailably rich Onassis.
For all the sisters’ dramatics, the true star of this particular show is decidedly neither the directionless Lee nor the determined Jackie. It is, in fact, the third figure in the book: Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, their diet-pill-popping “Mummy,” hostess of the “mother-daughter teas” to which she was still inviting her girls as they approached 40. Descended from Irish Catholics, just like the Kennedys, whom she regarded with a hauteur only leavened with a respect for their money, Janet claimed kinship with the English upper class broadly, and even a specific relation to the lineage of Robert E Lee.
The well-to-do mother had a taste for thrillingly bracing aphorisms: “Weakness isn’t something you’re born with. … You learn it.” When Jackie began to host teas during Jack’s presidential campaign: “Perfect strangers in the home sitting on your antique furniture?. … It is a new world, isn’t it?” Less comically, when Jackie was still in a trance of post-traumatic stress disorder in mid-1964: “We’ve all lost Jack, but it’s been eight months! You have to snap out of it.”
This astonishing matriarch — who married the sexy “Black Jack” Bouvier and then the impotent Hugh Auchincloss; who impregnated herself with Hugh’s sperm (using a spoon to do so, in his stepson Gore Vidal’s account) and thus conceived two children — is by no means unknown, although Taraborrelli brings her to splendid renewed life. His trick of turning incidents into highly coloured tableaus threaded with dialogue makes excellent use of well-trodden material.
Janet wanted her girls to marry rich men who would also treat them as ladies, as her own beloved Jack had failed to do. She boldly confronted Onassis over his lack of commitment to Lee, and advocated divorce when Kennedy remained on a Mediterranean cruise after learning that Jackie had lost their first baby, Arabella. By today’s reckoning, Janet was a monster of a mother; but Taraborrelli paints her with a kind of superb pathos. These women dealt in surfaces, but that doesn’t mean they lacked depth. They made no achievements by any modern standard, but this deliciously readable book is not in the business of judging: It knows its value better than that.