The end of Camelot — the princess and the first lady
Lee Radziwill, who passed away last week, was both the best friend and the endless competitor of her sister Jackie Onassis. Liadan Hynes tells the story of the last member of a dynasty
ONE-TIME princess, actress, muse, interior designer, fashion PR, art lover, a Truman Capote ‘‘swan’’, and the ultimate doyenne of her family, most of whom she outlived; Jackie Kennedy’s little sister can’t have been an easy moniker to have been lumbered with for Lee Radziwill. Three years apart in age, so intense was the competition between the two sisters according to one biographer that, after Jackie’s death in 1994, Lee had to completely rethink who she was, so utterly had she defined herself against her older sister.
Lee died at home on Friday, February 15 at the age of 85 in her home in New York. She was survived by her daughter, Anna Christina, her son Anthony having died of cancer in 1999, the same year as his cousin, John F Kennedy Junior.
Born Caroline Lee Bouvier, in March 1933, Lee was the youngest child of stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and socialite Janet Lee Bouvier.
Where brunette Jackie was reserved, and naturally athletic, Lee, three years younger, was fair, and “chubby, mischievous, adventurous”, wrote Vanity Fair. According to one Kennedy biographer, their mother was an early instigator of the close, but competitive relationship between the sisters. She would urge them to stick together, before then lavishing attention on Jackie over Lee. Janet is also said to have from an early age taught her daughters that marrying well, by which she meant marrying money, was a priority.
Jackie, seemingly first-lady-in practice from birth, was always a top student, Lee was not so keen. In 2013, she herself told The New York Times Magazine: “My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister.”
When she was seven, Lee ran away from the family home, taking her dog, heading out across the Brooklyn Bridge. The pair didn’t get far. “It’s rather difficult to run away in your mother’s high heels,” she told Gloria Steinem.
The sisters grew up in a 12-room duplex apartment on Park Avenue. Summers were spent on the family estate in East Hampton. Their parents’ marriage was not a happy one. John was a handsome man, said to resemble Clark Gable, known by the nickname Black Joe — a reference both to his deep tan and his womanising. He was also portrayed as a heavy drinker, and a profligate spender. “One thing which infuriates me is how he’s always labelled the drunk black prince,” Lee told the New York Times in 2013. “He was never drunk with me, though I’m sure he sometimes drank, due to my mother’s constant nagging. You would, and I would.”
An adoring father, he encouraged his daughters to be “the best”. But , wrote Vanity Fair, “there could be only one ‘best’.”
Jackie, the image of her handsome father, was an award-winning student, accomplished horsewoman, and renowned beauty.
“Jackie would grow up to be universally regarded as one of the most beautiful and stylish women in the world, but among those who knew both sisters, Lee was seen as being equally — if not even more — beautiful and stylish, with a keener eye for fashion, colour, and design,” commented Vanity Fair.
Lee, though, was in no doubt as to who was her father’s favourite daughter. Jackie. “That was very clear to me, but I didn’t resent it, because I understood he had reason to… she was not only named after him… but she actually looked almost exactly like him, which was a source of great pride to my father,” she wrote in her memoir, Happy Times.
Their parents divorced when Lee was seven, Jackie 10; their mother remarried soon after, to investment banker Hugh D Auchincloss. The girls moved with their mother and stepfather “Uncle Hughdie” to Virginia, into a new stepfamily of four siblings. Friends from those days describe the sisters as being like orphans — slightly lost, now that they were no longer the main focus of their mother’s attention. It was this sense of isolation that seems to have bonded the two sisters.
Meanwhile their father had moved to a one-bedroom apartment in New York; when the girls visited the dining room was turned into their bedroom. It left the sisters with a lifelong financial fragility.
As the Bouvier girls, who both spoke in that similar, distinctive whispering manner, became teenagers, their styles developed individually. Lee was the more flamboyant and the more popular with boys. To Jackie’s coming-out party she wore a bright pink strapless dress covered in rhinestones — an attempt, some speculated, to upstage her sister. Those who knew Lee often speak of her possessing a femininity unlike anything they’d ever witnessed.
In the summer of 1951, having graduated from high school, Lee went with her sister Jackie on a tour of Europe, equipped with introductions from their well-connected stepfather to high society and ambassadors.
‘My mother told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister’
On board their liner, they snuck into first-class dinners. Being introduced to an ambassador at a dinner, Lee’s underwear fell down. “It was the first time we felt really close, carefree together, high on the sheer joy of getting away from our mother; the deadly dinner parties of political bores, the Sunday lunches for the same people that lasted hours, Jackie and I not allowed to say a word,” Lee told the New York Times. The sisters would later publish a memoir of the trip.
Back home, Lee enrolled in college, but after three terms she dropped out. She went to Harper’s Bazaar, working with the legendary Diana Vreeland. In April 1953, then 20, she married the book-publishing heir Michael Temple Canfield.
“I was very young when we met, and he was so good-looking and clever. I wanted so badly to get away from my mother, and he seemed to offer everything... looks, privilege, friends, fun,” Lee said.
The original marital home was a penthouse in New York; the couple soon after moved to London, where Lee’s new husband was employed as the special assistant to the American ambassador.
Back home, Jackie had married John F Kennedy. In London, Lee’s marriage was following the unhappy pattern of her parents. Canfield was a drinker. Money was said to be an issue; Canfield’s income was not sufficient for the life to which his wife was accustomed. But it was her affair with the Polish prince Stanislaw Radziwill which proved the real breaking point of their marriage.
Lee and her new husband Stanislaw Radziwill had one son, Anthony, in the first year of marriage. “The marriage allowed Lee to flourish in a much grander style,” Vanity Fair records. She got the title Princess Lee. There was a house near Buckingham Palace, and a 50-acre estate near London, the decoration of which Lee, a lifelong interiors enthusiast, relished. Being married to Stas was, she has said, the happiest time of her life.
Lee was only in her late 20s, Jackie was just 31, when JFK was inaugurated. “How can I compete with that?” Lee is reported to have said. She and her husband did not attend the ceremony. The ostensible reason was that having given birth to a daughter, Anna Christina Radziwill, prematurely some months before, both mother and daughter’s health was a matter of concern.
Despite this false start, Jackie’s time in the White House is said to have strengthened the bond between the two sisters. It would be understandable if the elder Bouvier felt particularly in need of the trusted companionship only her sister could provide. She often travelled with Jackie during her time as First Lady. Lee has never commented on the philandering of her brother-in-law, whom she once described as having “a dazzling personality”.
The sisters shared an interest in fashion, Lee, the most daring, was the first to wear French couture designers. It was she who helped put together Jackie’s wardrobe for her famous trip to Paris in 1961.
Unbeknownst to the public, Lee’s marriage to Stas, another philanderer, was falling apart. Aristotle Onassis is most famously Jackie’s paramour, but it was the younger sister, Lee, who first enjoyed a romantic attachment with the Greek shipping tycoon. Lee’s husband seems to have treated the affair with equanimity, accepting a directorship of Olympic Airways, a company owned by Onassis.
The brothers Kennedy, however, were a different matter. Jack and Bobby were outraged by the affair. As an attempt at distraction, Lee was invited on Jack’s trip to Germany, instead of her sister, who was then heavily pregnant, where he made his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech. “It was the most thrilling experience of my life,” Lee later recalled.
It was Lee who first introduced her older sister to Aristotle. When Jackie lost her baby, Patrick, 39 hours after his birth, in August 1963, Lee left the Onassis cruise ship to fly to the Boston funeral, afterwards taking her sister back to the yacht, the Christina.
1963 was also the year Jack was assassinated, in November. When she found out, Lee said, she started crying uncontrollably, telling a journalist in 2013 that she had never cried since. Flying immediately to her sister’s side, she stayed with her in the White House after the funeral. To all appearances the dedicated sister, she did, according to Vanity Fair, afterwards confide to Cecil Beaton that she “had gone through hell” trying to help Jackie: “She’s really more than half round the bend! She can’t sleep at night, she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself!” Jackie is even said to have slapped Lee in the face, with the younger sister telling Beaton that Jackie was jealous of her.
Where Jackie would be forever defined by her years in the White House as the careful curator of the Camelot myth, for Lee the death
of her brother-in-law was to some extent an invitation to break free. Against her husband’s Stanislaw’s urging, in cahoots with her new friend Truman Capote, whom she said had fallen in love with her — “a remarkable girl,” he called her — she decided to take to the stage, playing the role of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story.
The costumes, by Yves Saint Laurent, seem to have been the most exciting thing about Lee’s performance, which is said to have been frozen. Life magazine put her on their cover, though, and her old boss Diana Vreeland ran a huge fashion spread starring Lee. Stas put an end to this new career, threatening that he would not let her see the children if she accepted further acting roles.
It was after the murder of her brother-in-law Robert that Jackie, said to be scared for the safety of her own children, married Onassis. Reports have it that she did not tell her sister about their secret engage- ment. Lee, who was said to have been heartbroken, later stated that it was Onassis who had told her, inviting her to the wedding. She is reported to have said to Capote: “How could she do this to me?” Though Lee did attend the wedding.
Lee and Capote later fell out when she sided with Gore Vidal in an argument. Capote then began to leak details of her love life.
Although Onassis soon grew apart from his new wife, the relationship between him and Lee was over. She had moved on to a friend of her sister’s, the photographer Peter Beard. Living together in Lee’s Manhattan apartment, Beard introduced her to Andy Warhol’s scene. Rudolf Nureyev and Leonard Bernstein were also friends. She featured on the cover of the magazine Interview, went with Beard on tour with the Rolling Stones. There was an interior-design business and a pilot for a talk show Conversations with Lee Radziwill. A documentary which started out about her childhood in the Hamptons became the famous documentary Grey Gardens, about her aunt and cousin Big Edie and Little Edie. It was Lee, friends said, who led the mission to rescue the pair, although Jackie was the one who got the credit.
In 1974, Lee and Stas finally divorced. The following year, Onassis died. Stas Radziwill would die bankrupt in 1976, leaving his children nothing. The Bouvier sisters’ stepfather, Hugh D Auchincloss, died later the same year, also virtually penniless. In the late 1970s, Lee nearly married millionaire hotelier Newton Cope, but he was said to have been put off when her sister insisted he sign a pre-nup.
As the 1980s progressed, unlike her wealthy sister, Lee’s finances suffered, and she was forced to sell her duplex, eventually moving to rented accommodation. Marriage to Herbert Ross, the director of films such as Footloose and Steel Magno- lias, helped matters. Jackie died of cancer in May 1994. Some reports have it that the sisters had gone years without seeing each other before her death. There are suggestions that Lee suffered with depression and alcoholism in this time.
The sisters reconnected, several months before Jackie died. Lee, at her bedside, was devastated. Shockingly though, Jackie, who remembered family, friends and those she had employed, in her will, left her sister nothing.
Her marriage to Ross over, Lee spent her later years between New York and Paris. Friends included Marc Jacobs, Sophia Coppola and Carolina Herrera. She no longer enjoyed going to the movies; no romance or mystery, and the ballet or the theatre were a chore. “They go through your handbag looking for bombs.” she told Vanity Fair, adding that “I feel like I’m in my own world, in the world but not a part of it.”