Forever defined by rivalry with her sister
socialite/interior designer b March 3, 1933 d February 15, 2019
She married a Polish prince, had affairs with a British cabinet minister and a duke, went on tour with the Rolling Stones and became an interior decorator to the super-rich, but Lee Radziwill’s life was largely defined by her relationship with her sister, Jackie Onassis.
Sharing the same breathy, almost whispery voice and smile, they looked alike in profile. Lee was thought by many to be the greater beauty, but she was reported to have said that she often felt ‘‘ugly’’ in comparison with Jackie.
Witty and sociable, she seemed warmer and less aloof than her sister, who was four years older. Their relationship was often fraught. The writer Gore Vidal, who had family ties with them, once waspishly declared: ‘‘Jackie’s relationship with Lee was very much S&M, with Jackie doing the S and Lee the M.’’
Jealousy of her sister was said to have spurred Lee into marrying the first of her three husbands, weeks before Jackie married John F Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lee flew immediately from her London home to Washington to console her sister.
But Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis in 1968 allegedly caused a rift between the sisters: the press had long linked his name to Lee’s, something she denied. What is certain is that Onassis had invited Jackie to recover on his yacht after the death of her newborn child, Patrick, in August 1963. Lee and her husband accompanied them on a cruise.
Her rift with Jackie never healed. Onassis left her younger sister nothing in her will, which was made public shortly after she died of cancer in 1994. Onassis said she had ‘‘great affection’’ for her sister, but that she made no provision for her ‘‘because I have already done so in my lifetime’’.
Caroline Lee Bouvier was born in New York to Janet Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III, a Wall Street broker who bore the nickname ‘‘Black Jack’’. Although her grandparents were of modest, mainly Irish stock, her parents were wealthy. They divorced when Lee was seven.
Lee was overshadowed throughout childhood by Jackie, intellectually and in popularity. Jackie’s biographer Sarah Bradford described the siblings’ relationship as ‘‘a mixture of closeness and intense rivalry, protectiveness and the desire to dominate, jealousy and interdependence’’.
At the age of 18, Lee wrote One Special Summer, a memoir of a tour to Europe with Jackie. On their return she met publisher Michael Canfield, who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Prince George, Duke of Kent. They married in 1953, settling in London, where Canfield was private secretary to the US ambassador.
It was not a happy marriage. Within 12 months, Lee was taking lovers. In 2001 the Daily Mail quoted Canfield, who died in 1969: ‘‘When I came home from work, I never knew whose hat I would find hanging on the peg downstairs.’’ When Jackie came to stay, Canfield asked her how to make Lee happy. ‘‘Get more money,’’ was the crisp reply.
There were alleged affairs with Roy Jenkins, who was chancellor of the exchequer, and the comedian Peter Cook. She was inseparable from Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer, and claimed to have slept with him.
Stanislas Radziwill, the Polish prince, was one of her many suitors. ‘‘I think your wife is delicious,’’ he told Canfield, ‘‘and I am pursuing her.’’ She was afraid of him until he put on a frilly pink dress during a game of charades.
In 1959 – the year she and Canfield were divorced – she became pregnant and married Radziwill, 20 years her senior, who had made a fortune in property. Their 15-year union proved the happiest of her three marriages. They lived in Oxfordshire and had two children, Anthony and Tina.
Christmases and summers were spent with Jackie. The sisters dazzled, be it at a dinner hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, or on their tour of India, hosted by Nehru, in 1962 – just the two sisters and 64 pieces of luggage. Andy Warhol dubbed them ‘‘the best sister act in town’’.
By 1963, however, the Radziwills had drifted apart, and in 1974 they divorced. She returned to America, taking Tina with her but leaving Anthony with his father.
In 1976 she finally found her metier as an interior designer of sumptuous hotels and the apartments of the mega-rich. This led to her meeting Newton Cope, a millionaire hotelier. A wedding planned for 1979 was cancelled by Cope after a quarrel with Jackie’s lawyer, who tried to compel him to sign a prenuptial agreement guaranteeing Radziwill US$15,000 a month.
In 1988 she married Herbert Ross, the film director. They separated in 2001, in part due to her hatred of Hollywood.
She confessed to Nicky Haslam, the interior designer, that after sobbing for hours on receipt of the news of Kennedy’s assassination, she never cried again, despite her sister’s death in 1994 and Anthony’s death in 1999 from cancer.
‘‘I was always aware that I’ve had a special and privileged life, yet it has been balanced by tragedy as it has been for so many others,’’ she once wrote. ‘‘I believe that without memories there is no life, and that our memories should be of happy times. That’s my choice.’’ – The Times