Family photo albums of the sixties’ most famous sisters
Photograph albums belonging to a New Yorker who took a few trips abroad with her elder sister in the early Sixties are expected to draw crowds to Christie’s in New York before they are auctioned on Friday.
Lee Radziwill was often said to be more striking than her sibling, with a sharper sense of style, but it was Jacqueline Kennedy who was the most famous woman on the planet at the time. Even President John Kennedy felt obliged to declare during a trip with his wife to France in 1961 that he was merely ‘‘the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris’’.
Radziwill, whose second husband was a Polish nobleman, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, died in February at the age of 85. She left a home in Manhattan filled with art, antiques, jewellery and photographs, which are to be auctioned.
An album chronicling the sisters’ semi-official trip to India, on which they were accompanied by the US ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, was compiled by the Indian government. It is expected to sell for up to US$60,000 (NZ$95,000) and shows them at a succession of dinners and events, on one occasion seated on either side of Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister – later described by Radziwill as ‘‘the most fascinating, gentle and sensual man I ever met’’. They had been welcomed at the airport in Delhi with a red carpet that was rolled out across the runway, and by 100,000 people who lined the route into the capital.
The sisters received a similar response in Pakistan. – The Times