A FOND ADIEU TO LEE
Jackie’s little sister Radziwill is dead at 85
Lee Radziwill, 85, the younger sister of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has died.
Radziwill, a beauty who worked as a public-relations executive and specialevents coordinator for fashion icon Giorgio Armani, passed away Friday in New York, Women’s Wear Daily reported.
She had been suffering from “age-related’’ diseases, the trade journal said.
She had tried out two other careers before joining Armani’s company.
Her pal Truman Capote (below with Lee in their heyday) pushed her to play the title role in a TV remake of the film-noir classic “Laura,’’ as well as other films. But the critics kept trashing her performances.
Then she worked a short stint as an interior designer. She was more successful at that. But she was best known and remembered for her work with Armani.
The Italian designer, 84, recalled Saturday: “She was an extremely elegant woman. When I met her in the early ’80s, I had the impression that she represented a very contemporary irony about American aristocracy, which is almost impossible to define.
“It is one that combined ease and sophistication, spontaneity and respect for the rules.”
She was born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933, to Janet Norton Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III, a stockbroker known variously as “Black Jack” and “the Black Orchid.” That was partly because of his dark tan but mainly for being “mad, bad and dangerous to know,’’ said Women’s Wear Daily.
Her dad’s fortunes plummeted along with the stock market in 1929.
Radziwill’s parents eventually divorced, and her mother went on to marry Hugh Auchincloss, heir to the Standard Oil fortune.
In the biography “America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,’’ author Sarah Bradford quotes Radziwill as sayinging that she loved to go to thee oil mogul’s farm in Virginia and that he had named two of his cows after her and Jackie.
Radziwill wass married three times. No. 1 was to publishing exec Michael Canfield, whom she married in 1953, a few months before her older sister wed then-Sen. John F. Kennedy. Polish aristocrat Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill was No. 2, in 1959, and film director Herb Ross No. 3, in 1988. All three marriages ended in divorce or annulment. Lee and Jackie apparently were not able to spend much time together, but Radziwill fondly recalls in their book, “One Special Summer,’’ her travels with her sister through Europe in 1951. “We were so young,” she writes. “It was the first time we felt really close, carefree together, high on the sheer joy oof 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 were not allowed to say a word.”
The book quotes Radziwill laughingly discussing the day when “all her underwear” fell down when she was being introduced to an ambassador.
While married to Canfeld, she had an affair with Stas Radziwill, and they later married, bestowing on her the title of “princess.” The real-estate mogul was 19 years older than her.
She said she “never learned so much from anyone else in her life.”
After her marriage to Ross ended, she dated — but did not marry — a wealthy lawyer named Peter Tufo, and wealthy real-estate investor Newton Cope.
She had a son and a daughter with Stas. Her daughter-in-law Carole Radziwill is a journalist and a former star of “The Real Housewives of New York.”
Despite her husbands’ wealth, Radziwill was often profligate with money. Later in life, she ended up having to sell her Fifth Avenue penthouse.
It turned out she was just as unlucky in finance as she was in love. The sale took place just before New York’s real-estate values went through the roof.