Inventing and living a fairy tale
KARL Lagerfeld and Lee Radziwill died within two days of each other, each at age 85, and such proximity seems apt. Both were icons not just of fashion but a kind of glamour that no longer exists: remote, aspirational and entirely self-mythologized.
Lagerfeld hid his real birth date for most of his life and claimed his parents had been wealthy aristocrats. He would say he had a personal butler at age 4, a French tutor at age 5, and a childhood spent in a castle.
Likewise, Radziwill, along with sister Jackie, fabricated much of her origin story. Both claimed to be descendants of French aristocrats, when, in fact, they were more working-class Irish Catholic than anything — at least half Irish and just one-eighth French. Among their ancestors were a maid and a cabinetmaker.
Their father was a drunk, a womanizer and a gambler who squandered the family’s modest fortune — a man who was so status-obsessed, he bought a custombuilt car during the worst of the Depression. And status was perhaps the only thing he had in common with his wife, Janet, who soon divorced him, remarried a wealthy broker and raised her girls with one decree above all others: Marry for money and status, not love. She taught them how to act as though they were to the manor born, and both girls, native Long Islanders, emerged with curious lifelong, haughty-yet-geographically indeterminate accents.
Radziwill spent her entire life jealous and resentful of her sister, Jackie, but it was Jackie’s marriage to John F. Kennedy that propelled Lee into the highest echelons, allowing her to ditch her disappointing first husband for a dispossessed prince with a meaningless title.
Nonetheless, Lee would use the honorific “Princess” without hesitation for much of her life — and the media bought into it. Even when she made the mistake of courting the filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, who wound up filming the documentary “Grey Gardens” about her mentally ill hoarder relatives, Radziwill maintained her mask of peerless sophistication.
Lagerfeld, too, remained imperious when the mask slipped. In 2007, his true past was revealed in “The Beautiful Fall,” a dual biography of Lagerfeld and his great rival Yves Saint-Laurent. Author Alicia Drake wrote that Lagerfeld actually grew up in a four-bedroom home in a grim German suburb, raised not by a mother of noble birth but by a retailer peddling ladies’ undergarments. During World War II, Drake wrote, the family suffered such severe deprivation that at times, Lagerfeld would have one slice of bread each day.
Lagerfeld was so enraged that he h wrote a scathing hi letter l to Drake and took her to court in France, suing for invasion of privacy. He lost. Perhaps no headline summed up Lagerfeld’s humiliation better than The Telegraph, in 2006:
“Call me what you like, insists Lagerfeld, but I was never middle class.”
Self-invention like this — not just creative but, it seems, somehow necessary for both of these icons to survive, to rise above their complicated familial relationships and become the embodiments of what they willed themselves to be — dies with them. We now reveal too much on social media, will parlay any embarrassment into cheap fame, and have confused vulgarity for relatability.
For proof, look no further than Radziwill’s own daughter-in-law Carole, who in 2011 became, even for the Kennedy-adjacent, the unthinkable: A “Real Housewife of New York” who now sells sex toys online.
There truly is much to mourn.