Sister of Jackie Kennedy dead at 85
NEW YORK – Lee Radziwill, the stylish jet setter and socialite who found friends, lovers and other adventures worldwide while bonding and competing with her sister Jacqueline Kennedy, has died. She was 85.
Anna Christina Radziwill told The New York Times her mother died Friday of what she described as natural causes. The Associated Press left messages Saturday and Sunday for the family.
The husky-voiced Radziwill shared her older sister’s affinity for fashion and globe-trotting, as well as her dark, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones. They were confidantes as young women, and Radziwill was a frequent guest at the White House during President John F. Kennedy’s administration. She was with the president when he made a trip to London in 1961, and Kennedy was godfather to Radziwill’s daughter, Anna Christina.
The Kennedys and Radziwills spent Christmases together in Palm Beach, Florida, and the sisters travelled to India and Pakistan. Radziwill helped select the wardrobe for what became one of Jackie’s signature moments - her trip to Paris with her husband in 1961.
“She had to travel a lot and liked to have me with her,” Radziwill wrote in “Happy Times,” a memoir published in 2001, seven years after her sister’s death. “Apart from mutual affection, I think our strongest bond was a shared sense of humour.”
But tensions emerged after Kennedy’s assassination, in 1963.
Radziwill had worried that her brother-in-law’s ascent would overshadow her and told Gloria Steinem for a Mccall’s magazine interview that her life during the JFK years was “so limited, so . jet-set, empty, cold, and not true.”
In 1968, Jackie wed the Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, whom Lee herself had once thought of marrying, only to have her sister urge her not to. Friends would say Radziwill felt betrayed and never entirely forgave Jackie.
Born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933, in New York City, she was the second daughter of John V. Bouvier III and Janet Norton Lee. They divorced in 1940. She attended Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence College, and was introduced to society in 1950.
Her first marriage was to Michael Canfield in 1953. The marriage ended in divorce and was later annulled. Canfield died in 1969.
She married Radziwill, a descendent of Polish royalty who became an English subject, in 1959. They divorced in 1974. He died nearly two years later.