Sisters who shared everything – even husbands
Jackie O’s younger sister Lee Radziwill — who has died at 85 — was America’s ‘Princess Margaret’. She had affairs with Aristotle Onassis, Rudolf Nureyev and (gossips claimed) even JFK. But she never escaped the shadow of the former First Lady...
‘Do you know the secret to happily ever after? Money and power’
SIBLING rivalry can sour any family, but being forever known as the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis proved a lifelong burden for Lee Radziwill. The two American society beauties started out battling for the favour of their exacting, social-climbing mother and later took their competitiveness on to an altogether grander stage as they fought over the world’s richest and most famous men.
They included the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and even, it is said, John F. Kennedy himself.
‘How can I compete with that?’ exclaimed Lee in horror when her sister became America’s First Lady — and she was right.
Mrs Radziwill — or Princess Radziwill as she insisted on being known after marrying a Polish emigre nobleman — had to be content with being the ‘pretty one’ and her sister the ‘smart one’.
Even if they were two of the most glamorous women of their generation, that distinction always rankled.
‘You’re just like me — you have to walk three steps behind,’ Prince Philip once observed when he sat next to Lee at a private dinner at Buckingham Palace.
However, as Lee went on to surround herself with a coterie of actors, dancers and writers — many of whom she would be romantically linked with — a comparison to Princess Margaret might have been more apt.
She at least managed to trump her older sister, who died in 1994, in longevity. Mrs Radziwill’s death in New York aged 85, which was announced at the weekend, signals the end of an era of jet-set glamour that has never quite been surpassed.
The two impeccably elegant, perfectly poised and impossibly entitled sisters who embodied it were — in the words of the writer Truman Capote, who knew them well — ‘American geishas’ who existed only to captivate the men who crossed their path.
It was, of course, always going to be a challenge living in the shadow of a woman like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, at one stage the world’s most famous woman. And her sister could have certainly steered a more independent course through life.
However, they were both, to a large extent, products of an upbringing that had drilled into them the importance of social climbing, strategic marriages and a ruthlessly mercenary outlook on life. ‘Do you know what the secret to happily-ever-after’ is?’ their hard-nosed mother, Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, once asked her two girls. ‘Money and power,’ she told them.
Both sisters were Debutantes of the Year and their father, the glamorous and hard-drinking stockbroker Jack Bouvier, would take them to casinos and race tracks, so they could observe the tawdry side of men. They must banish any romantic ideals and play hard-to-get, he told them.
Janet was just 21 when she divorced Bouvier over his philandering. She had struggled to bring up the girls in the rarefied style she wanted until her second marriage to the wealthy Hugh Auchincloss, and was determined they should never want for money themselves.
‘Both sisters could abide infidelities, but not insolvency,’ is how one recent book on them put it.
Suitors found financially wanting were ruthlessly dispatched.
Lee was more rebellious and insisted — at least initially — she would marry for love not money. She was just 19 when she married publishing executive Michael Canfield, who was believed by royal watchers to have been the illegimate brother of Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, the Duke of Kent. They moved to London in 1955 where they had a house in Belgravia with two servants.
When the romance began to pall and Lee made it clear he didn’t have the money to finance her lavish lifestyle, Mr Canfield turned to his sister-in-law Jackie for advice.
‘The best thing is for you to get her some real money,’ she told him, according to biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli. When he countered that they lived perfectly well already, she said: ‘I mean real money, Michael.’
Lee worked her way into London society and was rumoured to have had a fling with the Duke of Beaufort. Her marriage stumbled to a close and she blamed it on Canfield’s drinking, but money — his lack of it — was the real cause.
Aged 23, she started having an affair with the dashing and wealthy Polish prince, Stanislaw Radziwill, then 44. It was left to Lee’s formidable mother to give Canfield the boot while they were staying with her in America.
‘He’s gone, Lee. I took care of it,’ she told her daughter the next morning. Lee didn’t ask any questions.
She married Radziwill and embraced life between their two palatial homes — one behind Buckingham Palace and the other, Turville Grange, in the Chilterns, north west of London.
An embittered Canfield later alleged Lee had once boasted to him of having sex with JFK (who had married Jackie in 1953) while the two couples were on holiday together.
Nina Vidal, sister of the writer Gore Vidal (related by marriage to Jackie and Lee), claimed Lee made a similar admission to her, saying the tryst occurred while Lee was staying with the Kennedys after Jackie gave birth to her daughter Caroline.
Lee reportedly left her bedroom door open so Canfield could hear her and JFK making love.
True or not, this shocking story certainly did the rounds in London and in Washington DC, and Jackie would have heard about it — possibly fuelling the sisters’ increasingly uneasy relationship.
This peaked with what Lee would
‘They could take infidelities, but not insolvency’
‘We’ll always be sisters but we were friends once’
feel was the ultimate betrayal. Bored in her marriage to Radziwill, with whom she had a son and a daughter (he gave up his title when he became a British citizen, although she insisted the media still address her as ‘princess’), she started having an affair with tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1962.
One of the world’s richest men and a notorious womaniser, Onassis was 27 years older and having a long-running affair with the opera singer Maria Callas.
He told friends he was attracted to Lee because she was a ‘sad and lonely little creature’. She in turn was attracted by his vast wealth.
By now, she was the sort of woman who had her maid follow her into the lavatory to drop gardenias into the bowl every time she used it. The affair revitalised her, however Lee made the fatal mistake of inviting her sister to join her and her lover on his yacht in 1963.
Jackie had lost her third child, Patrick, shortly after birth and was in a deep depression, trapped in the White House and feeling unsupported by her husband.
Onassis was instantly smitten with the First Lady and, say friends, started moving in on her even as he continued his affair with her sister.
Later, after JFK’s assassination, Lee was mortified when Onassis and Jackie married in 1968, the hard-headed bride insisting he first sign a lucrative pre-nuptial agreement.
Lee — who attended the wedding on Onassis’s private island of Skorpios — was upset and furious not only because she had told friends she ‘deserved’ Onassis, but because she had turned down his marriage proposal in order not to embarrass her sister in the White House, as Onassis was viewed as disreputable.
Their mother Janet was among many who were convinced the siblings never got over their rivalry for Onassis.
Lee, still married to Radziwill, embarked on another affair, this time with an impoverished young artist and photographer named Peter Beard.
She and her mother were being driven to the theatre in London’s West End when she announced she had finally found a man she loved. Furious that her daughter could be so financially irresponsible, Janet threw Lee out of their car in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
Lee finally divorced Radziwill in 1974 to be with Beard — but then discovered he was having an affair with a model. When she did try to marry again, five years later, it was once more for money.
Newton Cope was a super-rich property heir, but — just an hour before their wedding ceremony — he refused to agree at Jackie and Janet’s insistence to guarantee Lee a huge $20,000 a month in maintenance. Lee went on to be romantically linked with a string of famous men, including the comic Peter Cook, politician Roy Jenkins and Mark Shand, brother of Camilla Parker Bowles.
A sometime camp follower of the Rolling Stones on tour, she was also rumoured to have had a fling with Mick Jagger.
A recent biography claimed both sisters fell madly in love with Rudolf Nureyev and liked to be seen on his arm. It was Lee, however, who managed to have an affair with the dancer even though he was ‘99 and a half per cent homosexual’.
For all their rivalries, Lee and Jackie retained a closeness for much of their lives. Lee hosted the Kennedys when they visited London and joined them on holiday. In 1962, she spent a month with Jackie on a tour of Italy, India and Pakistan. The siblings were famously photographed sitting on a elephant in Karachi.
The Radziwills were staying with the Kennedys when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in October 1962. Lee later said the four of them hardly slept for 13 days.
When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lee rushed over from London to support her grief-crazed sister. She pinned a note to Jackie’s pillow, expressing her love and admiration for her.
They grew apart in later life as each tried to forge careers — Jackie in publishing and Lee in a succession of creative endeavours that were unsuccessful. She had befriended an arty, creative set that included Andy Warhol, dancer Margot Fonteyn, designer Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote.
They encouraged her to try out acting, but her theatrical debut in Chicago was disastrous, with the Chicago Tribune declaring: ‘A new star is not born.’
Capote persuaded a Hollywood friend to put her on screen and the resulting 1968 film, Laura, was also an embarrassing flop.
An interior design career was barely much more successful, ditto her attempt to become a writer. Lee later complained that ‘whatever I did, or tried to do, got disproportionate coverage purely because of Jackie being my sister’.
Their relationship became more estranged as their financial circumstances diverged. Jackie received a $26 million settlement from Onassis, who died in 1975, while Lee got nothing from him. She struggled financially, became addicted to vodka and moved to ever smaller rented flats.
Jackie became their ailing mother’s devoted caregiver and was angry to learn Janet had given Lee $650,000 to make up for favouring Jackie as a child.
In 1988, Lee married Herbert Ross, a film director, but she hated Hollywood and was dismayed to discover he still harboured an obsession with his ballerina ex-wife. They divorced in 2001 and she continued to use the name Radziwill.
In her later years, reflecting on her relationship with Jackie, Lee observed: ‘We’ll always be sisters, but we were friends once, too.’
When Jackie died of cancer in 1994, Lee wasn’t invited to speak or read at the funeral. In her will, Jackie left substantial bequests to family members, including $500,000 each to Lee’s two adult children. Lee got nothing — her sister said she had given her enough already.