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Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee were so jealous, they competed over EVERYTHING: clothes, jewels money, husbands . . . even lovers
BOOK OF THE WEEK THE FABULOUS BOUVIER SISTERS: S: THE TRAGIC AND GLAMOROUS LIVES OF JACKIE AND LEE by sam Kashner and Nancy schoenberger (Harper £20, 336 pp) YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
With her chic apartment on East 72nd Street in Manhattan, dressed in black, smoking Vogue cigarettes and still hosting elegant low- calorie lunches served by her loyal maid therese, Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s whippet-thin younger sister Lee Radziwill is alive and well.
the only thing from which this elegant, gant thrice-divorced 85-year-old is finding it difficult to recover is having been the younger sister of a global icon — and, what’s more, the sister of a global icon who didn’t leave her a cent.
When Jackie died of cancer aged 64 in 1994, Lee (born in 1933, four years after Jackie) discovered that, in her 38-page will, Jackie had left substantial bequests to family members, friends and employees, including $500,000 each to Lee’s two adult children — but nothing to her.
She claimed this was because she had provided for Lee during her lifetime — but was it, in fact, the ultimate snub to punish her for sharing too many of her lovers?
‘the public humiliation was like a slap in the face,’ write the American authors of this riveting portrait of the two sisters, who loved each other, but were set on a course of lifetime competition from early childhood, when their father preferred Jackie and their mother preferred Lee.
this double biography has the aspirational feel of a glossy magazine piece, piling marriage upon marriage, luxury upon luxury, until the appetite is sickened, but still you can’t put it down.
there’s tragedy at its heart: not just that of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the ensuing ‘Kennedy curse’, though that is tragic enough, but also the tragedy of the death of love between two sisters.
Beneath all the sumptuousness, the yachts with gold taps, the summer houses in the hamptons, the duplex apartments on Fifth Avenue and the lavish shopping sprees are two sensitive siblings — ‘Jacks’ and ‘Pekes’ for short — perpetually yearning for nothing more than to be children again, being taught to swim by their adored father, Jack Bouvier, before everything started to go wrong.
the sisters were ‘bred to dazzle’. their racy father took his daughters to casinos and racetracks and told them that ‘all men are rats’ and that they must ‘play hard-to-get’. the early paradise of the girls’ childhoods was cut short when their parents divorced in 1940.
the two girls made it their business to go up in the world, rather than down. But who would rise the highest?
Both were Debutantes of the Year, but Lee was considered even more beautiful than Jackie. in 1951, the sisters travelled together to Paris, where they were a huge social success — but it was here that Lee began to sense Jackie was taking her aesthetic interests and style and then winning acclaim for them.
Lee was determined to marry first. in 1953, aged 20, she leapt into marriage with publishing scion Michael Canfield, upstaging her sister and throwing her the bridal bouquet. A month later, Jackie became engaged to John F. Kennedy, who was significantly richer than Canfield.
this financial situation made Lee twitchy and she was soon having an affair with a rich Polish émigré, Stanislaw Radziwill, whom she married in 1959. She styled herself ‘Princess Lee Radziwill.’ the couple lived in England, in a stunning Queen Anne house, turville Grange in the Chilterns.
You can settle down now, girls. You’ve got your rich, handsome husbands and your houses. But no: both women then fell madly in love with Rudolf Nureyev and liked to be seen on his arm. Lee managed to have an affair with the high-cheekboned
dancer, even though he was ‘99 and a half per cent homosexual’.
Gore Vidal claimed Canfield had confided to him that Lee had even gone to bed with ‘Jack’ (JFK) in the bedroom next door while they were holidaying in the South of France.
Then the White House years began: the ‘1,000 days’. Lee and Stan happened to be staying with John and Jackie at the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The four of them hardly slept for the 13 days. They were in the room with JFK when he put down the telephone and said: ‘In three minutes, we’ll know if we’re at allout war or not.’
As well as the tricky matter of a nuclear war to avert, there were other, toxic elements to the White House life. For example, John was having an affair with a staffer called Priscilla Wear. Jackie put up with it. As the authors write: ‘ Both sisters could abide infidelities, but not insolvency.’
Jackie was now not only the First Lady, but ‘the First Lady of Fashion’, completely eclipsing Lee.
Prince Philip expressed Lee’s plight succinctly when he sat next to her at a private dinner at Buckingham Palace: ‘You’re just like me — you have to walk three steps behind.’
When Jackie comported herself with the utmost dignity in the days after the assassination of her husband, she was elevated in the world’s eyes from First Lady to ‘living saint’. Lee really couldn’t compete with this.
BEHIND closed doors, she saw the reality: Jackie was half-mad with grief, having lost a baby son (Patrick, who lived only an hour) and a husband in horrific circumstances within five months of each other. In the chaos of grief and bitterness, the sisters could be heard yelling at each other.
Then along came Aristotle Onassis, ‘the Golden Greek’, who nurtured a lifelong hatred of the male Kennedys, who, in turn, distrusted him.
Lee had an affair with Onassis first, recalling his ‘sexual prowess: his Oriental tastes in that area’.
Onassis’s official mistress at the time was Maria Callas, who did not appreciate being supplanted and developed a lifelong loathing of Lee.
Onassis invited both Lee and Jackie on holiday on his yacht, at the end of which he gave Lee three diamond bracelets, but gave Jackie a dazzling diamond and ruby necklace. Lee was ‘miffed’ — you can hardly blame her.
She became convinced that Onassis had only pursued her as a way to get to her sister: his ensnaring of Jackie, the ultimate trophy, was sweet revenge on the Kennedys. But Jackie was, if
anything, keener on the marriage than Onassis, who got cold feet about the whole thing in the run-up to the wedding, spooked by being made to sign a pre-nuptial agreement, and perhaps still pining for his ex-wife Tina, or his mistress Maria, or his ex-mistress Lee.
Two days before the wedding, he rang Callas in a panic, begging her to save him: ‘If you come to Athens, Mrs Kennedy will get angry and go back to America.’
To which Callas retorted: ‘ You got yourself into this. You get yourself out of it,’ and slammed down the phone.
You can sit back and watch the disastrous marriage play out. Within months, well-read Jackie was sick of having to spend evenings at Onassis’s nightclub with his cigarsmoking Greek business chums.
He was irritated by Jackie’s extravagant spending. What he didn’t know was that she was embellishing her $30,000-a-month allowance from him by buying couture and then, after one or two wearings, selling the items on to a local shop to store up extra cash.
When Onassis’s son Alexander died in a plane crash, he blamed Jackie for bringing bad luck to his family: the ‘evil eye’ of the Kennedy curse.
Widowed and divorced, the sisters decided to start working in midlife. Jackie worked for Doubleday publishers for 20 years; Lee, not to be outdone, started an interior design business, which didn’t do well enough to make her rich.
Jackie had received a $26 million settlement from Onassis; Lee struggled, became addicted to vodka and moved to smaller and smaller rented apartments.
Jealousy was always in the air between them and, when Lee was not invited to speak or read a poem at her sister’s funeral, the rift was made visible to all.
Lee, though, is the one who’s lived the longest. ‘We’ll always be sisters,’ she said to the authors when they interviewed her, ‘but we were friends once, too.’