Sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies
Lee Radziwill, the free-spirited former princess who shared the qualities of wealth, social status and ambition with her older sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but who struggled as an actor, decorator and writer to share her sister’s aura of success, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her daughter, Anna Christina Radziwill, confirmed the death, citing natural causes.
It cannot have been easy living in the shadow of one of the world’s most famous women, the wife of President John F. Kennedy, and Radziwill was hardly immune to competitive instincts. Jackie Kennedy had helped create the mystique of the thousand days of Camelot — a woman who had made her new home a place of elegance and culture, who had brought babies into the White House for the first time in the 20th century.
Radziwill, the wife of a Polish émigré nobleman, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, was an international socialite and fashion icon who for years was on lists of the world’s best-dressed women. Like Jackie, she had cultivated passions for painting, music, dance and poetry. She made several attempts for professional recognition, but achieved only pale reflections of the spotlight on her sister.
For years — especially before and during Kennedy’s time as first lady — Radziwill had been close to her sister, sharing holidays and family gatherings; attending state functions; visiting the White House; hosting the Kennedys at the Radziwill town house in London; and, notably, taking a monthlong 1962 vacation with Jackie in Italy, India and Pakistan.
Cementing family ties, the Kennedys had named their firstborn child Caroline, after Caroline Lee, who had always been known by her middle name. John Kennedy had been godfather to the Radziwills’ daughter, Anna Christina.
It had all ended with the president’s assassination in 1963.
Rushing to Washington from her home in London, Radziwill, a childhood sibling rival who had been increasingly close to her sister in the pre-assassination years, brought sensitivity and emotional support to the crisis at hand.
In the ensuing days, with the nation watching, she was a visible support for the widow in weeds, escorting her husband’s body to the Capitol to lie in state; during the funeral at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, and at burial ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.
Radziwill kept her composure until Air Force One, passing overhead, dipped a wing in salute. Then she wept.
Caroline Lee Bouvier was born in Manhattan on March 3, 1933, to John Vernou Bouvier III and the former Janet Norton Lee. Her mother was socially prominent and her father, a Wall Street broker called Black Jack, traced his lineage to French soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War.
The parents were divorced in 1940, and Janet Bouvier married Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., a Standard Oil heir, who had three children by previous marriages and two, Janet and Jamie, in his marriage to Bouvier.
Lee grew up in the shade of her sister, who was nearly four years older and was her father’s favorite and an accomplished equestrian. They lived in commodious Manhattan apartments and at estates on Long Island and in McLean, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island, where they learned to sail on Narragansett Bay.
Lee attended the Potomac School in Washington and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Her teachers at Miss Porter’s found her bright and imaginative, but her grades were average, whereas her sister was remembered as a star. Lee enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, but left in her sophomore year to study art in Italy.
She joined Harper’s Bazaar in 1950 as an assistant to the legendary editor Diana Vreeland.
She held the job briefly, but it sparked her lifelong interest in fashion.
In 1951, Lee and Jacqueline Bouvier toured London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice and Madrid. Their reminiscences were collected in “One Special Summer” (1974).