Jackie O-My!
BIG PROBLEMS WITH LITTLE SISTER
Sisters, rivals, frenemies — what exactly was Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill’s lifelong relationship? “S&M,” distant relative Gore Vidal once observed. “With Jackie doing the S and Lee doing the M.” The truth — as Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s “The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters” explains — was more complicated. Born four years apart, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier and Caroline Lee Bouvier were raised in East Hampton and Manhattan, the pampered daughters of dashing stockbroker John (Black Jack) Bouvier and his socialite wife, Janet Lee. Their father doted on the first-born Jacqueline — who after all, had been named after him. Their mother preferred baby Caroline, whom everyone called Lee.
It began a competition that never quite ended, and eventually soured.
“We’ll always be sisters,” a sadly reflective Lee later said. “But we were friends once, too.”
Like many friendships, theirs was built on shared traumas. Their parents divorced in 1940, when Jackie was 11 and Lee 7; two years later, their mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, an even more successful stockbroker with a Newport mansion.
Auchincloss seemed to have an appeal to divorced women; he had already been Nina Vidal’s second husband, which gave her son Gore his later tenuous connection to the Bouvier girls.
But wealthy as their new family was, Jackie and Lee felt like poor relations. And they still missed the handsome, drunken father, whose chronic adulteries had finally driven their mother to throw him out.
At first, the girls were dramatically different. Lee loved the sea, and fine art; Jackie liked riding, and literature. Lee was a pale, thin, aristocratic beauty; Jackie was not, as her mother constantly reminded her.
“I am tall, 5’7, with brown hair, a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made,” Jackie wrote in 1951. “I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes…. Often my mother will run up to inform me that my left stocking seam is crooked or the righthand top coat button is about to fall off. This, I realize, is the Unforgiveable Sin.”
That self-critical essay won her a contest, and a chance to work in Vogue’s Paris office. Her mother refused to let her accept. After all, Jackie was already 22. Time she got married.
Jackie was allowed to go abroad, briefly, as long as she took Lee. But when they returned, Jackie went back to chasing a career, finally landing the job of “Inquiring Cameragirl” at the Washington TimesHerald.
However, she soon began dating the junior senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy — as readers might have guessed from the teasing questions she posed in her column (“Are the Irish deficient in the art of love?”). For their first public date, he took her to President Eisenhower’s Inaugural Ball.
In 1953, they were married. By 1961, they were in the White House, with two young children.
Baby sister Lee had beaten her to the altar by five months, although marriage to a publishing executive paled next to one to a Kennedy. By 1959, though, Lee had divorced her first husband and moved on to Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, an exiled Polish royal.
There were a couple of golden years. The sisters even happily vacationed together, including a memorable trip to Greece, where they were entertained by Aristotle Onassis.
But there was tragedy, too. Jackie had already had one miscarriage and a stillbirth. In the summer of 1963, her fifth pregnancy ended with another funeral, for 2-day-old Patrick.
And then came the trip to Dallas.
Afterward, back in D.C., Jacqueline took charge of the funeral arrangements, as she had a few years earlier for her rakish father, where the back pew was filled with his mourning girlfriends. She had returned to Manhattan, always a New Yorker at heart, and devoted herself to her children, and her dead husband’s legacy. If there were a carefully constructed Camelot myth, she helped build it.
Lee, meanwhile, cut loose, the partying Princess Margaret to Jackie’s staid Queen Liz. Through charm and sheer persistence, Lee bedded the resolutely gay Rudolf Nureyev; a romance with gallivanting photographer Peter Beard would follow, as would a platonic
friendship with Truman Capote. The waspish writer urged her to become an actress; a cheap TV remake of “Laura” is, mercifully, one of the only surviving bits of evidence.
Jacqueline reclaimed the headlines in 1968, with her marriage to Onassis, a union that scandalized millions. He was so short, so ugly, so – not American. But he was also so rich, and after Bobby Kennedy’s death, Jackie loved the idea of literally escaping to a private island.
But to Lee it felt like a bit of one-upsmanship — she had had an affair with Onassis first. And wasn’t the new Jackie O look — with enormous sunglasses and carefully curated, quasi-hippie resort wear – a bit of a steal from Lee’s own groovy style?
If the sisters were still subconsciously competing, they were in agreement on two things, bred into them since childhood: the importance of rich husbands and the joy of spending money.
Lee still freely spent Radziwill’s, even though they’d been estranged for years. They finally divorced in 1974. Meanwhile the Greek tycoon struggled to understand a wife who spent the summer in jeans and swimsuits, then went back to Manhattan and dropped $7,000 on a dress.
What he didn’t know? Jackie’s trick of wearing an outfit once, then selling it for a few thousand to an upscale consignment store, and quietly pocketing the cash.
But the carefree days were winding down.
Jackie’s second marriage was unhappy. Onassis remained in love with Maria Callas, and was prone to berating his new wife at the dinner table. She and Onassis divorced in 1975, and she headed home again to New York. A couple of jobs in publishing followed.
Meanwhile Lee was drifting. Her friendship with Capote evaporated when an excerpt from “Answered Prayers,” his new roman-a-clef fiction, led to a high-society shunning. Her insistence on being called “Princess” was beginning to grate, too.
Still it was important to her. After all, “Princess” did outrank “former First Lady.”
When “Steel Magnolias” premiered in London, Lee’s thenhusband, director Herbert Ross, took her to a party at Buckingham Palace. Infuriated that it was Julia Roberts who had been put with the royals, Lee simply switched placecards, ignoring the teary young actress when she tried to claim her seat.
Meanwhile, the sisters had grown distant. After Jackie died from cancer in 1994, at only 64 — her most successfully kept secret had been her two-packa-day habit — it turned out Lee had been cut out of the will.
Since then, Lee has quietly divided her time between apartments in Manhattan and Paris. Recently, attending a Washington, D.C., event celebrating the Camelot era, she looked around and realized that she was the only one left.
“There’s a fable or a myth — I think it’s French — about a woman who survives everyone’s passing,” the 85-year-old Lee said recently. “And everyone says, ‘She must be so strong, so mean, to have survived it so well.’ But they don’t know — you don’t realize – what a punishment it can be, to be the last one left.”