In the summer of 1951, two young women traveled through Europe together with a sketchbook, a notebook, and no particular plan except to be somewhere that was not home. They were the Bouvier sisters. The older one was 21 years old, dark-haired and quietly purposeful, already assembling the version of herself that the world was going to spend the next six decades studying.
The younger one was 18 and was by most accounts the prettier of the two, warmer in her expression, more openly amused by things, quicker to laugh, and quicker to be hurt. They spent the summer in Paris and Florence and London and several smaller places in between, and they drew pictures in the sketchbook and wrote in the notebook and came home at the end of August with the kind of material that 23 years later they would publish as a book called One Special Summer.
The book exists. The drawings exist. The photographs from that trip exist. What you cannot see in any of them, unless you know what you are looking for, is the thing that defined those eight weeks in ways that neither sister would have been entirely able to articulate at the time. This was the last summer of Lee Bouvier’s life in which the future was still open, still unwritten, still hers to fill with whatever she imagined.
The following April, Lee would be married. Three years after that, Jackie would be in the White House. And from that point forward, for the remaining 68 years of her life, Lee Radziwill would be introduced to everyone she met as Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister. She was not a footnote. She married a prince and befriended Truman Capote and Andy Warhol and launched one of the most consequential documentary films in cinema history without receiving a single frame of credit for it.
She survived betrayals that would have silenced most people. She outlived her son and the person who sat beside her son as he died. This is the story of who she actually was before and beneath and beyond the most famous woman of the 20th century. The Bouvier household on Park Avenue in the 1930s was the kind of establishment that looked from the outside like the embodiment of American prosperity and social arrival.
John Vernou Bouvier the third, called Black Jack by everyone who knew him, a nickname that captured something essential about his character, was a Wall Street stockbroker whose grandfather had been a French cabinetmaker who immigrated to Philadelphia after the Napoleonic Wars and worked his way into the orbit of Joseph Bonaparte.
Three generations later, the Bouviers had acquired money, property, and the kind of social position that money and property reliably produce. Janet Lee, who married Black Jack in the summer of 1928 at a church in East Hampton, had come from a slightly different stratum of prosperity.
Her family’s money came from real estate development rather than from anything that could be called inherited. This distinction mattered to the people in the rooms she was trying to enter, and Janet knew it mattered, and the knowledge made her careful in the specific way that people who are perpetually aware of being watched tend to be careful.
Jackie was born on July 28th, 1929 at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. Lee followed 4 years later on March 3rd, 1933. The girls were dressed alike and photographed together and given nicknames. Jackie was Jack’s, Lee was Peaks, and spent their summers at their grandfather’s estate in East Hampton, riding horses and reading and growing up in the particular way that rich children grow up, which is to say with more freedom than most children and less of certain other things that money cannot purchase.
What money could not purchase in the Bouvier household was stability. Black Jack drank, he gambled, He was constitutionally incapable of fidelity to a woman he had promised to be faithful to. And he made very little effort to conceal this incapacity from anyone who was paying attention. Janet was paying attention.
So were the children, in the way that children always are. Absorbing the silences at the dinner table, noting the angles at which their parents held themselves when they were in the same room. The family had a name for the way Blackjack related to his daughters. They called it vitamin P. Meaning praise, which Blackjack dispensed to Jackie in quantities that constituted something closer to adoration.
He called her brilliant. He called her beautiful. He told her she was the most remarkable girl he had ever seen. And he said it in front of other people. Which made the praise different from the private praise that parents dispense from obligation. Jackie absorbed this, and became in some fundamental way a person who expected to be found remarkable.
Lee absorbed something different. She absorbed the knowledge that she was loved, but not in that specific and slightly breathless way. She was the younger one, the pretty one. The one whose personality, warmer than Jackie’s, more eager to be liked, more openly emotional, made her endearing without making her destined.
She noticed, with the accuracy that children bring to the mapping of family hierarchies, exactly where she stood. Janet filed for divorce in June 1940. The proceedings were bitter and expensive. And ultimately resulted in a settlement that kept both girls in expensive schools, and made very little provision for the emotional damage that had been done.
Two years later, Janet married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., a wealthy stockbroker who provided financial security in the specific form of a large house in Virginia, a summer home in Newport, and absolutely none of his predecessors’ volatile charm. Lee would later say that she married her first husband at least partly to escape her mother.
This was frank in the way that Lee often was, and it told you something important about what the Auchincloss household had been like for a girl of 20 looking for a door. On April 18th, 1953, at the Auchincloss estate in Virginia, Caroline Lee Bouvier married Michael Temple Canfield. She was 20 years old. Jackie would marry John Kennedy 5 months later, an event that would generate a coverage apparatus so vast and comprehensive that the wedding of a younger sister 5 months earlier would barely register in the historical
record. Michael Canfield was the son of Cass Canfield, chairman of Harper and Brothers publishing house, and he was, by every account, charming, intelligent, and handsome in the dark-haired English way that Americans found impressive. He was working in London, and moved there after the wedding, setting up a household on Chester Square that Lee would later describe as briefly, deliriously happy.
What she did not know when she married him, and what she may have learned only over time, was that Michael Canfield was not quite who he appeared to be. According to the published memoirs of Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, a woman whose access to upper-class gossip was encyclopedic, and whose memory for detail was formidable, Edward VIII believed that Canfield was the biological son of his brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, and a socialite known in certain circles as the girl with the silver syringe. The woman’s
name was Kiki Preston. She was American, she was beautiful, she was a fixture of the set that Edward VIII and his brothers moved through in the 1930s, and she was known for a habit of injecting drugs with a solid silver syringe that she did not bother to conceal in polite company. Prince George had been involved with her in a way that had been a source of family embarrassment.
An infant had reportedly been produced and an adoption quietly arranged through a family friend, Cass Canfield. Michael Canfield grew up without knowing any of this, or if he came to know it, he kept the knowledge private. He was not in any case well. He drank in the way that a certain kind of unhappy person drinks, not as a social pleasure, but as a pharmaceutical necessity in amounts that became impossible to rationalize and ultimately impossible to manage.
Lee recalls an incident with the kind of specificity that suggests it became in memory the emblem of the entire marriage. She came home one afternoon and could not open the front door because Michael was lying unconscious against it, having collapsed somewhere between the hallway and whatever destination he had been attempting to reach.
He tried to stop. He could not stop. He told Lee with an honesty that was probably more sad than comforting that she was so in tune with life and he was not any longer. The marriage ended in 1958. Lee was 25 years old and had in the five years since her wedding watched her sister become the wife of a senator on his way to the White House and had herself become the wife of a man who could not get off the floor.
She was not going to let that be the end of the story. Before there was the Polish prince, there was the Greek shipping magnate and the sequence matters enormously. Aristotle Socrates Onassis was 60 years old in 1963, which was 27 years older than Lee and 22 years older than Jackie. He had been born poor in Smyrna and had turned the circumstances of his birth into the fuel for an appetite so large and so relentlessly successful that by middle age he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He owned a shipping fleet.
He owned a private island. He owned a yacht called the Christina O that was decorated with bar stools upholstered in the foreskin of a whale, which tells you something about his particular aesthetic. Lee had met him in 1958 before her first marriage ended through her friend Tina Niarchos, who was Onassis’s wife.
She had found him fascinating in the way that people who have grown up watching their mother evaluate men for their usefulness tend to find a genuinely powerful man fascinating. There was something there that was not performance, something that did not need to be inflated by other people’s regard because it existed quite comfortably without it.
By 1961, they were involved. The relationship was conducted with the discretion that extreme wealth makes possible and extreme wealth demands and neither party was in any particular hurry to define it. Lee was then married to her second husband, a Polish nobleman named Stanisław Radziwiłł, which will be discussed shortly, and the marriage was by this point not a happy one.
Onassis was separated from Tina. In the summer of 1961, Lee arranged for Jackie, who had recently become first lady and who was, as always, the sun around which everyone else orbited, to join them on the Christina. The cruise through the Greek islands was photographed and reported on extensively because everything Jackie did was photographed and reported on extensively and the photographs showed three people on a yacht in the Aegean looking like the world was entirely at their disposal.
What the photographs did not show was what Lee knew and what Onassis knew and what Jackie may have been less than fully forthcoming about, that Lee and Onassis had been intimate, that there was an understanding between them, and that the arrival of the first lady of the United States on the yacht was complicating that understanding in ways that would take 7 years to fully resolve.
In October of 1968, 3 weeks after Lee had reportedly been told by Onassis that he had no intention of marrying her sister, Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy were married on the island of Skorpios. Lee sent a telegram of congratulations. She did not attend the wedding. Friends who were close to Lee in those weeks described a woman maintaining composure with the specific kind of precision that people employ when the alternative to composure is something they cannot afford. She had been with him first.
She had introduced them. She had been promised, in the wordless way that powerful men make promises, that certain things would not happen. They had happened. She would not talk about it in detail for the rest of her life. Before Onassis married Jackie, and during the years when Lee and Onassis were involved, there was Stanisław Radziwiłł.
His name was Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, and he was known to everyone as Stas. He was Polish, and he came from one of the most ancient noble families in Polish and Lithuanian history. The Radziwiłł family had been princes since the 16th century, had owned vast estates across what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, and had been players in European dynastic politics for 400 years before the Second World War reduced much of their heritage to rubble and exile.
Stas had left Poland and settled in London, where he made money in real estate, and moved in the circles that old money and surviving titles still permitted. He and Lee were married in 1959, the year after her divorce from Canfield. She was 26. He was 45. They settled in London in a house on Buckingham Place that Lee decorated with the taste that would later define her public reputation, and then in a flat in Belgravia that was widely considered one of the most beautifully appointed residences in London.
Two children were born, Anthony Radziwill in 1959 and Anna Christina Radziwill in 1960. Lee would raise both of them largely in London with extended time in the United States and would maintain for years the particular structure of a woman who had achieved by outward measure exactly what she had been raised to achieve.
The marriage was not happy in the way that the best marriages are happy. Stas was older and not in good health and the combination of his age, his background and his temperament produced in him a remoteness that Lee found difficult. She was warm in the way that people who grow up feeling slightly secondary often become warm.
She needed connection. She needed to be genuinely seen and not merely admired and Stas admired her without necessarily seeing her. She filled the gap with friendships, with travel, with the extraordinary social life that her position made available to her and her personality made effortless. Among the friendships she filled it with was the friendship with Truman Capote.
She met Capote through the overlapping circles of New York and London society that both of them inhabited and they recognized each other immediately in the way that two people recognize each other when they share an ability to see through the social surface to something more interesting and more painful underneath.
Capote was in 1962 at the absolute height of his powers. In Cold Blood was being serialized in The New Yorker. He was famous not merely as a writer but as a person, a small extraordinary southern drawled presence who could walk into any room in any city in the world and become within minutes the most talked about person there.
He collected beautiful, powerful women the way some men collect art and he did with them what good collectors do with art. He studied them. He understood them. He put them somewhere in his mind where they could be accessed later. He and Lee became close in the way that is only possible between two people who find each other genuinely amusing.
They telephoned each other. They traveled together. He gave her advice about her marriage and her wardrobe and her ambitions, and she listened with the attentiveness of someone who had always been slightly hungrier than most people for a particular kind of permission. The permission to want things, to be more than the sum of her social position.
It was Capote who encouraged her to act. The decision to pursue acting was not on its face unreasonable. Lee was intelligent. She was physically extraordinary. She understood the mechanics of presentation in the way that people who have spent their entire lives being looked at tend to understand them. Several of the people around her believed she had genuine talent.
In 1967, she was cast in a live television production of Laura, the story of a detective who falls in love with a portrait of a dead woman, and then discovers the woman is not dead. It was scheduled to air on ABC. She hired Lee Strasberg to coach her. The same Lee Strasberg whose Actors Studio had shaped Marilyn Monroe and Al Pacino and James Dean, a fact that seemed in advance like a credentialing detail.
Capote, who had encouraged her to do it, told everyone he knew that she was going to be magnificent. Whether he believed this when he said it is a question that becomes more interesting in retrospect. The production aired in January of 1968. The reviews were not kind. They were, in fact, precisely the kind of reviews that follow someone into rooms they did not intend to enter.
Variety described her performance as lacking the foundation in technique that the role required. The New York Times noted that her beauty was not in question, but that acting required something other than beauty, and that what it required was not on this occasion present in sufficient quantities. One reviewer mentioned that she appeared uncertain of where to stand.
She gave three other performances in theater and television over the following years. None of them significantly altered the critical reception she had received for Laura. By the early 1970s, the acting career was over. Capote was asked after the reviews came out what he thought of the performance. He said something diplomatic.
What he was thinking was stored somewhere in his notebooks along with everything else. In 1975, Esquire magazine published four chapters of an unfinished novel by Truman Capote called Answered Prayers. The novel was described as his master work in progress. A roman a clef in the tradition of Proust in which the most powerful and intimate social world of the 20th century would be rendered in fiction so transparent as to be essentially memoir.
The chapter that Esquire published was called La Côte Basque 1965. It was narrated by a young writer at a famous New York restaurant who sits at a table near a woman called Lady Ina Coolbirth, a woman who was without meaningful ambiguity based on Lee Radziwill, and overhears a conversation. The conversation is about a man Lady Ina Coolbirth has been sleeping with.
The man is described with sufficient specificity that several people immediately identified him as the governor of New York. The conversation is explicit. It is intimate. It is the kind of thing that a person tells a trusted friend in the certainty that a trusted friend is precisely what they are telling it to.
What Capote had done was take the most private stories that his swans had told him in the privacy of friendship, and he had published them. The reaction was swift and total. Babe Paley, who was dying of cancer, and who was the woman Capote had loved most among all of them, never spoke to him again. Slim Keith never spoke to him again.
C.Z. Guest terminated the friendship. Gloria Guinness did not speak to him again. Lee did not speak to him again. They had been close for 15 years. He had sat with her during her divorce negotiations. He had advised her on how to furnish her apartment. He had told her, in those particular late-night phone calls that constitute the deepest form of intimacy available to people who express themselves best in words, the most honest thing she had ever heard about herself.
She had told him in return things she had told no one else. He published them. Capote would spend the remaining years of his life in a kind of social exile from the world he had spent his entire career ascending to. He died in 1984 at 60 years old in the guest room of Joanne Carson’s house in California of liver failure complicated by multiple drug intoxication.
He had told a reporter, several years before his death, that he was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and that he had managed to alienate almost everyone who had ever cared about him. And that he was not entirely certain he had done any of these things by accident. Lee was asked about him after his death. She said that he was terribly gifted and that she was sorry about his terrible end.
She did not say anything about the chapter. There is a detail about Lee Radziwill’s life that is almost never mentioned in the stories told about her, and it is perhaps the most significant thing she ever did. In 1971, Lee was involved with a photographer named Peter Beard, whose work she admired and whose company she found compelling.
She wanted to make a film, not a fictional film, but a documentary about her own childhood, about the world she had grown up in and the people who had shaped it. She hired the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, who were considered among the best documentary filmmakers working in America at the time. In the course of researching Lee’s childhood, the Maysles went to East Hampton to look at the houses and places that had been part of the Bouvier family’s history.
They drove out to a property called Grey Gardens, which had once been a respectable summer estate belonging to Lee’s aunt Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie. What they found there was not the house they had come to document. Big Edie was then in her late 70s, living in a state of considerable squalor with her daughter, Little Edie, who was in her mid-50s and who had been, before something went wrong, a dancer and an aspiring actress.
The house was in a condition that was difficult to accurately describe without appearing to exaggerate. There were raccoons living in the walls. There was a hole in the roof through which the weather entered. There were cats everywhere in numbers that defied precise counting. The garden had grown over the fence and the fence had grown over the road.
Albert and David Maysles walked in and never walked out. Not in the way that matters. They came back in 1973 and 1974 and filmed what they found. And what they found was two women constructing an entire world inside the ruins of the one that had failed them. And maintaining that world with a peculiar and absolute dignity that was more moving than anything you could have written for them.
Grey Gardens was released in 1975 and is now considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made. It won prizes. It became a musical and then a film of the musical. The two Edies entered the vocabulary of American culture as archetypes of something that resists easy definition but that everyone recognizes when they see it.
Without Lee Radziwill, none of it exists. She commissioned the project. She brought the Maysles to East Hampton. She paid for the initial research trip that found the house. The film that changed documentary cinema was, at its origin, an attempt to document the childhood of the woman nobody thought was interesting.
She is not mentioned in the film. If Capote was the friend who saw Lee most clearly and used what he saw most ruthlessly, Andy Warhol was the friend who saw her most generously and recorded what he saw with the kind of accuracy that only people who are also fundamentally machines for observation can achieve.
Warhol and Lee met through the overlapping art and society worlds of 1960s New York, and they suited each other in ways that went beyond the obvious. Warhol, for all his performance of blankness, was genuinely interested in people, particularly in people who existed at the intersection of beauty and disappointment, which is where Lee had spent most of her adult life.
He painted her. He photographed her. He included her in the orbit of the factory in the specific way that he included people who intrigued him, not as subjects, but as presences. His diaries, published after his death in 1987, contained dozens of references to Lee, to her lunches and her apartments and her opinions and her clothes and the particular quality she had of making a room feel more interesting simply by being in it.
He noted, with the oblique admiration that characterized his assessments of everyone he cared about, that she had a great sense of what everything was worth and no particular talent for pretending it was worth less. He found this, in his world, unusual. She found him, in return, one of the most genuinely uncomplicated presences in her life.
He did not want anything from her that she was not prepared to give. He was not going to publish what she told him. He was simply in the way that certain friendships are simply things, a pleasure. He died in February of 1987 of cardiac arrhythmia following routine gallbladder surgery at 58 years old. Lee was among the people who attended the memorial service.
She wore black and said very little and stood in the church with the quality she had spent her life perfecting of being present without requiring the room to organize itself around her presence. It was a quality she had spent a long time learning how to produce. The divorce from Stanisław Radziwiłł was finalized in 1974.
He had been ill for some years and the marriage had been functionally over for longer than the legal proceedings acknowledged. He died in 1976, 2 years after the divorce, of a heart attack in London. He was 62 years old. Lee was 43. She was still beautiful in the way that people who have invested seriously in their appearance throughout their lives are beautiful in their 40s with more precision than youth requires, with better clothes, with the particular self-knowledge that decades of being looked at produces.
She had two children, Anthony and Anna, both in their teens, and she had a reputation and a social position and a great deal of complicated history. And she had no husband for the first time in 21 years. She had a series of relationships in the years that followed. She was linked to Newton Cope, a San Francisco hotelier.
She was linked to Peter Beard, the photographer she had worked with in the early 1970s. She had a relationship with Herb Ross, the film director, whom she married in 1988, her third marriage, which lasted until his death in 2001. Ross was 15 years older than Lee and had made his name directing musicals, and the marriage was by most accounts a companionable one.
A different kind of arrangement than the ones that had preceded it. In the decades after her second divorce, Lee remade herself with the purposefulness of someone who had spent too long being defined by relationships. She became a decorator. She wrote a book about interior design called Happy Times that was praised for its visual sensibility and for something in the prose that suggested she understood that rooms tell you things about people that people themselves do not say.
She worked for Giorgio Armani in a public relations capacity. She was asked about Jackie continuously, and she answered the questions with the civility of someone who has had decades to practice. She moved to an apartment in New York on 72nd Street that she decorated in the way she had always decorated, with an eye that was simultaneously trained and personal, that saw what a room could be and turned it into that thing.
People who visited described it as the most beautiful apartment they had ever been in, and then described it in ways that made it clear they were describing something that was also, in its arrangements and its silences, a portrait of someone who had learned very thoroughly how to live alone. Of all the things that happened to Lee Radziwill in her long and eventful life, the one that seems to have come closest to breaking her was the death of her son.
Anthony Radziwill had grown up between London and New York, had studied at Boston University, and had become a television news producer of genuine ability, working for ABC News and later producing documentaries. He was, by everyone who knew him, described as warm and funny and exactly the kind of person his mother was, without the complicating shadow she had grown up in.
He had inherited her intelligence and his father’s measured quality, and had made of these things a person who who to embody a kind of uncomplicated goodness that neither of his parents had quite managed. In the early 1990s, Anthony was diagnosed with a rare cancer. The illness was slow and then faster and then constant.
And during the years of his treatment, his closest friend was John F. Kennedy Jr. who was, of course, his cousin by the most convoluted of paths, his mother being Jackie’s sister and JFK Jr. being Jackie’s son. They had grown up in the gravitational field of the same enormous history and had found in each other a friendship that was, for both of them, simpler than almost everything else in their lives.
JFK Jr. flew to be with Anthony in his final weeks. He sat with him in the hospital. He was present in the specific way that people who have been shaped by loss understand how to be present without requiring anything in return, without making the dying person perform comfort for the benefit of the healthy one.
Anthony Radziwill died on August 10th, 1999. He was 40 years old. 16 days later, on July 16th, 1999, the dates are confusing because what follows seems impossible. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane went into the water near Martha’s Vineyard. He was 38 years old. He had been flying to a Radziwill family wedding.
These two events, arriving within weeks of each other, are the kind of thing that tests the ability of language to do what it is supposed to do. Lee Radziwill had lost her son. And then, before she had any framework for what had just happened, she had lost the person who had sat with her son in his dying.
She did not speak publicly about either loss for a long time. When she did speak, she spoke carefully, in the way she had learned to speak about everything that had cost her the most. In the final decade and a half of her life, Lee Radziwill lived in New York and in Paris and moved between the two with the ease of someone who has never been required to explain herself to either city.
She gave occasional interviews. The T Magazine interview with The New York Times, filmed in her apartment on 72nd Street, became one of the most watched documents of her life, partly because of the candor with which she spoke about Jackie and about the question that had followed her for 80 years. In the interview, she was asked whether she had ever been jealous of Jackie.
She said she would have had to have been made of stone not to have had moments. She said that Jackie had everything. She had the looks, the intelligence, the children who thrived, the husband who became president, the second husband who was one of the richest men in the world. She said this without bitterness in the reflective way of someone who has thought about her subject for so long that the emotion has been replaced by something more durable and more accurate.
She was also asked what she thought of herself, of her own life, of what she had made of the decades she had been given. She said she thought she had a gift for friendship and a gift for recognizing beautiful things and a talent for living, which was not nothing. She said she had done some things she was proud of and some things she was less proud of and that the proportion seemed in retrospect roughly what most people managed.
She said she wished she had been more serious about certain things earlier in her life and then she laughed in the way she had always laughed, which was with her whole face and then with a sudden return to composure as though the laugh had been a permission she was not entirely certain she had been granted.
Caroline Lee Bouvier Radziwill died on February 15th, 2019. She was 85 years old. Her death was reported everywhere and the first sentence of almost every report identified her as Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister. This was accurate and it was, in its accuracy, precisely the thing that it had always been. The obituaries tried, with varying degrees of success, to convey what she had actually been.
They mentioned the marriages and the friendships and the Capote connection and the acting career and the decoration and the social presence and the style. Her style was mentioned in virtually every obituary because it had been real and distinctive and had influenced things that are still being influenced. They mentioned the title she had married into and the life she had made in London and in New York and in Paris and in all the other places that people with her kind of access make their lives.
Some of them mentioned Anthony. Fewer of them mentioned that she was the woman without whom Grey Gardens would not exist. None of them answered the question she had spent her life making people want to ask, which is not whether she lived in the shadow of Jacqueline Kennedy, but whether the shadow was all there was, whether a life shaped so entirely by comparison to something singular and brilliant and unrepeatable could contain, alongside the comparison, a self of its own.
The apartment on 72nd Street answered the question. The friendships answered it. The son she raised and the grief she carried and the laughter she produced at precise and appropriate moments answered it. The rooms she walked through and the rooms she made and the people who found in her company something they had not found elsewhere, these answered it.
She was not a footnote. She was Lee. And if the world spent 85 years getting that wrong, it was not in the end entirely the world’s fault. She had been made to practice this particular kind of reinvention that happens to women of a certain world when the structures they were raised to depend on fall away. Some of them retreat.
Some of them marry again quickly as though the absence of a husband is a medical condition requiring urgent treatment. Some of them do what Lee Radziwill did in 1976, which was to open a business. The business was called Lee Radziwill Inc. It operated from a desk in her Upper East Side duplex on Fifth Avenue, a 4,600 square foot apartment with views of Central Park that she had decorated herself, and that Architectural Digest had photographed in 1975.
The photographs had been published. The president of Americana Hotels had seen them, had studied the way she had arranged fabric against woodwork and light against shadow, and had telephoned to ask whether the woman responsible for these rooms might be willing to do the same thing for money. She was 43 years old.
She had been divorced twice, widowed once, betrayed by her closest friend, humiliated in the pages of Esquire magazine, and written off by the acting establishment. She had two teenage children, a title she had earned through marriage and kept through force of habit, and a reputation for taste so precise and so particular that people who visited her apartments described the experience with the kind of reverence normally reserved for churches or very good restaurants.
She said, “Yes.” Her first commission was to design private suites at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, Florida. She then designed model rooms at Lord & Taylor, the department store on Fifth Avenue, a project she approached with characteristic candor. She told an interviewer that she detested She thought they were too formal, too structured, too much like rooms in which people were performing the act of eating rather than simply eating.
She designed a combined dining and living room instead, with a large round table in one corner, because the round table was the one shape that did not impose hierarchy on the people sitting at it. This was not a woman dabbling. This was a woman who had spent her entire adult life studying the relationship between space and personality, between objects and the emotions they produce, and who had arrived through decades of unpaid practice at a philosophy of design that was entirely her own.
She told Architectural Digest in that first feature, “I’ve always believed in classic neutral proportions. They make it possible to create almost any spatial effect you want. Much as I love New York, I didn’t want a typical Manhattan interior. So many of them are as cold and slick as a hotel suite. I wanted to indicate that an individual lives here, a person with strong feelings about things.
” The word she used most often when she talked about rooms was feeling, not color, not period, not provenance. The collaboration that defined her eye had begun a decade earlier in London. And it had started with a letter. Renzo Mongiardino was an Italian set designer who had not yet become Renzo Mongiardino, the most celebrated interior designer of his generation.
He was working in Milan making sets for theater and opera when Lee saw photographs of his work in a design magazine and recognized something in them that she recognized in herself. A love of pattern and texture so absolute and so unashamed that it bordered on the theatrical without ever tipping into excess. She wrote to him.
The letter said more or less that her living room was like a bowling alley and could he come and fix it. He came to London to 4 Buckingham Place, four short blocks from the palace, where Lee and Stars had their townhouse. He lined the drawing room walls in Indian paisley cotton, which he framed in gold painted plastic.
The combination was preposterous on paper. In the room, it was extraordinary. Cecil Beaton photographed it. Vogue published it in 1966. Lee was photographed reclining on the divan in a caftan given to her by Hassan II of Morocco, looking like a woman who had finally been put in the correct setting. The Vogue photographs became in design circles the equivalent of a manifesto.
The room declared that pattern could be layered upon pattern without producing chaos, that expensive taste did not require expensive materials, that a plastic frame painted gold could do the same work as a gilt frame if the person choosing it understood why. Designers studied those photographs for the next three decades.
From the London drawing room, Lee brought Mongiardino to Turville Grange, the Radziwill’s 18th century Queen Anne house in Oxfordshire, near Henley-on-Thames. She told him she wanted a house of flowers. What he gave her was one of the most celebrated residential interiors of the 20th century. The dining room was the centerpiece.
Mongiardino covered the walls in lacquered Sicilian scarves printed with blue floral designs, and then his collaborator, Lila de Nobili, the painter, painted additional flowers directly over the fabric. De Nobili also created oval portrait medallions of Lee’s two children, birds around Christina, dogs and horses around Anthony.
George Oakes of Colefax and Fowler painted floral motifs onto silk panels that were made into cushions. Lanning Roper designed the gardens visible through the windows so that the flowers inside and the flowers outside appeared to be part of the same composition. Lee said later that the room sounded cute in description, but was not cute in person.
It had atmosphere, she said. It had the quality of being somewhere specific rather than somewhere general. She would later tell an interviewer that she had got Mongiardino at his best before he began decorating for the great collectors like Stavros Niarchos and Baron Thyssen and making houses that looked like museums.
What she meant was that when they worked together, he was still making rooms for people to live in rather than rooms for people to be impressed by and that the difference mattered to her because she understood it from the inside. Lee a route that only makes sense in the particular world Lee inhabited to fashion. In 1980, Giorgio Armani shut down the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center for a fashion show. Lee attended.
She remembered decades later exactly what she wore, a top in large black and white stripes with almost pointed shoulders paired with a long black velvet skirt. It was her first Armani. Five years later in 1985, she was appointed director of special events for Giorgio Armani in New York. The office was on the fourth floor above the store at 815 Madison Avenue.
Her colleague Hamilton South, who worked alongside her, described her role with a clarity that Lee herself, characteristically, would not have provided. She was an ambassador in the most traditional sense, he said. She wore the clothes. She had this wonderful effect on them. She got photographed constantly.
She showed the organization how to do things at a fundamentally different level, one that had never been seen before in the fashion business. Lee described her own job with less grandeur. She said she did a little bit of everything. She gave her opinion. She chose what she thought was appropriate. Armani saw it differently.
He called her an ambassador of his message to the world. He said that she, with her impeccable manner and many acquaintances, conveyed his idea of style to movie stars and leading figures in the artistic and cultural world. When asked what made her an Armani woman, he said, “She is strong-willed and feminine in a non-stereotypical manner.
And she expresses her personal style through reducing, not adding. She stays true to herself. She’s beyond passing trends. She worked for Armani for 8 years, leaving in 1994. She wore Armani to her third wedding to the film director Herbert Ross in 1988, a pale blue suit. She wore Armani to every important event for a decade.
When she returned to sit front row at his 40th anniversary prive show in Paris in 2015, wearing a black and white hand-beaded top, the paparazzi outside the Trocadero nearly trampled her. Armani saw her, stopped the photo line, and they embraced for what she described as 5 minutes. She had not attended an Armani show in 20 years, but 40 years, she said, is really something.
was Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer who had defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 and had become, by the time she knew him, one of the most famous performing artists alive. She decorated spaces for him. He was a frequent guest at her homes. The friendship was one of the longest and most uncomplicated of her life, which is to say, it lacked the specific qualities of betrayal and competition that characterized many of her other relationships with remarkable men.
Nureyev died in January of 1993 at 54 of complications related to AIDS. Andy Warhol had died 6 years earlier. Capote had died 9 years earlier. Her ex-husband Stars had been dead for 17 years. She mentioned all of them in a single sentence late in her life that contained something more revealing than she may have intended.
“When I was young,” she said, “I used to think that everyone should die at 70. But my closest friends, like Rudolf and Andy, and to an extent Capote, let alone most of my close family, didn’t even reach that age. There is something to be said for being older and memories. The fact that she included Capote in the list, more than 20 years after the betrayal, placed between Nureyev and Warhol, as though his name still belonged among the people she had loved most, tells you something about the nature of the wound.
It had not healed. It had simply become part of what had happened in 1975, and it did not end in 1975. After Esquire published the La Côte Basque chapter, Lee attempted to have it suppressed. The details of this effort are not fully documented because Lee did not document them. But the attempt itself was discussed among the mutual friends who were engaged in the same project of damage control.
Babe Paley attempted similar measures. So did Slim Keith. None of them succeeded because the mechanism of literary publication does not include a mechanism for recalling what has been read. What made the wound particular to Lee was that the chapter had not merely exposed private information. It had exposed private information in a context that made the exposer the narrator, the one with the superior vantage point, the one who sees clearly while everyone else is merely living.
Capote had not just used her secrets. He had used the act of telling him those secrets as evidence that she was the kind of woman who told secrets, which is to say a woman who could be studied, which is to say a woman who could be material. She had thought she was a friend. She had been a character. When asked about it after his death in 1984, she was measured.
She said he was terribly gifted and that she was sorry about his terrible end. She did not say what the chapter had cost her. She did not need to. Everyone who had read it knew what it had cost her because everyone who had read it had watched the Lady Ina Coolbirth character say things that could only have been told to someone in confidence and had understood that the confidence had been violated not by accident but by design.
The wound shaped the rest of her social life. She became, after 1975, more selective about intimacy. The warmth remained, the charm remained, the ability to make a room feel more interesting remained, but the depth of access she had given Capote, the late-night telephone conversations, the willingness to say the unsayable, the specific and dangerous pleasure of being fully known by someone brilliant, she did not offer that again.
Andre Leon Talley, her close friend in her later decades, described the architecture of her privacy with precision. “There was an unspoken rule,” he said. “If you were friends with Lee, you did not talk about her sister at all. It’s the subject you never bring up.” This rule applied to more than Jackie. It applied to Capote, to Onassis, to the entire constellation of subjects that had caused her pain.
“She edited people,” Talley said. “She edited herself. She edited her wardrobe. She edited her life.” The word he used was refusal, which was also the word Diana Vreeland had used about elegance and which Lee had taken to heart with a thoroughness that went beyond aesthetics into something closer to survival.
A factual correction required here because the sequence matters. And the sequence is worse than most people remember. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane went into the water off Martha’s Vineyard on July 16th, 1999. He was 38 years old. His wife, Carolyn Bessette, was 33. Her sister, Lauren Bessette, was 34. They were flying from New Jersey to Hyannis Port, where Rory Kennedy, the youngest daughter of Robert Kennedy, was to be married the following day.
The plane departed Essex County Airport at 8:38 in the evening and was never heard from again. 25 days later, on August 10th, 1999, Anthony Radziwill died at New York Hospital. He was 40 years old. He had turned 45 days earlier. The order matters because it means Lee lost the young man who had sat at her son’s bedside first and then lost her son.
It means that when JFK Jr.’s plane went down, Anthony was already dying, had been dying for years, and now had to absorb the death of his closest friend while his own body was in the process of failing. It means that Lee, in mid-July of 1999, was watching her son die and learning that the person her son loved most in the world had just been killed simultaneously.
Anthony had been diagnosed with testicular cancer around 1989 when he was 29 years old. The diagnosis came at the exact moment his career was accelerating. He had won an Emmy for his work on the 1988 Winter Olympics in Seoul. He had just joined ABC News as a producer for Primetime Live. He was building something of his own, separate from the family name and the family history.
And he was good at it in the specific way that people who have grown up watching performance from the inside are good at the real thing. The cancer was treated. There was a period that resembled remission. He met Carole Ann DiFalco, an ABC producer, while covering the Menendez brothers trial in Los Angeles. They fell in love.
They married on August 27th, 1994, at Most Holy Trinity Church in East Hampton with JFK Jr. as best man. The wedding was dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died 3 months earlier in May. Lee, Anthony’s mother, threw what Carole would later describe as an unforgettable reception, but the cancer had returned before the wedding.
New tumors had appeared. What followed was 5 years of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, and experimental treatments, most of them conducted in secret. Anthony and Carole kept the illness private because, as Carole explained later, cancer was still whispered about in the 1990s, still treated as a death sentence rather than a diagnosis, and Anthony himself was in denial about the severity of what was happening to him.
They divided their weeks with a precision that was itself a form of denial. During the week, they maintained their careers and social lives in New York, appearing healthy and successful. On weekends, they traveled to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where Anthony underwent major surgeries that were scheduled like brief holidays, with Anthony typically released by Monday or Tuesday to return to work.
“When you’re carrying a secret like that,” Carole wrote later, “inevitably, your world is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller because you’re just not letting it grow.” Their world contracted. The last year was the hardest. The cancer had metastasized beyond his lungs and now required chemotherapy and radiation rather than surgery, treatments that produced visible side effects.
He was hospitalized more frequently. The secret became harder to maintain. JFK Jr. knew. He had always known. The two men had spoken nearly every day of their adult lives. Rosemarie Terenzio, who worked as JFK Jr.’s chief of staff, described Anthony as more of a brother than a friend, the closest family member John had.
She said the cancer was emotionally devastating to John. Two years before the crash, in September 1996, Anthony had returned the favor of the best man’s role, standing beside John at his secret wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Georgia. 40 guests, a clandestine ceremony in a small chapel on an island off the coast because even a wedding had to be protected from the apparatus of attention that followed the Kennedy name everywhere it went.
By early summer of 1999, the doctors believed Anthony would die within weeks, perhaps months. John was writing the eulogy. He was preparing for what was coming. And then, on July 16th, on a flight he should not have been making in conditions he was not qualified to fly in, he was gone. When the ashes of John, Carolyn, and Lauren were scattered at sea from a Navy destroyer several days later, Anthony was aboard.
He was in a wheelchair. Lee was not aboard the destroyer. She was elsewhere in the specific and private way that she had learned to be elsewhere during the events that cost her the most. Three weeks later, she was at New York Hospital where her son’s heartbeats were counted until they stopped. Carol wrote about that night years later.
She described lying in the hospital bed beside Anthony and counting. She described the strangeness of calm. She described not sobbing, not screaming, not performing grief in any of the ways that grief is supposed to be performed. She described instead a slow and careful descent into something that did not arrive all at once, but came in stages over months, stopping on different stairs on its way down.
The funeral was held at Most Holy Trinity Church in East Hampton on August 13th, 1999, the same church where the wedding had taken place five years earlier. Lee walked in with Carol. Photographs from that day show a woman of 66 in dark clothing. Her face composed with the particular kind of control that is not the absence of feeling, but the refusal to let feeling dictate the terms of its own expression.
She did not speak publicly about either loss for a very long time. In her later years of her life, when the accumulated weight of experience had made certain pretenses unnecessary, Lee became more candid about the question she had been asked 10,000 times. She told Vanity Fair in an interview conducted in her apartment, where the Greek Independence Day parade was passing outside the window, “Please tell me this is not a story about my sister and me.
I’m just sick of that.” It’s like we’re Siamese twins. But she also told the truth when it was asked for. She acknowledged that her father had favored Jackie. She said it was very clear to her, but that she did not resent it because she understood he had reason to. Jackie was not only named after him, she said, but she actually looked almost exactly like him, which was a source of great pride to their father.
This was Lee at her most characteristic. Honest enough to name the wound, generous enough to explain why it was inflicted, and controlled enough to describe both the wound and the explanation in a single breath without letting either one dominate. She said in separate interviews over the last two decades of her life that she thought everyone has regrets, and that people who say they do not are either liars or narcissists.
She said there had been many things in her life to have regrets about in the sense that she wished she could have changed them or somehow made them not happen. And then she said the thing that mattered most, “What I don’t have is envy.” The distinction was important to her. Regret acknowledges that something went wrong.
Envy poisons the person who feels it. Lee was willing to admit that things had gone wrong. She was not willing to admit that her sister’s success had poisoned her. Whether this was true or merely what she needed to believe is a question that requires more certainty about the interior lives of other people than anyone is entitled to. She also said this, “I am always aware that I’ve had a special and privileged life, yet it has been balanced by tragedy as it has been for so many others.
I believe that without memories there is no life and that our memories should be of happy times. That’s my choice.” The book she published in 2000, the book about interior design and memory and the rooms she had lived in was called Happy Times. It was not an ironic title. It was a deliberate one. She was choosing which version of the story to keep and she was choosing the version in which the rooms were beautiful and the summers were warm and the people she loved were still alive.
In her final interview with T Magazine filmed in the apartment on East 72nd Street, she was asked whether she had ever been jealous of Jackie. She said she would have had to be made of stone not to have had moments. She said Jackie had everything. The looks, the intelligence, the children who thrived, the husband who became president, the second husband who was one of the richest men in the world.
She said it without bitterness. She said it in the reflective way of someone who has thought about a subject for so long that the emotion has been replaced by something more durable and more accurate, something that resembles understanding. And then she said she thought she had a gift for friendship and a gift for recognizing beautiful things and a talent for living, which was not nothing.
Which was not nothing. The phrasing is everything. It is the phrasing of a woman who knows she is being asked to measure her own life against the most famous woman of the 20th century and who has decided that the measurement, while unflattering, is not the final word. Lee divided her time between New York and Paris.
The Paris apartment overlooked Avenue Montaigne with a view of the Eiffel Tower. It was 1,625 square feet. She had designed it herself. It was south-facing. The New York apartment on the Upper East Side was the one she had lived in longest and loved most. Rich dark woodwork, yellow fabric on the chairs, an absence of clutter that Andre Leon Talley described as the physical manifestation of Diana Vreeland’s maxim that elegance is refusal.
A kneeling ceramic camel in the living room, a souvenir from the trip to India and Pakistan she had taken with Jackie in 1962. Objects she had collected across decades and continents. Each one chosen with what she called the intention of keeping it forever. “If I really can be said to have a personal style,” she said, “I think it is reflected in my taste for the exotic and the unexpected.
I like to create rooms which are essentially traditional and then add touches of the bizarre and the delicious. The bizarre and the delicious.” This was Lee Radziwill’s aesthetic manifesto delivered without fanfare and it described not just her rooms but her life. The traditional structure of a woman born into society, educated at Miss Porter’s, married to a prince, and then the unexpected arrivals, Warhol and Capote and Mongiardino and Nureyev and Armani, the Factory and the Maysles brothers, and the Rolling Stones 1972 tour
which she attended with Capote and Peter Beard sitting in the wings while Mick Jagger performed for 20,000 people in venues where a Polish princess and a southern novelist and a wildlife photographer constituted the most improbable entourage in the history of rock and roll. She lived long enough to become something other than what the world had decided she was.
She lived long enough to see Grey Gardens become a cultural institution and to know that she had made it possible without anyone remembering. She lived long enough to see Tory Burch name a handbag after her. She lived long enough to see Jonathan Anderson, when he became creative director of Loewe, pin a 1972 Warhol Polaroid of her to his mood board as the starting point for an entire collection.
She lived long enough to watch the world decide, very late and somewhat sheepishly, that she had been interesting all along. Friday Friday in 2019 at 85 years old. The announcement came from her daughter, Anna Christina. Carole Radziwill, her daughter-in-law, the woman who had married her son and counted his heartbeats and scattered his ashes off Main Beach in East Hampton at sunset, posted a tribute that was widely shared.
The relationship between Lee and Carole had been complicated in the way that relationships between mothers and the women who watched their sons die are always complicated. But the tribute was generous, and it was honest, and it said something about what Lee had been to the people who knew her. The obituaries ran everywhere.
The first sentence of nearly every one of them identified her as the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The New York Times called her a socialite, a princess, and a style icon. The Washington Post mentioned her marriages, her friendships, and the interior design career that had occupied two decades of her professional life.
The London papers remembered the house on Buckingham Place, and the years when she had been part of the social fabric of a city she had loved with the particular devotion of an American who finds in London something that cannot be found at home. Some of the obituaries mentioned Anthony, a few mentioned Grey Gardens, almost none mentioned the Mongiardino collaborations or the Armani years, or the nights when she She sat up late on the telephone with a man who would later turn those conversations into literature.
She had once said, “It is difficult for someone raised in my world to learn to express emotion. We are taught early to hide our feelings publicly.” This was the closest she ever came to explaining herself. Not apologizing, not justifying, not performing the kind of retrospective emotional accounting that memoir culture demands.
Just a statement of fact. She had been taught to hide her feelings. She had hidden them. The hiding had cost her certain things and preserved certain other things. And the balance between what was lost and what was kept was the balance of her life. The apartment on East 72nd Street was listed for sale after her death.
The asking price was $16.9 million. 4,600 square feet, three bedrooms, four bathrooms, the dark woodwork and the yellow chairs and the careful placement of objects that were not too many and not too few. Whoever bought it would get the rooms but not the feeling. The feeling had always been hers and it left when she did.
