She was born into the same family, attended the same schools, wore the same caliber of clothes, and moved through the same glittering world. She was more naturally vivaceious than her sister, quicker to laugh, more approachable to the strangers who encountered them both. And yet she would spend her entire life being called the other one.
Lee Radzil lived in the shadow of Jacqueline Kennedy for eight decades. And the story of how that shadow fell is not simply a story about sisters. It is the story of a man, one of the richest men who ever lived, who chose one sister over the other, and of what that choice cost the one who was passed over. The full story is stranger and more painful than the tabloid version, and it ends with a will that said everything anyone needed to know.
The Bouvier sisters, two girls, one shadow. To understand what happened between Lee Radzil and her sister Jackie, you have to start at the beginning in the specific household that produced them under the specific pressures that shaped what both of them wanted and how fiercely they would compete to get it. Caroline Lee Bouvier was born on March 3rd, 1933 in New York City.
the second daughter of John Venu Bouvier III, known to everyone as Blackjack and Janet Norton Lee Bouvier. Jackie had arrived four years earlier in 1929. The family lived in the specific altitude of New York society that the Bouvier occupied. Not old money in the oldest sense, but wealthy, socially ambitious, and organized around the cultivation of appearance and connection with an intensity that left marks on both daughters that never fully healed.
Blackjack Bouvier was a Wall Street stockbroker with a reputation for charm and a taste for women that extended well beyond his wife. He was handsome and charismatic and genuinely adored by both daughters, each of whom would spend some portion of her adult life looking for versions of the qualities he had in the men she chose.
He was also unreliable and financially reckless, and his marriage to Janet was, by the time Lee was old enough to observe it, a household organized around two people’s barely concealed contempt for each other. Janet Norton Lee Bouvier was a woman of different qualities. Ambitious, exacting, socially strategic in ways that were not warm, but were effective.
She had grown up in a family that was Irish American and Catholic and somewhat less socially established than the Bouvier, and she had married upward with the specific determination of someone who understood exactly what she was doing. Her primary instruction to her daughters, articulated so consistently and so directly that it became a kind of household motto was that money and power were the keys to everything and that they were to be acquired through marriage.
She repeated this with the explicit clarity that she brought to everything. Marry well, marry rich, marry up, and everything else would follow. It was not a romantic view of life. It was not intended to be. The dynamics within the household were clear. Jackie was her father’s favorite. Lee was her mother’s.
The daughters knew this. They grew up knowing it. and the specific knowledge that each parent had a preferred child and that neither daughter had the undivided love of both lodged in them in ways that shaped how they related to each other and to the world. Jackie and Lee were genuinely close in many ways, sharing humor, sharing aesthetic sensibilities, sharing a bond that was real.
They were also in constant ongoing half-conscious competition for something that their family’s structure had made them believe was limited. The approval, the attention, the love of the people who were supposed to give it unconditionally. Their parents divorced in 1940 when Lee was seven and Jackie was 11.
Their mother remarried in 1942, this time to Hugh Dudley Orchinloths Jr., a standard oil heir of considerable fortune who brought the Bouvier girls into the Newport, Rhode Island social world of genuine old money and introduced them to an even higher altitude of American aristocracy. The stepfather was not glamorous in the way that Blackjack had been, but he was stable in the way that Blackjack never had been, and the world he provided gave both daughters an education in what the highest rungs of American society looked
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like from the inside. Both girls attended Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut, the famous boarding school for the daughters of the American upper class. Both were beautiful. Both were intelligent. Both had the specific social gifts that their upbringing had developed in them. And both understood, having been raised by Janet Bouvier Orchinloths, that beauty and intelligence were tools, not ends in themselves, and that the right application of those tools led to the right marriage, and the right marriage
led to everything else. But there was a difference in how the world received them, and both of them felt it. Jackie had something that Lee did not quite have. Not greater beauty exactly, not greater intelligence exactly, but a quality of presence and a quality of mystery that drew people in ways that Lee’s more approachable warmth did not quite replicate.
Jackie could make a room feel like she was conferring a special favor on it by being there. Lee was more genuinely fun to be at a party with. But in the specific competition they were both running, fun was not the primary currency. First marriages and the competition takes shape. Lee Bouvier was considered the leading debutant of the 1950 season, a distinction that mattered in the world she inhabited, a formal recognition that she was among the most eligible and most accomplished young women of her set.
A full page photograph of her in her debut gown appeared in Life magazine’s December 1950 issue. She was 17 years old and already operating at the highest level of the world her mother had prepared her for. Jackie, four years older, was pursuing her own trajectory. She had attended Vasser and the Saon and George Washington University, and she was already working as a photographer for the Washington Times Herald when she met Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy at a dinner party in 1951.
Their courtship was long and complicated and they married in September 1953 in what became one of the most celebrated society weddings in American history. Lee watched her sister become engaged to a senator and realized with a clarity that she did not bother to conceal from the people around her that the competition had shifted entirely to Jackie’s favor.
She had made her debut before Jackie had formally secured her prize. Now Jackie had secured hers, and it was the Senate and the political future, and the specific, intoxicating combination of old money and new power that John Kennedy represented. Lee’s debut photographs in life were already ancient history. She had married first in April 1953 while Jackie was still in the process of becoming engaged.
Her husband was Michael Temple Canfield, the son of the president of Harper and Brothers Publishing House, a respectable marriage to a respectable man, but not the spectacular prize that her mother’s education had been preparing her for. They moved to England where Canfield was working and Lee established herself in London society which was rich enough and glamorous enough to provide a stage for someone of her beauty and style but which was also specifically not the stage that her older sister was now occupying.
The marriage did not last. By 1958, she and Michael Canfield had agreed to divorce. And while the divorce was being arranged, Lee had met the man who would become her second husband and give her the title she would use for the rest of her life. Prince Stannislaw Alrech Radzville, as everyone called him, was a Polish nobleman of genuine aristocratic lineage who had fled Poland when the communists took power and had settled in England.
He had become a British citizen, which legally required him to renounce his Polish title. But no such legal renunciation existed in Lee’s mind, or in the way she introduced herself from that point forward. She was Princess Lee Radzi from 1959 onward, and she pursued the title with a consistency that people found either charming or revealing depending on their point of view.
They married on March 19th, 1959. Their son Anthony was born 5 months later in Switzerland. Their daughter, Anna Christina, known as Tina, arrived in 1960. The newborn Tina’s godfather was John F. Kennedy. By then, the newly elected president of the United States. The year 1961 arrived and Lee’s sister became first lady.
Lee threw a party in London and told her guests with a combination of humor and genuine distress that competing with what Jackie had just become was impossible. She was 27 years old, married to a prince, living in a splendid house near Buckingham Palace in one of the most exciting cities in the world, the mother of two children whose godfather was the president of the United States.
By any ordinary measure, her life was extraordinary. By the measure that her mother had taught her, and that the competition with her sister had reinforced, it was not enough. And it was in the specific restlessness of this not enough feeling that she found her way to Aristotle Onases. Aristotle Onases, the man at the center of everything.
To understand why Aristotle Onasses mattered so much to what happened between the sisters, you have to understand what he was. Not simply what he owned, though what he owned was staggering, but the specific quality of person he was and the specific attraction he represented. Onasis was born in 1906 in Smyrna in what is now Turkey, the son of a prosperous Greek merchant family.
He had fled during the Turkish destruction of the city in 1922 and had made his way with almost nothing to Argentina, where he began trading tobacco. From that modest beginning, through a combination of ruthless commercial intelligence and an almost supernatural instinct for the deals that other people didn’t yet recognize as deals, he had built one of the largest shipping empires in the world.
He owned tankers, airlines, and a private island in Greece. He had, over the course of a lifetime of relentless acquisition, amassed what was at the time one of the largest private fortunes in the world. He was also by 1962 in a long and complicated relationship with Maria Callus, the Greek soprano, who was in her specific way as famous and as dominating a personality as Onasses himself.
Their relationship was intense and unstable and had been going on since the late 1950s and it would continue in various configurations for years beyond the point when Lee Radzil entered the picture. Onasis was not conventionally handsome. He was short, stocky, with heavy-litted eyes and a quality of physical presence that photographs don’t entirely capture, but that people who met him described with remarkable consistency.
He was intensely, magnetically alive, in a way that was almost physical, a force of attention and energy that made whatever room he was in feel like the most important room in the building. He was charming in the specific mode of very powerful men, not by being differential or gentle, but by being completely present, completely focused, completely interested in whoever was in front of him for as long as the interest lasted.
He was also known, well doumented, and entirely open about his view that women were a category of acquisition alongside yachts and paintings and oil companies. He had a long history of affairs conducted without much discretion and without visible guilt. He had been married once to Tina Leanos, the daughter of a rival Greek shipping magnate, a marriage that joined two of the great fortunes of the Greek maritime world.
And they had had two children together, Alexander and Christina, before their divorce in 1960. He was in 1962 a man without a wife, with all the money in the world, and with the specific combination of loneliness and appetite that produces someone who can make a woman feel in the first few hours of knowing him that she is the most interesting person he has ever encountered.
He was 60 years old in 1962. Lee Radzi was 30. He was 27 years her senior. exactly the same age gap that existed between her and stars Radzi. There is something in this that suggests a woman who found herself drawn to a particular kind of older established powerful man, which is perhaps not surprising given what she had been taught about power and what she had witnessed in her own father.
Blackjack Bouvier had been older than her mother, too. The template was established early. Lee was 30 years old and bored and married to a prince who was 23 years older than she was. She had beauty and taste and style and connections and a title. She did not have the specific thing that her mother had identified as the key to everything, the combination of money and power in the person she had chosen to share her life with.
Stars Radzil was aristocratic but no longer significantly wealthy. He was charming but not powerful in the global sense. And the man she found herself spending time with in 1962 was specifically almost grotesqually everything that Stars was not. Their affair began in 1962. Lee was still married to Stars. Onasses was still involved with Maria Callas.
The arrangement was not discreet. They were photographed together. They attended public events together. They appeared on his yacht together. The gossip was immediate and extensive. He told friends that he was drawn to Lee because she struck him as a sad, lonely creature who was agrieved that her sister was getting all the attention.
This is a description that may be more self-erving than accurate. Onasis was skilled at explaining his choices in ways that flattered himself, but it points at something real about what the attraction was built on. He saw someone who needed to be the center of something. He offered to be that center. What Lee wanted from the relationship was a matter of considerable public and private speculation at the time.
By the accounts of people close to her, she wanted what her mother had told her she should want, the great marriage, the great fortune, the great life. She believed, or at least hoped, that what was developing between them was leading somewhere specific. She was wrong. And the reason she was wrong is the part of the story that nobody who knew it ever forgot.
The yacht cruise that changed everything. Jackie Kennedy Onases was in the midst of the most devastating period of her life in the summer of 1963. Her third pregnancy had ended in tragedy in August. Her son Patrick Bouvier. Kennedy was born prematurely on August 7th, 1963 and died 2 days later. He had weighed less than 5 lbs and had been unable to breathe without the specific medical intervention that the era’s technology could not fully provide.
Jackie was at Boston Children’s Hospital when he died. She was 33 years old and had now lost three children, a miscarriage in 1955, a stillborn daughter in 1956, and now Patrick. She was in physical and emotional recovery from the loss when Lee, who flew from London immediately, was at her side.
Lee suggested that Jackie come to Greece, that she get away from Washington and the White House and the specific relentlessness of the role of first lady, and recover somewhere warm and beautiful and entirely removed from the institutional demands of being Mrs. Kennedy. Lee had access to just the right escape, the Christina, Onases’s legendary 325- ft yacht, which had become famous as one of the most spectacular private vessels in the world.
The crew quarters and guest suites were extraordinary. The swimming pool on the aft deck had a mosaic floor that could be raised to become a dance floor. The bar stools were upholstered in the skin of a whale’s foreskin, a detail that Onasis apparently found amusing to mention to guests. The Christina was not a subtle vessel.
It was a display of wealth on an almost theatrical scale. The invitation was framed as a gift from a loving sister to a grieving one, and it may genuinely have been exactly that in Lee’s conscious intention. But it was also an invitation into Lee’s world, into the space of the man Lee had been involved with for a year and believed was moving toward a future with her.
Whether Lee fully thought through the implications of what she was arranging, bringing her glamorous, famous, recently bererieved sister into close proximity with the most magnetic man she had ever met, is something only Lee could have known. What is documented is that she arranged it and what happened on the cruise was not what she had anticipated.
The Kennedy political team was deeply opposed. Robert Kennedy disliked Onassis on both personal and political grounds. Onasis had been sued by the American government in 1955 for violations connected to the ships he had purchased from the US fleet, and the Kennedy brothers had reason to be wary of associating the first family with a foreign tycoon of questionable political associations.
The State Department was uncomfortable. The trip happened anyway because Jackie needed it and because she had made the decision. The cruise took place in October 1963. It lasted 11 days. The photographs from those 11 days are extraordinary in the specific way that photographs sometimes capture more than what was intended.
The first lady of the United States on the deck of a billionaire’s yacht in the Aian, visibly alive again after the summer’s grief. Her face turned toward the sun. She looked like someone who had been allowed to be herself for the first time in months. Onasis was paying attention to her. Really, specifically, completely paying attention to her.
Lee was on the same yacht. Lee watched this happen. She had brought Jackie here. She had given this to her sister. And what her sister was receiving was not simply the therapeutic benefit of sun and sea. 6 weeks after the cruise ended, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The 5-year wait and the marriage that ended everything.
What followed between Onasses and Jackie Kennedy was not immediate or straightforward. She was the most famous widow in the world, and any relationship she pursued would carry enormous public and political consequences that could not be simply set aside. Robert Kennedy was running for the Senate and had political ambitions that extended far beyond that.
The entire Kennedy family had an investment in the image of Jackie as the keeper of the fallen president’s legacy as the figure of grief and dignity and national mourning who held the memory of November 22nd, 1963 in her person. A new relationship, particularly with a man as foreign and as controversial as Onasses, would complicate that image enormously.
So things developed slowly. They were in contact. They were seen together on various occasions over the following years. The specific nature of what was happening between them, whether it was a sustained romantic relationship, a deepening friendship, or simply the mutual awareness of two people who had discovered each other in a context of grief and drama, and had not resolved what to do about it, was not publicly established.
What was privately established apparently was that Onasis had told Lee his intentions. He reportedly paid her a significant financial settlement. Accounts vary on the exact amount, but figures ranging from $100,000 to several hundred,000 are mentioned in various accounts. The settlement, if accurate, has the quality of a formal ending of a formal arrangement.
Lee had been involved with him. She had apparently believed or allowed herself to hope that the involvement was leading to something permanent. Onasis was indicating that it was not. He was compensating her for the promise that had been made and would not be kept. For Lee, this was not simply a romantic disappointment. It was the specific loss of the thing that her entire upbringing had been designed to acquire.
Onasis was the man who had money and power in the combination that her mother had identified as the formula for a complete life. He was the man who had noticed her, paid attention to her, made her feel that she was specifically and particularly the person he wanted. And then he had turned his attention to her sister.
Lee remained married to Stars Radzil through this entire period. She managed the household, maintained her social life, was photographed at the right parties and in the right clothes, and lived with the specific private knowledge of what had happened, what had been offered, and what had been taken away. Jackie, in the same years, was managing the complexity of her own position.
She was the nation’s widow. She was raising two young children under extraordinary public scrutiny. She had her own private life, her relationship with the diplomat and intellectual Charles Bartlett, and then the long and documented relationship with the dress designer Valentino Gavani and the developing understanding that the role the country had assigned her, the eternal widow, the keeper of the flame, was not a role she intended to inhabit for the rest of her life.
The announcement came on October 17th, 1968. Aristotle Onases had proposed to Jacqueline Kennedy. She had accepted. The wedding would take place on his private island of Scorpios 3 days later. Onasses called Lee to tell her. He asked her to come. She came. She stood beside her sister at the altar as the man she had loved and hoped to marry placed a ring on Jackie’s finger.
She reportedly wept when she heard the news. By some accounts the devastation was genuine and total, not because the affair with Onasses had been ongoing, but because the hope of it had been, the possibility of it, the understanding that someday the situation might resolve itself in her favor rather than her sisters. She had been first.
She had been the one who found him, who brought him into their shared world, who had believed herself to be the woman he was moving toward, and he chose Jackie. What the Onases marriage meant for the sisters. The marriage of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onases on October 20th, 1968 was one of the most shocking events in the social and cultural history of the decade.
The reaction in America was one of disbelief and for many people genuine betrayal. She had been the nation’s grieving widow, the keeper of the Kennedy flame the most admired woman in the country. And she had married a foreign tycoon who was 23 years older than she was and who was by most accounts as far as possible from the saintly image of John Kennedy.
For Lee, the private reaction was considerably more personal than the public one. Jackie had married the man Lee had found and loved. Whatever Lee had been building, whatever she had imagined was possible with Onasses was now permanently foreclosed, and the marriage had a secondary consequence that Lee felt equally directly.
It transformed Jackie from a grieving widow into the wife of one of the richest men in the world. which meant that Jackie now had, in the most literal possible sense, the thing that their mother had told them was the key to everything. Jackie had done it twice. She had married the most powerful man in America, and then after that man was taken from her, she had married the richest man in the world.
By the specific metric that Janet Bouvier Orchinloths had established for her daughters, Jackie had achieved a perfect score, and Lee had not. Lee threw herself into other things. She had long been associated with the cultural and artistic circles of New York and London, and in the late 1960s and 1970s, those circles were extraordinary.
Her friendship with Truman Capot was one of the defining creative relationships of her life. Capote had met her in 1962 and designated her one of his swans, the term he used for the beautiful, wealthy, socially prominent women who constituted his inner circle whose glamour and sophistication he found endlessly fascinating.
He thought she was remarkable. She found in him a companion who saw her as herself, not as Jackie’s sister. He wrote a one-woman play called Laura for her, adapting the 1944 Otto Premier film, and she appeared in it in a 1967 television production. The reviews were largely unkind. Her acting career did not develop significantly beyond this and some subsequent stage appearances.
She tried. She had the desire, but the specific discipline of craft that acting requires was not something she had developed through a lifetime of work the way the performers she was competing with had. And the comparison, always the comparison, was difficult. She had a long affair with Peter Beard, the photographer and artist who was younger than she was, and who represented for her the specific freedom of a passionate and uncomplicated relationship with someone who had nothing to do with the world of money and power and social
competition that had structured her life. She loved him. Her mother threw her out of their shared car in the middle of Piccadilly Circus when Lee announced she had found the man she truly loved because Beard was not rich and Janet Bouviercloths had views about what love was supposed to deliver. She divorced Stars Radzil in 1974.
She discovered that Beard was involved with another woman. The late 1970s were a period of genuine difficulty for her. The divorce, the romantic disappointment, the ongoing assessment of a life that had produced much but not quite what she had wanted. The will that said everything. Jackie Kennedy Onases was diagnosed with non-hodkkins lymphoma in 1994. She was 64 years old.
The diagnosis was reported publicly and the prognosis was poor. When Lee learned that her sister was ill, she did what she had always done in Jackie’s moments of genuine crisis. She came. She was at her sister’s side during the final illness. She stayed. She was there when Jackie died on May 19th, 1994 in her Fifth Avenue apartment.
Then Jackie’s will was read. The will was 38 pages. It included specific bequests to family members, to friends, to employees. $500,000 trust funds went to Lee’s children, Anthony and Tina, from Jackie’s grandchildren. Substantial cash bequests went to people who had worked for Jackie, people who had been her friends, people who were simply part of her world.
Lee received nothing. The will contained a single sentence addressing the emission, and that sentence has been quoted and discussed and analyzed for three decades. Jackie wrote that she had made no provision for her sister in her will for whom she had great affection because she had already done so during her lifetime. The phrase great affection stands out.
Not love, not my beloved sister, great affection. the specific language of someone who is describing something that is real but is bounded, something that is felt but is also being managed, something that has been complicated by things that the document does not name. whether the bequest already done during her lifetime was a reference to specific financial gifts Jackie had given Lee across the years, or whether it was a reference to something more specific, something connected to Onasses, to a settlement, to an obligation that had
been discharged in a way that Jackie had decided was sufficient is not publicly documented. What is documented is the effect. Lee Radzi stood outside the circle of people that her sister had chosen to specifically honor in her final legal document, and she learned this publicly in the reading of a will that the entire world was watching.
She wept at her sister’s death. She was genuinely bererieved. The relationship between them, whatever its complications, was the most central relationship of her life. The competition and the closeness had been running simultaneously since childhood had produced the specific texture of her entire adult life.
She did not want Jackie to be gone. She also learned on the day that Jackie’s will was read that some specific and permanent accounting had been made and that she was on the wrong side of it. Lee Radzi after Jackie the final decades. Lee Radzil lived for 25 years after her sister’s death. She was in those years genuinely herself in ways that the competition with Jackie had sometimes obscured.
A woman of real aesthetic intelligence, real social charm, real personal history that extended far beyond the role of Jackie’s sister. her third marriage to film director Herbert Ross who had directed Foot Loose and Steel Magnolia’s and The Turning Point among other significant films lasted from 1988 until their divorce a short time before his death in 2001.
He was older than Lee. The marriage gave her a connection to the film world she had always been interested in and a stability that some of the earlier chapters of her life had not consistently provided. She became a brand ambassador for Giorgio Armani in her later years. a role that suited her perfectly, that used the specific quality of style and glamour that was genuinely and organically hers, and that required nothing of her, that she had not already spent a lifetime developing.
The Armani connection was a late career validation of something she had always been. Someone whose eye for beauty and whose instinct for what was excellent in clothing and design was not manufactured for public consumption, but was a genuine part of how she moved through the world.
She published a memoir called Happy Times in 2001, a book of photographs and reflections that offered her account of the life she had lived and the people she had known. The title is interesting. Happy times. Not all times. Not the defining times. The happy ones. She spent time with Andy Warhol, with Rudolph Nurayv, with the world of New York’s artistic community in the 1970s and 1980s.
That was one of the most interesting in the history of the city. She introduced Albert and David Masels, the documentary filmmakers, to her aunt Edith Beal and cousin Edith Bouvier Beal, whose eccentric life in a decaying East Hampton mansion became the documentary Gray Gardens in 1975, one of the most influential documentary films ever made.
Whatever the complexities of her relationship with Jackie, her contribution to American cultural life was genuine. She died on February 15th, 2019 at her home in New York. She was 85 years old. Her daughter, Anna Christina Radzi, told the New York Times that she had died of natural causes. The obituaries all mentioned Jackie.
Every single one. In every country, in every publication, she was described first as Jacqueline Kennedy Onases’s younger sister and then as everything else she was. It had been that way her entire life, and it was that way at the end. What the story was really about. The story of Lee Radzil and Aristotle Anassis and Jackie Kennedy is on its surface the story of two sisters and a man who chose one of them.
But it is also the story of something more fundamental. Of what it means to spend your life measured against someone else, of what the competition that their mother installed in both of them actually produced in the one who did not win the most visible rounds. Lee Radzil was not simply the less successful sister.
She was someone who had real qualities, real style, real intelligence, real warmth, real taste, and who spent her life in a context that consistently organized those qualities around their relationship to Jackie’s qualities rather than around what they were on their own terms. She was the one who was more approachable, more naturally warm, more fun to be at a party with.
She was the one who was quicker and wittier and more genuinely interested in other people. These were not small things. They were the things that Truman Capot saw in her. The things that Andy Warhol saw, the things that her friends across 60 years of adult life consistently described. She was remarkable.
She was simply remarkable in a world that was looking at her sister. She became a princess before Jackie became a first lady. She was the leading debutant of her era before Jackie married the senator. She found Onasses before Jackie met him. She was consistently first and consistently overtaken and the pattern accumulated into something that shaped the whole architecture of her self-understanding.
She was not chasing Jackie’s life. She was living her own life. and the specific cruelty was that her own life kept arriving at destinations her sister then occupied more completely. The Onasis affair was the most visible and most painful expression of that pattern, but it was not the cause of it. The cause of it was the specific environment of their childhood, the specific instruction of their mother, the specific dynamic of a family that had taught both daughters that love and approval were limited resources to be
competed for. Onasis was simply the most dramatic instance of a competition that had been running since they were girls in the same house in New York City. Jackie’s will was the final word on that competition. Not in the sense that it declares a winner. wills don’t declare winners, but in the sense that it confirmed what had been true for a long time, that something between them had calcified into something that could not be addressed in the ordinary ways, and that Jackie had chosen to address it in her final legal act by acknowledging it
with a sentence that was quiet and devastating and entirely in character. She described Lee as someone she had great affection for. She had nothing material to give her. She had already done so during her lifetime. The wedding photograph of Lee Radzil serving as matron of honor at her sister’s wedding to the man she had introduced to that sister, the man she had loved and hoped to marry is one of the more quietly devastating images in the entire Kennedy story. Lee is there.
She is composed. She is performing the role of supportive sister with the specific dignity of someone who has decided that what she feels internally is not anyone else’s business. Behind the composure is something that the photograph cannot capture. A woman who understood in that moment that the specific competition her mother had defined for her had been decided.
What that meant exactly only the two of them ever fully understood. and one of them was gone and the other was standing in the room where the will was being read. There is a version of Lee Radzeril’s life that the world never quite got to see. The version in which she was not the other one, not the less famous one, not the one who lost Onasses to her sister.
There is a version in which she was simply herself. the princess who had real taste and real style and real warmth and a capacity for friendship that made the people who knew her remember her not as Jackie Kennedy’s sister but as Lee Radzeril. The world didn’t often allow that version to be the primary version, but the people who knew her said it was the true one.
