The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters Read online

  Epigraph

  ITHAKA

  As you set out for Ithaka

  hope your road is a long one,

  full of adventure, full of discovery.

  Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

  angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

  . . .

  —you won’t encounter them

  unless you bring them along inside your soul,

  unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

  Hope your road is a long one.

  May there be many summer mornings when,

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

  may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

  to buy fine things,

  mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

  sensual perfume of every kind—

  as many sensual perfumes as you can;

  and may you visit many Egyptian cities

  to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

  Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

  But don’t hurry the journey at all.

  Better if it lasts for years,

  so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

  wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

  not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

  Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

  Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

  She has nothing left to give you now.

  And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

  Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

  you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

  —C. P. CAVAFY

  They walk the one life offered

  from the many chosen.

  —ROBERT LOWELL

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: “Girls Who Have Everything Are Not Supposed to Do Anything”

  1: Lee Radziwill in New York

  2: Jacks and Pekes in Paradise

  3: Americans in Paris

  4: London Calling

  5: Bouvier Style: The White House Years

  6: The Traveling Sisters

  7: Swan Dive

  8: The Golden Greek

  9: This Side of Paradise: Return to New York

  10: Working Girls

  11: Weddings and Funerals

  12: Lee Radziwill in the South of France

  Acknowledgments and a Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Also by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “Girls Who Have Everything Are Not Supposed to Do Anything”

  Never praise a sister to a sister.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  Jacqueline Kennedy, the greatly admired former First Lady, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of sixty-four. The illness spread rapidly through her body, and Jackie opted to die at home, in her spacious apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Lee Radziwill rushed to Jackie’s side when she learned of her sister’s illness. For a brief time, their long, complicated relationship seemed to melt away and they were just sisters, as close as they had been in their youth. Jackie refused invasive treatment, and the cancer spread to her liver, spinal cord, and brain. She died at home on May 19, 1994—ironically on her father “Black Jack” Bouvier’s birthday—surrounded by her family. Her son, John Kennedy Jr., announced her death to the world, commenting that she died at home, “on her own terms.”

  Lee wept.

  But when Jackie’s thirty-eight-page will was read, Lee discovered that substantial cash bequests were left to family members (including Lee’s two adult children), friends, and employees—but nothing to her. Not even a memento. Jackie’s last words to her sister, “for whom I have great affection,” were:

  I have made no provision in this my Will for my sister, Lee B. Radziwill, for whom I have great affection, because I have already done so during my lifetime. I do wish, however, to remember her children, and thus I direct my Executors to set aside the amount of five hundred thousand dollars ($500,000) for each child surviving me of my sister, Lee B. Radziwill . . .

  She left her one-sixth share of Hammersmith Farm to her stepbrother Yusha, to whom Jackie had remained close throughout her life.

  After reading about Jackie’s will, Gore Vidal recalled that she once told him in Hyannis Port, “I’ve kept a book. With names.” He thought she was joking about this enemies list, but thought otherwise after learning about Lee being cut out of the will. By way of explanation he said, “Her life in the world had been a good deal harder than she ever let on.”

  Lee was deeply hurt; the public humiliation was like a slap in the face. Jackie had certainly been well aware that Lee struggled to have a semblance of Jackie’s riches, often having to sell treasured homes and apartments and paintings in order to maintain the lifestyle that she and Jackie had been born to. So the question remains, twenty-four years following Jackie’s death: After Jackie and Lee had been close friends, confidantes, and coconspirators during the most formative years of their lives, why was Lee so completely left out of her sister’s will?

  * * *

  THEY WERE ALIKE in so many ways. In an era that clung to conventional roles for women despite new opportunities ushered in with the second wave of feminism, both women were raised to marry well, look to men for financial support, and always present an impeccable appearance to the world.

  Both women had a keen eye for beauty in all its forms—fashion, design, painting, music, dance, sculpture, poetry—and both were talented artists (Lee drew elegant botanical sketches, and Jackie wrote poetry, painted, and drew delightful caricatures). Both loved couture and both would be criticized for spending fortunes on their wardrobes. Both created a series of beautiful, beloved homes that would become refuges from harsh fates that often shadowed their lives. Both loved prerevolutionary Russian culture, and both loved the blinding sunlight, calm seas, and ancient olive groves of Greece. Both loved the siren call of the Atlantic, sharing sweet, early memories of swimming with their father, Jack Vernou Bouvier, at his familial seaside retreat in East Hampton known as Lasata (a Native American word for “place of peace”). Both adored their rakish father and missed him terribly when their parents separated in 1935.

  But they were different in important ways. One loved to stand out; one sought to fit in. One was outgoing, flirtatious, and fun-loving; the other was bookish and intellectual, with a deep thirst for knowledge. Although both sisters claimed they wanted to work and be self-supporting, one embraced modernism and feminism, and one remained deeply traditional, adapting herself to fit into societally accepted roles for women. Both were animal lovers: one particularly loved dogs; the other loved horses. One often found herself struggling for funds; the other attracted vast riches. One needed to shine on the public stage; one resisted fame and clung to the shreds of her privacy.

  The great irony of their lives is that fate handed shy, introverted Jackie a role on the world stage—for much of her adult lifetime she was arguably the most famous and admired woman in the world—and Lee, who longed to shine, was handed the lesser role of lady-in-waiting. “Being Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister,” their Bouvier cousin John H. Davis explained, “involved crosses and laurels no other Bouvier but she would have to bear.”

  But Lee rebelled against the role of lady-in-waiting. She was the first of the two sisters to
make “a sharp break with the milieu in which she was raised” when she proposed to her first husband, Michael Canfield, settled in London, and later became the first Bouvier to hold an aristocratic title, as Davis has noted. She has always known who she is, but has been frustrated in finding ways to express herself on the world stage; she needed to battle those who would keep her in a conventional—and secondary—role. Jackie, on the other hand, did not truly become herself until she was in her forties, after her first husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination and her second husband Aristotle Onassis’s death. Her inner life and her outward actions finally came together, and her originality and perspicacity were given a chance to fully bloom.

  Their story is also one of paradise lost and the struggle to regain it, because at the center of their core, they both yearned for the bliss of their earliest childhood, spent with their parents at Lasata, swimming in the sun-dappled waves off the Hamptons in the arms of their beloved father.

  The filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, whom Lee had hired in the 1970s to make a documentary about her and Jackie’s early years summering among the sand dunes and hedgerows of the Hamptons, remembered a special moment during filming. Albert Maysles recalled:

  One of the most memorable things that we shot was in the cemetery. Lee was walking around the graves in a very sad mood and she was telling me about her family. All of a sudden, she heard the sound of a train whistle in the distance. That haunting sound transfixed her. It must have brought her back to her childhood and the memory of her father’s week-end arrivals on that same train. As the cry of the train came roaring through, there was a captivated look on her face that I had never seen before. It was not a public look—I don’t think it has ever been captured by a photographer or a paparazzi. It was a private moment that got inside her soul, and it was beautiful. If I weren’t filming, I would have been moved to tears . . . something of great beauty came across in that moment, in the cemetery of all places, surrounded by death.

  1

  Lee Radziwill in New York

  My sister spoke a rather lovely and convincing French, but I got to live a more French life.

  —LEE RADZIWILL

  I love walking on the angry shore,

  To watch the angry sea;

  Where summer people were before,

  But now there’s only me.

  —JACQUELINE LEE BOUVIER

  Lee’s designer’s eye was much in evidence the first time we met Princess Radziwill in 2014 in her Manhattan apartment on East 72nd Street, not far from where her sister had lived at 1040 Fifth Avenue. It was a sunny day in spring and Lee’s floor-through apartment was bathed in light. “It’s my first priority,” she said. “I’ve never had a place that didn’t have fantastic light.” We emerged from a small elevator and were greeted at the door by Therese, her longtime lady’s maid, and ushered into a living room where light poured in from three tall, graceful windows. She was waiting for us on a fawn-colored sofa, impeccably slim, smoking a Vogue cigarette and drinking a Diet Coke, simply but elegantly dressed in black slacks, her champagne-colored hair immaculately upswept into a regal coif.

  Therese had arranged a lunch of chilled cucumber soup and an avocado-and-watercress salad, served on a folding table in front of the large fireplace, where an impressive over-the-mantel mirror gleamed back at us. It lived up to her reputation for serving exquisite meals that subtly matched her décor, such as serving borscht to coincide with the color of her dining room walls. Meeting Lee for the first time, we had the uncanny sense of looking into her wide-eyed, sensuous face and seeing two women: Jackie’s face is so famous that it’s hard not to see it reflected in Lee’s, as if Lee has somehow come to embody both women. Whippet thin, Lee’s features are more refined than her sister’s, her coloring lighter, her lightly tanned skin a shade of honey. Truman Capote famously described her eyes as “gold-brown like a glass of brandy . . . in front of firelight.”

  We were struck by the Eastern influences in the graceful room, such as the kneeling camel objet d’art in front of the trio of windows, inspired perhaps by her celebrated trip to India and Pakistan with Jackie in March of 1962. Books, an arrangement of orchids, botanical drawings—the beautiful objects are all carefully placed. There’s not a hint of clutter; Lee is one who took to heart Coco Chanel’s famous remark “Elegance is refusal.”

  “The lack of clutter, the choices of things to put on the wall,” Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley commented, “it’s all done with care and love of that objet, a sense of editing—editing her clothes and editing her friends and editing the menus for dinner. And she edits people. She edits herself. She edits her wardrobe. She edits her life.” One thing Lee has edited most carefully has been her relationship with her sister and the Kennedys, and their impact upon her life.

  It’s been twenty-four years since the death of her celebrated sister, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who had become an international icon of grace, style, and beauty. In her long, slow escape from the Kennedys and the Kennedy mystique—and from her sister’s long shadow—Lee has retreated ever more into her own exile. Like Napoleon’s flight from Waterloo to Paris and Elba, Lee has gone from the Hamptons to Virginia and New Hampshire, to London, finally alighting in New York and Paris, where she divides her time. She summers in the South of France (like Jackie, Lee has always been attracted to French culture). “I had a very romantic imagination as a young child,” she mused over her salad. “And France, Europe, French history—things European took hold of my imagination early on.” Lee hardly touched her meal, a habit that went back to Miss Porter’s School for girls, where she began seriously dieting as a young teenager. As Talley once said about Lee, “You never see her eating any great plates of food. The soup dances on the spoon, but it rarely ends up in her mouth.”

  In the weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the historian William Manchester described Jacqueline Kennedy as “a great tragic actress.” But it was Lee who had a brief fling with acting, though now she seems more like an elegant but haunted White Russian in exile, from a noble and wealthy family whose demands, and whose tragedies, have inadvertently shaped her fate. If her muse was beauty, it was history that claimed her.

  The late writer, intellectual, and professional contrarian Gore Vidal, whose mother, Nina, was once married to the Bouvier sisters’ stepfather Hugh Auchincloss, described Jackie and Lee’s relationship as “S & M, with Jackie doing the S and Lee doing the M.” A catty overstatement, perhaps—and it’s no wonder that there was no love lost between Lee and Gore Vidal—but it’s no secret that the two sisters, once so close, had by the end of Jackie’s life become estranged. We noticed that when talking about Jackie, Lee always refers to her as “my sister,” never by name.

  Lee once wrote that she always felt that Jackie was the reasonable one, and she the impetuous romantic: “There are people whose lives are almost destined to be shaped by the impulses of their hearts, rather than by reason . . . The desires of youth, for Jackie, were held in check by a certain faintheartedness.”

  Surprisingly, Lee spoke openly about her sister, though we had been cautioned by Talley, “It’s the subject you never bring up. I mean, there’s an unspoken rule that if you’re friends with Lee, you don’t talk about her sister at all.”

  Talley first met Lee in 1975 when he was working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. He recalled that “the first thing she said to me was, ‘Oh, I love your suit. It reminds me of my father.’” Talley answered that he’d copied it from a photograph of Jack Bouvier dressed in a beautiful single-breasted, one-button suit with Edwardian cuffs and shiny shoes, standing beside Jackie with her pony. “Style,” Bouvier once said, “is not a function of how rich you are or even who you are. Style is more a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s what you are . . . It’s what makes you a Bouvier.”

  Growing up, both girls had adored their father, so it’s likely th
at the seeds of Jackie and Lee’s later estrangement were planted early in life, when it became clear that Jackie was their father’s favorite, in part because she was the firstborn, was named after him, and she “actually looked almost exactly like him, which was a source of great pride to [him],” Lee said. Their father used to lavish praise on his two pretty daughters, which came to be known in their household as “Vitamin P.” But Lee also noted that Jackie received more praise from their father—and more criticism.

  After their parents’ divorce, the two girls found a new life with Hugh D. Auchincloss and his family at Merrywood, a stately Georgian house and terraced gardens overlooking the Potomac Palisades in McLean, Virginia. They summered at Hammersmith Farm, Auchincloss’s sprawling, wooded estate in Newport, Rhode Island, which was also a working farm. The displaced girls were welcomed by their stepfather and delighted in the farm’s menagerie of animals, but they still felt like poor relations. The fact that they were the products of divorce—rare in that world, at that time—and were practicing Catholics in a large Episcopalian household added to their sense of being “other,” not quite at home.

  “We certainly weren’t Catholics like the Kennedys,” Lee once wrote, “but we went to church every Sunday in New York with my grandfather Bouvier” and, three times a week, to a convent, “Helpers of the Holy Souls, so we were meant to be grounded in the Catholic faith.”

  There was another point of contention that became apparent when the two women were grown and making their mark on the world. Both women would be admired for their style and beauty, but many believe that it was Lee who had the more discerning eye and love of beautiful things—fashion, flowers, fabrics, color, design. Her interests in fashion, the Italian Renaissance, and Russian dance all predated Jackie’s, who would earn international attention for her tastes and interests—some of them entirely guided by Lee, such as her early interest in French couture.

  To this day, Lee still wants to be written about apart from her sister. Would she have been famous without her? She never wanted to be the footnote in Jackie’s story. As early as 1963, the journalist Barbara Walters described interviewing Lee on camera for the Today show, noting how Lee objected to being introduced as Jackie’s sister: “‘Forgive me,’ Lee interrupted, “but would you please make no reference to my sister and not refer to me as ‘Princess’?” And later Lee told her, “If you’ve no objection, I’d prefer to be addressed simply as ‘Lee Radziwill’ for the purposes of this interview.” Walters concluded: