The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters Page 6
a beautifully dressed, shy girl—inclined to bite her fingernails and spend every weekend away from college. She was no great student, even in her favorite subjects (psychology and design), and a notable nonparticipant in extracurricular activities. Her friend, even at the time, was her sister, although there were understandable signs of rivalry.
Walters recalled when Jackie visited the campus and decided to show a portfolio of her drawings to one of Lee’s favorite professors. Jackie was a talented but undeveloped artist, and she was no doubt pleased when the art history professor spent nearly an hour going over her portfolio. But Lee wasn’t. “I wish you would someday spend half as much time on me!” she complained.
For Lee, more important things than finishing college were in the offing: after a summer in Italy, she took a job as a special assistant to Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar. More exciting (because this was 1953 and the surest way to leave the confines of Janet’s household), there was a wedding in the offing: despite the Times-Herald announcement of Jackie’s engagement, Lee was going to beat her older sister to the altar.
Lee apparently did not share her sister’s early conviction to make a career for herself before marrying. For Lee, it was by way of marriage that she would transcend the realm of Janet’s considerable influence on her young life. That spring, at the age of twenty, Lee married Michael Temple Canfield, a shy, handsome twenty-seven-year-old publishing scion whom she had known and dated occasionally since she was fifteen.
Michael was the adopted son of Cass Canfield, the wealthy and distinguished publisher of Harper & Row (which would become the Kennedys’ publishing house), but he was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Kiki Whitney Preston, an American adventuress who first met the duke in Kenya, where she allegedly introduced him to cocaine. As a result of this thrilling rumor, young Michael adopted rather dapper English airs and dress, and—at six foot three inches, blond and imperially slim—he did cut an elegant figure. (Gore Vidal described him as an “uncommonly charming and decent youth . . . someone out of place in our wild world of bloody tooth and claw.”)
Canfield knew both girls, and he once took them on a rowboat ride in Central Park. He watched the two sisters whispering together in the back of the boat, in deep, serious conversation, and finally asked them what they were talking about.
“Gloves,” they replied.
* * *
ON THAT RAINY day in early spring—April 18, 1953—Hugh Auchincloss hosted the wedding reception at his stately Merrywood home, and Bouvier—still chastened by and envious of his successor’s wealth—gave away the bride. It was his first visit to Auchincloss country, and after being given a tour of its rolling lawns, its grand Georgian house, the Potomac shimmering in the distance, Bouvier bitterly felt the difference in their status. He was proud of how beautiful Lee looked, but it was a sober reminder of how much he had lost.
Auchincloss had slight misgivings about Lee’s marriage to Michael Canfield, not because of Lee’s youth (twenty was a normal age for young women to marry in the l950s), but because “he’ll never be able to afford her,” he confided, prophetically, to a friend.
Lee later said that one reason she married young was that she couldn’t wait to be on her own and set up house. The couple moved into a tiny penthouse apartment in New York, which Lee delighted in decorating, but soon thereafter the couple decamped to London. Sent abroad to work in Harper & Row’s London office, Canfield was instead persuaded by Lee to take a position as secretary to the ambassador to England, which quickly won the young American expats entrée to the best of London society.
By marrying first, Lee upstaged her older sister, at least in the eyes of the Auchinclosses. To punctuate that fact, she tossed Jackie her bridal bouquet just before leaving Merrywood for her honeymoon. Jackie had already broken off her engagement to John Husted, which had never been a passionate love match on her part, but rather something that had seemed suitable.
Within a month after catching Lee’s bouquet, Jackie became engaged to the most eligible bachelor in America, the dashing young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Not only was he extremely handsome, witty, and intelligent, but also, as a Kennedy scion, he was very, very rich. And Canfield was not.
* * *
THEY HAD BEEN seeing each other for about a year, introduced by Jack’s friend Charles Bartlett at a Washington, DC, dinner. Young Jack Kennedy was struck by Jackie’s intelligence and her somber beauty. Leaning over the asparagus in Bartlett’s dining room, he invited Jackie out on their first date.
Jackie found ways to get and keep Kennedy’s attention during the yearlong courtship that followed, and to sound him out on the subject of marriage, with playfully provocative questions she posed in the Times-Herald as its Inquiring Cameragirl: “Could you give any reason why a contented bachelor would want to get married?”; “Should engaged couples reveal their past?”; and—ironically, perhaps, given Kennedy’s much publicized romantic exploits—“[Do you agree that] the Irish are deficient in the art of love?” and “If you went on a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?”
They were noticed publicly for the first time when twenty-three-year-old Jackie accompanied thirty-five-year-old Kennedy as his date to Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural ball in January 1953. Jackie feared that Kennedy’s supporters considered her “a snob from Newport who had bouffant hair and French clothes and hated politics.” (And it wasn’t just Kennedy’s supporters. Once elected, Kennedy worried that the menus in the White House were becoming too French. “What the hell was Potage aux vermicelles?” he peevishly asked. “I just don’t want any more persons in this house being too French.”) But in fact Jackie’s style and knowledge of French were assets to the presidential hopeful. She had already proved invaluable to him, helping him prepare his remarks for his first major speech on the Senate floor, by translating and summarizing nearly a dozen French texts on the French Empire, including Indochina. Jackie’s reading aloud from de Gaulle’s Mémoires helped inform Kennedy’s speeches. De Gaulle’s “All my life I have had a certain idea of France” became Kennedy’s “I have developed an image of America” in his announcement of his candidacy for president in l960.
The ceremony was held on September 12, 1953, touted in the press as “the wedding of the year.” The gala reception, organized by Janet, was at Hammersmith Farm in Newport. Once again, Black Jack Bouvier was invited to escort his daughter down the aisle, but once again he was so abashed by the opulence of the Auchincloss estate that he sulked, half dressed, with a bottle of Scotch in his room at the Hotel Viking and railed against the Auchinclosses.
Here’s how Gore Vidal described it:
. . . Black Jack came to Newport, Rhode Island, to give away the bride. He was on his best behavior. But inspired by who knows what furies, Janet decided that although she could not bar him from the church, she could disinvite him from the reception, which, as it turned out, the Kennedys were to take over as a sound-and-light spectacle, celebrating the triumph of the Boston Irish over that old Protestant patriciate which had scorned Jack’s father, Joe Kennedy, not because he was Irish and Catholic, as he would have it, but because he was so exuberantly and successfully a crook.
After years of disappointment and decline, Bouvier no longer cut a dashing figure. Sadly for father and daughter, he had gotten too drunk to walk his favorite daughter down the aisle, and the honor fell to Hugh D. Auchincloss, his nemesis.
* * *
THE YOUNG COUPLE settled in Georgetown while Kennedy flourished as the young senator from Massachusetts. It was a blissful time for them both, but it was marred by two unexpected sorrows: in 1955, two years after their marriage, Jackie suffered a miscarriage. The following year, Jackie gave birth to a daughter she named Arabella, but the infant was stillborn.
* * *
IN LONDON, LEE was enjoying an extraordinary social whirl in the homes of London’s elite, but the marriage was not particularly happy. Not only wa
s Canfield a heavy drinker, but the couple was unsuccessful in their attempts to conceive (Canfield was later discovered to be sterile), though Lee desperately wanted a child. She soon began having affairs, which Michael knew of but did not complain about. The coup de grâce for Canfield came when it became clear that Lee intended to live at a level well beyond her husband’s means. When Jackie visited her sister in London and Canfield asked her how he could hold on to Lee, Jackie answered, “Get more money, Michael.” When he demurred, pointing out that he already had a modest trust fund and a good salary, Jackie explained, “No, Michael. I mean real money.”
* * *
THE 1950S HAD not been kind to Jack Bouvier. He began the decade by selling his seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $90,000 (the same seat, right before the 1929 stock market crash, had sold for $625,000). He retired on a nest egg of $200,000—far less than his father had. He drew up his will and, as his nephew Davis recalled, “became more of a recluse than ever,” holing up in his New York apartment with Esther, his housekeeper, now his sole companion.
A lean, weatherbeaten Swedish woman with a long, creased neck and protruding eyes, Esther cleaned Jack’s apartment, cooked his meals, did his laundry . . . loaned him money . . . took care of his shopping, accompanied him on his occasional travels [to Florida and Cuba], and listened to his endless declarations of love for his daughters.
Later in life, Jackie expressed her gratitude for Esther’s care of their father by helping to support her in her advanced years. It wasn’t lost on Bouvier that at sixty-four, his life was greatly diminished—the financial cost of his divorce, the estrangement of his daughters, his lack of female companionship and of a doting family surrounding him in his twilight years. He blamed Janet for all of it. He lived for his daughters’ phone calls and visits—increasingly rare as Jackie was caught up in the demands of her husband’s political career, and Lee was living in London.
Bouvier continued to send his daughters small checks (which included a little message to each, written on the check itself, such as “to a beautiful girl on her birthday”).
On July 27, 1957, Bouvier was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, suffering from severe abdominal pains. His doctor had not informed him that he had cancer of the liver. He was in torment until August 3, when he slipped into a coma and died in Lenox Hill at the age of sixty-six.
Jackie flew in from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with Jack Kennedy. As she would on a more famous occasion just six years later, she organized the funeral. Her extended family was impressed by “the decisive, distinctive way she handled everything, from the obituary to the burial.” Jackie sent Jack Kennedy to select the casket and deliver the obituary and a photograph to the New York Times. She insisted that Jack deliver the text and photo personally to the managing editor, no doubt to ensure respectable space on the obituary pages of the newspaper. She got the photo from one of her father’s former girlfriends, which must have been an embarrassing confrontation for the young Washington wife.
For her father’s funeral, Jackie insisted on festooning St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue with garlands of summer flowers instead of the usual dark wreathes and waxen lilies. “I want everything to look like a summer garden,” she told her Bouvier aunts, “like Lasata in August.”
Few people attended besides family—Bouvier’s sisters and nephews and his two daughters—but in the last pew sat a row of veiled women. They were Bouvier’s former paramours, and they had all come for their last assignation with Black Jack Bouvier.
After the funeral Mass, he was buried in East Hampton in the graveyard of the church where he had married Janet Lee a lifetime ago. At the site of his burial, mourners heard the rattling of the Long Island Rail Road train as it rolled past on its way to the nearby station.
After the funeral, Bouvier’s will was read. He left various small bequests for his sisters, nephews, and their children, but the greater part of the estate went to Jackie and Lee to be divided equally: approximately $80,000 apiece after taxes. He also left a painting of Arabian horses by Schreyer to Jackie, and his writing desk to Lee.
For Lee—despite a surprisingly generous bequest—her father’s diminished circumstance before his death had evoked a need for the comforting haven of wealth. For both sisters, Black Jack Bouvier would remain in their memories and haunt their imaginations as a deeply romantic, idealized figure.
* * *
BACK IN LONDON after the funeral, Lee accepted an invitation from Vogue to select American fashions for the US pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, as their “permanent representative” from the fair’s opening on April 17 to its close on October 19, 1958. She loved choosing and promoting American couture and jauntily posed for Vogue atop a tower of suitcases. Lee had finally begun to find her métier—but the troubles with her marriage persisted and she embarked on a number of discreet, and not so discreet, affairs. One of them, with the émigré Polish aristocrat Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill, would change their lives.
Stas Radziwill, the scion of an ancient Polish family brought to its knees by the German invasion, worked for the Polish underground and escaped to London at the end of World War II. Virtually penniless, he traded on nothing but his charm and his wits, marrying a Swiss heiress and eventually making a fortune in real estate. He was bighearted, larger than life, sometime imperious, and cut a recognizable figure in London, living beyond his means and swanning around town in a big Cadillac. By the time Lee met him, he was married to his second wife, the heiress Grace Maria Kolin.
Lee first met Stas (who was nearly twenty years older than she) in 1952 at a shooting party in the English countryside, at the home of Lady Lambton. The dashing Pole was passionate about shooting and was an excellent shot—a pursuit that Lee did not share (“I hated to see those birds fall from the sky”). Stas was there with his second wife, Grace, and Jackie was there as well, on a visit to London to see her sister. She surprised Lee with a flirtatious gambit when she turned to Radziwill and said, “Stas, you have such beautiful lips.” (Perhaps Jackie was signaling to Lee that Stas was a worthy prospect.)
While John Kennedy’s star was rising, he had set his sights on the presidency, Canfield’s drinking had accelerated and his stint at the American embassy was about to end. The marriage was essentially over when Lee began her romance with Stas. James Symington, the son of Democratic senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, was an attaché at the embassy at the time, and he recalled a dinner party he gave for the Canfields, the Radziwills, and Lord and Lady Dudley.
“It was on March 26, 1957—I remember the date because it was a birthday party for my son, who had just turned two. The invitation read that he would be asleep, but I would be hosting in his place. I remember Lee as a pretty girl—I remember she looked great!” Symington had known Canfield since they were both students at St. Bernard’s School in Manhattan. “He worked for the ambassador in London before me; when Jock Whitney took over the embassy, I became his secretary,” he recalled. “I guess you know that after their divorces, Lee married Radziwill, Grace married Lord Dudley, and Michael married Lady Dudley. It was quite a trio!”
Seven years after their first meeting, Lee Bouvier Canfield became Princess Lee Radziwill. When Radziwill had become a British citizen, he’d been required to officially give up his princely title, but he managed to cling to it, as did Lee. For Lee, it was a prize she was not going to give away.
John Davis later wrote:
When Lee married Prince Radziwill in March 1959, she was a childless, relatively impecunious divorcee living in a by no means opulent apartment in London, who had been occupying her time with various fashion assignments such as running the fashion show at the American Pavillion at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. Within two-and-a-half years of her marriage, she had become one of the great ladies of the Western World.
If Canfield’s connections through the American embassy had thrust Lee into the highest echelons of London society, her marriage to
Stas allowed her to flourish in a much grander style, not to mention granting her the dubious title of princess, which she used, albeit illegitimately. Though Stas wasn’t nearly as rich as his brother-in-law, his success allowed Lee to live a life that even Jackie would envy: a three-story Georgian house at 4 Buckingham Place (a charming house not far from Buckingham Palace, though in a relatively modest neighborhood), and a sprawling weekend country home outside of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, just an hour’s drive from London.
Called Turville Grange, it was a stately Queen Anne brick-facade “bakehouse” built in the seventeenth century on fifty acres, facing Turville Heath. The lavish gardens behind the manse overlooked the Chiltern Valley. The estate was so vast it included a large guesthouse, a cobblestone courtyard, a stable with a dovecote, and an herb garden. The Radziwills had a staff that would make any Edwardian household proud: a cook, a butler, two maids, and a nanny for their children. In the middle of the courtyard, like something out of an Elizabethan ballad, was a mighty beech tree surrounded by a bench used for mounting horses. A large kitchen garden and a rose garden lined by espaliered pear trees completed the landscape. Stas designed an elegant, indoor swimming pool (which Lee disliked).
Lee’s longtime friend Leslie Caron, the celebrated French actress and dancer, saw that Stas delighted in pleasing his stylish wife, allowing her to lavishly redecorate both of their homes and providing Lee with holidays in leased or borrowed Italian and Portuguese villas. Caron thought that he treated her like a child bride, like Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and she felt that, like Nora, Lee “wanted to try out her wings and be independent in the same way.”
Of the city and country residences, Lee felt most at home in Turville Grange, which she described as “a house of flowers. When you entered, it had a smell of straw rugs and burning fires, mixed with the scent of sweet flowers.” It was their “Month in the Country house,” Lee recalled—it was Chekhov and Turgenev, two Russian writers Lee admired. They filled the place with their menagerie—including three horses and a pony, a cat named Pussy Willow, and five dogs. “Lee was creating a personal, earthly paradise of her own taste and expression,” said her friend André Leon Talley. In some ways, it was Lee’s answer to Merrywood and Hammersmith Farm, and their duration there was probably the happiest time of their marriage.