It can’t have been easy being Lee Radziwill, forever known as the sister of the world’s most photographed woman, later its most dazzling widow, always America’s queen. As Jackie Kennedy’s younger sibling complained to a journalist in later years, ‘Please tell me this is not a story about my sister and me. I’m just sick of that!’
But just how challenging was it being the most famous sister on the planet, knowing that everyone’s eyes were always looking past her to her superstar sibling? And how on earth did she not just survive, but thrive?
The answer may lie in the forthcoming sale of her personal items by Christie’s in New York. Following Lee’s death in February this year, hundreds of unique pieces will be going to auction in October, and they reveal tantalising glimpses of a life lived both in the spotlight, but also in the shadows. Lee was an intimate witness to a glamorous but tumultuous era in American history, she became a princess herself by marriage but, despite her exalted status and globetrotting lifestyle, she had a lifelong fight to carve out her own identity – a struggle that was never easy, and sometimes heart-breaking.
Any frustration felt by Lee with her sister would have been understandable. Their intense association, one of both fondness but also rivalry, dated back to their childhood, when their mother harboured great ambitions for both, aka marriage to rich men, but clearly favoured her elder daughter Jackie. Despite this, the girls were thrown together by their parents’ traumatic divorce and once travelled across Europe together. Lee wrote later, ‘Apart from mutual affection, I think our strongest bond was a shared sense of humour.’
Both seemed set for happy futures – beautiful, popular in their respective fashions, Jackie athletic, intellectual, reserved, Lee rebellious, creative, mischievous. But if Lee’s star shone brighter at first with life in London and an early first marriage, it was forever eclipsed when Jackie’s husband Jack Kennedy became the youngest and most glamorous ever US president. Lee was reported to complain at a dinner party, ‘How can anyone compete with that? It’s all over for me now.’
For the heady years that followed, when Lee was often at Jackie’s side, either at balls in Washington or on overseas trips, despite being at the epicentre of the glamorous Kennedy court, she knew all eyes were on her sister – especially when Jackie dazzled Paris in 1961, dressed in haute couture selected for her by Lee. The younger sister was credited in fashion circles for having a far more innate sense of style, but it seemed it was her sister who would enjoy the benefit.
Events took a more Bette Davis-esque turn after the shocking assassination of JFK in November 1963. Lee was at her sister’s side throughout the tumultuous period that followed, when Jackie was beside herself with grief, but she can’t have expected what happened next. In the first half of the decade, Lee had been conducting her own scandalous affair with Greek shipping mogul Aristotle Onassis, a man whose millions somehow failed to endear him to either Lee’s mother Janet or the entire Kennedy clan. It was
later reported that Lee had even turned down Onassis’s proposal for fear of dirtying the Kennedys’ good name. Well…
Following Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Lee could only join the rest of the world in picking their mouths up off the floor when it was announced that Jackie would be becoming the next Mrs Onassis. Lee attended the wedding on the groom’s personal Greek island of Skorpios and summoned the grace to say, ‘I am very happy to have been at the origin of this marriage which will, I am certain, bring my sister the happiness she deserves.’ Hmmm…
So how did Lee cope with all of this? Her cousin John H Davis in his book The Bouviers put Lee’s problem in stark terms: ‘Although she was abundantly gifted herself… she had often been obscured by the shadow of her sister’s prominence, and now that shadow threatened to eclipse her identity.’ So how did she rescue that precious sense of self?
Well, firstly, Lee had no shortage of admirers, not including the big fish she lost to her sister. Truman Capote once described the Bouvier sisters as ‘American geishas, women who existed only to captivate the world’s richest.’ This description is, I think, as unfair, particularly of Lee, just as the tag permanently attached to her of ‘socialite’ is limiting.
Photographs through the decades show her always smiling, often laughing, and two of her three marriages lasted more than a decade. She clearly had personal qualities that endeared her to a catalogue of unusual characters, from Andy Warhol to photographer Peter Beard. She was a great friend of Truman Capote, who travelled with her on the tour bus with the Rolling Stones in 1972. Other names linked with hers were as disparate as comedian Peter Cook, politician Roy Jenkins and the Duchess of Cornwall’s explorer brother Mark Shand, who famously loved his elephants more than people. This is not the calling card of a woman interested only in cash.
But more intrinsically, and ultimately more enduringly, Lee had her creativity and remained permanently engaged with art, people and culture. As the items in the Christie’s collection reveal, she remained open to influences her whole long life. She said herself, “If I really can be said to have a personal style, I think it is reflected in my taste for the exotic and the unexpected.”
As a teenager, Lee’s great love was Renaissance paintings, inspiring her to track down revered art historian Bernard Berenson on her first trip to Italy. ‘I felt like I’d met God,’ she said, and went on to correspond with him for the rest of his life. As a young girl, she’d worked as an assistant to legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Later, she became a muse to Georgio Armani, and collaborated with a host of other designers and artists, making her own name with interior design. Truman Capote even put her on the stage in The Philadelphia Story where the play bombed, but her Yves Saint Laurent costumery successfully dazzled.
Her biggest creative triumph came about through her relationship with Peter Beard. Together they travelled to the derelict East Hampton house of her eccentric aunt Edith Beale, and her equally idiosyncratic daughter Little Edie. This unusual pair consented to being filmed at intimate quarters by Beard’s friends The Maysle brothers, and the resulting documentary Grey Gardens has become a recognised masterpiece of the genre. By the time Jackie Onassis died in 1994, the two sisters were living far more separate lives than in previous years. However, Lee grieved for her dying sister, telling her in her last hours, ‘I love you so much, I always have, Jacks, I hope you know it.’ It came as a shock then, both to her and the wider public when Jackie wrote in her will that she had made no provision for her sister ‘for whom I have great affection because I have already done so during my
lifetime’.
Throughout history, there have been women famous for being the sister – the other Boleyn girl, some of the lesser-known Mitfords, Pippa Middleton and, arguably Lee Radziwill’s most similar peer, Princess Margaret. Only they can know the extent to which sibling bonds were tested by comparative success, luck and popularity. Even by these standards, though, it’s fair to say Lee Radziwill had a uniquely challenging lot in life. It’s to her credit that, if she often wanted to scream and pull her sister’s hair, more often she counted her good fortune and put a positive spin on it. She told the New York Times in 2013, ‘I’m perfectly content at this time of my life. I’ve done so many fascinating things and the greatest joy is that I continue to do interesting things and meet fascinating people.’
Most pertinently, she added, ‘What I don’t have is envy.’
