“When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away,” Lee Radziwill once told journalist Gloria Steinem. “I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge… I didn’t get very far… It’s rather difficult to run away in your mother’s high heels.”
Raised in a 12-room duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan, Radziwill was born into great wealth. Her family summered at the family estate in East Hampton and her mother spent weekends at the racecourse schooling prize-winning horses.
Despite profound resources, Radziwill’s childhood and, at times, later life is blackened by a bleak sadness. Somewhat frustratingly, this misfortune isn’t well documented in her eponymous book Lee but rather hinted at. Although she adored her father, Wall Street stockbroker and socialite John Vernou Bouvier III, his relentless womanising ended up derailing his marriage. “My parents divorced when I was seven-years-old,” she writes. “Two years later, when we were at our grandfather’s house in East Hampton, my mother telephones to say that she had married Hugh Auchincloss. I felt my world had crashed.”
But it hadn’t. Years later, although her first marriage to book publisher Michael Temple Canfield ended after an affair with aristocrat Stanislaw ‘Stas’ Radziwill, she subsequently became a princess, travelled the world, and partied with some of the most iconic figures of the past century.
While this jet-setting lifestyle enabled her to tour with the Rolling Stones and become muse to the likes of Truman Capote and Rudolf Nureyev, Radziwill reminds one of a tempestuous enclosed bird, fluttering its beaten wings in a gilded cage. Nowadays, she is fiercely private and in a quest for freedom shares personal pictures, intimate letters and inspirational anecdotes, recalling friendships with numerous cultural figures, from Peter Beard to Andy Warhol.
Radziwill and her older sister, Jackie Kennedy, had a difficult relationship
For decades, Radziwill’s fabled wide-eyed prettiness has defined American style. Her homes, from Paris to New York, have been photographed for the pages of Vogue – the most memorable being a Turkish textile-smothered den and a decadent bedroom boasting a dramatic pink canopy bed.
The society doyenne is also well known for her turbulent relationship with older sister and former First Lady Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Lee Kennedy Onassis. Both were beautiful, and often drawn to the same men. Jackie grew up to be renowned as one of the most beautiful women in the world, but for those who knew both sisters, Radziwill was often regarded the most alluring, with a keener eye for fashion and design.
Jackie further surpassed her sister by becoming engaged to the admirable soon-to-be senator, John F. Kennedy. “My father managed to convince himself that John Kennedy would really be a good husband for his beloved older daughter – this, in spite of the fact that his future son-in-law had gone to Harvard instead of Yale. Unsurprisingly, they had a great deal in common, namely humor, and both took a passionate interest in sports.”
While Jackie became First Lady at just 31-years-old, Radziwill embraced motherhood, living in a handsome house at 4 Buckingham Place (near Buckingham Palace). Despite the distance, she and her sister were closer than ever. Kennedy was reported to be particularly proud of his wife and sister-in-law. According to photographer Cecil Beaton’s diaries, he once told Radziwill, “I love her [Jackie] deeply and have done everything for her. I’ve no feeling of letting her down, because I’ve put her foremost in everything.”
For six decades, Radziwill has remained silent about her brother-in-law’s alleged affairs, which include Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Judith Campbell Exner. “Jack was very charismatic, of course,” she gingerly writes, “and I think he was a good president and a very good father – he adored his children.”
Since then, Radziwill has become an actress, an interior design consultant, and a public relations executive for Giorgio Armani. In 2008, she received the Légion d’Honneur from the French government; she fell in love with Paris on her first trip to Europe, with her sister, in 1949. But while Lee is her attempt to satisfy the public’s fascination with a life awash with romance, scandal and opulence, it seems this latest release may have unearthed some forgotten questions that remain unanswered.
