Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The wedding of Janet Jennings Auchincloss to Lewis Rutherfurd was held at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, which, of course, was where Jackie had married Jack back in 1953. (Though Janet had been raised Episcopalian, Lewis was Catholic, thus the Catholic Church wedding.) Janet, just eight then, had been Jackie’s flower girl. Now she was a bride, looking gorgeous in a short-sleeved, sheer organza dress with gossamer silk petals, designed by the Italian fashion house Sorelle Fontana of Rome. Janet’s hair was swept into a classic chignon to reveal the shadowless brow and patrician mold of her chiseled features. A single strand of pearls was at her neck, a gift from Jackie.

  The wedding day was as chaotic as one might expect, given that Janet was the half sister of Jacqueline Kennedy. More than eight thousand people showed up just to get a quick peek at Jackie in her two-piece, short-sleeved canary-yellow dress ensemble. Her appearance caused such bedlam, it was everything police could do to keep the crowds in control in front of the church. For a moment, Jackie and Janet Sr. were blocked by a team of photographers at the top of the steps. Jackie looked stricken as flashbulbs went off in her face, the popping sounds seeming to unnerve her. Finally, her mother, looking deceptively dainty in a pink dress with a large white picture hat and matching gloves, shoved one of the paparazzi. He tumbled into another until, finally, the whole lineup of them fell over themselves like circus clowns.

  By the time the bride arrived on the arm of her father, Hugh, the scene was out of control. People were shouting Jackie’s name and demanding that she come out of the church and make another appearance. “No! No!” Janet Jr. exclaimed. “Tell them to go away,” she said from inside the car. “They’re ruining everything!” Hugh opened the door slowly and, sheltering his now-sobbing daughter from the onslaught, rushed her up the stairs and into the church as quickly as possible.

  Winthrop Rutherfurd III, Lewis’s brother, who was his best man, recalled, “What a mob scene! We had a hell of a time getting into that church, and the entire time I was fighting my way in I was wondering how we were going to get out. There was such a craze to see Jackie. Janet was terrified. We were all caught off guard by it.”

  After the service, Janet and Lewis and everyone else couldn’t leave the church. “Tell them to back up!” the bride shrieked to police. “We can’t even get to our car!” Lewis held on to his new wife tightly as they made their way through the throng. Janet recoiled as clawing hands tore at her dress. As soon as everyone was out of the church and on their way back to Hammersmith, the crowd rushed inside and tore everything apart looking for souvenirs, bits of flowers, program booklets, whatever they could find. They even hauled down the canopy outside the church’s doors.

  “There were almost another two thousand people outside the front gate at Hammersmith wanting to just get a look at Jackie,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss. “Mummy was pretty upset.”

  “Animals!” Janet Sr. exclaimed when everyone finally got back to Hammersmith for the reception. Though she was on edge, she pulled herself together quickly. “In the end, it was a great party,” Jamie recalled. “If there was one thing Mummy knew well, it was how to entertain, and she made it very special for Janet, having planned every last detail many months in advance. There was a lot of gourmet food and liquor with dancing—a very good time for friends and family to celebrate this big day in my sister’s life.”

  While guests mingled under an enormous green-and-white-striped canopy on the backyard of the estate, Jackie pulled her sister aside and apologized to her for the mêlée her presence had caused at the church. Janet said she was just glad Jackie was there, that she couldn’t have had the wedding without her. “Jack would be so proud of you today,” Jackie said, holding her sister’s hands and smiling at her. She then presented Janet with two blue leather-bound books by JFK, Profiles in Courage and Why England Slept. Both were inscribed to Janet; Jackie had Jack sign them back in 1963, she explained, anticipating that one day they, as a couple, would present them to Janet on her wedding day. “And now, here we are,” Jackie said, “without him. But somehow I feel that he is here with us.”

  No one could sum up better what happened next than Stephen Birmingham, one of the best of Jackie’s biographers: “Suddenly, at the foot of the great cascade of lawn, the New York Club’s sailing cruise swept into the bay—hundreds of sails billowing like a host of butterflies composing a backdrop for the party. One guest gasped and said, ‘I don’t believe it! It’s not real! It’s being produced by Walt Disney!’ But it was just another example of the Auchincloss style. Janet Auchincloss Sr. knew that the cruise was scheduled. She had guessed it would arrive in time to help decorate her daughter’s wedding. It did, and in her chosen colors: white on blue.”

  Observation Deck

  November 1966.

  Jack Warnecke and Jacqueline Kennedy stood on the observation deck of the new fifty-foot-high windmill on Hammersmith Farm. His four kids—Roger, Fred, Margo, and John—and her two—Caroline and John—stood with them, their eyes as wide as saucers. “Man, you can see the whole world from up here,” John Jr. exclaimed. Jack and Jackie, their arms around each other, gazed out at the vista of ocean and sky and the arcing Jamestown cantilever truss bridge spanning the west side of Narragansett Bay. “Look what we did,” Jack told Jackie as he kissed her on the forehead. He took a lit cigarette from his mouth and placed it between her lips. She inhaled deeply, tilted her head back, and exhaled the smoke into the sky.

  A year or so earlier, the old windmill at Hammersmith Farm, which was about a hundred years old and was once used to pump and store water for the estate, burned to the ground. But what was Hammersmith without a windmill? Of course, a new one needed to be built and straightaway.

  Janet and Hugh had never been happy with the location of the old windmill. They had the perfect spot in mind for the new one, about a quarter of a mile from its original site and closer to the shoreline. One day, Janet rented a forklift that could raise her and Jackie high up into the air so that they could inspect the view from that vantage point. It was spectacular. How would the new site look from the main house, though? With Janet at the potential site perched high up on the forklift’s platform, her skirt blowing in the wind, she communicated by walkie-talkie with Jackie in the main house half a mile away. “To the left,” Jackie said as Janet then shouted down that instruction to the forklift operator. “Okay, a little bit to the right now,” Jackie decided. “No, no! To the left, Mummy! The right! There, that’s it. That’s it, Mummy!” Once mother and daughter finally figured out where the windmill should be built—Janet would later call it “a great example of Bouvier women teamwork”—they knew there was only one architect who could design it for them, and that was Jack Warnecke. (Hugh had actually originally hired designer Anna M. Tillinghast, but then sued her after blaming her for the fire to the original structure, which occurred while she was dismantling it.)

  When Jack thought it would be more fun if he and Jackie designed the new structure together, it soon became their pet project. The new windmill would end up being much bigger than the original. Now it was fifty feet high with four floors—one room to a floor—and an elevator between them. There was a large entertaining room on the ground floor; a dining room on the second; an enormous bedroom on the next; and, on top, a circular observation deck from which one could see far out into the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t quite finished by Thanksgiving, but enough was done that Jack and Jackie could take the kids up to the deck for a thrill. The price tag for this renovation was well over $30,000—about $220,000 today. (It should be noted that while this structure was called the Windmill, it did not have blades. It was, basically, just a well-appointed tower.)

  The trip to Hammersmith had been a surprise for Jack’s children. “They didn’t know where they were all going,” recalled his personal assistant, Bertha Baldwin. “And they told me that when they got there, they were all excited. ‘Where the heck are we? What is this great place?’ And then Jackie walked out and surprised them. ‘You live
here?’ they asked.”

  This was actually the first time Jack’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Margo, would spend time with Jackie, since she’d been away at boarding school in Manhattan for most of her father’s relationship with her. “All of us kids knew that Dad was head-over-heels in love with Jackie by this time,” recalled Jack’s son Fred. “Not that I want to get too private, but, many years later, I was driving my dad to the airport and he told me a story. He said that he and Jackie had once been at a party. On the way home, he pulled over to the side of the road. They couldn’t keep their hands off one another, so the two of them had sex, right there in his car. I said, ‘Really, Dad? Is that true? Or, are you making that up? Because the idea of you and Jackie Kennedy doing it on the side of the road is sort of crazy.’ He said, ‘Of course I’m not making it up. You think I didn’t have any fun in my life? That I was only about business? No. I lived my life.’ So, yeah,” Fred Warnecke concluded, laughing, “he had his fair share of fun, put it that way. And so did Jackie.”

  Lee’s Big Break?

  After about a year of training, Lee Radziwill still didn’t feel she was ready to go forward with her acting career and take on any significant roles, and she was probably right. Many novices train much longer than just a year with stakes not nearly as high as they were to be for Lee, someone for whom the press and much of the public would be gunning as soon as she went before a camera or walked out onto a stage. One of the greatest influencers in her life at this time, Truman Capote, encouraged her to abandon her preliminary training, though, and just jump headfirst into a role. He convinced Lee that too much training might erode her natural ability and charisma. A true and loyal friend—at least at this juncture—Truman really did believe that her greatest asset as an actress was her own innate personality and character, organic and real. “He thought there was nothing I couldn’t do, and that I must go in the theater and I would be perfect,” Lee recalled in 2016. “He would arrange it with such taste. He was convinced that I could do this.”

  Prodded on by Truman, Lee accepted the role of Tracy Lord in a play called The Philadelphia Story. The Philadelphia Story had been a movie success in 1940 as produced by George Cukor and starring Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katharine Hepburn. It was a romantic comedy based on the Broadway play of the same name—which had also starred Hepburn. Hepburn played Tracy Lord, a rich, Main Line Philadelphia socialite who is torn between three men: her ex-husband, a wealthy suitor, and a tabloid reporter. (The movie was later remade into a musical called High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra.)

  The Philadelphia Story was scheduled to run for four weeks at the Ivanhoe Theater in Chicago, starting on June 20, 1967. When the show’s producer, Charles Booth, told Lee that he wanted to bill her as “Princess Lee Radziwill,” she balked. She said she wanted to be known as “Caroline Bouvier” in order to distinguish her new career from her public persona. This acting venture was about her, not her husband or her marriage, she said. Producer and star debated the issue until, finally, they settled on “Lee Bouvier” for the marquee. However, Booth wasn’t happy about it, feeling strongly that no one would recognize the name. Lee also said there should be no mention of Jackie in her Playbill biography. This also made no sense to the producer. Why were people coming to see her if not for the fact that she was Jackie’s sister?

  Much of The Philadelphia Story had to do with class, status, and the concerns of the entitled. Immediately, the press felt that Lee had been stereotyped. Of course, noted many a reporter, Lee knew all there was to know about life as a wealthy, superficial woman. Lee bristled at the suggestion. She said she felt that The Philadelphia Story was just “frivolous, charming nonsense fluff.” She explained that Tracy Lord was a woman unlike herself. “Tracy is a charming, pleasant, attractive, amusing girl, but I don’t think I have much in common with her,” she said. “Not many ideas have crossed her mind.” She added that Tracy “has none of the feelings I understand of sadness or despair or of knowing loss. I am so much smarter and have so much more going for me than Tracy Lord,” she said. “I try not to be insulted when people claim to know me so well and have such a low opinion of me, but it’s difficult.”

  When Lee called Jackie to tell her the exciting news about The Philadelphia Story, Jackie was elated. She was also worried. This diversion of Lee’s had just gotten real; she was going to be onstage and in front of people! Jackie said that just because she herself could never do it wasn’t reason to project her fears onto her sister. However, she told relatives that she was worried. She and Lee were hypersensitive, she said, to criticism “just because of the way we were raised.” She couldn’t help but wonder how her sister would deal with what she feared was in store for her.

  Janet’s Surprise Encounter with Onassis

  In the fall of 1966, Jamie Auchincloss was studying at Cambridge in London. His mother, Janet, went to visit him at that time and, while she was in London, thought it might be fun to pop in on Lee. She called Lee and Stas’s home at Buckingham Place and learned from one of the Radziwills’ functionaries that Lee wasn’t there. Lee had taken a suite at Claridge’s Hotel. Janet wondered why Lee would have a suite at a London hotel when she had a perfectly beautiful home nearby? She knew that Lee and Stas continued to have trouble in their marriage, though. In fact, according to Jamie, Stas had recently complained to Janet about Lee. “He told Mummy that Lee was plowing through his money,” Jamie remembered. “‘I’m almost wiped out!’ he told her. Mummy said that perhaps she would talk to Lee about her spending, but that she couldn’t guarantee results.”

  It just so happened Claridge’s was exactly where Janet and Hugh were staying while in London—a happy coincidence, Janet thought. Janet decided to surprise her daughter by just going ahead to her suite without trying to make further contact. “She found out where the suite was,” Jamie recalled, “and went right up and rang the bell. No answer. She banged on the door. No answer. She tried the doorknob. It was open! So she walked in and she saw an older, gray-haired man on a sort of a raised platform sitting behind a Napoleonic desk. He had wet hair and was wearing a dressing gown. He had his feet up on the desk while talking on the telephone.”

  It took a moment for Janet to realize who she was looking at, but not long. She’d never even met him before, but she knew the one and only Aristotle Onassis when she saw him. “Where is my daughter?” she demanded to know.

  Onassis was startled by the intrusion. He hung up the telephone. “Well, that depends,” he said. “Who is your daughter?” he asked, looking at her quizzically. “In fact, while we are at it, who are you?”

  “My daughter is Princess Lee Radziwill,” Janet said, “and I am Mrs. Janet Auchincloss.”

  “Oh,” Aristotle said. “Then your daughter just left.”

  The two strangers stood staring at each other for a moment before Janet, by now upset, turned around and stormed from the suite.

  “Understandably, my mother was left speechless,” Jamie Auchincloss would recall. “She saw Onassis in a dressing gown with wet hair, his feet on the desk. And Lee had just left? It wasn’t difficult for her to draw her own conclusions.”

  Later that day, she saw Lee and confronted her about Onassis. What was going on? In a heated discussion about it, Lee told Janet it was none of her business. She made it clear that she wasn’t going to discuss Onassis with her. She also didn’t deny or confirm anything.

  Janet was still upset when she left England a few days later As soon as she got back to the States, she called Jackie and told her about it. Jackie, too, was surprised. This was the first confirmation she’d had that while he was calling her, stopping by and giving her and her children presents, Onassis was also probably in some way involved with her sister. She was also concerned about Stas and hated to see him get hurt. “Jackie and my father were still close after the President was killed,” said his son John Radziwill. “She would come to him for advice all the time. She still liked my father a lot.” Lee knew
how Jackie would feel about her relationship with Onassis, which, Janet figured, was probably why she hadn’t discussed it with her. Jackie was upset. She said she would talk to Lee about it, “after I have a chance to cool off.”

  Taking time to cool off was Jackie’s choice, but not Janet’s. About a month later, when Janet heard that Onassis was going to be in New York, she decided to see him.

  “I was with Margaret one day when a very upset Janet came in to talk to Hugh,” recalled Delores Goodwin, best friend of Margaret Kearney, who worked for Hugh Auchincloss in the Washington bureau of his brokerage firm. “She walked into his office and slammed the door. Thirty minutes later she came out and told Margaret, ‘Hughdie has an assignment for you. Please make sure you complete it.’ Hughdie then came to us and said that Aristotle Onassis was in New York and that Janet wanted to meet with him. He wanted Margaret to set it up. ‘But I don’t even know him, and I don’t know anyone who does,’ she said, protesting. He said, ‘Figure it out,’ and went back into his office and slammed the door. Margaret said, ‘What in the world is going on around here?’ She and I then went to lunch. I told her I’d once read in a newspaper that when Onassis was in New York he stayed at the Pierre Hotel. I said, ‘Why not just call the hotel, ask for him and see what happens?’ We agreed that it was a long shot, but why not? So, when we got back to the office, that’s what she did, and sure enough, she was connected to someone who said he was Onassis’s assistant. Margaret said she wanted to make an appointment for Mrs. Auchincloss, and it was made on the spot. We were astonished. Margaret then went into Hugh’s office and told him, and he was delighted. ‘I don’t know what my wife has planned,’ he told her, ‘but thank you for making it possible. Now maybe she will give me a moment’s peace about it.’ Two weeks later, Mrs. Auchincloss was on her way to New York to meet with Aristotle Onassis.”