Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  In both the book and the accompanying documentary, Lee thought she would interview Bouvier relatives about their own happy summers in East Hampton. She would also include archival photographs and film footage. Jackie thought all of this was a great idea and said that as soon as she got back to her apartment in Manhattan, she would start rummaging for pictures to help out.

  In weeks to come, Lee and Peter put together a comprehensive proposal for the book and documentary, which they wanted to release simultaneously. They hoped the documentary might even air on network television. They soon hired filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. Unfortunately, it would be the introduction of the Maysleses into this vanity project that would, ultimately, end up completely ruining it for Lee.

  Grey Gardens

  As Lee Radziwill and Peter Beard walked up to the enormous monstrosity of a mansion before them, Lee couldn’t quite believe her eyes. The three-story aging structure was all but hidden by a wild tangle of vines, overgrown bushes, and hanging tree limbs. Its many windows were cracked and broken. Its front door seemed to be barely hanging from its hinges. There were obvious gaping holes in the roofing. In fact, the structure was so dilapidated it looked as if it should have been demolished years earlier. It was difficult to believe that, once upon a time, she and Jackie had spent many happy moments here at the East Hampton Grey Gardens estate of their Aunt Edie and their cousin Edie.

  The senior Edith Bouvier Beale was Black Jack Bouvier’s sister, making her Lee and Jackie’s aunt. In 1917, “Big Edie,” as she was known, married lawyer and stockbroker Phelan Beale. They had three children, a girl, Edith—“Little Edie”—and two sons, Phelan Jr. and Bouvier. In 1923, Phelan Sr. bought the enormous twenty-eight-room Grey Gardens mansion with its ocean view, in East Hampton. After a series of financial setbacks, Big Edie’s life went into a downward spiral. Worried about her mother’s state of mind, Little Edie, who had attended Miss Porter’s School like Jackie and Lee, moved in with her in 1952. As the years passed, the two women became hermits, rarely venturing from the security of their home, hoarding their possessions and other junk. By 1972, the elder Edie, seventy-six, had resigned herself to a life that had never quite worked out. However, the younger Edie, fifty-four, harbored concerns that she could have had it better—she could have had it like Jackie and Lee, in fact—if only time had been kinder to her.

  In the spring of 1972, the Beales’ plight became the subject of great attention when the Suffolk County Board of Health raided their estate and reported its deplorable conditions. “My God, you should have seen the place!” Lee would say in 2013. “And them!” she exclaimed of her peculiar relatives. When she told Jackie about it, Jackie was certain she was exaggerating. So she went to see for herself. She was just as shocked as her sister. She then telephoned Ari in Greece to tell him about her relatives’ plight. Ari agreed that something should be done about it. He volunteered to have new heating and plumbing systems installed at Grey Gardens as well as a new roof, and, later, to also have around a thousand bags of trash carted away from the home. It cost him about $32,000, a little less than $200,000 in today’s money.

  Because of her immersion in the documentary and book she was endeavoring to create, Lee was already in quite the sentimental mood. Now, after coming face-to-face with the Beales, she couldn’t help but think that only chance and circumstance had separated her from the fate of her destitute relatives. “Our stupid little problems and silly disagreements make me feel so ashamed,” she told Jackie that night at Hammersmith, which still had not been sold. “How could we let such nonsense bother us? Look at our lives,” she exclaimed. As she motioned to their gorgeous surroundings, it was as if a strong feeling of bittersweet nostalgia had swept over her. “I love you, Jacks,” she exclaimed. Jackie wasn’t as moved by the Beales’ dilemma as she was by Lee’s emotional reaction to it. “I have to agree,” she said. “We are fortunate, aren’t we? And I love you, too, Lee.”

  Janet thought her girls were just being sentimental but, if it made them closer, so be it. She personally felt that the Beales had exactly the kind of life they wanted. She hadn’t seen them in quite some time but actually had made the trek out to Grey Gardens before Lee and Jackie had thought to do so. She had realized that Jamie hadn’t ever been to East Hampton and, as he recalled, “she wanted me to see it, to get to know it, and maybe understand a little more about the Bouvier history. So we went all about East Hampton and eventually ended up on the doorstep of Grey Gardens. It was quite an education. My mother told me that, many years earlier, Big Edie would show up at family functions and sing ‘I Love You Truly’ to her, completely embarrassing her but also touching her deeply. My mother didn’t feel sorry for them, though. She knew that relatives had tried to help them and that they’d turned them down. They were happy in their world, Mummy felt. She certainly didn’t feel that Big Edie should have to end up in an old folks’ home.” In fact, according to one account, Janet told Jackie, “When I get to be that age, please do not try to put me in a home, Jacqueline. Please promise me.” Jackie made that promise.

  Lee couldn’t get the idea of helping the Beales out of her mind. In talking to Peter Beard about them, an idea came to her. What if they featured them in her documentary? Certainly, the Beales’ plight was the flip side of the pristine and romantic story of the Bouvier sisters’ entitled youth in East Hampton. The extreme contrast could make for interesting viewing. She thought that maybe Big Edie might even narrate it. The idea seemed viable enough for Lee to bring to her new producers. Of course, they wanted to meet the women right away. Lee made it possible.

  Upon meeting them, the Maysleses found the Edies fascinating—more fascinating, in fact, than Jackie and Lee! Suddenly, they wanted to focus Lee’s documentary exclusively on the Beales, to the total exclusion of the Bouvier sisters. Lee was ambivalent about this unexpected development. She’d been cultivating her own concept for months. Still, she was smart enough to at least give the Maysleses a chance. After all, they had a history of filmmaking—they were just coming off of the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Therefore, she allowed them to get the Beales on film.

  “Absolutely not,” said Lee after viewing the filmmakers’ preliminary work. She found the new take on the Beales’ story too cruel and “on the nose” and even suspected that the Maysleses had encouraged the women to exaggerate their behavior. Lee had a completely different vision. It had to do not only with her and her sister’s time in East Hampton but with her relatives’ places in society and how the public’s response to their living conditions reflected the mores of upper-crust society. She wanted to produce something deeper and more meaningful than what might result by just taking a camera into the run-down home of two eccentric people in hopes that they might act in an outrageous manner. Therefore, she wanted to go back to her original idea; she refused to give the Maysleses permission to use the film, which she and Peter Beard had paid for.

  Not surprisingly, the Maysleses just quit Lee’s documentary and decided to make their own. After Onassis’s renovations on Grey Gardens were complete, the brothers went back to the Edies and gave them $5,000 each, along with a promise of a percentage of potential profits. The Beales hoped that this opportunity might ensure not only that mother got to stay in her beloved home, but that daughter got to leave it for a possible career as a singer in New York. They agreed to the deal. The brothers then reshot the interviews with the Beales for their own program. When Albert Maysles was asked by the writer Dan Rattiner how Lee felt about the Maysles brothers stealing her idea, he answered, “There wasn’t much she could do about it. The Beales willingly allowed us to make this film.”

  Suddenly, Lee found herself without her filmmakers and without her documentary. This was truly exasperating. How did her documentary about herself and her sister end up being their documentary about Big Edie and Little Edie? Of course, such creative and financial hurdles are par for the course in filmmaking. However, for Lee, this surprising occurrence was just more of the same:
self-involved, uninspired people standing in her way, making it impossible for her to achieve her dreams. She could have continued with her own documentary, but now she had lost her enthusiasm. She’d work on her book instead.

  Janet’s Dismay Over Jackie

  Janet Auchincloss was pacing back and forth in her living room at Hammersmith while talking on the telephone to Sherry Geyelin. She was upset. “How could she do this?” she asked angrily, her eyes flashing. “I just do not understand that girl.” She said that Jackie had somehow gotten Aristotle Onassis to take care of the Beales, relatives Jackie hadn’t seen in years. Yet when Janet had asked her to appeal to Onassis to help save Hammersmith, she refused to do so, saying she wanted to first speak to Andre Meyer about it.

  By late 1972, at the age of sixty-three, Janet was at her wits’ end over what to do about Hammersmith Farm. Though the estate had been on the market for a year, it had still not sold. The bills continued to mount; the property was draining Hugh’s coffers. Garrett Johnston, now of Thomson & McKinnon, Auchincloss, recalled meeting with Hugh about the problem. “It was hopeless,” he said, “there was no way to save it. Since it hadn’t sold, they were vacillating between lowering the price and taking it off the market. I told Hugh to just let it go. He said he would but Mrs. A. was still pushing to find a way to save it. If it were up to him, he said, he would have sold it two years earlier. He couldn’t take the stress, he told me. However, his wife still didn’t really want to sell it. ‘It means more to her than it does to me,’ he said. He said Mrs. A. felt that the historic relevancy of Hammersmith was such that it should be kept in the family. He was worried about her, that it was all too much for her—for both of them. ‘Keeping all of those people at work is going to kill us both,’ he told me. He said that Janet was not well, that she was having some health challenges, or emotional problems … he wasn’t clear about it, only that she was not right.”

  These days, Janet did seem less focused. She had always been a detailed-oriented person with her notebooks and calendars, every moment of every day structured. By ’72, she was more undisciplined. She was also more temperamental. Jamie recalled that she had a drawer in her bathroom “that was filled with prescription bottles. I stumbled upon it one day and was startled by it. I wondered why Mummy was taking all of these medications. She was a fairly high-strung person already, so I really had to wonder what these drugs were doing to her.” The question was never answered. “To this day, I don’t know if it was drug induced or not,” he said, “but the thing with the Beales really did set her off.”

  For Janet, the question was a simple one: Why had Jackie asked Onassis to help save Grey Gardens when she would not ask him to help save Hammersmith? Of course, the truth was that Jackie hadn’t asked Onassis for assistance at all, he’d volunteered it. “I’ll bet she didn’t do property research on Grey Gardens,” Janet said, dismayed, “yet she wants to know all of Hugh’s private business in relation to Hammersmith.” In Janet’s mind, Jackie had used her sacred relationship with Onassis to the advantage of the Beales, no questions asked. Why not do the same for the betterment of her own more immediate family? She said to one relative that she and Hugh had “poured our life’s blood” into Hammersmith and that Jackie’s lack of caring about it was impossible for her to reconcile. “This is what family is all about,” she added, “helping one another. If that’s not what we do, then what good are we to one another?”

  After reconnecting with the Beales, Jackie actually began to forge a relationship with her aunt and cousin, the two Edies. She began to have late night telephone calls with them and wrote them long letters saying how glad she was to have them back in her life. It took her a little longer to appreciate what the Beales represented than it did Lee, but once she realized that her relatives were a link to an important past, she was not willing to let them go. She would maintain a relationship with both women, by telephone and correspondence, as well as the occasional visit. None of these developments made Janet feel any better about the situation, though. How Jackie could help the Beales and not “our own family” would remain a point of contention between mother and daughter for many years to come.

  When Jackie brought the children to Hammersmith for Thanksgiving in November of 1972, Janet barely said two words to her. Jackie kept to herself, horseback riding with the kids, talking to Yusha, Tommy, Nini, their children who were also present, as well as to Hugh and Jamie, but not very much to her mother.

  One night a few weeks later, shortly after the Beales made their deal with the Maysleses, Jackie was again visiting Janet at Hammersmith when she had a car take her into Manhattan, ostensibly so that she could spend the night at her own home. The next morning she returned to Hammersmith after a nearly four-hour drive. Of course, Jackie had a chauffeur, but, still, it was exhausting. She walked into the wood-paneled kitchen and found Janet having coffee. She greeted her cheerily. With an icy expression, Janet said, “Hello, dear. Did you spend the night with the Edies, your new favorite relatives?” A flicker of annoyance crossed Jackie’s face.

  On the warming shelf above the stove, Janet had arranged her expensive Minton china, which she’d had since before she married Hugh. Jackie grabbed one of the antique cups. She then sat down at the table and poured herself a cup of coffee. Reaching into her purse for her cigarette case, she took one out and lit it. She slipped it between her lips. However—according to one of the ever-present maids—before she could even inhale, Janet reached over, snatched the cigarette out of Jackie’s mouth, and plopped it into her cup of coffee. Glaring at her mother, Jackie rose and calmly walked out of the kitchen.

  * * *

  Janet would never see the Grey Gardens documentary; she just wasn’t interested in it. However, Jackie, Lee, and most of the immediate family shared the same feelings about it when they finally saw Grey Gardens: they found it completely unwatchable. It was difficult for them to accept that the lovely and sentimental documentary Lee had envisioned about her and Jackie’s summers in East Hampton had somehow been transformed into such a tragic story about destitute relatives. Even with Onassis’s generous renovations, the dilapidated Grey Gardens manse reeked of squalor on the screen. The entire project was a disappointment and embarrassment to Janet and her daughters, and they just hoped it would soon disappear without a trace. Instead, of course, it went on to become nothing short of iconic. In fact, it would ultimately be transformed into a Broadway musical (earning Christine Ebersol a Tony for her portrayal of Big Edie) and then an HBO movie (starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as Big and Little Edie).

  “Every Wave Is the Same. Every Wave Is Different.”

  Lee Radziwill was gravely disappointed by the failure of her documentary idea. To give her time to regroup, Truman Capote suggested she accompany him on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street concert tour that summer of 1972. He was covering it for Rolling Stone. “And so he said, ‘Honey, you gotta’ come!’” Lee explained to Sofia Coppola in an interview, imitating Truman. “I said, ‘I would adore to!’” Once Lee decided to go, Peter Beard was hired to take photographs. Off they then went to join Mick Jagger and company on the road in June. It was a fun and exciting couple of weeks, a far cry from anything Lee had ever experienced; she slept on a tour bus in bunk beds. Always open to new experiences, she had the time of her life and was completely fascinated by the groupies that followed the Stones to every stop. Lee would say that she could see how people would find Mick Jagger sexy, “but I found him a little repulsive.”

  While Lee was on the road with the Stones, some noticed that she seemed to be drinking too much. Perhaps one of the reasons was because her relationship with Stas was more tense than ever before, especially now that she was openly with Peter Beard.

  Once back from the Stones tour, Lee sent for her children in August and anticipated five good weeks with them at Montauk. Both seemed to have grown overnight. She really didn’t want to send them back to England, where they were being schooled. She had no choice, though,
come September. That’s when she decided to “collect her life,” as she put it, and finally tell Stas that she wanted to end her marriage. She was thirty-nine and determined to close the Princess Radziwill chapter of her life by the time she hit forty.

  Stas made it easy on Lee by being the one to file. “She’s been gallivanting around the world,” he told the writer George Carpozi for an article in Photoplay called “Nobody Wants a Part-Time Marriage,” adding, “I barely saw her last summer. My decision was the only solution to this irreconcilable situation. It makes me very sad but she left me with no alternatives.”

  In a sworn declaration to the court, Stas added of Lee, “There was no way I could talk sense into her. She was prepared to continue her abandonment of wifely obligations in the furtherance of whatever it was that she was pursuing.”

  “He still loved her and was upset,” said Stas’s son John Radziwill. “Lee wasn’t the wicked stepmother, though. While she could never replace my mother, she was in our lives for a long time and we grew to love her. In the end, my father was generous to her. He gave her everything she wanted and more. He said, ‘I’m giving Lee a lot. I want her to be okay, and the kids, too.’” (It’s worth noting that Janet and Stas remained friendly after his divorce from Lee; he often visited her at Hammersmith. One year, he even attended the annual “Coaching Day” at Stratford Hall in honor of Robert E. Lee, dressed in eighteenth-century garb and riding atop a coach with Janet in the parade!)