Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Now emotionally free of Stas, Lee continued to look forward to a future with Peter, even if some thought they were mismatched. He was bohemian, always disheveled and sloppily attired with his moccasins and fringe vests and casual wear, whereas she was, well, she was Lee—impeccably dressed, done up to the nines. They got along well, though, rarely argued, and had a strong bond between them. Lee felt they just needed time to clarify their relationship. She and Peter went back to the apartment Lee still had on Fifth Avenue, and began their future lives together.

  As her divorce made its way through the courts—it wouldn’t be finalized until 1974—Lee felt, more than ever, an urgent need to stay busy, especially since the children were still being schooled in England. (While the Radziwills tried to work out custody, both Anthony and Tina would stay with their father rather than be uprooted from their schools.) Though the documentary was now out of the question, she still wanted to write the book about her and Jackie’s summers in East Hampton. “I feel the way I have always felt,” she told a reporter, “and that is that I am deserving of every opportunity to achieve my goals.” To that end, Andy Warhol convinced her to pen about a thousand words on the subject for Ladies’ Home Journal. The idea was to sell the story to the women’s magazine as an “extract” from the book, which the editors would tout on its cover. Meanwhile, it was Truman’s idea to throw a book launch party and invite the crème de la crème of the publishing world to it—publishers, editors, advertising people, publicists. Hopefully, these executives would meet Lee and be impressed with her. The next day, if all went as planned, her agent’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing with offers to publish her memoir. This was unconventional; these sorts of parties were usually held after a book was published, not before. However, for Lee, maybe an exception could be made.

  The Ladies’ Home Journal piece hit the stands at the end of December ’72 with Lee’s “book extract.” Its headline touted Lee’s new book Opening Chapters, promising “enchanting memories and photos of her early life with Jackie.” (Jackie’s name did not appear anywhere in the magazine article, only in some of the photo captions.) The feature’s text was fairly oblique and would likely concern any editor hoping for complete candor. “Everything was so simple then,” Lee wrote. “Complication, confusion, wounds, suffering hadn’t entered our lives. That’s why I like to recall those days.…. I still feel total freedom … in tune with the ocean and this part of the world [East Hampton], which is rapidly changing. Every wave is the same, every wave is different, it’s a kind of infinity.”

  The party for Lee was held at the elegant Four Seasons hotel in New York. Excitement was in the air as she mingled with the publishing elite and Manhattan glitterati. Looking fetching in a black turtleneck sweater and matching slacks with a chain necklace and gold beaded belt, she talked about how much her book meant to her and said she was serious about writing it.

  At one point, a huge commotion in a corner of the room caused everyone to dart over. It was Jackie. Unfortunately, as often happened in these kinds of situations, she captivated everyone to the point where, suddenly, Lee was no longer the focus of attention. Jackie seemed excited to be present and surrounded by influential people from the publishing world. At one point, she had so many executives around her, she couldn’t even be seen in the pressing mob. She spent a great deal of time talking to Tom Guinzburg, publisher at Viking Press, as Lee watched with great curiosity. She had to wonder: How did Jackie do it? How was it that no matter where she was, Jackie was always able to bask in the glow of acclamation without ever feeling awkward or out of place? Lee had too many insecurities to be so completely comfortable all of the time. She usually pulled it off, but she had to actually work at it. However, Jackie never had to exert any energy at all; she was just … Jackie.

  As hoped, in the weeks to follow the offers did come rolling in for Lee’s memoir. Eventually, she signed a book deal with Delacorte Press for Opening Chapters, giving her an advance of $250,000, quite a hefty amount for a memoir in 1973 (about a million and a half in today’s money). She wasn’t the only one who would benefit from that party at the Four Seasons, though. Jackie had something up her sleeve, too—though Lee didn’t know it yet.

  “Bred for It”

  In January of 1973, death would once again instigate great change in Jacqueline Onassis’s life when Aristotle’s only son, his beloved Alexander, was killed in a crash while flying his own twin-engined Piaggo. Grief-stricken and angry at the world, Ari turned on Jackie, accusing her of having first cursed the Kennedy family with death and now his own. However, much to the surprise of most people, Jackie seemed to love Onassis more, not less, after the tragedy. He had given her and her children a good life; she remained grateful. She wasn’t going to hold against him horrible statements he’d made while deeply grieving his only son. She understood such despair firsthand and how it could twist a person’s logic and emotions. She still wanted to be with him and made plans for the two of them to take a summer trip to America together and stay at Hammersmith.

  Six months later, during a gala at the Newport home of Candy and Jimmy Van Alen on July 10, Janet told her society friends Eileen Slocum and Oatsie Charles that Jackie and Ari were coming to visit at Hammersmith at the end of the month. “We muddle through,” Janet said, when speaking of her daughter and Onassis, “that’s what families do.” She said she was “getting along” with Onassis and that when he and her daughter were in residence at the farm, “I put them in the Castle, where I used sometimes to put Jackie and the President. Yes, I admit, it’s strange,” she told her friends, “but we have no choice but to just go on, don’t we?” She also said that after Alexander’s death, Jackie put a stop to the flying lessons that Caroline had been taking at Hanscom Field in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Caroline had been learning to fly a Cessna two-seater. “Jackie said, ‘That’s the end of that. Caroline is upset about it, but she’ll get over it.’”

  Jackie and Ari had a history at least five years in the making; special, private moments that were romantic and fun. “I’m just not giving up on him,” she said after Alexander died. Maybe Janet said it best in July of ’73 when Janet Jr., Lewis, and their kids came to visit Hammersmith for five weeks, a trip that would overlap with the Onassises’. In front of Janet and Lewis, Oatsie Charles asked Janet how Jackie was able to put up with Onassis. Janet thought it over and answered simply, “She’s been bred for it, I guess.” Janet Jr. seemed a little surprised by her mother’s answer. She said she wouldn’t put up with the kind of marriage her half sister had “for even one second.” Janet Sr. smiled at her daughter and, patting her on the knee, said, “Well, good for you, dear.” Then, giving Lewis a hard look, she added, “And well you shouldn’t.”

  Changing Winds and Shifting Tides

  A year and a half flew by; it was now July 1974 and once again Jackie and Lee were aboard the Christina, this time sailing with Ari from Palm Beach to the Bahamas. Along for the ride were their friends Jay Mellon and Karen Gunderson Lerner. They were also with their children, John and Caroline and Tina and Anthony. Of course, in addition there were many other friends and at least fifty ship employees, many of them servants at the beck and call of Onassis’s guests.

  Unfortunately, Lee’s personal life was in a bit of a shambles as the Christina pulled away from its dock in Palm Beach. Just when she had felt herself completely committing to him, Lee found Peter Beard in bed with another woman. She had hoped he had more personal integrity, and she had certainly argued his merits to her mother. As it happened, Peter left her for a model named Barbara Allen Kwiatkowska. “[Lee] was crazy about him and felt that I had taken him away from her,” Barbara would say. “To be fair, she was right. I did. But their personalities were just so different. It was as if they were from two different worlds, and I think they had even less in common with the passing of time.”

  “It was her breakup with Peter Beard that really shook her to the rafters,” Truman Capote once observed of Lee. “That was the beginnin
g of this period of hers of feeling totally undone … she was really devastated by it.”

  A proud woman, Lee didn’t want others to know the details of why the relationship ended, especially Janet. After she told one family member about it, she said, “This secret dies here. I do not want my mother to know a thing about it.” On this cruise, though, Lee managed to maintain her sense of humor about things. When Jay Mellon asked how she was doing, she was overheard saying: “Well, let’s see now. My sister married my rich ex-lover. My marriage to a prince just ended in divorce. I had an affair with a man who sleeps in a tent and doesn’t have a pot to piss in. And I learned recently that he’s been cheating on me with a pinup model. But all things considered, I’m doing quite well, thank you for asking.”1

  While Lee was going through her breakup with Peter, she was still dealing with one of the most upsetting consequences of her divorce from Stas: Anthony and Tina were separated from each other. The divorcing couple simply could not come to terms about custody of their children. Therefore, they decided that Stas would keep Anthony, fifteen, who was attending the prestigious Milford Academy boarding school in England, while Tina, fourteen, would move to America to be with Lee. It was a terrible idea and everyone in the Radziwills’ circle knew it, but it seemed the best solution at the time; one child for each parent. Of course, the siblings would be miserable without each other, each subsequently blaming their parents for breaking up their home.

  As the Bouvier sisters sailed, they seemed to have more in common than they’d had in some time, especially given that Jackie’s marriage to Ari continued to unravel. Jackie confided in Lee that Ari had recently told her he wanted a divorce. She refused to grant it, she said, because she felt he now needed her more than ever. He had recently been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a debilitating nerve disease. Lee had to admire Jackie’s loyalty to Ari. Many years later, in 1999, Karen Lerner—who would soon divorce Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist of the Broadway show Camelot—would say of this particular time, “I felt the sisters were close, that they were bound by tradition, family, and blood. It’s never easy to understand the complexities of sisterhood … the changing winds and shifting tides.”

  Lee’s intended memoir greatly contributed to the sisters’ renewed closeness. Jackie was genuinely excited to see her sister so heavily invested in a project in which they both believed. Their summers in East Hampton together had been a special time for them, and they now spent hours remembering those moments while Lee jotted frantically on a yellow notepad. They even made plans to raid Janet’s attic once they got back to the States to see what they might discover there in terms of photographs or letters that would assist Lee in her project.

  “Each random memory was special to the Bouvier sisters. For instance, they recalled the time they, as little girls, won a school costume party dressed as farmers with floppy hats and matching striped shirts,” recalled Karen Lerner. “Lee was missing her front tooth, she recalled. They’d won a silver cup that day, which they would treasure for years, that is until Jackie lost it. They reminisced about Central Park in the winter, and how much they loved to sled down what, as kids, seemed like slopes as steep as any at Mammoth. However, it was always the summers they loved most, those months away from the city with Black Jack. No matter how angry Janet was at Jack, she always allowed the girls to have their time with him.”

  Now, with Jackie about to turn forty-five and Lee forty-one, the sisters had to wonder how they’d ever let anything come between them. After a long night of drinking margaritas and reminiscing, Jackie seemed to recognize as much when she became surprisingly candid in front of witnesses. “I haven’t been a good sister to you, have I?” she asked Lee as she put her head on her shoulder.

  In some ways, Lee probably would have agreed with Jackie’s assessment of their relationship. However, she also saw the great value Jackie had in her life. For instance, Jackie was a wonderful aunt to her children, always taking care of them whenever Lee was out of sorts or distracted with one of her projects. Jackie was known in the family as being a great and protective mother, whereas Lee would have to admit to always being challenged in that respect. Of course, there would be areas Jackie could improve upon when it came to her relationship with Lee—she could certainly be more open and more trusting, for instance—but to say that she was not a good sister? Lee would never go that far. Despite their differences and disagreements, they had too much shared history, too much affection, a special, magical kind of intimacy that only they, as sisters, could fathom. “I know we can both do better,” she told Jackie. It was a magnanimous answer, and one Jackie obviously appreciated because it brought tears to her eyes.

  It had been a memorable time on the Christina for Jackie and Lee. At its conclusion, when the yacht docked back in Palm Beach, Lee embraced Jackie good-bye, saying she was looking forward to seeing her at Hammersmith Farm for their “treasure hunt”—and she meant it, too. Just before they parted company, though, Jackie looked at her sister with an impish expression. She tapped her on the shoulder. “You’re it, Lee,” she said as she raced off. “Oh, no, I’m not!” Lee exclaimed as she ran after her sister. Then, as everyone on board watched and laughed, the two raced all over the deck of the Christina, kids once more.

  Raiding Janet’s Attic

  In September of 1974, Janet was delighted to find that both Jackie and Lee were available to attend a special dinner she was planning to host at Hammersmith Farm for the World Affairs Council, a nonprofit organization to which she belonged. Janet had recruited an international relations expert to speak about foreign policies after the meal. She and Hugh would be at opposite ends of the table while Jackie, Lee, Jamie, Yusha, Nini, and Tommy and a host of others would be seated in the middle on both sides, including Jackie’s children, Caroline and John, and Lee’s daughter, Tina. (Anthony had just left for the UK a day earlier.) One of the other guests was Linda Murray and her mother, Jane, who worked with Janet on the World Affairs Council. She recalled, “My mother met Mrs. A. in 1972 at an Affairs Council summit; I was about eighteen. Mom adored her, said she was smart, funny, and blunt.” Also present were Sherry Geyelin and her husband, Philip, who was the editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

  The Bouvier sisters actually had an ulterior motive for visiting Hammersmith at this time. They wanted to explore Janet’s attic for mementos—the “treasure hunt” they had planned while on the Christina. To that end, as soon as they arrived at the farm, they ran up to the cramped space above the third floor of the Big House. There they found dozens of cobweb-covered boxes. When they opened them, much to their delight, they discovered hundreds of photographs that had been saved by Janet, as well as what seemed like every card and letter ever sent to her by her children. Jackie and Lee hadn’t recognized just how sentimental Janet was about the past. In fact, when Lee tried to interview her for her book, she became prickly, not wanting to talk about Jack Bouvier, for instance. She said that what was done was done, the past was in the past, and there was no point in revisiting it.

  Perched on dusty trunks in the attic, Jackie and Lee marveled at what they found there, including lengthy letters between Janet and her father, “Grampy Lee.” As the sisters read them, they realized that almost every letter was unkind. Jim T. Lee criticized Janet in nearly all of the missives, calling her “stupid” and “lazy” and predicting that she would never come to any good in her life. He hated the man she loved, Jack Bouvier, and gave chapter and verse as to why Janet was a fool to have ever married him. Reading this correspondence made them feel so bad for their mother. They had no idea how vicious Grampy Lee had been to her. She’d obviously never been good enough in his eyes, which may have reminded Lee of her relationship to Janet.

  Jackie and Lee also found boxes of letters from their father, Jack, to Janet, long love letters in which Black Jack proclaimed his undying devotion to her. These letters were full of pain and anguish as he apologized for having affairs and for not being as devoted to her as he should
have been. Again, Jackie and Lee were surprised. They couldn’t believe they knew so little about Janet’s hurt and sorrow. In one box, they found an old dog-eared photograph from 1934 of Jack, Janet, and a woman they didn’t know (identified as “Virginia Kernochan” in pencil on the back of the picture). All three were sitting side by side on a split-rail fence at New York’s Tuxedo Park Riding Academy. Jack was holding Virginia’s hand while Janet was looking in the opposite direction. They had seen the photo before and often wondered about it.

  Of course, none of the sisters’ discoveries and ruminations about them had a thing to do with their summers in East Hampton—the subject of Lee’s book. However, they came to view their mother in a new and more sympathetic light and realized they had a lot more in common with her than they’d thought. After all, how many times had Onassis been unkind to both of them over the years—and how many times had they gone back for more? However, when it came to Black Jack, it would always be difficult for them to take a completely pejorative view of him. The sisters agreed that his absence had created a void in their lives that would never be filled. Jackie didn’t want to know anything more about him from these indicting letters; it was as if she couldn’t bear it. She told Lee to take all of the correspondence, and to never show it to her again.

  By the time the two women emerged from the attic, they had at least a dozen boxes of mementos. Lee said she would have a courier service pick them up in the morning and have them delivered to her apartment in New York. While Janet claimed to not be interested in the past, her reaction when she saw Lee’s stash belied a different point of view. “I need that stuff,” she said, alarmed. “You can’t take it, Lee.” She told her to put it all back just where she had found it. However, Philip Geyelin understood the importance of such research and told Janet, “Let her have it. It’s history, Janet. Family history.” When Lee then promised she would have it returned in less than two weeks’ time, Janet reluctantly agreed to allow her to take the mementos, saying, “I know I’ll regret this. I can see it coming.”