Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  After all was settled about Lee’s bounty, it was time for dinner. There were around twenty people present, some eating in the dining room at two tables—one oblong mahogany table in the middle of the expansive room on a plush gold carpet and under a large crystal chandelier, and another smaller rounded table closer to the deep bay window in what was considered a breakfast alcove. During dinner, Lee spoke about the memoir she was writing, and also about a television pilot she’d recently filmed—a series of interviews with Rudolf Nureyev; John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist; Halston, the designer; Gloria Steinem, the feminist journalist; Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws; and Dr. Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist.

  “My Lee is always telling me she wants to do more with her life,” Janet told some of the guests over after-dinner drinks out on the porch. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Lee wasn’t in earshot, Janet then told Linda Murray’s mother, Jane, “Lee has always somehow seen her destiny as being of a greater purpose than the rest of us.”

  At that moment, Lee happened to walk out onto the flowered terrace. She’d heard what Janet said and looked upset. “If you have something to say, Mummy,” she told Janet, “just say it.” At that, Janet threw both hands in the air and said, “In front of company, Lee? Really? I don’t think so! The President has just been impeached,” she added, all of a sudden referring to Richard Nixon, “and there are real problems facing our country, so stop being so self-involved.” She then got up and walked away from her.

  Lee stared at Janet in disbelief. Finally, she said to no one in particular, “I’m just trying to get through this day without losing my fucking mind!” She then donned a wool jacket and began to descend the steps from the porch to the front yard.

  “At that moment, I saw Jackie meandering toward the house from the shore,” recalled Linda Murray. “Apparently, she’d gone for a long walk on the beach. Quickly sizing things up, she seemed to sense Lee’s angst. She stopped and, with a smile, beckoned for her sister. Once they were together, Jackie put her arm around Lee’s shoulders. The two sisters then walked back down to the shore, Lee’s head on Jackie’s shoulder. It was so sweet. They stopped and stared at the majestic view of Jamestown and the harbor, as if they’d never seen it before. Then they sat out on one of the largest of a cluster of rocks and chatted until the sun began to set.”

  Something Wrong with Janet?

  March 15, 1975.

  Jackie was in New York when she got the call. She was actually packing to return to Paris, where Ari had been convalescing due to complications of the myasthenia gravis from which he’d been suffering.

  Since Ari had been hospitalized for some time, Jackie hadn’t been able to make up her mind as to whether to stay in Paris to be with him or be with her children, who were in school in Manhattan. If not for his daughter, Christina, she probably would have stayed by her husband’s side. However, Christina had made her life a living hell, accusing Jackie of not only being after Onassis’s fortune but also of being unfaithful to him, which wasn’t true. Having had her fill of Christina, Jackie said she needed to clear her head and return to the States, but with the intention of going back to Europe in about a week. However, then Ari took a sudden turn for the worse. Now Artemis sadly informed Jackie that he had died.

  A distraught Jackie telephoned Janet to ask her to accompany her to Greece for the funeral. Of course, Janet was sorry Onassis was gone—not exactly devastated, but … sorry. However, she didn’t want to pack up and go to Greece on the spur of the moment, as she had when Jackie got married. She said no, she wasn’t going. Her mind was made up about it. Shortly after, Lee telephoned Janet, who told her that she was in the middle of packing to go to Greece. However, Lee said she had just spoken to Jackie, who’d said Janet had refused to go. Janet became irate. “Of course I’m going,” she said.

  A few weeks earlier, when Janet arranged a Mother-Daughter Tea with Jackie and Lee in New York City and didn’t show up for it, the sisters knew for sure something was wrong. For Janet to forget such an important date on her calendar was completely unusual. As was often the case, Janet was staying with her friend Mary Whitehouse, two floors below Jackie at 1040 Fifth Avenue. When the sisters went there to make sure she was okay, she insisted that it was they, not her, who had gotten the date wrong.

  “We were beginning to believe that something neurological was going on with Mummy,” Jamie Auchincloss recalled. “Because they didn’t have the tests they have today, nothing would come back pointing to anything specific. The doctors just said, ‘It’s probably just old age.’ I remembered Mummy’s drawer of mysterious prescription bottles and wondered if they were somehow responsible. She was becoming so forgetful.”

  In the end, Janet did meet Jackie for the funeral; she and Marta Sgubin (Jackie’s maid) brought Caroline and John with them to Greece for the service.

  Lee didn’t attend the service. In the past, it’s been reported that the reason was that Jackie had specifically asked her not to go lest the public be reminded of Lee’s past relationship with him. This isn’t true. It was Lee’s decision. Likely, her entire life would have been altered had she made different choices about Onassis along the way, as would have Jackie’s. She just felt it was time to let it all go. His death was freedom for her; no longer would she need to wonder “What if?” Or … at least that was her hope at the time.

  The funeral was difficult, of course, made even more so by virtue of the acrimony that existed between Jackie and Christina. Janet was displeased by the way her daughter was treated, conscious of the fact that so many of Onassis’s friends seemed to somehow blame his widow for his death. Jackie had cursed the Kennedys, they said—echoing Ari’s assertion after Alexander was killed—and now she had also done the same to the Onassises. Few seemed to understand that Jackie had always appreciated Ari’s having rescued her and her children during the darkest time of their lives. In her own way, she did love him, and she had said that she knew in her heart that he felt the same about her.

  The settling of the estate would, not surprisingly, also be trying for Jackie, especially when it was learned that complex Greek laws could influence how much a spouse might inherit, no matter a will’s stipulation. Eventually, after a great deal of legal wrangling with Christina, Jackie agreed to a settlement of $25.5 million from Onassis’s estate, $6 million of which would go to estate taxes and $500,000 for her attorneys, leaving her with $19 million. (Christina said she would gladly give Jackie the money “just to never have to lay eyes on you again.”) Jackie would also receive $150,000 a year for the rest of her life. Her children would each receive $50,000 a year until they turned twenty-one. At that time, $100,000 a year would be added to Jackie’s annuity. In return, Jackie gave up her interest in Skorpios and the Christina, as well as all of Onassis’s homes.

  To this day, most people believe that Jackie was left a wealthy woman when Aristotle Onassis died. However, when one considers that the shipping magnate was worth at least $500 million at the time of his death, $19 million and an eventual maximum of $250,000 annually for his widow doesn’t seem like a large settlement. It would be the investments Jackie would make with that money, however, that ended up making her an extremely rich woman.

  Unfortunately, Lee would not benefit in any financial way from her tumultuous past with Ari. He had made no provision whatsoever for her in his will.

  Crushing Blows

  By the spring of ’75, Lee Radziwill had been working on her memoir, Opening Chapters, for more than two years. It was due to be delivered to Delacorte in June; Lee eagerly sent off the manuscript and waited for a response. However, the letter she received from her editor, Eleanor Friede, indicated that there were serious problems with the writing. When Lee then later met with the publisher, it was suggested that she hire a ghostwriter. Lee balked. She wanted to write her own book, otherwise she felt it was duplicitous to call it a “memoir.” When asked if she might consider adding personal stories about the Kennedys, she refused that request, t
oo, saying she would never betray her sister’s confidence.

  Lee didn’t want to write about the Kennedys because it wasn’t her story to tell. It frustrated her that the angle that most interested her publisher was one that directly tied her to her sister. She didn’t think it was fair, and it wasn’t how she wanted to distinguish herself. In other words, she wasn’t about to ride on her sister’s coattails up the New York Times bestseller list.

  In the end, Delacorte decided to cancel Lee’s contract—another blow for Lee, but not the last one she’d suffer at this time. In the fall, CBS decided not to move forward with the pilot Conversations with Lee Radziwill. It wasn’t because of Lee as much as it was simply because the network couldn’t seem to find a slot for the show. Still, it felt to Lee as if nothing ever seemed to go her way!

  At least Lee’s relationship with Jackie seemed to be better. However, just when it seemed as if they had peace between them, Jackie made a decision that once again caused turmoil.

  After Ari died, Jackie wanted to enter the workplace and, typically, figured out exactly what to do and then just did it. Unlike Lee, she didn’t have numerous false starts and disappointments. In September of ’75, she glided right into a job as an editor at the publishing house Viking Press, in New York, hired by Tom Guinzburg. Though she really had no skills as a book editor, she’d always had a great love of literature and was, obviously, well read. She’d also always enjoyed talking to authors and had a great appreciation for their craft. Moreover, she had undeniable clout as one of the most famous women in America. Viking really couldn’t resist the idea of hiring her. “It was a good fit,” recalled Tom Guinzburg. “Jackie was willing to do whatever it took to find complete fulfillment as a book editor.”

  The problem was that Jackie chose not to tell Lee about her new vocation. She felt that because Lee had been so upset by her failed book deal, this news of Jackie’s job in publishing would hit too close to home. When Lee found out through mutual friends, she couldn’t help but be disappointed and hurt.

  Jackie said that she’d lived much of her life through her husbands’ experiences and that, at the age of forty-five, the time had finally come for her to distinguish herself as her own woman. In other words, she had her own personal goals and desires that had nothing at all to do with upsetting her sister or causing her grief. In fact, Jackie had started seeing a psychoanalyst, Dr. Marianne Kris, who, strangely enough, considering JFK’s much storied history with Marilyn Monroe, had once been Marilyn’s therapist. In their sessions, according to what Jackie would tell her relatives, Kris delved deeply into Jackie’s PTSD and helped her to understand that most of her decisions since 1963, as well as her behavior and interactions with loved ones, had been informed by trauma. “She told me, ‘I’ve lived in a dark place for such a long time, I want out of it now,’” said one of the editors who worked with her at Viking. In other words, Jackie was on her own journey of self-discovery, just as Lee had been on one for years.

  Yet no matter how hard Lee tried, it was always an uphill battle for her. Now she saw Jackie, who’d never worked after her job at the Washington Times-Herald almost twenty-five years earlier, hired right on the spot and then lauded as a huge success before she even started the job.

  “Jackie O is just so amazing,” opined a writer for People magazine. “She really can do it all! How in the world does she do it?” For Lee, this kind of commentary was understandably exasperating. Her longtime friend Chauncey Parker put it this way: “Jackie was still the star and everything always seemed to go so well for her. Lee was absolutely swamped by this.”

  Lee Radziwill, Inc.

  Now that Jacqueline Onassis seemed to have found her rightful place as a member of the workforce, what would be next for Lee Radziwill? After considering her options for a couple of months, she was clear about one thing: she wasn’t going to give up until she found what she wanted. Despite recent disappointments, in some ways she remained a model of diligence and determination. She still felt the need to do something constructive to satisfy an urge not only to be creative but also to be taken seriously. However, one of the great paradoxes of Lee’s life was that, even given her ambition, whenever she faced disappointment, she would move on quickly from it. She would be too disheartened to continue trying. In the same way she quit acting after having received bad reviews, or didn’t shop her documentary after having been betrayed by the Maysles brothers, she decided not to take her rejected manuscript to another publisher. Some in her life found it maddening that Lee would always seek to cut ties with any idea that wasn’t immediately successful for her. They felt she might have been better served sticking to just one thing … and make that thing work. It was fine with Lee that others had such opinions. They didn’t really matter to her. The way she saw it, she was adventurous and a risk taker, a woman never satisfied with the status quo, always eager for the next adventure, “and I just don’t see anything wrong with that,” she would say.

  At about the same time that Lee was contemplating her professional future, she became involved in a new relationship with a noted New York attorney named Peter Tufo, whom she had met at a luncheon in Southampton in the fall of 1975. Tufo, who was thirty-seven at the time and, at five feet nine, considered by most to be more average-looking than dashing, was a Yale graduate. Lee was at his side in the fall when he was sworn in at City Hall as the pro bono chairman of the Board of Correction, the agency that runs the New York penal system.

  Tufo was like Peter Beard in the sense that he didn’t have great wealth, though he was certainly more financially secure. Lee again broke the mold set by her mother and sister of partnering up only for security. “Lee continued to like men who were actively and intellectually engaged, with an artistic bent,” said Gustavo Paredes, Provi’s son. “It still wasn’t about money for her as much as it was about the way a man thought, his vision of things. She and my mother had many conversations about the men in her life, and my mother said that while Lee wanted stability she still, by the mid-seventies, was intent on finding it in her work, not in her men. This is something my mom felt people didn’t know about Lee.”

  When Lee polled her friends about what they thought was right for her, a career as a professional interior designer often seemed to come up. Of course, Lee had always had a flair for design. She was widely known as a stylish woman, considered by many to be a tastemaker. She certainly had the networking skills to help make a design enterprise a great success. Lee also realized that she needed to be less reliant on other people to do right by her; she needed to make her own way. It was with this goal in mind that she started her own design firm. Rather than jump in without forethought, she wanted to take her time and strategize the best way into the business. She also decided not to tell many people outside of her close circle about it. “I have found that not everyone can be supportive of your dreams,” she explained, “and that kind of negative thinking can influence you in ways you’re not even aware of. It’s best to keep your ambitions to yourself.”

  “Well, I guess it had to happen,” Janet Auchincloss told Oatsie Charles one day at Hammersmith as they sat on the porch and talked things over. “Lee Radziwill, Inc., eh?” Janet was reading aloud a newspaper article about her daughter’s latest venture. She noted that though Lee had always thought she was too hard on her, she’d just been worried about her. “She’s so desperate to be someone she’s not,” Janet told Oatsie, “whereas Jacqueline is so desperate not to be someone she is.” It was an astute observation on Janet’s part, one that perfectly encapsulated the lifelong dilemma of both of her daughters.

  Oatsie said that maybe it was a good idea that Lee would no longer be at the mercy of producers, editors, or others controlling her fate. Janet had to agree. “She has worked hard and no one has ever given her one goddamn thing,” she said of Lee. “She has had to fight for every crumb, hasn’t she?” Janet also noted that, in her opinion, Jackie’s new job at Viking had somehow been influenced by Lee having made the first connection
s with publishers in New York, thereby introducing the literary world to the Bouvier sisters. Janet now took the view that Jackie had only encouraged Lee in her publishing venture so that she herself could scheme her way into that world. After all, Lee was the first one in publishing, not Jackie, Janet proffered, “and then Jacqueline just swooped right in as if she were made for it. Typical Jacqueline.”

  One of Lee’s first commissions was to design a suite for the Americana Hotel chain’s resort in Bal Harbour, Florida. She would also be hired to design the fiftieth-floor presidential penthouse suite of the Americana hotel in Manhattan. With these jobs in hand, her mind was made up about “Lee Radziwill, Inc.” It was now in full swing. As soon as she made the official announcement in mid-February, she won another commission, a model room for Lord & Taylor, the Manhattan department store. When that model was unveiled on March 2, with its soft peach and green color scheme, rattan furniture, and straw rugs, the press showed up in droves for Lee’s official debut as an interior designer.

  “It’s interesting that she’s come full circle,” Jackie said of her sister after the unveiling of the Lord & Taylor room. “Do you remember when she did Yusha’s apartment in New York?” she asked Janet. They had gone to see Lee’s unveiling with relatives. Janet, who was acting particularly chilly toward Jackie these days, said she had no memory whatsoever of Lee ever having remodeled Yusha’s apartment. In fact, she insisted that it had never happened. “Of course it did,” Jackie said, according to a witness to the conversation.