by Sam Kashner
Lee turned to the designer Renzo Mongiardino to decorate both houses. “My living room is like a bowling alley, can you come fix it?” she wrote to the Italian designer. Mongiardino was an architect who worked as both an interior designer and a theatrical set designer. He frequently collaborated with the opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli, notably on Zeffirelli’s production of The Taming of the Shrew in 1967, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction, and on Romeo and Juliet in 1968. He was nominated again in 1973 for art direction on Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon. He also designed sets for a production of The Nutcracker choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev and for several operas in Milan, Venice, and London. As an interior decorator, he was in high demand among the grandest families in Europe, naming among his clients Aristotle Onassis; the Italian industrialist Giovanni Agnelli and his wife, Marella; Gianni Versace; Edmond and Lily Safra; the Rothschilds; and the Hearsts—and Lee and Stas Radziwill, not quite in that echelon, but edging closer.
Though grounded in the modern movement, Mongiardino took his designs further, juxtaposing the ordinary with objet d’art, employing rich, textured fabrics and sculptured panels, using trompe l’oeil to superb effect. He inserted fakes among the antiques, guided by his sense of proportion and harmony. Thus “authenticity” took a back seat to dramatic effect. After all, he was trained as a set designer, so design had to set a mood, make an impact, be memorable and beautiful, but not necessarily historically accurate. Lee chose him for all of the above, and because their tastes resonated with each other. She wanted an opulent, rich, and layered look. She was inspired by a cushion Renzo had designed that she spotted in an Elle magazine photo spread, and knew immediately she wanted him to design her two homes. “His eye was extraordinary,” Lee later said, “and I learned so much from him.”
With Mongiardino, Lee’s two homes were transformed into sumptuous, inviting, enchanted retreats. For the house at 4 Buckingham Place, Mongiardino designed the living room and bedroom with a rich display of tapestries, giving them a nineteenth-century, old-world atmosphere. Cecil Beaton, the favorite photographer of the royal family and a celebrated theatrical designer, photographed the living room for Vogue in 1966.
Inviting the designer to turn his eyes toward the Turville country house, she apologized that it was “no palazzo,” just a project “to amuse him.” She supplied four yards of eighteenth-century fabric, which Renzo “copied . . . for the living room exquisitely—even better than the original.” The dining room had a Russian theme (Lee dubbed it “the Turgenev dining room”), achieved by pasting richly colored Sicilian scarves—hand-painted by the designer Lila de Nobili—to the walls; it, too, was photographed for Vogue in 1971.
Lee certainly enjoyed the perks of her London house, but her heart was in the country. “We had wonderful gardens,” she later wrote,
a fantastic kitchen garden and a huge pink-walled vegetable garden . . . We had a marvelous chef; we had a full household. We were an hour and a half from London, so it was very easy. Stas insisted on building an indoor swimming pool, which was hideous, but he enjoyed it.
For Lee, turning to a theatrical designer to transform her houses seemed fitting, as she was drawn to the arts of invention and dramatic self-presentation. She had found escape from the domestic tensions of her childhood homes in fantasy and a love of beauty. Lee confided that she always preferred the nineteenth century to her own, in love with its music and painting. “I love all the dramatic composers—Debussy, Scriabin, Mahler, Ravel—and painters like David and Delacroix. They had such power and vitality, and such warmth.” As the London designer and decorator Nicky Haslam observed, in her theatrical flair, Lee had “not safe good taste.” In the dramatic Mongiardino, she’d found her ideal designer.
Born August 4, 1959, five months after her marriage to Stas, her first child and only son, Antony, arrived. She chose to give birth in Lausanne, Switzerland, because they were known for having the best obstetricians in the world, and because it was easier there to put out the story that Antony (later changed to Anthony) was three months premature. Despite a difficult birth, he was a robust, black-haired, healthy boy, and Lee adored him. By marrying first and having a child barely two years after Jackie bore Caroline, Lee was keeping pace with her older sister. But more important, Lee was happy.
The early years of her marriage to Stas were blissful. “Stas was crazy about Lee,” friends of the couple observed, and “immensely proud of Lee . . . They had a mutual respect and admiration for each other which was rather exciting for both of them.” Besides the great satisfaction of completely redecorating her town and country houses, she and Stas took frequent trips to Europe and to the States. She took up horseback riding at Windsor and joined Stas on weekend shooting parties, living the life of landed aristocracy, with a tilt toward the bohemian crowd represented by Lee’s friend Cecil Beaton. Lee even occasionally took her pet dog, a pug named Thomas, for high tea at the Ritz in London. They entertained extravagantly, hosting candlelit dinners at 4 Buckingham Place. Stas used salty language and told bawdy stories, and he liked to tease Lee by saying, “Shit! The little girl is very, very small . . . It is fantastic how much she costs to dress!” For her part, Lee teased Stas about his Polish accent and broken English, doing spot-on imitations.
Once the decorating of her two houses was complete, Lee continued to search out eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and Italian drawings. She still searched for creative outlets, and wrote an unpublished article with the revealing title “The Anxiety to Distinguish Oneself.” She gave it to the Harvard professor, economist, and Kennedy friend John Kenneth Galbraith to edit, and he changed it so much that Lee ended up “throwing it away.” But the anxiety remained, only to be relieved for a time when Rudolf Nureyev entered the picture. She fell mightily for the world-renowned Russian dancer, undermining her marriage to Stas.
* * *
IT DIDN’T MATTER that Nureyev, though bisexual, was primarily gay. After all, Truman Capote would fall in love with Lee—for her grace, her beauty, her intelligence, her star power. Lee found herself powerfully drawn to the ruggedly beautiful dancer. Many women were attracted to his sensuality, his exuberance, his glamour. Another worshipper was Princess Margaret, who commented after attending the London premiere of his production of The Nutcracker in February of 1968, “He was more beautiful than I can describe, with his flared nostrils, huge eyes, and high cheekbones.” Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s then paramour, were also devotees; Faithfull admitted that they were “obsessed” with Nureyev.
Since his dramatic defection to the West on June 16, 1961, in Paris, Nureyev was regarded as a rock star, a tempestuous and supremely gifted artist, attracting the adoration of thousands of balletomanes. Lee adored him, but Jackie had seen him first.
In April of 1963, when London’s Royal Ballet took up residence at Carnegie Hall for their New York season, Jackie Kennedy (as well as Princess Grace of Monaco and Greta Garbo) joined the ranks of Nureyev worshippers. She attended Nureyev’s New York premiere and was deeply impressed by his performance with the celebrated dancer Margot Fonteyn, who at forty-two years of age had seen her career reignited by her partnership with the twenty-three-year-old Russian in Giselle. The principal ballerina described that evening as “one of the strongest artistic experiences of my life . . . there were 40 curtain calls . . . Seeing [them] made up for having missed Nijinsky and Chaliapin.”
At another performance, Jackie asked to go backstage to meet Nureyev, but the dancer’s manager, the impresario Sol Hurok, discouraged her, and Nureyev reportedly left “fuming.” But not long after, Jackie invited Nureyev and Fonteyn to the White House for tea, beginning a thirty-year friendship between the “two sixties icons, he, ballet’s most famous prince, and she, the queen of Camelot,” in the words of Nureyev’s biographer Diane Solway. His brilliant presence ignited Jackie’s interest in tsarist Russian culture, which she would return to later in life.
Like
her sister, Lee found in Rudolf Nureyev the apotheosis of artistry and a kind of peacock beauty that mirrored her own lean, high-cheekboned face; in photographs, they could have been twin descendants of the Tatars. Throughout her life, Lee found herself drawn to artists deeply devoted to their work—Truman Capote, the designer Renzo Mongiardino, and, of course, Nureyev, who possessed another quality that spoke to her. “I have the greatest sympathy for those who end in despair,” she once said, and perhaps in Nureyev she sensed the wisp of impending doom.
Lee first met the Russian dancer when she and Stas saw him dance with the Royal Ballet in London. Joan Thring, the Australian manager who organized many of Nureyev’s world tours, recalled that Lee had phoned her in March of 1966 to say that she wanted to do something for the dancer on his fast-approaching birthday, on March 17. She asked if she could throw a party for Nureyev, and after that, Joan Thring said, “she never let go.”
Lee and Stas threw a lavish party for Nureyev on his twenty-eighth birthday, and Lee invited many of his fellow dancers, though the appeal was somewhat lost on Stas, who referred to the celebrated Russian simply as “Lee’s friend, the dancer.”
The following year, Lee invited Nureyev to stay with them at their London house and at Turville Grange, as the Russian dancer did not yet have a permanent home. At first, Nureyev was suspicious of Lee’s hospitality—he was by temperament a self-protective man. Lee described him as being like “a very alert animal: on guard and afraid of being caught or trapped.” Lee started showing up at his classes and rehearsals, deepening his suspicion, but he was finally won over, Lee believes, by seeing “the way we lived, the way I did things.” Nureyev did indeed love the exotic nineteenth-century atmosphere of Lee’s two homes, and in fact he followed her lead in hiring Renzo Mongiardino to design the sets of the next ballet he choreographed. He’d particularly admired Lee’s dining room, with its antique leather walls, taken from Mongiardino’s set for Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew. “It was heavy and dark,” Lee recalled, “and Rudolf adored it. He’d never heard of Renzo before, but he was also so curious and receptive.”
Nureyev stayed with the Radziwills for seven months, bonding over their love of Oriental design and rich fabrics. Lee described a typical day:
He had lunch at four or five o’clock in the afternoon before a performance, and after a performance it took him hours to wind down. We used to go [window shop] antiquing about 11 and walked and walked until 2 in the morning. And Rudolf would inevitably become thrilled about some extremely dark, heavy piece of furniture. And the next day I would have to go and find out what it was.
Nureyev eventually owned a home called Villa Arcady in the hills above Monte Carlo, in the town of La Turbie, Monaco. Lee loved it: the music continuously wafting throughout the house, its nineteenth-century feel, its wrought iron gates, white stucco walls, and heavy furniture. (Cecil Beaton believed that Nureyev liked substantial, grand-sized furniture and heavy iron pieces so that they could never be stolen, which he described as a vestige of his peasant upbringing.)
Lee recalled, “When I first knew [Rudolf], the only language he spoke, apart from Russian and Tatar, was English—poorly—but then I always found Slavic English with no prepositions more expressive and far more provocative than English spoken as expected!” Of course, that was what Stas’s English sounded like, and it was part of Nureyev’s immense appeal. “Part of his charm,” recalled one of his friends, “was to get women to fawn all over him. Gay or straight, he flirted like crazy.” Nureyev “enjoyed a special rapport with women,” writes Solway, though “his interest in them was primarily social or aesthetic, not sexual.”
Rudolf was drawn to Lee, whom he described as “. . . not just a socialite. She attracts people of substance.” Nonetheless, one of his friends, the ballerina Lynn Seymour, observed that he “had female lovers, whom he’d get fascinated with for a while,” and Lee was one of them—one who was incredibly persistent. “Lee kept pushing and Rudolf finally just gave in,” one of Lee’s friends reportedly said.
Nureyev was also enjoying a friendship with Jackie, and they would often shop together on Fifth Avenue when he was in New York. He managed to balance his friendship with both sisters, but the two women competed for his attention. Lee was often spotted dancing with Nureyev late into the night at nightclubs in Monte Carlo and London. Though he flaunted both friendships, the dancer was much closer to Lee. “I believe my sister was—you’d have to use the word ‘jealousy’ to describe how she felt about how close we were at one time,” Lee later reminisced.
During his visits with Lee at Turville Grange, the two were often alone together, with Stas away in London. In fact, Nureyev rarely saw Stas. Joan Thring was convinced that Lee had succeeded in bedding Nureyev, just based on the intimate way they wandered the grounds of Turville Grange at dusk. Lee knew Nureyev was “99-and-a-half percent homosexual” and that she would have to take the initiative if they were going to be intimate. Apparently, she did. In fact, Nureyev claimed that Lee was one of two women he had gotten pregnant. He confided in the Observer’s ballet critic Maude Gosling (who wrote with her husband, Nigel, under the pseudonym Alexander Bland) that he had impregnated Lee, adding, “And what do you think she did? She destroyed my baby.”
Decades later, Lee refuted this allegation, attributing it to Nureyev’s confusion in the late 1980s when he was dying from AIDS. “Perhaps he was upset that he would die without an heir,” she mused.
Despite whatever bitter feelings—or delusions—Nureyev nursed at the end, their friendship was genuine and it lasted throughout his life. He treasured an extraordinary objet d’art Lee had given him: a gold, jewel-studded, double-headed eagle, which he secreted away in the cavernous fireplace of his Monte Carlo home. He was always afraid of being robbed, but perhaps its secret place was also an indication of how Nureyev had to keep hidden his deeper feelings for Lee. When asked about this, her only answer was an enigmatic smile worthy of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. “I only ever wanted him to myself,” she said. “Always.”
5
Bouvier Style: The White House Years
I seem so mercilessly exposed and don’t know how to cope with it.
—JACKIE
Good night my darling Jacks—the bravest and noblest of all. L.
—LEE
Lee was only twenty-seven when John Kennedy won the presidency and her sister moved into the White House, ascending to the title of First Lady. Stas had proved a great help to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket by campaigning in Polish communities in the Midwest, warmly speaking to the crowds in their native language, which was difficult for him as he suffered from stage fright.
Kennedy was grateful to Stas and hugely enjoyed his company. They were both charismatic men-about-town who relished their wealth and the company of beautiful women. Jackie also adored her new brother-in-law: his solidity, dark complexion, and penchant for women and wine, so like their father’s, made him irresistible to both sisters. Jack and Jackie cherished his visits to the White House, where he would play backgammon with the president, helping him to relax, and bring back deep gossip from London for the president to enjoy. Lee recalled that “Jack Kennedy loved gossip, but not nearly as much as my sister.” Jackie, remembers Lee, once asked a guest of the White House what he knew about “le scandale,” the breakup of Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher’s marriage by Richard Burton during the making of Cleopatra. “Do you think she’ll run off with him?” Jackie had eagerly inquired.
In the heady days after the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that had nominated Jack Kennedy for president, Stas and Lee vacationed with the Kennedys and the Arthur Schlesingers, who drove down from Cambridge to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis, on Cape Cod. They all spent a blissful afternoon on the Kennedy boat. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, Harvard professor, and Jack’s special assistant, would eventually be, at forty-three, one of the old men of the Kennedy administration. He recalled that outing:
We brought along several hand-cases of empty coke and tonic bottles; these were to be targets for rifle shooting. After we got out an appropriate distance, the boat stopped, and Jack tossed the bottles overboard. Several of them sank straight away. Others floated for a moment. And Jack and Radziwill shot at them. Jack is plainly an excellent shot. All this was carried out agreeably, with much banter and laughter.
After shooting, the boating party dove from the boat and swam in the icy waters of the Atlantic, then warmed themselves with Bloody Marys and “an excellent lunch . . . cigars and conversation,” returning to port before 5 p.m. Schlesinger had never seen “Jack in better form. He was warm, funny, quick, intelligent, and spontaneous.”
How wonderful for Jackie and Lee that their husbands relished each other’s company, bringing the sisters even closer in the early, exuberant days just before the election, and in the two and a half years to come. At the time, both were pregnant, both expecting in November.
If Jackie was cautiously hopeful, Lee had mixed feelings about her second pregnancy. She conceived just six months after Anthony’s birth, although she had not wanted to become pregnant again so soon. The birth of her second child would be more difficult than Anthony’s had been. On August 18, 1960, on a short visit to New York City from Hyannis Port, she was rushed to New York Hospital and gave birth to Anna Christina Radziwill, who was three months premature. Tina was frail and kept in an incubator for several months, and Lee found herself in the grip of paralyzing postpartum depression. While Stas campaigned for Jack Kennedy, Jackie comforted her sister, but Lee was so distraught and so anxious that Stas felt she would recover better at home, in London. They flew back, leaving Tina in the hospital, to be sent for by the children’s nurse.
