The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Peter was the catalyst that brought the two sisters back together after Jackie’s divisive marriage to Onassis. He was a wonderful friend and mentor to all four children, involving them in art projects and botanical expeditions, windsurfing and swimming with them, and both Jackie and Lee appreciated their offspring’s delight in his company. If Peter had been something of a peace offering from Jackie to Lee, it was now Lee who could offer Jackie and her children resplendent vacations from the city, and from the darkening clouds gathering over her life on Skorpios.

  If Peter had been more malleable, he would have been something of an exciting boy toy, but in fact Peter was then and has remained a truly independent spirit, challenging Lee to open her mind to new adventures and to move further away from the proper society girl she was raised to be. That meant giving Peter the space to take off for Africa when the spirit moved him, and it also meant maintaining a rather open relationship. Peter continued to see other women while he was with Lee, and Lee tolerated it, as long as it didn’t show up in the gossip columns.

  They made for an interesting pair: the immaculately dressed Lee Radziwill and the disheveled Ivy League adventurer dressed in moccasins and old clothes, sometimes sleeping in his station wagon bedecked with rattlesnake skins and animal bones. One of Peter’s oldest friends, Porter Bibb, commented:

  Peter always looked like he had just been sleeping in his car, but he was so damned good-looking and appealing and visceral that he was irresistible anyway. He loved the ability to drop out of the sky into Lee’s life and then go back into his own life, and in that sense I saw him as being in control. Peter was desperate to be in control of every aspect of his life.

  Another friend of Peter’s was the Yale-educated James “Jay” Mellon, heir to the Andrew Mellon fortune and an enthusiast of African safaris. (He was also the author of a number of books, including the oral history Bullwhip Days, about the depredations of American slavery, and The Face of Lincoln, a compilation of daguerreotypes of Abraham Lincoln that Jackie would later have a hand in publishing.) He often joined Lee and Peter in Manhattan for drinks at Lee’s apartment, followed by dinner on the town. Mellon felt that “Peter and Lee were obviously in love,” but he noted the social dissonance between the two: “She was always pecking away at him for his slovenly behavior, and he didn’t give a damn. They quarreled a bit here and there.”

  Lee and Jay Mellon started a flirtatious friendship that lasted over a year, but Jay came to be disillusioned with what he saw as Lee’s superficiality and fascination with money and status. He felt that was true of both sisters, but with Lee,

  I had a feeling quite often that there was another person inside of her who was really quite a nice person, actually. And Peter would often say to me that if you get Lee out to the country and put some blue jeans on her, she becomes a completely different and a much nicer person. The problem with her starts after a few days when she gets the itch to go back to the city . . . [because] she isn’t being seen in the right places and going to the right parties. Then this uptight quality of hers asserts itself . . . the publicity-conscious part that wants to build up her image in various ways.

  Another of Jay Mellon’s friends, journalist Steven M. L. Aronson, agreed that Lee was “a marvelous and genuine person if you can get her away from the strobe lights.” That’s what Peter offered her: a chance to step away from the pecking order of London and Manhattan society, to live a freer and more sensual life.

  Truman Capote was a third wheel in Lee’s relationship with Peter, and his adoring friendship was one of the currents that pulled Lee back to Manhattan, back to the fierce Darwinian struggle for recognition and triumph in the eyes of the world. Just as he had tried to launch Lee as an actress, he encouraged her in a new venture: writing a memoir. Lee wrote an article about her halcyon childhood in East Hampton for Ladies’ Home Journal, based on the memoir she was intermittently writing, and the redoubtable woman’s magazine gave her a cocktail party at the Four Seasons to celebrate the article and hopefully attract publishing interest. It was just before Christmas, and the champagne flowed, and the centerpiece of the party was a cake in the shape of a book. Norman Mailer was present, as well as Jackie’s friend John Kenneth Galbraith and, of course, Lee’s biggest champion, Truman Capote, who made it known that Lee “wrote it herself,” referring to the thousand-word Journal article, adding, “I see the book going to forty thousand words. The title, ‘Opening Chapters,’ is good.”

  Soon after, Lee and her children flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, for a skiing holiday.

  * * *

  “REMIND ME TO tell you about being on tour with the Rolling Stones,” Lee said one winter afternoon. In June of 1972, Lee, Peter Beard, and Truman Capote joined the Rolling Stones on their 1972 North American concert tour. Capote was to cover the tour for Rolling Stone magazine, with Peter supplying the photographs.

  It was originally Lee’s idea. She thought it would help Truman with a case of the “blahs”—a word both Lee and her sister used for a sense of dissatisfaction with life, as in “he’s just going through a bad case of the blahs.” By the early 1970s, Truman was very much adrift, struggling with his roman à clef, Answered Prayers, the book that he claimed would be his Proustian masterpiece, according to Gerald Clarke. But Truman, Clarke wrote, “seemed eager to do nearly anything rather than lock himself away and confront the problems inherent in any long and complicated novel.” Unable to write, he was restless, recovering from yet another misguided love affair, though drinking less than he had been in the preceding two years.

  Lee had a brainstorm. With Peter Beard and Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, she persuaded Truman to cover the 1972 Rolling Stones tour of North America. Lee suggested that Peter accompany Truman and photograph the Stones on the road as they toured the country. It would be marvelous, Lee told Truman, and she encouraged him by suggesting that the article could eventually be expanded into a book, a variant of an earlier piece in the New Yorker that became the celebrated The Muses Are Heard, Truman’s account of traveling with the Everyman Opera Company when they toured the Soviet Union performing George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Lee knew Truman’s work well, and knew she could flatter him with it. It worked.

  Lee did not blame Truman for the debacle of her acting career—though some thought that he had set her up for public embarrassment out of his conflicted romantic feelings toward the Principessa. She also knew that Truman vowed to tell the secrets of his “swans” in his new book, deep-dish gossip he’d heard as the world’s most celebrated houseguest and intimate of society luminaries Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Carol Matthau. Lee knew there wasn’t anyone Truman wouldn’t betray for a good story—even her—so perhaps she wanted to distract him with a new project, or just keep her status as his favorite swan.

  Truman invited Lee to join him on the tour. “He had taken me to see several Stone concerts at Madison Square Garden,” Lee recalled decades later, “so he said, ‘Honey, you gotta come.’ And so I said I would adore to. And so that’s how it started.” So she, Truman, and Peter Beard joined the Stones in late June, midway through their two-month tour of thirty-one cities.

  Ironically, given the city’s historical significance to the Kennedys, they joined the tour in Dallas. Lee had never been there before. Just nine years after the assassination, the Texas School Book Depository on Dealey Plaza had been turned into a museum. Truman was eager to spend time there, given his fascination with crime stories (In Cold Blood had cemented his reputation as one of America’s greatest living writers). But Lee found herself “horrified to see that what was on display . . . were the newspapers where Dallas was conspicuously mentioned, as if it were a source of pride,” writes biographer Diana DuBois.

  After touring the museum, Lee spoke witheringly of former governor John Connally, who had been struck by one of Oswald’s bullets but had survived, saying that the Texas governor “just screamed his head off when he was shot and never contacted the family afterwa
rd.” For Lee, Dallas raked up images of the assassination and of Jackie’s perilous grief.

  They continued with the tour, Lee and Truman sleeping in bunk beds on the tour bus. The highlight for Lee was being backstage before each concert, which “was always wonderful, as they were tuning up and exercising and screaming and—you felt such an air of excitement.” She immediately saw that Mick Jagger was “absolutely the leader, always in command, the one that stayed so straight so he could keep everybody else under his control. I can see how people found him sexy, but I found him a little repulsive,” she admitted.

  Clarke claimed that the Rolling Stones liked Truman and he liked the Stones, but Keith Richards recalled in his 2010 memoir, Life, that they often teased and terrorized the brilliant writer with the high-pitched, querulous voice. “We had some sport with Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, one of the group of Mick’s society friends,” he wrote, “who had attached themselves to the tour and who included Princess Lee Radziwill, Princess Radish to us, as Truman was just Truby. He was on assignment from some high-paying magazine, so he was ostensibly working.”

  Actually, he was working, but mostly working on just surviving the tour. He found the concerts deafening and was reduced to wearing earplugs to maintain his sanity. “Truman found the amplified instruments and the roar of the crowd almost unbearable,” Lee recalled. That was one of the things that bothered Keith Richards, who wrote, “Truby said something bitchy and whiny backstage—he was being an old fart, actually complaining about the noise.” He decided he was going to teach “this motherfucker” a lesson:

  I mean this snooty New York attitude . . . it got a little raucous. I remember back at the hotel, kicking Truman’s door. I’d splattered it with ketchup I’d picked up off a trolley. “Come out you old queen. What are you doing around here? You want cold blood! You’re on the road now, Truby! Come and say it out here in the corridor.”

  After the difficult experience in Dallas, putting up with Truman’s complaints about the noise and the Stones’ rabble-rousing, Lee had had enough. She was eager to return home and she expected Peter to return to New York with her. She ought to have known by now that Peter would do whatever Peter wanted to do. When he informed Lee that he wanted to continue the tour, in part to keep an eye on Truman, she was furious. At the height of their argument, Lee told Peter that she had long suspected that Truman was envious of their heterosexual relationship. After all, Peter had been the first serious romance in Lee’s life since she and Truman had first met. She insisted that Truman had asked him to remain on the tour just as a way to break them up.

  It was Lee and Peter’s first serious argument, and she went back to New York alone.

  However, on July 27, Lee did attend the tour’s final, three-hour performance, held at Madison Square Garden, followed by a gala birthday party thrown for Mick Jagger by Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun on the rooftop ballroom of the St. Regis hotel. Lee reunited with Peter and Truman, who were joined by Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. For Lee, that party was the beauty part of the whole shebang—the only time in the entire tour that she felt she was at the white-hot center of American culture. She knew it was through Peter that she was able to enter this exciting world that Jackie had only glimpsed from afar. “The demimonde was too much for my sister,” Lee said.

  With Truman comfortably returned to his country house in Sagaponack to begin writing the piece for Rolling Stone, Lee was there to act as midwife. He began by reading bits and pieces aloud to her and Peter. He took its working title, “It Will Soon Be Here,” from a nineteenth-century painting of farmers in the Midwest trying to save their harvest from a threatening storm—very likely suggested by Lee, with her deep interest in nineteenth-century painting.

  Despite Lee’s best efforts to keep Truman focused, the deadline passed, and then another, and the article was never finished. “It may have been that he did not have the energy or power of concentration to devote himself to any significant piece of prose,” as Clarke proposed, or else, as Truman told Lee and Peter, there was simply nothing really to write about. All that hysteria and energy was simply a well-oiled machine whose excitement was as exaggerated as the elongated tongue that appeared onstage as the Stones’ logo. “I can’t be bothered,” Truman explained. “Maybe if I had been younger.”

  Lee had tried. Truman’s alcoholism and occasional cocaine use was already alienating Lee, as was his parade of, in her words, “inappropriate boyfriends.” Soon Truman would need real rescuing and would be bitterly surprised when Lee failed to help him.

  * * *

  JUST TWO YEARS after the wedding, rumors of divorce loomed over Jackie’s second marriage, as bad luck continued to dog Onassis. His daughter, Christina, hastily married a man twenty-eight years her senior whom she’d met poolside at a hotel in Monte Carlo. They divorced after eight months when Onassis cut off her trust fund. Tina Onassis, Ari’s ex-wife and mother of his children, secretly married Stavros Niarchos, who had been formerly married to Tina’s sister, Eugenia. That marriage had ended with Eugenia’s suicide (she had taken twenty-five Seconals), and Onassis believed that Niarchos had physically abused her, contributing to her death. He was incensed when his archrival had married Tina, whom he still cared deeply about.

  On January 4, 1973, Onassis dined out with his son, Alexander, and discussed his plans to divorce Jackie. He planned to start proceedings using the ruthless New York lawyer Roy Cohn. Alexander was delighted to hear of his father’s intentions. He had always held out hope that his parents would reunite, and he’d been just as devastated when Tina married Niarchos following his aunt Eugenia’s suicide. Alexander, like his father, felt that Niarchos had had something to do with Eugenia’s death, and now the young man actually feared for his mother’s life. It was easy for him to blame Jackie for preventing a reunion between his parents.

  Alexander, just twenty-four, had come a long way from his youthful years as a wealthy brat. He was still a shy, somewhat inarticulate young man, more comfortable working on engines or piloting planes than hobnobbing with society, but he was well liked among his father’s Olympic Airlines employees, where he had been put in charge of a charter service that flew to the smaller Greek islands. His stewardship had been a success, and Alexander had further endeared himself by piloting small planes under emergency situations, rescuing people ill or stranded in remote areas. Despite the poor eyesight that prevented him from getting a commercial pilot’s license, he would often fly where more experienced pilots would not go. In one instance, Alexander rescued a fisherman’s son whose hands had been blown off by dynamite, and flew him to safety. When the boy’s father pressed a hundred-drachma tip into Alexander’s hands—worth about 30 cents—he accepted the gift, so as not to injure the fisherman’s pride.

  Onassis and his son had reached a rapprochement in their once contentious relationship. He was proud of his son and heir, often referring to him as his “alpha and omega.” Alexander left the dinner elated that his father planned to divorce Jackie, and pleased that he’d agreed to replace an antiquated company plane, the Piaggio, that he felt was unsafe.

  But on January 22, 1973, less than three weeks after that dinner in Paris and three months after Onassis’s fourth wedding anniversary, Alexander was piloting the Piaggio in a test run with two other pilots on board. The plane crashed seconds after takeoff. Alexander’s right temporal lobe was crushed in the accident. Covered in blood, he was rushed to a hospital in Athens.

  Onassis and Jackie were in New York when they received the horrible news. They immediately flew back to Athens, and Ari sent a plane to fly Christina in from Brazil. She had heard about her brother’s crash over the radio. Onassis also flew in a leading neurosurgeon, London’s Dr. Alan Richardson, in a desperate effort to save his grievously injured son. Heartbroken, Onassis told Dr. Richardson, “If I give you my entire fortune, can you save my boy’s life?” As Gage reports, “All the money, the business deals, the yachts and villas and ships—his kingdom had been accumul
ated for this boy.”

  But after examining Alexander, Dr. Richardson concurred with two other surgeons that Alexander was beyond help, having suffered irreversible brain damage.

  Onassis made one more attempt to turn the balance in his son’s favor: he flew in an icon of the Virgin Mary sacred to the Greek island of Tinos, a place where the sick and dying make pilgrimages. He called Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens to beg him to bring the sacred icon from Tinos to his son’s bedside. He did so, but to no avail. Ari was beside himself with grief.

  Jackie, who had already lived through the death of two infants and the horrific murder of her husband, remained somewhat stoic in the face of Ari’s grief. She had learned to cling to the mundane facts of life in the grip of terrible events, like the poet Robert Desnos reading palms and telling fortunes while a prisoner at Theresienstadt. But at least two accounts of her behavior at Alexander’s bedside do not flatter her: knowing that Ari was considering divorcing her, Jackie reportedly approached Alexander’s lover, Baroness Fiona von Thyssen-Bornemisza, to ask if Alexander had mentioned a settlement amount to bestow upon Jackie if they divorced.

  Alexander had fallen in love with Fiona when he was nineteen and she was thirty-five, struck by seeing her step out of a sports car during a snowstorm in St. Moritz. He described her as “tormentingly lovely,” and he carried a torch for the baroness, though his father disapproved. Jackie probably gravitated to her because both were still considered outsiders in the close-knit Onassis family.

  Fiona had no answer for Jackie but to ask Ari himself.

  After Christina arrived from Brazil and saw her brother, Onassis made the decision to remove Alexander from life support, telling Christina, “Let us torture him no more.”