The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Still unable to accept the death of his only son, Onassis considered having him cryonically frozen by the Life Extension Society in Washington, DC, with the hope that one day science could repair his injured brain. However, his close friend Ioannis Georgakis convinced Onassis that such a move would interfere with the migration of Alexander’s soul. Greek Orthodox Christians believe that it takes forty days for a soul to leave earth and reach paradise.

  Alexander lay in a gold-plated casket for three days, while thousands filed by to pay their respects. For Jackie, it must have felt as if she were reliving John Kennedy’s funeral: present were royalty and heads of state, including the prime minister of Greece and head of the military junta that ruled the country, George Papadopoulos. Leaders from around the world sent their condolences: President Nixon, President Pompidou, Queen Elizabeth, and even Constantine, the exiled king of Greece.

  Onassis finally left the church on the third day, hand in hand with his daughter, Christina. The family was beginning to close its ranks against outsiders, and Jackie seemed to be increasingly shut out. Ari appeared to have aged overnight. When he threaded his way through the crowd outside the church and suddenly stumbled, an ancient seaman called out, “Courage! Stand up, old man.” Onassis did so, and walked on.

  Alexander’s body was buried on Skorpios.

  In the weeks after his son’s burial, Onassis was inconsolable. He wandered the island in the company of a stray dog and spent long nights at his son’s grave. He would sit for hours in the grass, talking to Alexander and drinking ouzo, pouring a glass for his lost son. Jackie was worried; she had been through that kind of suffering, and she tried to console him and to repair their relationship. She tried to distract him by inviting guests like the Pierre Salingers aboard the Christina on a trip to the Antilles. She tried to ingratiate herself with members of his family, and she took him on trips to Mexico, Spain, the Caribbean, and Egypt. On a visit to New York, she asked Yusha Auchincloss to bring along pretty girls of his acquaintance to distract Ari—something she had done while planning state dinners for Jack Kennedy. Nothing seemed to rouse Ari from his grief.

  The only person who could really console him was Maria Callas, because they understood each other, and because early on in their affair, they had lost an infant son. When he first arrived at her Paris apartment after losing Alexander, he fell into her arms.

  “My boy is gone,” he wept. “There’s nothing left for me.”

  * * *

  THOUGH SHE WOULD later deny it, Lee’s affair with Peter Beard essentially ended her marriage to Stas. Lerman noted in his diaries that as early as February 20, 1971, Truman Capote called Stas over the “blower” (in a bit of British slang) to say that Lee was “hysterical over Peter Beard . . . She’s gone to England to arrange a divorce. He’s bad news, isn’t he? Maybe she won’t marry him, but she thinks she will . . .”

  Jackie, always fond of Stas, was not pleased. Seeing the impending loss of his family, Stas asked Jackie to intervene by persuading Lee to stay in the marriage, just as the Kennedys had once asked Jackie to convince Lee to end her affair with Onassis. Jackie was critical of how Lee’s behavior and a divorce would affect Anthony and Tina, feeling that her sister already spent too much time away from her children. Lee resented Jackie’s interference and her lack of support. “You don’t have to live with his moods,” Lee told her sister, even going so far as to say that Jackie’s marriage to Kennedy would not have lasted if he had lived. It was a low point in their relationship, stoking the embers of Lee’s sense of betrayal over Jackie’s marriage to Onassis. According to one source, “Their youthful closeness was gone.”

  Stas finally sued for divorce, hurt by Lee’s affair with Peter, whom Stas had counted as a friend. Their divorce was announced on March 3, 1973, Lee’s fortieth birthday, and was finalized the following year. His fortunes had dwindled considerably by then, and he had become a rather haunted figure, reminiscent of Jack Bouvier near the end of his life. Despite Stas’s own occasional affairs, Lee was still the love of his life, and after the marriage ended, he fell into a depression and was often heard to lament, in his Polish-accented English, “Why did Princess leave? I can’t understand why Princess left.”

  Bordering on bankruptcy after the 1971 death of his friend and business partner Felix Fenston and the crash of the real estate market, Stas had to sell Turville Grange. It was heartbreaking for both him and Lee—they had spent many blissful summers there, and Lee especially had derived great pleasure in turning the country house into a splendid retreat. Fourteen-year-old Tina went with Lee to Manhattan while fifteen-year-old Anthony remained with his father so he could continue to attend Millfield School in Somerset. Anthony and Tina were desperately unhappy at being separated, and it could not have been a preferable solution for Lee, whose relationship with Tina had always been strained, while she openly adored her only son.

  Stas gave Lee a generous settlement, in part to move his remaining funds to America to avoid the high taxes levied in England and thus safeguard his children’s future. He allowed her to keep Francis Bacon’s Figure Turning, which Lee hung in her Manhattan duplex apartment. In a rare public statement about her divorce, Lee later told People magazine in her characteristic whisper, “It was stale for a long time. It just took a long time to work out the details.” She also explained in a 1974 interview with the New York Times:

  I was a foreigner married to another foreigner, living in a foreign country. That’s fairly difficult in a way. We both missed our own countries a lot. Divorce is a 50-50 thing, and it can be a number of petty things that finally drive you out of your mind.

  * * *

  JACKIE’S MARRIAGE WAS also approaching its end. Besides being a personal tragedy for Onassis, the loss of his son was the death knell for their marriage, and he began to take out his grief on Jackie. Peter Beard, on his several visits to Skorpios, recalled:

  I can’t tell you how many meals I sat through when Onassis would scream at her. He used to make insulting comparisons, right to her face between Jackie and Callas. He said Jackie was superficial and Callas was a “real artist.” Jackie just sat around and took it.

  Beard also noticed that Onassis was nicer to Jackie when they were in London, visiting Lee, or in Manhattan, but on Greek soil, “all the macho in him came out. When he exploded, everybody ran for cover.” He returned to his favorite subjects, berating Jackie for her extravagant spending, and for deserting him for Manhattan on too many occasions. During one such tirade, Peter and John Jr. ran for cover, hiding in the shower.

  Jackie called her eccentric cousin Edie Beale, confiding in her that everything seemed to go wrong after Alexander’s death and that Ari’s personality had undergone a sea change. “Mr. Onassis really lost his mind when his son died in that airplane crash,” she recalled years later. “Onassis was no longer interested in life. He became a perfect horror to live with.”

  In Acapulco during the first winter after Alexander’s death, Jackie and Ari visited Loel and Gloria Guinness. Another of their guests, the fashion doyenne Eleanor Lambert, recalled:

  When it was midnight and the fireworks began, Ari started to sob. Jackie put her arms around him, just like the Pieta, and held him. She let him cling to her for what seemed like ten minutes. It was so touching because he was not kind to her. But she stuck by him in this awful time when he was mourning so terribly.

  There’s a Greek saying that if you turn your back on love, your luck will turn against you. That seems to be what happened to Onassis, if indeed Maria Callas was the woman he most loved. In his superstitious Greek soul, Onassis began to blame his bad luck on what he perceived to be Jackie’s “malocchio”—her evil eye—as so many around her had died early and tragic deaths. Even Christina, who had at first been warm toward Jackie, now believed she had brought the gods’ wrath down upon their family. According to Gage, Christina

  always felt that the union with Jackie had brought a curse on the family; now she was certain of it and openly
said so to her father. Even Artemis, who bowed to no one in either her superstitions or her defense of her sister-in-law, felt it necessary to assure a guest at her dinner table, “It is just bad kismet. Jackie’s not responsible for it.”

  “Greeks are very fate-oriented, and he felt that it was a curse that Alexander had died,” Letitia Baldrige later remarked. “He unfairly blamed her . . . so it became inevitable for that marriage not to work.” Peter Evans, one of Onassis’s biographers, wrote that the woman he had once praised as “cool and sharp at the edges, fiery and hot beneath the surface,” now seemed “coldhearted and shallow,” no longer “my class A lady” (inspired by the slogan on her L&M’s “20 class A” cigarettes). Onassis once believed that some marriages are made in heaven, but the best ones are made on Skorpios. As he turned against Jackie, that was no longer true for him.

  Maria Callas, who had never stopped loving her Aristo, took little satisfaction in the “Jackie jinx” and its effect on Onassis and his family, although the idea had taken root among Onassis’s employees and even the Greek people. Even the tabloids blamed Onassis’s unprecedented run of bad luck on “the Kennedy curse.” His regret over the marriage gradually became an obsession, and he sought to rid himself of an alliance that seemed to have turned fate against him.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING of l972, Lee set out to make a documentary about her childhood in the Hamptons with the legendary avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a friend and sometime collaborator of Peter Beard’s. What Lee had in mind was a lyrical tribute to her happy memories of growing up with Jackie in East Hampton, coupled with images of Caroline, Anthony, Tina, and John Jr. enjoying the same summer pleasures. The Lithuanian-born Mekas, then in his late forties, came out to Montauk to film.

  Mekas strove for a diaristic effect in his films (“like little sketches of people, friends, locations, even the weather”). His distinctive style, seen in his documentaries of groundbreaking artists such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Harry Smith, Allen Ginsberg, video artist Nam June Paik, and Andy Warhol, has been described as “a marriage between avant-garde poetics and ‘home movie’ amateurism,” achieved through handheld camerawork and natural or overexposed lighting.

  Given Mekas’s experimental style, television producers passed on the project, and the few dollars she and Peter Beard raised barely covered expenses. However, Jackie saved the day by hiring Mekas to teach her children the fundamentals of photography and filmmaking. The documentary, This Side of Paradise, was shot over several summers in Montauk, with occasional forays into Lee’s and Jackie’s Manhattan apartments.

  Each segment is connected by intertitles. “Home scenes” looks very much like a home movie of Tina Radziwill’s birthday party, an intentional device of Mekas’s to convey the intimacy and spontaneity of private events. In “Oh, yes, the summers of Montauk,” we see John Jr. and Anthony boisterously wrestling and spraying each other with shaving cream. Later, Tina and Caroline swim in the Atlantic while Anthony, John Jr., and Peter Beard cavort in the sand. Scenes at the beach are shot in overexposed film that renders the sunlight blinding, like a home movie true to the heady pleasures of heat, sea, and sand.

  Besides being a record of languid summers on Montauk, Paradise also shows the close bonds between the two sets of cousins. Keeping in mind that Caroline and John Jr. had endured the sudden, unthinkable murder of their father, the bothersome predations of paparazzi, and the adjustments of moving to Greece as the stepchildren of a Greek tycoon who already had grown children of his own, the two seem like normal, happy teenagers. Gloria Emerson recalled Jackie once saying that “if you are a good mother it does not matter much what else you have done.” Jackie was nothing if not a good mother, attending their baseball games and school plays, taking them to their favorite movies, and making sure they were well educated—Caroline at Concord Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, and John Jr. at the private Collegiate School in Manhattan.

  Anthony and Tina had also suffered hardships. They’d recently seen the separation of their parents, which meant a kind of banishment of their beloved father and the loss of their childhood home, Turville Grange. Yet in Paradise, they, too, are blissfully unaware of the fates that would catch up with them, in the present moment swimming, roughhousing, tasting all that summer has to offer. They appear, as film critic Aaron Scott describes, “unselfconscious and carefree, deeply engaged with one another and their surroundings.”

  Unable to raise the funding to complete the project, Mekas drifted out of their lives, but he’d loved working with Lee and found her to be “very talented and smart.” In the end, This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography would not be edited or released to the public for another twenty-seven years, except for footage Mekas used in his 1990 film short, “Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol” (which he dedicated to Lee). But it did lead to another film that would become a camp classic and inspire a Tony Award–winning musical and an Emmy Award–winning film for HBO.

  When Mekas departed the scene, Peter Beard’s friend Porter Bibb suggested that the documentarians Albert and David Maysles might agree to complete the film with the possibility of Lee’s friend Truman Capote narrating. Bibb had worked with the Maysles brothers as a producer on Gimme Shelter, a groundbreaking documentary about a 1969 rock concert featuring the Rolling Stones in Altamont, California. (The concert had gone terribly wrong when a Hells Angels gang member, hired for security, knifed an audience member to death, unwittingly captured on camera.) Once the Maysles brothers signed on, Lee introduced them to her aunt and cousin living in a dilapidated house on Georgica Road in East Hampton, thinking it might be a good idea to film them as part of Paradise, to show the Hamptons before it was spoiled by overdevelopment and tourism. But once again, a project conceived by Lee ended up not only being about two other Bouviers, but leaving Lee out of the final cut altogether. Once the Maysles brothers met the oddball Beales in their gothic setting, they had found their subject.

  During her summers in Montauk, Lee had renewed her friendship with her Bouvier aunt and cousin, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, major presences during Lee and Jackie’s summers in Lasata. Reduced by penury and hobbled by their own eccentricity, which included the OCD illness of hoarding, mother and daughter were living in their once beautiful but now decaying twenty-eight-room mansion in East Hampton, known as Grey Gardens.

  “It was my idea,” Lee recalled decades later, “when Stas and I lived in England at Turville, to go back to East Hampton, which I had so much nostalgia about as a child, and have my extremely eccentric aunt be the narrator for my memories.” Lee recalled her aunt Edie’s “wonderful singing voice” as well as her eccentricity. “She’d say anything. Her imagination was quite extraordinary, and her daughter, Edie, ‘Little Edie’ we always called her, was almost as eccentric.”

  Little Edie, however, didn’t start out as pixilated as her mother. She’d graduated from Harvard, had wanted to work in the theater as a costume designer and an actress, had come out as a debutante celebrated for her beauty, and had flirted with Joseph Kennedy Jr. She was creative and imaginative. She had tried to set herself up in New York City to pursue her dreams. “It was when her mother locked her up as her companion at Grey Gardens,” Lee observed, “and she never left East Hampton for twenty-five years,” that Little Edie became as eccentric—and lost—as her mother. Lee knew that it would take days—weeks—just to get them to open their door. It wasn’t enough to knock. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” Lee recalled. “You bang and you scream.”

  Appalled by the squalid condition of their once splendid home and gardens—over thirty cats roamed the filthy corridors, and raccoons nested in the walls—Lee galvanized Jackie to help them save their home from demolition by the local board of health. It was Peter’s idea to get the Maysles brothers to come in with their 16 mm cameras. He thought that “the Maysleses will be charmed by them,” and he was right. As Lee recalled:

  The Beales were terribly attracted by the
Maysleses because they adored to have their picture taken and they adored to scream at one another constantly. And they said, listen, we don’t want this to be an Edie narrating for you, for your nostalgia. We can really make something extraordinary out of this.

  The writer Bob Colacello, editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine from 1970 to 1983, accompanied Lee and Jackie to Grey Gardens once the restoration was under way. As he later wrote:

  Lee was doing a good job, given the incredible decay into which the house had fallen—and the incredible state of mind into which her cousins had fallen . . . Big Edie was propped up in her bed and her bedroom, which had not yet gotten that Radziwill touch. A tree branch extended into the room through an open window to the middle of Big Edie’s bed, and squirrels and raccoons climbed in to eat potato chips and pretzels. The bedcover was a trash heap of cracker boxes and candy wrappers, half-eaten tins of tuna fish and cat food, spilled milk, assorted other droppings, and piles of old Confidentials and new Enquirers, all with Jackie covers.

  What got left out of the now-legendary documentary, titled Grey Gardens, is the degree to which Lee spearheaded the rescue mission. The documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, a friend of Lee’s, described outtakes from the Maysles brothers’ documentary as

  incredible footage. She’s actually cleaning the house. But who got the credit for cleaning up Grey Gardens? Jackie. But it’s Lee actually moving the refrigerator out of the kitchen. Then the Department of Health comes. Lee deals with [them] and she’s amazing. She comes off so well. She’s so nice to Big and Little Edie, so sweet. And Big Edie’s so excited to have her there. There’s this great part where she’s screaming to someone, “Lee! Lee’s here! My niece, Lee’s here from Montauk!” And Lee looks so beautiful. It’s really like she’s in Technicolor in the black-and-white scenes from The Wizard of Oz, in this perfect A-frame sundress, with the hair, and the kids are with her.