The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

Becky Singleton, Jackie’s assistant, was not alone in feeling that Jackie had been unceremonious in her sudden departure. “There was no personal discussion of the incident itself,” she later said. “You do have the right as an employee to leave. But there are ways and ways to do it.” Nonetheless, Jackie had met with Doubleday editor Lisa Drew—who had first turned down Archer’s novel before it landed at Viking—and delicately sounded her out about a possible move to Doubleday. Her friend Tucky—Nancy Tuckerman—worked in their publicity department, and Jackie had been a personal friend of John Sargent’s, who headed the publishing house. He offered her a job.

  Though the much larger, more corporate publishing house didn’t have as much literary cachet as Viking, Jackie was offered a decidedly better deal—$20,000 yearly for a three-day week. She accepted and began her new job on February 11, 1978. (In the gap between leaving Viking and starting at Doubleday, Time magazine reported that Jackie was unemployed, with the cheeky headline “Situation Wanted, References Available.”) Her office was just as tiny and sunless, but when Sargent apologized to Jackie for its lack of windows, she answered, “Oh, that’s alright, John. I’ve lots of windows in my home.”

  Soon Jackie would have more than just a view of east Central Park. She began building a house that year on 365 acres in Martha’s Vineyard, which she would name Red Gate Farm. Sprawling between Chilmark and Menemsha, along Squibnocket Pond in Gay Head, it was on a grassy lot with scrub oaks, Scotch pines, ponds, marshes, and an old stone wall built by the original settlers, both hidden away from the prying eyes of the world and close to the ocean. It included 4,620 feet of beachfront—some of it adjacent to a nude beach. This would become Jackie’s recovered version of Lasata.

  In addition to the land, Jackie spent another $3 million building a 3,100-square-foot house with eight fireplaces and a guesthouse. This became Jackie’s favorite home, a fulfillment of one of her lifelong goals. “I think that one of the finest things that one can do in life is to create a loved house that shelters generations and gives them memories to build on,” she said about this last home she had built for herself and her children. All of the book-lined rooms faced the ocean, with spectacular views. George Plimpton described Red Gate Farm as “a dream place, a sunlit place. It’s hard to explain the effect it all had on you—all the variations in color, water sparkling like diamonds everywhere you looked.”

  At her Martha’s Vineyard summer home, Jackie indulged her desire to create a secure, gemütlich interior. Fires were lit every morning in her bedroom, no matter the season. She slept on pink linen bedsheets, and three linen nightgowns were pressed and laid out on her bed each evening. Jackie

  rose each morning at 7 AM, ate breakfast, then covered her entire body with Pond’s cold cream and swam for 2 hours in Squibnocket Pond. After lunch, she would go biking, waterskiing or kayaking from 1–4 PM. Dinners were early and light and she would often watch movies on her VCR until about 9 or 10 PM before retiring for the night.

  She was, not surprisingly, embraced by her eminent neighbors on the Vineyard, like the singer Carly Simon and the novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose. Red Gate Farm became a beautiful refuge that would replace Hyannis as a family retreat. Given how reckless some of their Kennedy cousins had become, Jackie wanted to keep Caroline and John Jr. away from the Kennedy compound and have them spend more time with their Bouvier cousins, Anthony and Tina, described by a friend of Lee’s as “really nice, well-brought-up, classy kids.” She wanted her children to know about their Kennedy legacy, but she wanted to shield them from the Kennedy competitiveness and risk-taking behavior.

  * * *

  JACKIE WASN’T THE only sister going to work. According to DuBois, Lee had been miffed when Jackie took a job with Viking without telling her about it. An unnamed witness reported that Lee “reacted with red-faced ire” when she heard about Jackie going to work: “She just lost it, she was so angry beyond all reason.” If true, her anger might have been motivated by the blatant fact that Lee was no longer fully in Jackie’s confidence, and that Jackie was now stealing the thunder that Lee had chased and coveted throughout much of her adult life: a meaningful career. But it might also have been the goad that focused Lee, once again, to look for meaningful work.

  In February of 1976, after the Jonas Mekas film was tabled and Lee was edited out of Grey Gardens after having spearheaded the clean-up effort, Lee put aside writing her memoir and at the age of forty-three opened her own interior design firm in Manhattan.

  She’d always had the chops—and the taste and imagination—for interior design. Why not make a profession out of it? “Decorating has always been my hobby,” Lee said, “but now I’m taking it seriously. It’s been cooking in my mind for 15 years. I’ve always been interested in art, architecture, color.” It was her love of art history, after all, that had gotten her through school.

  Lee first approached the highly successful designers Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta about partnering with them, but when that didn’t work out, she decided she was better off going alone in her new venture. “Without a partner,” she said, “I am not indebted to or irritated by anyone. I don’t have to worry about disagreeing over taste or tempo.” She set up shop on the second floor of her Manhattan duplex, in a room painted white, with sisal carpeting covering the floor and one large working table in the center of the room, soon laden with richly colored fabric samples, design sketches, and handwritten estimates.

  Within eight months of starting her business, Lee was invited to create a model room for the Lord & Taylor department store in New York, as part of a “Celebrity-Decorated Rooms for Summer” promotion. The result was simple yet stunning, combining her love for summery rattans with cool, peachy colors, and it was featured in House & Garden amid much fanfare. She also landed a contract with Americana Hotels to design a VIP suite for their hotel in upscale Bal Harbour in Miami, Florida. It was a beautiful room that succeeded in combining “an aura of brightness and shine,” as Lee said, with “the warmth and comfort of home . . . the quality of a residence, as opposed to a typical hotel interior.” Mario Di Genova, president of the hotel chain, was pleased, commenting, “Her rooms have that touch of class, yet not with severe traditional furnishing and antiques. She’s not locked into a style.” For two years Lee continued to work with Di Genova, who remained impressed with her designs and her ability to attract the right kind of attention. “She was so obviously an extremely elegant woman, and she gave parties at our hotels that brought national and international attention to them,” Di Genova said. He also noted that she very much wanted to make an original, artistic statement with each room she designed, and once she’d made up her mind, it was impossible to budge her. Lee was professional, but she refused to abandon her vision in the face of such mundanities as budget and durability, both of which finally became an issue for Di Genova. Lee was ultimately given just a handful of high-end suites to decorate, and when Americana Hotels was put up for sale in 1978, that association ended.

  Given Lee’s talent, hard work, and stellar connections, she was soon flourishing in her new profession. She moved to an office rented from architect John Carl Warnecke, who had designed the JFK memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and who was an occasional escort of Lee’s. Her sleek new office was on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street across from Central Park, and with Warnecke’s encouragement and mentorship Lee attracted commissions from San Francisco, Houston, and Brazil. Her success surprised even her. “It’s no joke. I have been far more successful than I ever imagined!” she said. She was even making money, which made her feel more confident—she charged $500 a day for consultations and earned $25,000 to $35,000 for the rooms she designed.

  One of the hallmarks of her design style was to have a fire going in the fireplace as often as possible, “like having a friend that you like to be with.” She also recognized that one of her strengths was being able to design in a number of different styles, from contemporary to beach-inspired to nineteenth-century grand.


  Some people sniffed at Lee’s ambitions, believing that her success was a mere reflection of her exalted status, but others disagreed. An editor at Architectural Digest, Paige Rense, said:

  I don’t think people took her seriously as a decorator, though she had a lot more talent than most people decorating today. If she hadn’t been Princess Radziwill, she could have been Sister Parish.

  Besides Warnecke, Lee also received help and encouragement from Mark Hampton, who had become a good friend. He was able to provide her with contacts with the right contractors and tradesmen; she reciprocated by inviting him to parties where he could meet potential high-end clients. “I wanted a full-time job,” she said, “and now I have really got one, and in this field I think I am as good as anybody.” She relished the hard work, getting up at dawn to meet with contractors and plumbers, and she relished the confidence of being successful and recognized on her own. “I’m nobody’s kid sister,” she told journalist Lee Wohlfert for an interview in People when Jackie’s name came up, as it always did.

  After leaving London and her marriage to Stas, Lee had reinvented herself as a very successful Manhattan professional. That was a good thing, because when Stas died in the summer of 1976, he had nothing to leave for his children but massive debt.

  * * *

  AS HIS FORTUNES continued to dwindle, Stas Radziwill was reduced to selling their former home at 4 Buckingham Place. (It was bought by the heiress Charlotte Ford, who had been one of Stas’s mistresses.) He was drinking heavily, broken by his divorce and his staggering financial losses. On June 27, 1976, Prince Stanislas Radziwill died of a heart attack, during a weekend party in Essex, England. He had returned to his room after a game of cards and, while undressing for bed, suddenly collapsed. The household was alerted several hours later when a dog brought along by another weekend guest began howling outside of Stas’s room. A butler then found him lying dead on the floor. He was just sixty-two years old.

  The funeral was held at St. Anna’s Chapel not far from Turville Grange. His coffin was draped with the Radziwill family flag, lent to the family by a Warsaw museum. Besides Lee and her children and Jackie and Caroline, present also was Stas’s longtime girlfriend, Christine Weckert, an American girl in her late twenties who was besotted with Stas and had pressured him to marry her. Friends thought that her greatest appeal was that she somewhat resembled Lee in appearance. Sadly for Christine, Stas had reportedly proposed to her just hours before his death.

  Jackie was devastated when Stas suddenly died. She and Jack had always felt close to him, drawn by his warmth and lack of snobbery. His niece Countess Isabelle d’Ornano described Stas as “a great personality, someone you would not forget.” The countess saw that

  Jackie loved Stas. He and Lee were so different, they had nothing in common . . . [Jackie] understood him, and whenever she spoke of him, it was with enormous affection . . . he counted in her life.

  Upon his death, it was discovered that he owed 15 million pounds to his creditors, much to Lee’s surprise, and by making himself personally responsible for the debts of his holding companies—which was an honorable but disastrous thing to have done—he had bankrupted his estate. Anthony left England for good, returning to live full-time with Lee in New York.

  More losses were to come. Five months later, in November of 1976, Hugh D. Auchincloss, once referred to as “the first gentleman of New York,” died from emphysema. Surprisingly, Auchincloss had also lost most of his fortune through bad investments. Though Janet remarried three years later, to retired investment banker Bingham Morris, she had to sell the main house and much of the land at Hammersmith Farm, moving into “the Castle,” the yellow farmhouse on the property that had once served as servants’ quarters.

  At their stepfather’s funeral, the two sisters arrived and left separately.

  * * *

  JACKIE REMAINED WORKING at Doubleday for the next sixteen years. Although there was speculation that she was involved in a romantic relationship with executive editor John Sargent Sr., a striking, bearded patrician considered one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, that was a rumor never substantiated. Jackie was seeing other prominent men at the time, such as director Mike Nichols and journalist Pete Hamill, but none were serious relationships. Jackie meant it when she said she now wanted to put work above men in her life.

  At first, she felt a bit lost at Doubleday, which was a much larger, much more corporate environment. Having essentially been given carte blanche at Viking to bring in writers and book ideas, she now had to run the gauntlet of weekly meetings with marketing and editorial departments to present and defend her ideas. For someone as shy as Jackie, that was a challenge. She managed to show up at editorial meetings once a month instead of weekly, and according to writer and former Doubleday editor Harriet Rubin:

  When her turn came to present her ideas, she trilled about projects that would have gotten anyone else fired for being ridiculously uncommercial: a collected Pushkin, an American “Pleiade,” an illustrated children’s book based on a tale in Vasari of Leonardo crafting artificial insects. She lost those battles.

  Another former Doubleday editor, James Fitzgerald, described the editorial meetings as a kind of Gong Show in which Jackie “would go into those things and she’d get shut down and cut down on some projects . . . just like the rest of us.”

  One of her early successes, though, was bringing Diana Vreeland to Doubleday from Viking for the 1980 publication of Allure, a book of photographs. She worked closely with Vreeland, poring over photographs in the doyenne’s Manhattan apartment and designing the look and scope of the collection.

  Jackie lost more editorial battles than she won, but Doubleday did what it needed to keep her there as she was a considerable asset to the publishing house. For her part, Jackie wanted to be a good team player, which is why she accepted the editorial duties for bringing out Michael Jackson’s memoir, Moonwalk, in 1988. It was a four-year undertaking, resulting in a book that Jackie felt was “a professional embarrassment,” though it was her biggest commercial success as an editor. Another former colleague at Doubleday confided that Jackie was moved to discover, based on notes they exchanged, that the pop idol was barely literate.

  * * *

  IN 1976, AFTER the breakup with Peter Beard and the death of Stas, Lee began seeing Peter Tufo, a prominent Chicago-born New York lawyer involved in city politics who was also known as something of a ladies’ man, having courted many socially prominent women before meeting Lee. The two had many interests in common, including theater and ballet, and Tufo seemed genuinely smitten with Lee; he was once overheard at a social gathering as saying, “Isn’t she beautiful, intelligent, artistic, creative, and radiant? Lee is just so wonderful!” They took skiing vacations in Switzerland and traveled to Morocco together, and it also mattered that Tina seemed comfortable with Lee’s new beau, the three of them sometimes sharing an evening out. Lee and Tufo discussed marriage, but both were deeply caught up in their own work—by now Lee had thrown herself wholeheartedly into her interior design business. She told Klemesrud:

  In the last few years I have really learned to take care of myself. It was almost like being reborn. Before, everything was done for me. I was totally incompetent, and so was my daughter—there were endless things one could not cope with. Suddenly I was on my own with two children. It was terrifying . . . [but] I have found the most important thing is to be self-reliant. Marriage is an extremely difficult relationship . . . I am so happy on my own.

  One shadow that loomed over Lee’s newfound happiness with herself and her new beau was Truman Capote’s disapproval—his envy, actually, as he resented the time Lee devoted to Tufo in neglect of her once closest friend. He ostensibly objected to the Manhattan lawyer’s middle-class background, insisting that he was not good enough for Lee, but in truth her estrangement from him wounded his feelings and his vanity.

  * * *

  IN NOVEMBER 1976, Lee spent much of her divorce settlement from Stas to b
uy the beach house on Gin Lane in Southampton that she had been renting, for $329,000. There was some unpleasantness over the payment of the real estate agent’s commission (“When it came to money, Lee was just impossible” he reportedly said), and Lee was obliged to occasionally rent out the house during the peak summer months, but it was a brilliant acquisition both financially and emotionally, indulging her love of the sea. The former owner, a man named Mark Goodson who had been part of Lee’s social circle, greatly regretted having sold the place “in the days before properties went wild.” This was when the Hamptons was still thickly populated by artists, before it became overrun with tourists, gawkers, weekenders, and the ultrawealthy—billionaires refusing to mingle with millionaires.

  * * *

  IN 1979, LEE came close to being married for a third time, but not to Tufo. She met Newton Cope, a widower and a successful restaurateur and hotelier in San Francisco, on a business trip with Mark Hampton. Lee was invited to a dinner party by a prominent rancher and vintner, Whitney Warren, who indulged in a bit of matchmaking by seating Lee next to the newly widowed, fifty-five-year-old Cope.

  Cope, the father of seven children, quickly fell for Lee. They spent the entire evening in deep conversation, and when the night was over, Cope decided to ask Lee to redecorate the prestigious Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, which he owned. A bicoastal romance quickly flourished, and for a while Lee was juggling her affair with Tufo in New York and her romance with Cope in San Francisco. At first she was discreet, avoiding Cope’s advances and making sure to keep a door open while the two were working together on redecorating the Huntington. She wasn’t yet ready to let Peter Tufo go, and as one acquaintance observed, “Lee always took her reputation quite seriously because of her sister.” Nonetheless rumors abounded, and the press began asking questions about their relationship. The Daily News reported, “What’s this hot romance between Lee and Newton Cope?” which, unfortunately, Peter Tufo saw after an evening out with Lee. Furious, he stomped out of her apartment.