The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Tufo was jealous, and the two spent much of their time together arguing. It had begun to dawn on Lee, anyway, that Tufo did not have the resources Lee needed to live the way she expected to live, and she increasingly resented the time he spent at work, both for his law practice and on his civic work such as developing and narrating a thirteen-part television series on public education titled Save Our Schools. Perhaps Truman’s complaint that Tufo was “not good enough”—read “not rich enough”—for Lee had gotten under her skin. On Tufo’s part, he was still holding out the hope of fathering children, something that held no interest for Lee, even if that weren’t impossible for her, as she had undergone a hysterectomy five years previously, when she was thirty-nine. They separated just before Christmas of 1977. (Lee would later have second thoughts and would try to rekindle the flame, but this time it was Tufo who made it clear that he had moved on.)

  According to DuBois, Lee was left feeling restless and alone, despite her earlier claims of self-sufficiency, and she began to drink more than usual and to take her frustration out on Tina. Seeing a reflection of herself in her daughter, perhaps, Lee was especially hard on Tina, wanting her to be slimmer, more outgoing, more the image of how Lee saw herself. It had gotten so difficult for Tina that she began spending more and more time with her aunt Jackie, eventually moving into Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment. As weekends turned into months, Lee felt increasing resentment. Was this going to be another area in which Jackie bested her, in raising her own daughter?

  Lee complained to Newton Cope, whom she was now seeing exclusively after breaking up with Peter Tufo. Cope later told Lee’s biographer:

  It must have cooled things off between them for a while, because Lee never mentioned much about Jackie after that. I think she was hurt. She didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to pry. But it was quite obvious to me that Lee wasn’t much of a great, warm mother. Tina always struck me as unhappy . . . Her father’s death must have been a terrible weight on Tina. It’s too bad, because she is a very nice girl.

  Lee was struggling with two seemingly intractable problems: she was hurting financially despite her design business, and she was abusing alcohol. It might have been a family disease, given her father’s alcoholism, or it might have been her way of coping with her insecurities—personal and financial—and her disappointments in the men in her life. She continued to work on her design business, which helped keep her sober during the day, but she sometimes operated with clouded judgment, making grand promises to clients she couldn’t fulfill. As DuBois writes, “Lee was such a perfectionist in her work that when she could not meet the demands of her unreasonable nature, she would become enraged and calm herself down with a drink.”

  Her drink of choice was vodka—probably introduced to her by Stas and Nureyev. Because she could go for long periods of time without drinking, and few people saw her under the influence, she continued as a high-functioning alcoholic under the radar of many of her friends and acquaintances.

  At Jackie’s insistence and with her help, Lee entered Alcoholics Anonymous, attending meetings twice weekly at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. Oddly enough, she fit in with the other recovering alcoholics, dressing down in a turtleneck and jeans, and her sincere desire to achieve sobriety impressed the group. As one member observed, “AA is a great social leveler—the road to alcoholic recovery strips away a lot of the distractions. It was probably very refreshing for her not to have to be Lee Bouvier Radziwill for once.”

  Her friend Ralph Rucci thought that one reason for Lee’s alcoholism was that she “has absolutely no patience or tolerance for boredom—none. But Lee really took care of it—her addictions. She’s quite proud of that, as she should be.” But the deeper reasons emerged throughout Lee’s attendance at AA meetings. A fellow member recalled that

  Lee described her life as raunchy, hard-drinking, and messy, and she confessed to how her alcoholic behavior and personality played a major role in the failure of her endeavors. She never felt that she was much of anything, that she always felt second in her family, and in truth, in every way. Her self-image was devastating and covered over with grandiosity. Alcohol gave her a false sense of confidence as a way to mask her painful shyness . . .

  She admitted to sometimes picking up Anthony and Tina at school with alcohol on her breath, or forgetting to pick them up at all, and she realized that she was doing harm to them. That is probably what most alarmed Jackie, the good mother, who hated to see her nephew and niece being overlooked.

  Lee carried on, traveling to San Francisco once a month to work on the Huntington Hotel commission and to continue her relationship with Cope. She was always professional, to the point that Newton Cope never saw her drink. By the end of her first year of attending meetings, Lee managed to achieve sobriety.

  They spent a great deal of time together. “I had a house in Napa,” Cope reminisced. “We drove up there a few times. Looked at the grapevines. What do people do? We were happy together.” On his visits to see Lee in New York, he always stayed at the Carlyle Hotel, so each could maintain their privacy, even as they grew closer. Like Peter Beard and Jay Mellon before him, Cope noticed that Lee could be two different people—warm and fun-loving in private but often cold, brittle, and snobbish in public. “It’s too bad she has two personalities,” he said, “and her warmth isn’t there all the time.”

  Lee ended up redecorating only five of the rooms of the Huntington Hotel—worn out from travel and the strain of fulfilling other commissions in New York—but also because her designs once again proved too lavish. She did successfully redecorate several rooms in Cope’s Nob Hill apartment, however. Cope negotiated to buy the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan, with plans to turn the penthouse into a home for Lee and himself. That deal fell through, but not the intention to live together: in April of 1979 they announced their engagement and planned a wedding for May 3.

  The plan was for Lee to move to San Francisco, but keep her apartment in Manhattan and her beach house on Long Island. She would open an office of her design business in San Francisco, and they would commute between the two cities.

  But an hour before the wedding was to begin, Cope called California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Bass, who was to marry them at Whitney Warren’s luxurious apartment on Telegraph Hill, telling him that the marriage was off—or at least postponed. Apparently, Jackie was the catalyst.

  Though they were at the lowest point in their relationship, Jackie still wanted to see her little sister well taken care of. Cope was reportedly worth around $10 million, so Jackie privately contacted him and insisted that he settle a $15,000-per-month prenuptial agreement on Lee before the marriage went through, arranged through Jackie’s lawyer, Alexander Forger.

  “I don’t think Lee would have thought of something like that. She wasn’t as money-hungry as Jackie was,” a friend of both sisters believes. “Lee wanted to be taken care of, yes, but I don’t think she would connive in that way.” Cope ended up feeling manipulated and bullied, telling Forger, “I am not buying a cow or a celebrity the way Onassis did! I am in love with this woman!” Cope, too, was surprised to see how Lee was intimidated by her big sister.

  “Why the hell are you so afraid of your sister?” Cope had asked Lee one night, leaving a dinner party Jackie had given in honor of the couple. Cope later said, “It’s too bad Lee couldn’t get away from that sister of hers. Being just a few blocks away, it was like an unhealthy bond she couldn’t escape from . . .”

  They postponed their wedding until fall, but by then it was clear to Cope that Lee really didn’t want to move her life to San Francisco. Cope, too, recognized that they had little in common. For one thing, he was a Republican who disliked the Kennedys. But mostly, Cope felt manipulated, and the dire warnings of some of his friends no doubt took their toll: that both sisters were gold diggers—“the two worst piranhas in the United States,” in the words of one of Cope’s friends. And on Lee’s side, there was Truman reportedly whispering
in her ear, “That Newton Cope out in San Francisco, that provincial little town, what’s he got?”

  Years later, Cope would insist that it was he who called off the marriage, wondering how much Lee had to do with insisting that he sign a $15,000-per-month prenuptial agreement: “All those articles that said I was left at the altar, and Lee called it off were wrong. I CALLED IT OFF!”

  Nonetheless, they took a two-week trip, their would-be honeymoon, in St. Martin and considered marrying there—away from Jackie, and lawyers, and the press, and without the prenup. But Cope was wary by now, and the romance was soon over. Another problem awaited Lee at home: a long-simmering feud that had turned litigious between Truman Capote and Gore Vidal.

  * * *

  BY NOW JACKIE was an immensely rich woman; the $26 million settlement from Onassis grew to $150 million under the astute guidance of her trusted friend and new companion, a married Orthodox Jewish diamond broker named Maurice Tempelsman. She would additionally acquire another estimated $40 million in art, antiques, jewelry, and real estate.

  Lee, on the other hand, was still struggling. With her marriage to Cope called off and her design business a success but not enough of a success to underwrite two high-end abodes in New York, she sold her stunning duplex apartment at 969 Park Avenue and bought a much smaller penthouse five blocks away, at 875 Park. Though smaller, it had a wraparound terrace that Lee graced with plants in blue and silver hues, backed by a picket fence, giving it a country air. Later she would sell that apartment and be reduced to renting even smaller apartments in New York. She sold many of her prized possessions: Fabergé boxes, much of her nineteenth-century furniture, and Francis Bacon’s Figure Turning, which sold for only $200,000. Had she waited a few years, it would have brought her millions in the burgeoning art market of the 1980s.

  Like Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Lee was facing the prospect of a slow and steady fall, made harder to bear by her sister’s wealth. One wag even joked that since Lee had been involved with Onassis before Jackie and had introduced them, Jackie should have given Lee “a finder’s fee” when Onassis left her a wealthy widow.

  “When you are a very, very rich girl,” Truman Capote once observed, “you don’t marry the same way a real girl marries. You marry the way another person travels in a foreign country. You stay there until you tire of it, then you go elsewhere.” That was one area in which Truman and Gore Vidal were in agreement. “Both sisters were brought up like geishas, to get money out of men,” Vidal had waspishly said about the two sisters, whose mother, Janet, had supplanted his own mother in the Auchincloss household a lifetime before.

  As for Jackie, she would not marry a third time. Her friendship with Maurice Tempelsman deepened into love after they first met in 1975, soon after Ari’s death. The two attended the Broadway musical Chicago and stayed up talking until 3 a.m., finding many interests in common. They both loved literature; Tempelsman introduced Jackie to Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu. From an Orthodox Jewish family in Belgium, Tempelsman had arrived in New York in 1940, having fled the Nazis. He was a supporter of Democratic causes and had been invited to the Kennedy White House on a few occasions. He was married, and he and his wife, Lily, had three children. Divorce was out of the picture, but that didn’t prevent his and Jackie’s relationship from blossoming over intimate dinners at Lutèce, La Côte Basque, the Four Seasons. Eventually, by 1982, Lily Tempelsman granted her husband a “get,” an Orthodox Jewish divorce, and he moved in with Jackie at Ten Forty. Though rather portly and balding—certainly no peacock like Jack Kennedy or Peter Beard or even Onassis—he “worshipped the ground [Jackie] walked on,” according to one of her close friends.

  * * *

  BY 1977, TRUMAN Capote was in deep decline, drinking too much, snorting cocaine, and partying at Studio 54, which had opened its doors on West 54th Street in April of that year. Truman loved the disco, describing it as “the nightclub of the future . . . Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix.”

  Truman’s weight had ballooned, drowning his once refined features in alcoholic bloat. The art collector and Picasso biographer John Richardson recalled seeing “a sort of bag lady with two enormous bags wandering around the corner of Lexington and 73rd, where I lived then. And suddenly, I realized, Christ! It’s Truman!” Richardson invited the writer up for a cup of tea. He disappeared into the kitchen to make the tea, but when he returned, he noticed that “half a bottle of Vodka—or Scotch or whatever it was—was gone. I had to take him outside and gently put him into a cab.”

  All of Truman’s celebrated swans had abandoned him after the publication in Esquire in November of 1975 of a salacious chapter titled “La Côte Basque 1965” from Answered Prayers, the book that was going to be Truman’s masterpiece. Truman had boasted to Marella Agnelli that Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef. He even told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen: wham!” But he might as well have turned the gun on himself: it was nothing short of an act of social suicide.

  Just ten years earlier, the 1965 publication of In Cold Blood had brought him international fame, sudden wealth, and literary accolades beyond anything he’d experienced before. He’d been a literary darling since the age of twenty-two, when his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published, but his vivid “nonfiction novel” had created a new genre and had added gravitas to his celebrity.

  In 1966, Truman had signed a contract for Answered Prayers for an advance of $25,000 and delivery by January 1, 1968, but no book appeared. Three years later, he renegotiated a three-book contract for an advance of $750,000, with delivery by September 1977. The contract was amended twice more, culminating in an agreement of $1 million for delivery by March 1, 1981. He missed that deadline as well.

  Truman described his plan for the book to Gerald Clarke: “I always planned this book as being my principal work . . . I’m going to call it a novel, but in actual fact it’s a roman-a-clef. Almost everything in it is true, and it has . . . every sort of person I’ve ever had any dealings with. I have a cast of thousands.” He took his title from Saint Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Carmelite nun who’d said, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

  If Truman was constructing Answered Prayers like a gun, he pulled the trigger when “La Côte Basque 1965” appeared in Esquire. He had turned his narrative gifts on the haut monde of New York, his very own swans—Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Mona Harrison Williams. Just as Proust’s three-thousand-page masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), had chronicled the public and private lives of nineteenth-century Parisian aristocrats, Capote revealed the gossip, the secrets, the betrayals—even a murder—among New York society. “All literature is gossip,” Truman told Playboy magazine when the merde hit the fan. “What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina or War and Peace, or Madame Bovary, if not gossip?”

  “La Côte Basque 1965” was intended to be the fifth chapter of the finished book, and it referred to Henri Soulé’s celebrated restaurant on East 55th Street, across from the St. Regis hotel. It was the elegant pond where the swans gathered to lunch.

  An article by the celebrated gossip columnist Liz Smith, “Truman Capote in Hot Water” in New York magazine, was accompanied by an Edward Sorel caricature on the cover depicting Truman as a French poodle biting the hand of a society lady (“Capote Bites the Hands that Fed Him” read the headline). “Society’s sacred monsters at the top have been in a state of shock,” Smith wrote. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and s
creams of outrage . . . not since Marcel Proust flattered his way into the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain . . .”

  Whereas Truman had disguised many of his swans, Liz Smith outed them in her article: Lady Coolbirth was Slim Keith; Ann Hopkins was Ann Woodward; Sidney Dillon was Babe Paley’s husband, William Paley. “It’s one thing to tell the nastiest story in the world to all your fifty best friends,” Smith wrote, “it’s another to see it set down in cold, Century Expanded type.”

  A friend not mentioned in the story was Cecil Beaton. The two men had been close since the l940s. It was Beaton who had introduced Truman to London literary society, and Truman had once rescued Cecil from a beating by two sailors he’d picked up in Honolulu. Though they were friends, Beaton envied Truman’s success with In Cold Blood and the social triumph of the Black and White Ball (inspired by Beaton’s black-and-white costumes for the horse-racing scene in My Fair Lady). If Beaton had been looking for an opportunity to break with his former protégé, this was it. Beaton had spent his entire life cultivating the rich and the royal; that’s where his loyalties lay. “I hate the idea of Truman,” he wrote in a letter after the notorious article was published, “how low can he sink?”

  A few of Capote’s friends remained loyal, however, such as the socialites Cornelia Guest and Louise Grunwald (then Louise Melhado)—though Grunwald considered herself less a swan than a “satellite.”

  “What’s interesting about these women,” Grunwald said in retrospect,

  is that they were lonely. They didn’t really have anyone else to talk to, without losing face. I could have told Truman things—I had a past—but I didn’t. You have to remember, these were unhappy women, and I wasn’t unhappy. But he had been rebuffed by so many in that world. I didn’t see much of him after that. He must have been afraid of my rejection.