The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Truman probably should have listened to Joe Fox, his editor, who had warned him not to publish chapters before the novel was completed. “I was against this plan, feeling that he was revealing too much of the book too soon, and said so,” he later explained. But Truman felt it would be great publicity for the book—the worst decision of his professional life.

  “I’d never seen anything like it,” Clarke recalled.

  I read “La Cote Basque” one summer day in Gloria Vanderbilt’s swimming pool in the Hamptons when Gloria and her husband, Wyatt Cooper, were away. I was reading it while Truman was floating in the pool on a raft. I said, “People aren’t going to be happy with this, Truman.” He said, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.” He could not have been more wrong.

  How could Truman have been so blindsided by the howl of injury the story evoked? John Richardson suggested:

  I wonder whether he wasn’t testing the love of his friends, to see what he could get away with. We had Truman around because he paid for his supper, by being the great storyteller. Truman was a brilliant raconteur. We’d say, “Oh, do tell us what Mae West was really like,” or what did he know about Doris Duke? And he’d go on in that inimitable voice for twenty minutes, and it was absolutely marvelous, one story after another. And he loved doing it—he was a show-off.

  If anything, Truman was puzzled by the extreme reaction of his swans. “What did they expect?” he protested. “I’m a writer, and I used everything. Did all these people think I was there just to entertain them?” Apparently, they did.

  There were many theories as to why Truman published the gossip and secrets of his society friends. Louise Grunwald believed that “surrounding himself with beauty had something to do with his own self-image. Truman wanted to be them.” Truman had been fussed over as a young child for his beautiful blond curls, and he possessed an elfin, boyish beauty in his youth. Cooper once observed, “Truman would like to be glamorous and beautiful. He has often acted out fantasies of his own by telling his women friends how to act, who to have love affairs with, by manipulating them.” Or making them over.

  Unlike Truman’s other swans, Lee did not break with Truman over “La Côte Basque,” having been spared any mention, or betrayal of secrets, in the article. And her friendship had been deeper, more genuine, than with his other swans. But even before the publication of “La Côte Basque,” she had already begun to move away from him.

  What completely ended their friendship was the lawsuit for libel brought against Truman by Gore Vidal. In an interview he’d given to Playgirl magazine, Truman had related the story about how a drunken Gore Vidal “insulted” Jackie at a White House dinner party and was allegedly thrown out of the White House by Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger. Gore was incensed by Truman’s story, which proved to be the culmination of the smoldering feud that had gone on between the two men for decades. Besides professional jealousy, the masculine and self-contained Vidal—though gay—had contempt for overtly homosexual, feminized men like Truman. He demanded an apology and $1 million in damages.

  Truman had asked Liz Smith to intervene and persuade Vidal to drop his lawsuit. Vidal refused. Truman then asked the columnist to beg Lee to give a deposition on his behalf, as he allegedly had first gotten the story from Lee. Liz asked Lee to at least say that the incident had occurred—“Otherwise, Gore is going to win this lawsuit, and it’s just going to crush Truman.”

  Lee reportedly answered, “Oh, Liz, what does it matter? They’re just a couple of fags.” Liz Smith could not believe her ears. “I called Truman back and I said, ‘She won’t do it.’”

  Lee’s acid comment reflected how much she disliked being in the middle of litigation between Gore Vidal, whom she increasingly saw as a snake, and Truman, whose alcoholism frightened her, perhaps stirring up fears about her own struggle with alcohol. In any case, it was a nasty remark, and a foolish one to make to Liz, a gossip columnist who counted Truman as a friend.

  Lee stopped returning Truman’s calls. “We drifted apart because of his drinking,” Lee explained years later. “I never forgot about him, but we didn’t see each other, because he wasn’t making any sense whatsoever. It was pitiful. Heartbreaking, because there was nothing you could do. He really wanted to kill himself. It was a slow and painful suicide.”

  The lawsuit dragged on for seven years, until Vidal agreed to settle for a written apology and a fraction of his legal fees. He felt he had won the moral victory.

  Truman escaped to Hollywood to appear in Neil Simon’s crime spoof, Murder by Death, but he was still drinking, still angry, and still nursing his wounds. He stayed with his good friend Joanne Carson, one of Johnny Carson’s ex-wives. On August 25, 1984, three days after he arrived at her house on a one-way ticket, Joanne found Truman gasping for breath, so she called the paramedics. By the time they arrived, fifty-nine-year-old Truman had died in her arms. His last words were “answered prayers,” which raises the question of how much Truman welcomed his own demise.

  For Lee, not seeing Truman again “was a terrible loss, because he did bring a lot of joy into my life, more than anybody I can think of, off the top of my head. He had a great sense of humor and a wonderful laugh,” she wrote tenderly in Lee, her brief, illustrated memoir published many years later, in 2015. She had forgiven him his alcoholic excesses and his occasional venom, though she would always regret having given a deposition that favored Vidal more than it helped Capote. Lee had given a sworn affidavit to Vidal’s lawyer that it was not she who had told Truman about a drunken Vidal being evicted from the White House, leaving Truman without a leg to stand on.

  Why did she do it? As DuBois pointed out, to have done otherwise would have made her liable as a codefendant, vulnerable to a legal entanglement that could have cost her a fortune in attorney fees and damages—a fortune she did not have.

  But she had once described Truman as her closest friend.

  * * *

  THE PREVIOUS YEAR, in March of 1983, Lee sold her penthouse at 875 Park Avenue for an especially good price because the apartment had been featured in Architectural Digest. From there she moved to a rented duplex apartment at 48 East 73rd Street. In downsizing, she had to shed many of her treasured objets d’art. Comparing herself to a diplomat “taking with me from place to place the pieces that I love and need and putting the rest in storage,” she also said the paring down was like “going on a diet to purify yourself.” But she still managed to transform the several rooms into a beautiful home. She covered the living room ceiling in gold wallpaper to complement the golden cork paper on the walls, with the effect that the entire room took on a luminous hue in evening light.

  The following year, she closed down her design business.

  Lee had become tired of the boring details of running a business—the endless invoices and paperwork, the waiting for materials to be delivered and being blamed by the client when they were late or didn’t show up. “They think it’s your fault, whereas you can do nothing whatsoever about it. You call the upholsterers, the curtain people, the carpenters, every single day, and you just repeat the same thing the next day,” she complained. “I don’t find decorating creative any longer. I did it until I felt boxed in.”

  Lee increasingly spent time in her Southampton home, wandering the beach in jeans with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, swimming almost every day the weather permitted. She hosted luncheons around the pool for her now grown children and for friends in the Hamptons, like the painter Roy Lichtenstein and his wife, Dorothy. She occasionally took on decorating jobs but only if they interested her, but she no longer looked upon it as a lucrative, full-time business.

  In March of 1985 Lee began work as a roving editor-at-large for Architectural Digest, beginning with a story on Nureyev’s sumptuous Paris apartment. She followed that up with a visit to Hammersmith Farm to report on her mother’s residence in the yellow farmhouse, which she had moved into with her third husband after Hughdie’s death. Though much dimi
nished from the fairy-tale estate of Lee and Jackie’s youth, it was still an impressive property.

  At the end of the summer of l986, Lee began a new job tailor-made for her interests and talents: director of special events for the influential Milanese designer Giorgio Armani, which meant that she would publicize his clothes by wearing them at important social events, appearing as Giorgio’s “image-maker, aide, flag-waver, muse, and showpiece.”

  Lee had known the fashion designer since the late ’70s, when she was on his VIP gift list and thus was the recipient of his clothes and jewelry in exchange for prominently wearing his designs among her wealthy society friends, boosting his access to new clients. She had admired his fashions from the start, saying, “His clothes suit my way of life so well. They’re so effortless, so easy to wear.” She also recognized Armani’s modernity, his willingness to break with the past, moving from formal tweeds to unstructured jackets, rolled sleeves, understated elegance. In these ways, they were simpatico.

  11

  Weddings and Funerals

  Sell everything. You’ll make a lot of money.

  —JACKIE

  I don’t do death well.

  —LEE

  Since 1982, Carolina Herrera—Lee’s friend—had become Jackie’s favorite designer, and it was she who designed Caroline Kennedy’s wedding dress for her marriage to Edwin Schlossberg on July 19, 1986.

  Jackie had stepped back and allowed Caroline to make her own wedding plans. Herrera recalled that Caroline wanted “to do her own wedding her own way . . . not the classic way, and Jackie was very happy about that . . . And the boys wanted to wear not morning suits, but white pants and blazers, and she was quite happy about that.”

  Schlossberg asked the African-American designer Willi Smith to design what the men in the wedding party would wear. He wanted a “sophisticated yet breezy effect,” which was achieved by a navy blue linen suit, oversized in keeping with the fashion of the late 1980s. Ushers wore violet linen blazers with pink ties—unconventional yet somehow keeping with the casual setting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, where the reception was held. Caroline’s close friend and cousin Maria Shriver, who had married Arnold Schwarzenegger three months earlier, was matron of honor, and John Jr. was best man.

  Schlossberg, 41, was the scion of a wealthy Jewish family. He was thirteen years older than Caroline, but then Jack Kennedy had been twelve years older than Jackie, so that was not considered unusual. As Sarah Bradford writes in America’s Queen:

  Like Jack, it might be said, he did not have “a steady job,” nor did he have to worry too much about money. He came from a wealthy textile family with a home on Park Avenue and he himself was equipped with the regulation loft and a converted barn in the Berkshires. The only difference that might have come between them was their religion; she was from an Irish Catholic family while the Schlossbergs were practicing Jews.

  Anti-Semitism, that “stupid suburban prejudice” (as Ezra Pound described it to the poet Allen Ginsberg, visiting him at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC), ran like a vein through the Kennedy and Auchincloss families. In 1986, that no longer seemed to matter, especially since the death of Hughdie, the resident anti-Semite in the family, and certainly not to Jackie, who had unexpectedly found a soul mate in Maurice Tempelsman. Like her mother, Caroline was made truly happy by Schlossberg, an unapologetically unathletic, artistically inclined Jewish New Yorker who had once nursed an ambition to become a poet.

  So Schlossberg was warmly welcomed into the family. At the rehearsal dinner, John Jr. toasted him with, “The three of us have been alone for such a long time, we welcome a fourth person.” Nor did the Schlossbergs object, so on July 19, 1986, Caroline became Mrs. Edwin Schlossberg in a Catholic service at Our Lady of Victory in Centerville, Massachusetts.

  As Jackie left the church after vows were exchanged, she leaned on Ted Kennedy’s shoulder, tears glistening in her eyes. Tears of joy, of course, and perhaps of relief at her daughter’s happiness, in a country where, just eighteen years earlier, she had felt that “they’re killing Kennedys” in America.

  Though she was long out of the White House, America still felt a fondness for Caroline, and many compared her wedding to Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson the same month. Hundreds of reporters and photographers and nearly a thousand spectators thronged the churchyard, creating such a clamor that the bride, escorted by Ted Kennedy, actually had to shush them as she entered the church.

  Another of Jackie’s friends, the prominent fund-raiser George Trescher, organized the lavish reception. A white tent was raised on the lawn outside matriarch Rose Kennedy’s house, a puffball filled with a thousand flowers suspended above the dance floor. The New York catering firm Glorious Food planned the menu with Jackie—one area where she took full charge. Instead of “unseasonably heavy New England seafood and boiled beef,” as one report mistakenly had it, the two-hour champagne reception was followed by

  a cold pea soup with mint, shrimp and apples, vegetable vinaigrette, roast chicken with rice, cold sirloin of beef, salad, raspberries and two identical wedding cakes, white inside and out—and without the traditional bride and bridegroom on top.

  Jackie later joked, “I don’t know how this is going to go down with those meat and potato, vanilla ice cream Kennedys.”

  Carly Simon, Jackie’s new friend in Martha’s Vineyard, sang “Chapel of Love.” More tears were shed at the reception when Ted Kennedy toasted his sister-in-law as “that extraordinary gallant woman, Jack’s only love.” Finally, while a bank of fog rolled in from the ocean, the evening ended with a spectacular fireworks display organized by George Plimpton, which featured custom-designed fireworks for fifteen family members and friends—including “a rose for Rose Kennedy, a sailboat for Teddy, a bow tie for the professorial Arthur Schlesinger.”

  Tina Radziwill was reported to have been one of Caroline’s bridesmaids, but though she and her mother both attended the wedding and reception, they were not included in the wedding party. Excluded from the wedding altogether were Jackie and Lee’s Bouvier relatives—her first cousin and her twin aunts—because Jackie had broken off relations with her first cousin John Davis after he published his history of the Bouviers in 1969. That was the one unpardonable sin, as far as Jackie was concerned.

  * * *

  JACKIE HAD BEEN delighted at her daughter’s marriage and looked forward to the prospect of grandchildren, but she was downright relieved when Lee married the Hollywood film director Herbert David Ross on September 24, 1988, at the age of fifty-five. Jackie confided in a friend, “I’m happy for Lee, because between you and me, Lee has stared into the jaws of hell.”

  The couple married in a civil service presided over by a judge and witnessed by Lee’s close friend Rudolf Nureyev. Bob Colacello, who covered the wedding for Vanity Fair, noted that both bride and groom were dressed in Armani (ice blue for Lee, a tasteful gray for Ross), while Nureyev jauntily wore his trademark beret. Afterward, Jackie hosted a wedding dinner for the couple at her Fifth Avenue apartment, while a phalanx of paparazzi swarmed on the sidewalk below.

  With sixty-one-year-old Ross, a radiantly happy Lee saw many of her desires and interests converge in the persona of a warm, witty, highly successful Hollywood director. He had many successful and admired films to his credit, including Play It Again, Sam, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Goodbye Girl, and later, with Lee showing up on location in Louisiana, Steel Magnolias, but it was three dance-themed movies he directed that had gotten Lee’s attention—The Turning Point, Pennies From Heaven, and Nijinsky, in which Nureyev had played the title role. Lee recalled:

  I’d known all about Herbert a long, long time and had hoped that our paths would cross . . . When I saw The Turning Point, Herbert’s name stuck in my head for a long time and then many years passed and I saw Pennies from Heaven, which I loved so much that I saw it three times by myself in one week.

  They’d met in January at a dinner party in Bel Air given by
producer Doug Cramer, and the two immediately felt a connection. Cramer recalled, “The minute Lee and Herb met at cocktails, they started talking and didn’t stop. You could almost feel the electricity between them.” Besides their love of ballet, they shared many interests, including literature, décor, travel. Ross called Cramer two days later to thank him for “introducing this most enchanting woman into my life.” As for Lee, she has always loved the movies, and to this day she is one of New York’s most famous moviegoers.

  They began seeing each other regularly, spending a weekend near Santa Barbara at a ranch belonging to Ross’s friend, the producer Ray Stark. Ross threw a fiftieth birthday party in Los Angeles for Nureyev, with Lee as a special guest. They traveled to the Caribbean together in April.

  In May, Lee traveled with Ross to Atlanta as he began scouting locations for what would become the 1989 hit movie Steel Magnolias. He settled on the small Southern town of Natchitoches in Louisiana—a town of moss-draped cypresses where the sweet scent of Confederate jasmine hung in the air—a perfect place for the romantic tear-jerker about small-town Southern women relying on their friendships to get through life. The movie provided a breakout role for Georgia-born Julia Roberts. Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, a luminous Dolly Parton, and a somewhat miscast Daryl Hannah rounded out the cast. As a testament to Lee’s affection for Ross, she flew into the humid locale over several weekends to be with the new love of her life. While the hard work of filmmaking was under way, Lee water-skied in a murky river “filled with alligators and water moccasins,” as she later said. Call it love—of course it didn’t hurt that Ross was worth many millions, having earned a $2 million fee for more than twenty films he directed. Which is one reason that Jackie was thrilled for her sister—not just that Lee was happy at last, but that Lee would no longer need her for the occasional rescue.

  But Lee no longer needed Jackie’s help because that same year, she sold her Southampton beach house on Gin Lane for $3.5 million, ten times what she had bought it for less than ten years earlier. It was bought by Frances Lear, then wife of the TV producer who created All in the Family, who would end up putting the property on the market in 2003, for $17 million.