by Sam Kashner
Lee and Ross became engaged when Lee planned to spend the month of August in Sardinia, and Ross sent a private plane to bring her back to Natchitoches. As Nureyev remarked about them, they had both been through “difficult times.” After so many disappointments in love—including an intense romance with the eminent architect Richard Meier—Lee was at loose ends. She had walked away from her design business after a decade of hard work. Her position representing Giorgio Armani’s couture was satisfying but not deeply involving, and with Anthony and Tina now on their own, she was lonely—as was Ross. A year before marrying Lee, he had lost his wife of thirty years, the celebrated dancer Nora Kaye, to cancer. Her illness was a long and lingering one, and Ross had been devastated when she died.
The Brooklyn-born director, who had started his professional life as a dancer and choreographer, was a great companion for Lee and was well liked by Anthony, Tina, and—most important, perhaps—Jackie. Though their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, Lee seemed to find an element of security and love with him. Ross was to Lee what Tempelsman was to Jackie—a cherished, charming companion whose Jewishness would have raised eyebrows among Janet Auchincloss’s Newport society (and certainly with Hughdie). Perhaps that was part of their appeal.
In an aside, Gore Vidal offered up an unsubstantiated but intriguing claim that Janet Lee Auchincloss’s Southern lineage might well have been Semitic.
One should note that the first of Hughdie’s three high-powered wives was Russian; the second, my mother; the third, Jackie’s mother, Janet, born Lee, or as my mother used to observe thoughtfully, Levy. Apparently, Janet’s father had changed his name in order to become the first Jew to be a vice president of the Morgan bank. My mother wondered how Hughdie, a quiet but sincere anti-Semite, would respond when he found out.
Lee and Ross’s monthlong honeymoon in Sardinia, Milan, Verona, and Mantua had to be, in Colacello’s words, “the most sophisticated month in the history of honeymoons.” Much of it was spent ogling architecture, as they were looking for inspiration for the home they were planning to build on four hundred rolling acres in the Santa Ynez Valley, near Ray Stark’s ranch. Their few disagreements centered on design: “He likes Tuscan, while she favors Provencal,” noted Colacello. Lee was inspired by the beauty of the California acres, calling it “the most beautiful piece of property I’ve seen anywhere”:
As far as you can see in any direction nothing but rolling hills and the oaks that are indigenous to California. It really reminded me of Kenya, because I’ve never seen an expanse of land like that in this country that wasn’t dried up and barren, or anywhere in Europe either.
They certainly had the means to design and build a masterpiece, given Lee’s sale of her Southampton beach house and Ross’s $5.6 million sale of the beautiful home he’d shared with Nora Kaye in Santa Monica, which boasted an eighty-foot-long black granite loft and a black swimming pool.
The poet Robert Lowell once wrote, “They walk the one life offered from the many chosen,” and for Lee, the life offered seemed to come back to houses, homes, décor, and real estate—all of which provided her joy and a safe haven. And Ross doted on her. They spent the summer of ’89 in East Hampton in a rented, oceanfront estate on Further Lane. Caroline visited with her first child, Rose, born in March of 1988, whom she’d named after her paternal grandmother, and Anthony came out every weekend from Manhattan, where he worked as a producer at the ABC newsmagazine Day One. Lee loved Anthony’s visits and threw a lavish party for his thirtieth birthday. Her East Hampton soirees were buoyant occasions, not to be missed.
Ross’s driver, John Chaney, saw how much they doted on each other. “Herbert is not prone to paying a lot of attention to anybody,” he told Lee’s biographer, “but he does to Lee. He gives her a lot of time, shows her a lot of love and affection and is very considerate. Both of them are.”
Lee Bouvier Radziwill Ross, happy at last.
* * *
AFTER SELLING A town house she owned in Georgetown, Janet Auchincloss moved back to Hammersmith Farm to live permanently in the Castle. The sale brought her $650,000, which Janet put into a trust for Lee, asking Anthony to manage it. Oddly, given her relative wealth and comfort, Jackie was miffed by this and demanded to know why she’d singled out Lee to receive such a generous bequest (well over $1 million in today’s dollars). “Lee needs the money,” Janet told her. Jackie complained that their mother was “playing favorites,” but Janet was adamant, and putting her young grandson in charge of the trust suggests that she was concerned that Lee would too quickly run through the funds.
Now settled back at Hammersmith Farm, albeit in the smaller farmhouse, Janet became increasingly confused and forgetful, showing the signs of what would later be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s. She would sometimes wander into the big house that had been sold, forgetting that she no longer lived there, and rearrange the coffee-table books in the living room.
Her third husband, retired investment banker Bingham Willing “Booch” Morris, was of little help and was often irritated with her increasing confusion. They had been childhood acquaintances, and Janet had reached out to Booch on the death of his wife, which had led to their courtship and marriage.
It was not a happy union. Jackie had been horrified when she learned that Booch had melted down all of Janet’s hunter trophies to sell the silver. When Janet had blissfully forgotten that her daughter with Hughdie, Janet, had died, Booch’s angry response was, “You know she’s dead! She died of cancer last year!” Booch hated the Kennedys and he refused to drive Janet to Boston for the dedication of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, though he himself was a Harvard man. Her stepson Yusha drove her to Boston. Jackie was so incensed at his behavior that she managed to eventually banish him from Janet’s home.
Though she grew increasingly confused, Janet continued to dress well and to look her best, remembering to wear her hat and gloves when leaving the house. She continued to spend time with her two beloved Jack Russell terriers, Victoria and Taffy. As her memory failed, she found herself dwelling more on the distant past, and often spoke about her first husband, Black Jack Bouvier, to the surprise of both Jackie and Lee.
Lee later recalled:
It was really extraordinary . . . it was so strange to me because of the last eight, ten years of her life, she referred to him all the time . . . we had never been allowed to mention his name in her house, or her name in his house, though he mentioned it plenty—she was always referring to “Jack Bouvier and I and the horses we had and the things we did.” I really thought I was hearing things . . .
Jackie called her every day and visited her every weekend toward the end, as Janet became increasingly housebound and was looked after by Yusha. Caroline visited with her young daughter, Rose, and Janet was able to rouse herself long enough to admire her first great-grandchild. The following year, in March of 1989, Janet was hospitalized for a hip fracture, and Jackie flew in from Hyannis, where she had been celebrating Rose’s ninety-ninth birthday.
While Jackie held her mother’s hand, Booch stayed upstairs, loudly playing a radio until Yusha told him to shut it off. Janet died in July of that year, at the age of eighty-one, and her funeral service was held at Trinity Church, attended by three hundred mourners. Lee, who had not been at her mother’s bedside, attended the funeral and wept visibly as a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” Janet’s ashes, as were her daughter Janet’s before her, were scattered at Hammersmith Farm.
Janet had left Hammersmith Farm to her six living children and grandchildren from her marriage to Auchincloss, and to her late daughter Janet’s three children. Lee would end up selling her one-seventh ownership to her stepsister Nina, and Jackie would leave hers to Yusha, who continued to live on at the Castle. There was some resentment that Jackie and Lee inherited any part of Hammersmith Farm as they were not Auchinclosses, a fate that had propelled them from an early age to secure their own fortunes.
* * *
THE YEAR 1
990 would usher in a dark decade for Lee and Jackie. In 1993, Rudolf Nureyev died after contracting AIDS and was buried at the Russian cemetery Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, forty minutes south of Paris. Lee attended his funeral and was struck by the sight of black-clad attendants “descending the imperial staircase of the Paris Opera,” where the funeral was held. In death as in life, Nureyev knew how to make grand and memorable gestures.
Seventeen years later, Lee revisited his tomb, designed according to the dancer’s wishes by the theatrical designer Ezio Frigerio, with whom he had worked on many of his ballets. In March of 2010, she described the pilgrimage to his tomb “among the shade trees and stone monuments” in a piece titled “Visiting Nureyev’s Grave,” for the online newsletter Departures.
In the brief essay, Lee muses on first seeing Nureyev dance at Covent Garden and befriending him in 1961, following his defection from the Soviet Union. She treasured his friendship to the end, thanking him for introducing her to “so much of what to this day gives me pleasure”—Scriabin’s music, Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry—and, finally, she describes Nureyev as “an exceptional dancer, an incredible person, and my closest friend.”
* * *
LEE’S SADNESS OVER the passing of her longtime friend, who had added so much glamour and excitement to her life, was assuaged the following year, 1994, when her son, Anthony, became engaged to Carole Ann DiFalco, whom he met while both were working as producers at ABC News. They were covering the notorious Menendez brothers’ trial at the time. Carole, an intelligent, coltish young woman from a colorful, working-class family in upstate New York, is currently a reality TV star on The Real Housewives of New York City.
Carole was very impressed with Lee, calling her “one of the most interesting women I’ve ever met,” who, at sixty-one, still possessed “a very childlike curiosity.”
When I first met her—that ravishing face!—she was otherworldly. I have pictures of the two of us from my life with Anthony. And I’ll tell you, I don’t want to stand next to Lee in a photograph again. She’s too gorgeous. We’d sometimes walk through a restaurant and it would become absolutely quiet. I’ve been with other well-known people, but nothing like that ever happened.
Carole would often attend Lee’s Sunday lunches at the East Hampton house she shared with Herbert Ross. “There was always someone interesting there,” she recalled. She was impressed with the way Lee effortlessly entertained, engaging her guests in conversations about art, literature—and gossip! “She was very entertaining and very elegant,” Carole recalled,
but never grand. There is an elegant casualness that I don’t think I’ve seen since. And I think that’s why she really shined at those lunches and dinners in East Hampton. She was always gracious, even to her ex-lovers. And that list is massive!
Carole was also impressed by Lee’s artistic talent (“She paints, she drew the orchids on our wedding invitation”) and her elegant writing style: “She used to write long letters to Anthony and to her sister, in elegant, feminine, very light handwriting.” When Lee and Jackie lived just ten blocks away from each other in New York, “the letters would fly back and forth. They were like the Brontës. She was always toying with the idea of writing her story.”
After marrying Anthony in 1995, Carole found herself having to “correct people when they say, ‘Oh, you’re married into the Kennedy family.’ No, I married into the Radziwill family.” It was a point of honor for her, extended to writing into her contract with Real Housewives a clause stating, “They are not to refer to me as a Kennedy. I just wanted it to be clear.” So in marrying Anthony, she inherited one of her mother-in-law’s issues, the long shadow of the Kennedys.
* * *
ON MAY 19, 1994, Lee was at a dinner party hosted by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in his Greenwich Village town house when she received a phone call from her nephew. After speaking with John, she immediately left and headed for 1040 Fifth Avenue.
Jackie had been ill since the winter of 1993, having suffered a fall from her horse, named Clown, during a jump at the Piedmont Hunt Club in Virginia on November 22. She suffered an injury to her groin that became infected, eventually cured by antibiotics. The following month she and Maurice Tempelsman toured the Caribbean aboard Tempelsman’s boat, the Relemar, when she fell ill and was rushed back to New York. Doctors at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center noticed her swollen lymph glands and performed a biopsy. The diagnosis: advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Yet just a few weeks earlier she had been photographed jogging in Central Park and had inspired the tabloid headline, “64 and Fit as a Fiddle. Wow! Look at Jackie Now!” She was shocked by the diagnosis, wondering why she had worked so hard at staying fit—jogging, horseback riding, even doing countless push-ups—to be struck at the age of sixty-four with so devastating a diagnosis. She finally decided to quit her two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, something that had been concealed from the public—amazingly so—for all of her adult life.
At the time, John Jr. was deeply involved in a relationship with the tall, lanky, blonde actress and heiress Daryl Hannah, whom he had met at Jackie’s wedding reception for Lee and Ross. Their tempestuous off-again, on-again romance did not have Jackie’s support, although she liked Daryl and was rather impressed at her family’s fortune (her stepfather was the billionaire Jerrold Wexler, who had supported Democratic political candidates). Jackie felt that Daryl wasn’t quite right for her son—perhaps too volatile, with a reputation for being “flaky,” although that quality belied a keen intelligence. She and John fought often, in public, another violation of Jackie’s insistence on privacy and public decorum for her family.
Jackie also knew that her handsome son was harboring ambitions to become an actor—an ambition she heartily disapproved of—so she might have been wary of Daryl’s influence in that direction. Although she had once expressed her own theatrical ambitions, she had been skeptical of Lee’s forays into that world. Having learned to cope with the gaze of the world on her every movement, she wanted nothing more than to live out her life without the intrusion of the press, and she wanted that for her children as well.
John Jr. was already attracting the wrong kind of attention, widely noticed for his masculine beauty. Andy Warhol wrote in his diary on December 20, 1980: “Vincent was having a party so cabbed there (5$). It turned out to be a really great party. I was taking pictures of this handsome kid I thought was a model and then I was embarrassed because it turned out to be John-John Kennedy.”
People magazine dubbed John Jr. “America’s Most Eligible Bachelor,” and he appeared on the cover of their September 12, 1988, issue as “The Sexiest Man Alive,” with the following admonition:
Okay, ladies, this one’s for you, but first some ground rules. GET YOUR EYES OFF THIS MAN’S CHEST! He’s a serious fellow . . . Scion of the most charismatic family in American politics and heir to its most famous name.
Jackie was not pleased. She had finally persuaded her son to abandon his acting ambitions and had “wanted people to take John seriously,” explained Jackie’s half brother, Jamie Auchincloss. “She thought the whole sex-symbol thing was just demeaning.”
Six weeks after his sister’s July 19, 1986, wedding, John Jr. began classes at New York University School of Law. Jackie had won that battle. Two years later he stepped onto the podium at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta to introduce his uncle Ted Kennedy, causing Time writer Walter Isaacson to worry “that the roof of the Omni Auditorium might collapse from the sudden drop in air pressure caused by the simultaneous sharp intake of so many thousands of breaths” at his appearance and “flawless performance.” Jackie and Lee were present, and were impressed enough to wonder if John Jr. might well pursue “the family business—politics.” All a great irony considering how carefully Jackie tried to shield her children from the public gaze, but the legacy seemed inescapable.
John Jr. would eventually attempt to meld the worlds of politics and celebrity entertainment in the short-lived magaz
ine he founded, titled George, launched with much fanfare and featuring on its initial cover the model Cindy Crawford bewigged like George Washington.
The original plan, which John Jr. approved, was to depict Crawford as Jackie Kennedy. Caroline nixed that idea as tasteless. She was far more protective of the Kennedy legacy than was her younger brother, and she had a more serious turn of mind. She aced the New York State bar exam, while John Jr. ended up having to retake the exam twice. Caroline’s tastes and interests were closer to Jackie’s—books, poetry, children. Her first published book, In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action, coauthored with Ellen Alderman, became a bestseller in 1991; she followed that up with seven more books, including two poetry anthologies. One of those was compiled for children, and it bore a photograph on the cover of Caroline as a little girl reading to her teddy bear sitting next to her on a chair.
* * *
JACKIE WOULD NOT live long enough to get to know the woman John met at a low point in his relationship with Daryl Hannah—the stunning twenty-seven-year-old Carolyn Bessette, at the time a fashion publicist and personal shopper at Calvin Klein. Beautiful, tall, slim, poised, Carolyn had some of the same qualities as Jackie, though she didn’t physically resemble her. Both women had an inner confidence and a femininity that deeply impressed people. They had a similar style sense—there are dozens of blogs devoted to Jackie and Carolyn, one which compares nearly identical camel coats the two women were photographed wearing, decades apart. And when Carolyn did become engaged to John Jr., he gave her an engagement ring that was a duplicate of the sapphire-and-emerald “swimming ring” that Maurice Tempelsman had given to Jackie, and which Jackie treasured.
