The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Coincidentally, Carolyn was already good friends with Carole Radziwill, Anthony’s wife. She described Carolyn as “quite a lovable person. She was clever, she was naughty, and she had that balance of being able to be really serious and yet funny . . . she was a great girlfriend.”

  When Jackie was diagnosed with cancer and instructed to begin chemotherapy, she immediately called John and Caroline to her side at Ten Forty, while her stalwart companion, Maurice, sat with her and held her hand. She told her children the diagnosis, and they all wept. But Jackie quickly pulled herself together and assured them that her doctors held out hope that she might survive.

  Most people around Jackie did not know of her life-threatening illness, as she continued to work at Doubleday, though sometimes she appeared bruised as a result of her therapy. Jackie tried not to let it interfere with her editorial duties and relationships with her authors. Soon, however, the results of chemotherapy took their toll, and she hid her hair loss under a turban, joking with a colleague that it might start a trend. Once, while she was walking in Central Park, a paparazzo attempted to take her photograph. Tempelsman—usually so peaceable—angrily chased him off.

  Jackie had her lawyers draft a living will instructing her children not to prolong her life by extreme measures at the end. Jackie and Lee’s half sister, Janet, had died painfully in March of 1985 after a brutal struggle with lung cancer when she was just thirty-nine. Jackie had been at her half sister’s bedside throughout much of the ordeal, struck by her uncomplaining stoicism. Tish Baldrige noted Jackie “was horrified at how much her sister Janet had suffered and she wasn’t about to let that happen to her. Jackie always had to be in total control of her own life—that was one thing about her that never changed.”

  On February 11, 1994, Jackie had Tuckerman announce to the New York Times that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  When Lee arrived at her sister’s apartment that night, Jackie was dying. Whatever dark currents had passed between the sisters over the decades, Lee only wanted Jackie to recover, to be the strong, older sister who had, from time to time, looked after Lee and tried to make sure she was well taken care of. Lee could barely imagine a world without Jackie in it. Caroline and John left Lee alone with Jackie for some time, and when Lee left Jackie’s bedside, she was weeping.

  A steady stream of friends and family, vetted by Caroline and John, made a pilgrimage to Ten Forty to say their farewells. Yusha, who had always loved his stepsister, drove in from Hammersmith Farm in Newport. Ted Kennedy and his new wife, Victoria Reggie, arrived. Caroline cried softly outside Jackie’s bedroom, comforted by Ed Schlossberg, while John ushered in visitors for a last moment with Jackie. She and John took turns keeping vigil at their mother’s bedside, reading her poems she treasured by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson, and prose passages from Jean Rhys, Isak Dinesen, and Colette, Jackie’s favorite writers.

  Monsignor George Bardes of St. Thomas More Church arrived to administer the last rites. More friends and family members streamed into Jackie’s room, two at a time—Carly Simon and Bunny Mellon, Pat Lawford and Ethel Kennedy, Eunice and Sargent Shriver. Lee went in one more time to say her final good-bye, striking at least one of the assembled mourners, John’s close friend William “Billy” Noonan, as eerie:

  As the priest began the rosary which is meant to release the soul from purgatory, the surreal light caught people’s bowed heads in profile . . . Then Lee Radziwill walked in. It was eerie. Jackie’s sister looked so much like Jackie, and had her hair done like Jackie’s, and dressed like Jackie, that for a second . . . I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Christopher Andersen notes in The Good Son that Jackie’s presiding doctor came into her room every twenty minutes, and finally administered “enough morphine to ease her into as painless a death as possible.”

  Jackie passed away at 10:15 that Thursday night. John publicly announced her death, saying that she had died “surrounded by her friends and her family and her books and the people and the things that she loved. And she did it in her own way and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that, and now she’s in God’s hands.” It was telling that she considered her books almost to be part of her family, among the people and things she most loved.

  Once the death was announced, hordes of onlookers thronged the sidewalk in front of Jackie’s building and remained there for days, leaving armfuls of flowers and memorabilia as tributes.

  John said, “It’s a strange procession: First come the doctors, then the lawyers, then the funeral director. It isn’t simply a death, but a series of steps in death.”

  The funeral was held at St. Ignatius Loyola, where Jackie and Lee had both been baptized and confirmed, and the ceremony befitted a queen, with hundreds of luminaries, including Hillary Clinton and Lady Bird Johnson, in attendance. Lee arrived in a stretch limousine without Herbert Ross, who had opted to remain on location in Arizona, where he was shooting his latest film, Boys on the Side.

  John and Caroline read poems that they selected to reflect their mother’s “love of words, the bonds of home and family, and her spirit of adventure,” including selections from a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry that Jackie had been given as a prize at Miss Porter’s School. Mike Nichols read scripture, Jessye Norman sang “Ave Maria,” and Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy. Lee’s daughter, Tina, spoke at the funeral, and Anthony was a pallbearer—but there was no place for Lee.

  The family had not invited her to speak at her sister’s funeral. Caroline felt that Lee had not been there for her mother during her illness, and there was probably some residual feeling that Lee had neglected Tina, who had remained close to her Kennedy cousins. If indeed Lee had shied away from visiting Jackie during her fatal illness, it was not because of a lack of feeling. If anything, it was from too much feeling. “I don’t do death well,” she said many years later, and the prospect of losing her sister—her best friend, her rival, her impossible role model—was too much for Lee to endure.

  Jackie’s body was then flown to Washington, where, accompanied by a police motorcade and a phalanx of limousines, she was transported to Arlington National Cemetery to be buried next to the grave of John F. Kennedy. Next to them were the graves of Arabella, her stillborn daughter, and her infant son, Patrick. Once again, Lee was not given a chance to speak or read a poem in her sister’s memory. In a dark suit and sunglasses, she remained aloof, an onlooker, hurt and angry at being banned from speaking, while sixty-four bells rang from Washington National Cathedral to commemorate the burial of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, once the nation’s most beloved First Lady.

  Eight months after Jackie’s death, Rose Kennedy passed away on January 22, 1995, having achieved the advanced age of 104—four decades longer than the life span of her famous daughter-in-law.

  * * *

  JACKIE’S FUNERAL WOULD leave Lee bitter, aware of how deep the rift between her and her sister had become. This was only exacerbated by the reading of Jackie’s thirty-eight-page will the week following, leaving her nothing—not a piece of jewelry, not a trinket, not their father’s writing desk, which Lee had given to Jackie after inheriting it. What was the cause of the animus? Perhaps Jackie had never gotten over her resentment when, in 1984, Janet had bequeathed the proceeds of the sale of her Georgetown town house to Lee. Perhaps Jackie felt that Lee’s marriage to Herbert Ross had left her rich enough that she no longer needed any help from her. Or was there another reason that Jackie so completely snubbed Lee in her final hours? Gore Vidal had gotten to know and to admire Lee’s first husband, Michael Canfield, and as part of his near obsession with Jackie and—to a lesser extent—Lee, he writes that Canfield once confided in him:

  “There were times when . . . I think [Lee] went perhaps too far, you know? Like going to bed with Jack in the room next to mine in the south of France and then . . . boasting about it.”

  It’s hard to know if Vidal is telling a truth here, or passing on gossip, or is blinded by
his eventual dislike of both sisters, especially Lee. But he had no problem assigning Jackie’s omission of Lee as a kind of revenge, writing, “Now, from the grave, Jackie inserts the knife.” He reports that Jackie once asked him, “Who was it who said ‘Revenge is more sweet than love’?” He goes on to argue that in his opinion, “The one person [Jackie] ever loved, if indeed she was capable of such an emotion, was Bobby Kennedy. As Lee had gone to bed with Jack, symmetry required her to do so with Bobby.”

  If the suggestion that Lee had had a fling with Jack Kennedy is true and Gore Vidal knew about it, then perhaps that was another reason that Lee did not want to testify against Vidal in his slander suit against Truman Capote. Perhaps he held that over her, and she had more to lose siding with her dear friend than with the contentious, sometimes vicious Gore Vidal.

  It seems rather churlish of Gore to have helped destroy Lee’s friendship with Truman. But perhaps at the end of the day, Vidal in some sense was family, though the connection was held together by a slender thread. In patrician, well-connected families like the Auchinclosses, the Kennedys, and the Bouviers, family matters.

  * * *

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment was sold for $9.5 million and her effects were sold at Sotheby’s, bringing in another $34.5 million, far exceeding the expected estimate of $5 million. Jackie’s diamond ring from Onassis sold for $2.4 million, far more than its $660,000 appraisal. “Sell everything,” she had told her children as she lay dying. “You’ll make a lot of money.” Indeed, the auction—held two years after Jackie’s death—was something of a feeding frenzy, with long lines around the block. Jackie knew people would pay high prices for provenance. Even the auction catalogue brought in over $500,000. Bouvier’s writing desk, which Jackie had displayed in the White House’s West Wing, was appraised at $2,000 but sold for $68,000.

  Caroline and John Jr. reaped more than $30 million from the auction, the rest going to charity.

  * * *

  AFTER HER MOTHER’S and her sister’s deaths, more tragedies awaited Lee.

  In an unforeseen twist to Anthony and Carole’s fairy-tale romance, on their honeymoon Anthony discovered a testicular lump that would turn out to be cancerous. The five years of their marriage were spent in multiple surgeries and agonizing treatments for Anthony’s cancer, painfully recounted in DiFalco’s searing memoir, What Remains. As Anthony’s chances of survival dwindled, John Jr. prepared a eulogy for his cousin and closest friend, whom he knew was dying.

  John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette on September 21, 1996, a little over two years after Jackie’s death, on Cumberland Island in Georgia, a remote hideaway perfect for a couple who had had to deal with constant prying by the public and the press.

  On Friday, July 16, 1999—just three years into what many described as a tempestuous marriage—John Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, plunged to a watery grave when John became disoriented in a heavy fog on their way to a family wedding in Hyannis.

  They had planned to leave the city by 6:30 p.m. so that John Jr. still had enough light to fly by, as he had not yet mastered flying by the Piper Saratoga’s instruments. Though he was a novice pilot, he expected to land in Martha’s Vineyard before dark, in time to drop off Lauren and still make it to Hyannis Port. Carolyn had not been sanguine about the trip, already alarmed by John Jr.’s love of pushing the envelope, daredevilry that earned him the nickname “Master of Disaster.”

  Jackie had admired her son’s athleticism and adventurous spirit, but she had balked at his plans to earn his pilot’s license, well aware of the number of deaths by plane crash that haunted the Kennedys. Jack Kennedy’s elder brother, Joseph, and his beloved sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy had both died young when their planes crashed. Ted Kennedy survived a plane crash that had broken his back and taken the lives of his pilot and a campaign aide. And of course Onassis had never recovered from his beloved son Alexander’s death when his plane crashed on takeoff. She felt so strongly about this that she had “made John swear that he would not pursue his pilot’s license,” as John’s biographer Christopher Andersen wrote, and on her deathbed she’d asked Tempelsman and Ted Kennedy to hold him to that promise. But it was a promise he couldn’t keep. Already a risk taker, he’d loved the sense of freedom that soaring alone in the sky gave him.

  Others have noted that John suffered from attention deficit disorder and thus did not have the sustained focus required in a good pilot. And that night he was flying with another handicap—he was on crutches because six weeks earlier he had broken his right ankle in a parasailing accident. Carolyn only agreed to fly to Hyannis with John because he was supposed to be copiloted with the more experienced Jay Biederman, John’s flight instructor. But Biederman canceled at the last minute, so John decided to pilot the plane on his own. It was actually Carolyn’s investment banker sister, Lauren, who talked her into going. John was so confident of his abilities that he didn’t bother to file a flight plan.

  Already leaving too close to twilight, they then encountered an unexpected blanket of haze that settled over the coast and greatly reduced the visibility John would need to pilot the plane. At one point their Piper flew perilously close to an American Airlines jet carrying 160 passengers. The American Airlines pilot skillfully averted a collision that John and his passengers might not even have been aware of. John stayed close to the coastline where he could see the lights of the towns he knew—Greenwich, Bridgeport, Old Saybrook—but after forty minutes in the air, the dense fog blocked out their flickering lights. A more experienced pilot would have, at that point, turned on the automatic pilot and let the instruments guide the plane. John did not. When night came, visibility was zero, and John was completely disoriented. A local pilot named Tom Freeman described that sensation: “You are totally, completely in the dark—literally as well as figuratively—if you don’t know how to rely on your instruments. It’s a sickening, scary feeling.” Without visual cues, he would not have been able to tell up from down. When the Piper Saratoga suddenly nosedived toward the blackness of the Atlantic, John apparently tried to reverse the plane’s trajectory without first leveling off, resulting in a “graveyard spiral,” plunging the plane with its three passengers to their deaths in the sea.

  It was a blessing that Jackie did not have to live through the premature death of her son, her handsome charmer, her golden boy. But with her son, Lee would not be so blessed.

  On August 10, 1999, after numerous surgeries, Anthony finally succumbed to the cancer that had robbed him and his young wife of their future. “Carolyn and John would die three weeks before Anthony,” Carole recalled, “so I was left that summer with no one that shared those memories, and no one that I could talk to about it.” Ironically, Anthony outlived his cousin, so it was he who would deliver the eulogy at John’s funeral.

  Jackie once wrote, “This conflict with the gods is the essence of the Greek tragedy.” One can look at the trajectory of Jackie’s and Lee’s lives and see the outline of an ancient curse: the death of the firstborn son. It began with the Kennedys, with the fatal plane crash into the sea of the firstborn Kennedy son, the charismatic Joseph Kennedy Jr., whom his father was grooming to run for president.

  John and Jackie Kennedy’s two sons would both be taken—Patrick, shortly after his birth, and John Jr., lost at sea. Onassis endured the death of his firstborn and only son, Alexander, and it destroyed him. Joseph, John, and Alexander were all like the Greek mythic figure Icarus, who flies too close to the sun, only to fall to a watery grave. Anthony Radziwill, another one of fate’s darlings, was born the proud and loving son of a prince. He was just forty when his mother had to see him buried. She has so far outlived him by nearly twenty years.

  “Did you notice that small fifth-century Roman head of a boy over the mantel?” Ralph Rucci once asked. “She’s had it in her life for many, many years. It’s one of her favorite things because it looks like her son, Anthony. She looks at it, and it gives her comfort.” />
  * * *

  LEE’S MARRIAGE TO Ross didn’t survive the personal toll of those tragedies. Accompanying Lee to visit Anthony in the hospital while he endured chemotherapy treatments must have stirred up painful memories of Nora Kaye’s long battle with cancer. Ross still grieved the loss of his first wife. He had created ballets for the American Ballet Theatre as a young choreographer in New York before becoming a film director, and had formed a deep, creative partnership with Nora, whom he’d married in 1959. The two had established their own ballet company, the Ballet of Two Worlds, to perform works that Ross had choreographed, including Caprichos (Caprices), inspired by Goya’s etchings. They toured Europe for a year before disbanding, and the memory of their long partnership was something Ross could not let go of, to Lee’s increasing resentment.

  There were other issues as well. Like Stas Radziwill before him, Ross was alarmed at how quickly Lee ran through large sums of money. (It was a familiar complaint leveled at both Jackie and Lee, by all of their husbands.) Lee spent the profit from the sale of Ross and Nora’s home in Los Angeles on two warehouses of furniture for the Santa Ynez Valley home they were building. She spent a fortune planting olive trees on the property, and her spending habits often put Ross in a black mood. It got so bad that he complained to a friend, who noted, “He has to do two pictures a year to break even, which is about $5 million a year. He doesn’t have a lot of money put away. It’s one of those odd little nightmares. All I know is, this is not a happy man.”

  Lee’s critics point to a brouhaha over the London premiere of Steel Magnolias in February of 1990 as the beginning of the end for their marriage. It was a Royal Command Performance, held at the Odeon in Leicester Square, with a presentation of the film’s cast to Charles and Diana, Prince and Princess of Wales.

  Lee insisted that she be introduced to the royals as “Princess Radziwill,” not as Lee Bouvier Ross, only to be told by Columbia Pictures that the reception line was just for those involved in the film. She would only be allowed to stand behind her husband. When Ross learned about that arrangement, out of deference to Lee, he refused to take part. He had to be persuaded by his friend Ray Stark. So when the grand event occurred, Lee gamely took her place in the second line of guests, behind Ross.