The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  But when it came time to be seated for the screening, Lee balked at the seating arrangement, which had the film’s principals in the front row with spouses in the second. This was unacceptable for Lee, who did, after all, still retain the (somewhat dubious) title of princess, and who had twice dined as her sister’s guest of honor at the White House, and who had been hailed by thousands of Indians and Pakistanis on a state visit and had been seated next to Prime Minister Nehru—so she immediately took one of the seats in the front row, between her husband and Prince Charles. She was not going to sit behind Dolly Parton or Julia Roberts or Olympia Dukakis. Hence the clashing of two worlds: Hollywood’s ever-changing hierarchy, and the time-honored protocols of state and le haut monde. Lee knew where she belonged—but that night belonged to Hollywood. Lee had actually stolen Julia Roberts’s assigned place, and the film-industry representatives were livid. It got worse when Julia tried to take her seat, whispering to Lee that she was in the wrong place, but Lee ignored her. Finally, as DuBois reports, Ray Stark tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to leave, and when she didn’t budge, he hissed, “Lee, you are a cunt.”

  In the end, Prince Charles and Lady Diana moved their seats to accommodate the cast of Steel Magnolias, amid much embarrassment all around. Olympia Dukakis and a now-tearful Julia Roberts had to find other seats. After the screening, at an elegant cast party at the Elephant, Ross tried to smooth things over with Stark, but Ray continued to fume. DuBois quotes an industry insider as saying, “It was unforgivable because it hurt him a lot with his career . . . By not standing up to Lee, Herbert jeopardized Columbia’s position, jeopardized the Prince, and jeopardized his own standing in England.” Ross’s friends began to look upon Lee as a liability, the dominating and domineering half of the marriage.

  The screenwriter and comedian Buck Henry, perhaps best known as the writer of The Graduate and television’s spy spoof Get Smart, saw that “the end of the Herb Ross marriage is when people began turning away from Lee, began to think of her as a terrible person, though I always liked Lee.” Hollywood insiders certainly turned against her, but when people like the legendary director Mike Nichols—who had once seriously courted Jackie—also turned against her, it cut closer to home.

  After thirteen years of marriage, the couple separated in January 2000 and divorced in May the following year. It was not a pretty sight, as the once loving couple fought over everything—every objet d’art, every dish, every stick of furniture (including a beloved antique desk Ross had bought at auction and that Lee lay claim to). They put their beautiful East Hampton home up for sale, and the comic Jerry Seinfeld offered $19 million for it. By then, Ross was dying from heart disease, and when Lee balked at selling, Ross’s friends felt that she was trying to outlast him so the house and all its proceeds would be exclusively hers.

  For her part, Lee had delayed the separation for the sake of Anthony, who had struggled with cancer throughout the summer of 1999, so that he and Carole would have an idyllic place to spend their weekends. She also “worked like a son of a gun to make sure [Ross] got the best treatment,” according to her lawyer Stanley Pleasant, after Ross was hospitalized at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.

  He died on October 11, 2001, at the age of seventy-four, having suffered with heart disease for over a year, no doubt made worse by his acrimonious divorce. His ashes were buried next to Nora Kaye’s grave site in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  AFTER THE END of her marriage and the deaths of her ex-husband, her sister, her nephew, and her beloved son, Lee’s outlook became darker and she became more guarded. Peter Beard and others had already noticed and commented on “the two Lees”—the warm, outgoing, adventurous Lee who thrived in the Hamptons and on Montauk, near the sea and away from New York society, and the Lee who turned brittle and aloof when she reentered the city. Many of Lee’s social peers noticed how grim Lee had become, and they were highly critical of her treatment of Herb Ross throughout the divorce and through his fatal illness. The harsh, self-protective Lee seemed to have completely overtaken the carefree, game girl that Peter and others had come to love.

  * * *

  GIVEN THE AMOUNT of suffering and loss Lee endured, however, it’s surprising that she was able to finally publish her long-awaited memoir in the form of a breezy, upbeat recounting of the happiest times of her life, with stunning family photographs displayed throughout. (She had learned from Peter Beard, no doubt, the life-affirming art of scrapbooking and collage.) Happy Times was published in 2000, and if the public expected a bitter reckoning, they would be disappointed.

  In March of 2001, Lee was interviewed on the popular Larry King Live TV show on the occasion of her book. Larry King asked Lee, “Why this book?” and she answered:

  I did it because it was a difficult period in my life and so I was considering writing, and I thought that it would be uplifting to go back and look at some things worth remembering . . . those memories were exciting. Memories are very powerful . . .

  She talked about the difficulty of growing up in a divorced household, and how much she had loved being with her father (“He was such a joy to be with, and we were the focal point of his life . . . we just adored him”).

  When Larry King asked Lee outright if she and Jackie had been rivals, as they were just four years apart and “both pretty,” Lee shot back, “We really weren’t . . . four years is just enough difference, I think, not to be rivals.”

  He pressed on with, “Your sister . . . changed America . . . the way she treated the White House, the way she was?” To which Lee responded by extolling the White House years under Jack and Jackie’s stewardship, when it became a place where “music, art, science, business, philosophy” all flowed through the People’s House. This had been Jackie and Lee’s world, a place where the finest aspects of life were sought, appreciated, and flourished, where figures like Pablo Casals and André Malraux were the rock stars, then, when taste and knowledge were things to acquire and to treasure. “The idea that anything was possible was the strongest feeling all the time,” Lee said.

  Larry King, in his usual blunt style, then asked Lee, “Were you ever just a housewife?” Lee didn’t blink at that, and she gamely explained that she did not work when her children were young, but had worked for Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, ran the American fashion show in Brussels for the World’s Fair, and then, in the l990s, worked for Giorgio Armani for ten years. Curiously, she didn’t mention her design business—perhaps that was more a labor of love, while it lasted, than “work.”

  King then touched upon Lee’s recent tragedies, beginning with John Jr.’s sudden death. “You had tragedy soon after John Jr., didn’t you? You lost a son.”

  “My son died of cancer, which he had a very, very long battle with. He was just forty, by a week.”

  “I don’t know how you—someone once said, upon losing a child, you’re never the same.”

  Lee answered, “I think grieving is the same for everybody that lost someone you love deeply. It’s the same. You know, you’re really no different than anybody else who’s lost somebody they adored.”

  Again, the talk show host pressed on: “But losing a child—just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No. Losing a child is a very unnatural thing.”

  “Where do you get the ability to bounce back from incredible tragedy?”

  “It’s a force of nature, and it’s a determination to go forward. I guess it must be in the genes . . . how can you keep going if you don’t go forward?”

  * * *

  AS MANY OF her social peers fell away after Herb Ross’s death, Lee found herself befriended by a younger generation of filmmakers and designers, like Sofia Coppola, Hamilton South, Marc Jacobs, and Ralph Rucci. They sought her out, and it was easier to befriend younger people who didn’t hold her responsible for her history than to maintain friendships with people who had begun to describe her as cold and avaricious.

  Drawn to her unerring chic, her sophisticati
on, and her endurance, they elevated Lee to the role she was born to inhabit once Jackie’s long shadow had begun to fade: style icon.

  12

  Lee Radziwill in the South of France

  They don’t know—you don’t realize—what a punishment it can be, to be the last one left.

  —LEE

  This in part has been a story of being and becoming, beginning in a prefeminist era when “girls who have everything are not supposed to do anything.” Yet both of the Bouvier sisters achieved fame in their lifetimes. Jackie ascended to an iconic status, where she continues to reside, twenty-four years after her death. At the heart of it, Jackie was unknowable. Out of shyness, perhaps, out of a determined desire to remain private while trapped in the public gaze, she has endured as an expression of the feminine ideal, like Greta Garbo or the Mona Lisa—remote, mysterious, tantalizing with her Giaconda smile. When Jackie spoke publicly, it was usually on behalf of others: John Kennedy’s campaign and his presidency, the decorators and curators who helped her refurbish the White House, through the many books she edited and saw published at Viking and Doubleday. Sphinx-like, she didn’t seek confessional self-expression that has defined much of public discourse since the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, Lee sought to be known, to express herself, to have her voice, her style, her talents, her sensibilities made public. She belongs to the present, and has outlived everyone else.

  In September of 2006, the late writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens reviewed five new books on the Kennedys in the Atlantic. In many ways, Hitchens was highly critical of the Camelot myth, in keeping with his reputation as a contrarian. In his final paragraph he wrote:

  If this vulgar hoodlum president had not been survived by a widow of exceptional bearing and grace, his reputation would probably now be dirt. Sheer discretion and consideration, exerted on her behalf (and partly demanded by her in return for “access”), conditioned many of the founding chronicles and continue to influence the successor ones. Perhaps even this spell is now not too strong to be broken . . . But all this was almost half a century ago, which is surely enough time for the dispelling of our remaining illusions.

  After the review was published, Hitchens received a phone call from Lee. Hitchens had been critical of Jackie in his review, mocking her taste in using Camelot as the metaphor for her husband’s term in office.

  At the time of Lee’s phone call, Hitchens was gravely ill with esophageal cancer and hospitalized at the critical care unit of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. An intimate who was with Hitchens did not want to put Lee’s call through, saying, “This is ridiculous. The man’s dying. He doesn’t want to be criticized about something he struggled to write.”

  But Lee hadn’t called to complain or criticize. When she finally got through, she told Hitchens, “Oh, finally someone who gets it, who’s not in thrall to Camelot. I wish it had gone on for a thousand pages.” She even intimated that when he got out of the hospital, they would spend time together and perhaps even work on her memoir. “Hitch had a bounce back after that, which everyone was attributing to Lee,” an intimate recalled.

  But that was not to be. Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, and Lee’s recent book, simply called Lee, published by Assouline press in 2015, is not a memoir so much as a gracious and lovely trove of photographs chronicling the happiest times of her life—not very different from her earlier coffee-table book, Happy Times. In her reaction to Hitchens’s critical review—which still manages to compliment Jackie’s grace and intelligence—Lee reveals that her rival was not just her sister, but the whole Kennedy machinery that elevated Jackie to the queen of America and upset the delicate balance between them, an imbalance that was impossible for Lee to ever set right.

  Agreeing with Hitchens that the Camelot myth was orchestrated with smoke and mirrors, she felt that her relationship with her sister had been tarnished by a chimera. Carole Radziwill saw that Lee was “up against sixty years of mythmaking, so I completely got it that she would appreciate Chris Hitchens’s review.”

  But Hitchens was wrong about the “dispelling of our remaining illusions” about the Kennedys. In the more than five decades since John F. Kennedy’s death, the nation continues its fascination with what is now looked upon as a golden age of civility in American politics, and its fascination with Jackie Kennedy’s myth and style—and with Lee’s, by extension.

  Diana Vreeland was the first to publicly admire Lee’s style:

  Lee has an extraordinary sense of luxury. It’s real selection, real taste, her taste. Very, very luxurious. That doesn’t mean there’s a lot of stuff. And very, very distinctly arranged for men. It isn’t just a woman’s indulgence. Lee is a very remarkable girl. When I say remarkable I mean: she isn’t like anyone else.

  Carole Radziwill notes that Lee “has that feminine quality that’s hard to put your finger on, but it has a great romantic side. Men just fell at her feet.” Carole noted, too, that Lee “was always so appropriately put together for her age. She knew to stop wearing sleeveless dresses at a certain point. She just knew.” Young actresses such as Abigail Spencer, who has appeared in the episodic television shows Timeless, Mad Men, and Suits, said that when preparing for the Emmy Awards recently, “All the girls took Lee as their fashion icon,” loving her “ballet chic” and “barefoot elegance.” It’s Lee’s turn, now, to be known for what her father, years ago, once said about style: “A habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s what you are . . . It’s what makes you a Bouvier.”

  In 2008, Lee managed to accomplish something never achieved by Jackie, who had adored everything French—its history, its literature, its food—since she was a young woman. Lee was awarded the Légion d’honneur by the French government, presented to her at the home of the writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and his wife, the actress Arielle Dombasle.

  “I remember when she received her Légion d’honneur in Paris in this extraordinarily beautiful, exquisite, white silk suit from Dior,” recalled André Leon Talley.

  You’ve never seen an American woman dressed that way to go receive such a prestigious honor. We all made an effort to get there for Lee. Peter Beard came from New York. (She was in love with Peter Beard!) And Marc Jacobs was there—everyone was there to see her get her Legion d’honneur. The first thing she said to Marc was “Why have you dropped me?” Who knows where that comes from? Some fragile place of insecurity. I mean, Marc Jacobs hadn’t dropped her! When she had to leave, who took her home in his car? Marc Jacobs.

  In 2013, Nicky Haslam wrote an encomium to Lee that was published in the February 17, 2013, issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, titled “The Real Lee Radziwill.” She graced the cover under the rubric “True Elegance,” looking regal, beautifully coifed and dressed, and cold as an ice sculpture. To accompany the issue, filmmaker Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation) and Deborah Needleman, then T’s editor in chief, helming her first issue, interviewed Lee on camera.

  They set up a small crew in Lee’s apartment. In the fourteen-minute interview, Lee reminisced fondly about her Rolling Stones tour with Truman Capote and meeting Peter Beard for the first time on the island of Skorpios. She recalled the difficulties working with her aunt and cousin, the two Edie Beales, in East Hampton. But it’s her time with Peter that she remembered with the most tenderness, and she credited him with opening up her mind and her spirit to undreamt-of possibilities. “When my sister asked me to come and recover after a big operation to Skorpios and have my own house there and the children,” she recalled,

  it sounded like the ideal place to recuperate, and she already had asked Peter Beard, who she knew, to come and amuse her children with painting, with sculpting, with skiing, because they just adored him. His mess was everywhere in the house, of his collages, photographs, just all over every floor, and he was always on his knees gluing or rubbing a pen into his arm to get blood to put on his paintin
gs. And then we’d go off . . . and water-ski for hours when the incredible heat had gone down . . . it was just paradise . . .

  When she described Peter as “super looking [with the] body of a Greek god,” he truly seems to have been the love of her life, the source of her sexual awakening, the person who made her feel most alive.

  At one point, Sofia Coppola said, “I’m always struck by how incredibly strong and willful you are, and yet how you maintain this sort of childlike sense of curiosity and joy and that you’re quite adventurous and naughty, and also I guess a bit vulnerable.”

  Lee answered, “I don’t see why you can’t be both.”

  Coppola continued admiringly, “You’re just engaged with life and with people and with art and with culture,” to which Lee answered, “If I wasn’t curious, I wouldn’t want to live. And as Luis Buñuel said in the beginning of his book . . . ‘Without memory there is no life.’”

  It’s a charming interview, which suggests that Lee has finally found her spotlight—though on a much smaller stage than her sister’s—and that she has finally found her greatest role, the part that suits her best: herself.

  * * *

  HOW DOES LEE live now? Until recently, she divided her time between New York and her three-bedroom Paris apartment on the Avenue Montaigne—with a view of the Eiffel Tower—but that apartment was recently put up for sale for $4 million. She is not giving up Paris, but she now prefers to spend her time at the Plaza Athénée. “There’s a softness here that we do not find so easily at home,” she told William Norwich of the New York Times in 2000. “Everybody isn’t in such a rush. The day starts later and ends later. And when you see some sun, Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. It brings tears to your eyes.”