The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Lee had created a minimalist, almost Zen-like refuge of order and calm in her 16th arrondissement apartment. The floor was stripped bare and left unvarnished (“A raindrop would show on it, but never mind”). She’d worked with designer Christian Liaigre to achieve an uncluttered “extraordinary sense of calm . . . I don’t know what happened, but I lost the desire to acquire more things. It’s very peaceful to have lost that desire.”

  In New York, Lee dines with longtime friends, such as Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Peter Beard and his wife, Nejma, Marc Jacobs, and designers Nicky Haslam and Hamilton South. As a friend related, “What she has done and will continue to do every summer is to position herself in a rented house somewhere irresistible, like Suni Agnelli’s house in Porto Santo Stefano. She fills the house with friends, and that’s the way she holds court these days.”

  Lee still loves the water, and her friend observed that she prefers “private swimming” whenever possible. “I don’t swim in front of others,” she explained. As Lee is still in excellent physical condition, one can speculate that her connection with the sea has now become something personal and cleansing, a refuge in a dangerous world.

  “She was my mother-in-law,” Carole Radziwill said about Lee, “so we didn’t agree on everything, but she was very respectful of me, of my relationship with Anthony.” Carole believes that Lee has made peace with the fact that she was always “overshadowed by her sister . . . But I like Lee’s philosophy: you have to take ownership of your life.”

  That is exactly what she has done. Through it all, Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwill Ross has managed to endure. “I don’t do death well,” she once said, sitting on her couch in her sun-washed living room. “There’s a painting by Rubens,” she mused, “in Mantua, Italy. I’d like to go back to Mantua to see this painting one more time, to say good-bye. I’ve always loved it. It’s sad when you realize there’s more life behind you than ahead of you.”

  Perhaps that has been Lee’s greatest gift after all: to survive, and to do so with grace and courage. With her sister gone, Janet and Jack Bouvier and Hugh Auchincloss gone, Edie Beale and her daughter gone, her beloved son and nephew gone, Lee is the keeper of the Bouvier flame.

  At a recent Kennedy-era event in Washington, DC, soon after the death of Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in October of 2010, Lee looked around and realized that she was the only one left. It was “alarming and shocking” to realize that the last one standing from that time was a Bouvier and not a Kennedy. It brought to mind Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, her favorite play, where at the end they forget to remove Firs, the old caretaker, and you can hear his lonely pounding from the locked house as workmen chop down the cherry trees.

  * * *

  “WE’LL ALWAYS BE sisters, but we were friends once, too,” Lee confided rather wistfully that summer night, in a villa belonging to two friends, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. It was early July, just after Independence Day in the States, and the sea was as blue as a Fabergé egg. Earlier that day, somehow looking soigné in rolled-up blue jeans and sneakers, she had held a conch shell up to her ear, to hear the sound of the sea. It delighted her. “This could come out of a myth,” she said, happy as a girl.

  The princess then boarded a yacht owned by the Agnellis. Sailing by the small fishing village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, Lee pointed out the Chapelle de Saint-Pierre des Pêcheurs, a fisherman’s chapel as old as the Crusades, where Jean Cocteau had painted on the ancient stone walls. “He painted John the Baptist walking on water in front of the fishermen,” she said. “On another wall in the chapel, he painted Django Reinhardt,” the French gypsy guitar player of the 1920s.

  The cliff-side villa had a pale, ghostly interior, which set off the white piano in a room that opened onto a terrace with a ravishing view of the sea. Far below, one could just make out a very tan, older man sunbathing nude, lying on his belly, like some kind of fabulous sea creature. Lee invented a story about him—what had brought him to the Mediterranean to that particular rock by the sea—while she smoked a long, thin cigarette. Lee’s two hosts teased her about her hair (the color of Veuve Clicquot), which had begun to curl in the damp sea air.

  The following night, Lee attended the Grand Théâtre de Provence production of The Magic Flute, part of the summer’s Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Sitting in the opera house waiting for the curtain to rise, Lee commented that “when the world went mad, Provence gave the world poets—troubadours.” She said that if she could have lived another life, she would have loved to have been a singer: “There’s something celestial about a beautiful voice.”

  Even with its comedic moments, Mozart’s sublime opera evoked in Lee wistful memories of her father. Despite being a bon vivant and handsome as a movie star, Bouvier had been unable to reverse his diminished circumstances. Yet the girls’ early childhood at Lasata remained a treasured memory for Lee, an idyllic time before their parents’ divorce, before all the wounds, the complications, the betrayals, the suffering. As her cousin John Davis has observed, however, “Not much remains of the Bouviers today and their beloved East Hampton besides their tombs.”

  “There’s a fable or a myth—I think it’s French—about a woman who survives everyone’s passing,” Lee mused. “And everyone says, ‘She must be so strong, or so mean, to have survived it so well.’ But they don’t know—you don’t realize—what a punishment it can be, to be the last one left.”

  The following twilight at the villa, as the sun turned the sea to gold, Lee was asked, “If your life was a novel, which famous writer would have written it?” She immediately answered, “Balzac.” Balzac’s novel Old Goriot came to mind. It’s about a man whose daughters, to whom he was completely devoted, abandon him to die in poverty while they live rich and fashionable lives. “No, scratch that—maybe Tolstoy,” she said on second thought, but considering the remarkable life she has lived—maybe both.

  “I would need another lifetime,” she added, “just to be able to tell this life’s story.”

  Acknowledgments and a Note on Sources

  The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters grew out of several interviews and subsequent articles written for Vanity Fair, beginning on November 11, 2011, when we first interviewed Princess Lee Radziwill for an article on Truman Capote’s last, disastrous (and unfinished) novel, Answered Prayers. Princess Radziwill invited us into her light-filled apartment on East 72nd Street and treated us to an elegant lunch of chilled cucumber soup and a watercress salad. The interview ranged over many subjects—her friendship with Capote and its demise, the theatrical ventures they embarked upon, her response to the death of John F. Kennedy. In short, we were captivated, and the idea took root of writing a book about the relationship between Lee and her more famous sister. In May of 2016, “The Complicated Sisterhood of Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill” was published in Vanity Fair under Sam Kashner’s byline, but we still felt there was more to explore.

  Once we embarked upon this book, Sam subsequently traveled to the South of France to interview Lee again and spend time with the Principessa (as Capote called her), following up with several phone conversations. Throughout it all, we found her guarded, yes, but also beguiling, witty, highly intelligent, and sometimes haunted. As always, she possessed an elegant personal style and a love for beauty reflected in every environment she inhabited.

  Writing this book was like a treasure hunt, delving into the legions of articles and books written about her and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, sifting through the public records of two of the most written-about women of the twentieth century. Because we name the sources of our quotations throughout the book, we’ve dispensed with academic notes but have included a complete list of those sources used and, as follows, a list of those who kindly allowed us to interview them, either in person or by phone.

  Our thanks to the late Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss, Peter Beard, Harry Benson, the late Ben Bradlee, Eva Burch, the late Joanne Carson, Helen Chavchavadze, Gerald C
larke, Bob Colacello, Louise Grunwald, Buck Henry, Reinaldo Herrera, Nick Hooker, John Manchester, Jonas Mekas, the late Mike Nichols, Carole Radziwill, Diane Reverand, Frank Rich, Ralph Rucci, the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Allen Schwartz, the late John Seigenthaler, the late Liz Smith, James Symington, André Leon Talley, Taki Theodoracopulos, the late Robert Tracey, Matt Tyrnauer, and—before his death in 2012—the irascible, irreplaceable Gore Vidal.

  Additionally, we are ever grateful to our indefatigable literary agents, David Kuhn, William LoTurco, and Alison Warren at Aevitas, for their skill and forbearance. Gratitude to our gracious and supportive editor, Gail Winston, for her scrupulous reading of this book; to the eagle-eyed copy editor, Mary Beth Constant; to associate editor, Sofia Groopman; and to HarperCollins’s eminent publisher, Jonathan Burnham, for his patience and belief in us. To Mary Molineux, senior research librarian at Swem Library, College of William & Mary, and to our resourceful photo researcher, Joshua Luckenbaugh—many, many thanks!

  Finally, our gratitude to Lee Radziwill, whose brilliant conversations opened a window to her past and present. It is an unpayable debt.

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  ———. “Pas de Deux.” Vanity Fair, January l989.

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  ———. “A Clash of Camelots.” Vanity Fair, October 2009.

  ———. “The Complicated Sisterhood of Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill.” Vanity Fair, May 2016.

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  ———. “People I Wish I Had Known.” Vogue, February 1961: 134ff.

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  ———. “Why My Sister Married Aristotle Onassis.” Cosmopolitan, September 1968.

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  ———. Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot. New York: William Morrow, 2003.

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  ———. Nemesis: Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys. New York: Harper, 2004.

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  Manchester, William. Controversy: And Other Essays in Journalism, 1950–1975. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976.

  ———. The Death of a President: November 1963. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

  Noonan, William Sylvester, with Robert Huber. Forever Young: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. New York: Viking, 2006.