Lee Radziwill: Trendsetting socialite and sister of Jackie Kennedy

The advantages of being the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy were not lost on the American socialite and style queen Lee Radziwill, in spite of the shadow it cast on her.

Brought up in the Bouvier and Auchincloss families, Radziwill was raised with her sister in mansions along the US east coast.

She famously floundered as an actor and obtained the empty title of princess only after exchanging vows with an exiled Polish nobleman, her second of three husbands.

But her adventurous spirit, looks, husky voice and association with the Kennedys opened doors to royal palaces, gala soirees, torrid romances and touchstone events of the Sixties and Seventies.

Even before her sister married John F Kennedy and became first lady in 1961, the fashion press began taking note of Radziwill’s chic image of clean lines, oversize sunglasses and free-flowing hair.

She worked as an assistant to longtime Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland; ran the American fashion pavilion at the Expo 58 – the Brussels World’s Fair – and inspired designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs. After seeing a photograph of Radziwill walking her dog in the 1960s, designer Michael Kors dubbed a throwback collection that included balmacaan coats and stovepipe velvet slacks “the Lee Radziwill look”.

Truman Capote said she outshone her more-famous sister. “She’s all the things people give Jackie credit for,” he told People magazine in 1976. “All the looks, style, taste – Jackie never had them at all, and yet it was Lee who lived in the shadow.”

During the Kennedy administration, the two sisters were confidantes and travelling companions. They dined at Buckingham Palace and toured India, riding elephants and hobnobbing with prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Radziwill spent much of the Cuban missile crisis holed up in the White House with Jacqueline and watching the president exchange tense phone calls with aides.

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By the time Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, she was an A-list socialite in her own right, dubbed Princess Radziwill thanks to her marriage in 1959 to Prince Stanislas Albert “Stash” Radziwill, who had fled Poland after the Second World War to become a property developer in London.

She danced at Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball in 1966, sometimes called “the party of the century”, and joined other celebrity hangers-on during the Rolling Stones’ infamously debauched 1972 US tour. Keith Richards, who was unimpressed, dubbed her “Princess Radish”.

Always restless, she tried her hand at various careers.

With Capote providing acting tips and Saint Laurent a rack of dresses, Radziwill debuted in a 1967 Chicago stage production of The Philadelphia Story.

She played snooty socialite Tracy Lord, the role made famous by Katharine Hepburn. “A star is not born,” wrote one reviewer – she was roundly panned.

The next year, Capote adapted the Vera Caspary suspense novel Laura for TV production with Radziwill in the title role. But the reviews were even more brutal, calling the actor a pale comparison to Gene Tierney in the first-rate 1944 film version.

None of this dimmed Radziwill’s allure in high society. She graced magazine covers and was photographed by Richard Avedon.

Andy Warhol captured her elegance in an orange silk-screen portrait. Her closest friend was Russian ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev, and she was romantically linked to other dashing men of the era, including architect Richard Meier and photographer and artist Peter Beard.

In 1976 she set up an interior decorating business in New York with a contract to design suites for Americana Hotels. She also worked as an event planner and style counsellor to Giorgio Armani and was a fixture on the cocktail party and fashion show circuits of London, Paris and New York. Even into her eighties Radziwill was making best-dressed lists while her expensively outfitted apartments were featured in architecture and design magazines.

Caroline Lee Bouvier was born in New York in1933. Her father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier III, was a wealthy stockbroker notorious for his womanizing and heavy drinking. Her mother, Janet Norton Lee, hailed from a prominent Southern family.

After divorcing, her mother was married in 1942 to Washington businessman and Standard Oil heir Hugh Auchincloss Jr, stepfather of the author Gore Vidal.

The Bouvier sisters, raised in large part by governesses, attended the private Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Unhappy after her parents’ divorce, the future princess said she grew so lonely that at age 11 she tried to adopt an orphan.

She claimed her parents doted on Jacqueline, who was four years older, a bookworm and a better equestrian, while Lee, who was once thrown from a horse and trampled, was afraid of the animals. “My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister,” she told The New York Times.

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But like her sister, Lee was considered a classic beauty and named debutante of the year by the Hearst newspaper chain when she “came out” in 1950, the year of her Miss Porter’s graduation. She enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College north of New York City but, professing a strong dislike for academics, left after her sophomore year to study art in Italy.

She and Jacqueline spent the summer of 1951 touring Europe, a trip that they turned into a book with illustrations by her older sister – One Special Summer (1974).

Lee wrote a second memoir, in 2001, called Happy Times, but her glamorous life was also marred by failed relationships and personal tragedy. Her first marriage, to Michael Canfield, son of the eminent book publishing executive Cass Canfield, collapsed, in part, because of his heavy drinking and her burgeoning relationship with Stanislas Radziwill; they wed in 1959 and divorced in 1974.

Her planned wedding to San Francisco hotelier and bon vivant Newton Cope was called off at the last minute, reportedly over differences involving a prenuptial agreement.

In 1988, she married film director and choreographer Herbert Ross. They divorced in 2001, shortly before his death.

She had two children with Prince Radziwill. Their son, Emmy Award-winning TV news producer Anthony Radziwill, died of a rare form of cancer in 1999 just weeks after her nephew, John F Kennedy Jr, to whom she was close, died in a plane crash. Survivors include a daughter, Anna Christina “Tina” Radziwill.

“I’ve been far more successful than I ever imagined,” she once said. “I’m nobody’s kid sister.”

Caroline Lee Radizwill, Princess Radziwill, born 3 March 1933, died 15 February 2019

© Washington Post