In 1962, Truman Capote sat down with Lee Radziwill for an intimate chat over lunch in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. Since coming from a small town in Alabama decades earlier, the diminutive gay author had carved out a unique spot in New York society: a scathingly sharp, always entertaining guest whose charm opened the doors to the most exclusive circles . . . and whose eyes and ears were always open and observing what he saw there. He liked nothing better than boring into a person’s life and exploring their most private secrets.
Lee had never talked with Truman like this before, and she had every reason to be suspicious. Her older sister, Jackie, was the overwhelmingly popular First Lady, an iconic figure who was changing the way Americans thought about dress, décor, and culture. If Jackie had been lunching with them, there would probably have been a crowd in the street and a frisson of excitement inside this privileged sanctuary.
Lee had a gilded lifestyle. She was married to Stanislaw Radziwill, a Polish prince who had left his native land, and she lived in two grand homes in England—and later a major apartment in Manhattan too. With her sister in the White House, she had to be careful how she acted, what she said, and to whom she said it. She must have known that Truman was an infamous gossip.
It was a measure of the emotional pain Lee was suffering that, despite Truman’s reputation, she told him the most painful secret of her life: she was wildly jealous of Jackie. It was natural that Lee would be somewhat covetous of a sister who was the First Lady and the most admired woman in the world, but her feelings went far beyond an understandable or controllable emotion. She was consumed with jealousy. It was all she could think about, all she could talk about. Her sister had done nothing wrong, but that did not matter. Jackie had transcended Lee in a manner that, in Lee’s eyes, was destroying her life. She had what almost anyone would say was everything—more than everything—yet she was so dissatisfied, so empty, so lost.
After the lunch, Truman did what Lee should have expected him to do. He wrote his friend Cecil Beaton and told him all about it: “Had lunch one day with a new friend Princess Lee (My God, how jealous she is of Jackie: I never knew); understand her marriage is all but finito.”
With her splendid homes, her son, Anthony, born four and a half months after the marriage, her daughter, Anna Christina, or Tina, born three months premature in 1960, and her loving husband, Lee had a seemingly picture-perfect life. But she had grown tired of Stas and, starting in 1961, she began spending more time in the United States.
There is a clause in the U.S. Constitution banning inherited titles. Yet Americans are obsessed with royalty, even when the pedigree behind them is shaky at best. Stas had given up his title when he fled Poland, but as Lee moved around New York City and Washington, D.C., she was known as “Princess Radziwill.” Even The New York Times bought into it. In November 1961, America’s paper of record did a story on Lee headlined “Princess Lee Radziwill Adds Charm to Any Setting.” The story referred to her as a princess again and again, and in that way, it was a pure delight. But the story was there for only one reason: Lee’s brother-in-law was now president of the United States and her sister was First Lady.
Lee loved attention and publicity that sanctified her worth, but for the rest of her life, Jackie would always be lurking there somewhere. During a dinner party at Buckingham Palace that Queen Elizabeth gave for the President and Mrs. Kennedy, Prince Philip said to Lee, “You’re just like me—you have to walk three steps behind.”
Lee’s marriage to Stas had been like Fourth of July fireworks, flashes in the night and then nothing but darkness. Painfully, it had turned out that Stas was not the prince charming of Lee’s childhood dreams, but rather an aging, quirky man who took far more than he gave. Although Lee still bore his name, she had moved on and found a new lover, Aristotle Onassis — a man with animal vitality and a great fortune. Not so much self-educated as uneducated, there was a raw immediacy to the man that was exciting and dangerous.
When Aristotle wanted a woman, he showered her with his attention … and he wanted Lee. The shipping magnate had a long-term relationship with the opera singer Maria Callas, but that did not prevent Lee from going off on Onassis’s magnificent 325-foot yacht, the Christina. The shipping magnate had the barstools made of the scrotums of whales, but the bar was not the only place on the ship where sexual games were played. Stas was understanding. Having little choice, he took some measure of solace in the steady downing of vodka and his own affairs.
Jackie, meanwhile, was having a terrible time getting over the death of her newborn son Patrick, who had died in August 1963. That October, in a genuinely benevolent gesture to her bereaved sister, Lee asked Ari to invite the First Lady to join them on the Christina.
But as soon as Jackie walked up the gangplank, Lee knew she had made a horrendous mistake.
Ari was mesmerized by Jackie and could not keep away from her. He was so taken with Jackie that it was as if Lee no longer existed. Lee had never faced such an immediate and painful comparison to her sister, and her nightmare of a life lived as Jackie’s coat holder returned in vivid form.
Ari made little attempt to hide his feelings toward Jackie, and this was compounded by the gifts he gave the sisters when they left the yacht. Jackie received an exquisite necklace of diamonds and rubies. Ari gave Lee three bracelets so dinky that she believed even Jackie’s five-year-old daughter, Caroline, wouldn’t have worn them to her own birthday party.
Lee flew back to Washington a month later to aid and comfort Jackie once again, after the horrific assassination of President Kennedy. As bereft as she was, Jackie was not going to wear widow’s weeds all her life, and she moved with her two children to New York to start a new life. Lee needed something new in her life too, and in 1964, she and Stas also purchased an apartment in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Eighth Street, near the Metropolitan Museum, nine blocks south of her sister’s apartment. Lee took the large bedroom as her own and shuttled her husband off into the antechamber, no bigger than a maid’s room
Lee had creative instincts that she never seemed able to focus into a sustained career or expertise. She dressed well and lived well, but she didn’t have the self-control to channel her talents in any tangible way. In New York, she started writing about fashion for women’s magazine, but the disciplined routine of a magazine writer was not for her, and she soon sought other diversions that her friend Truman was happy to provide.
Truman and Lee had a special kinship. Whatever Lee did, wherever she went, she felt she was second best, always standing in the gigantic shadow of her older sister. As for Truman, as a gay man he felt that when he went into the salons of the powerful and elegant, he could always be spurned, no matter how successful he was as a writer. That was the shadow that hung over him. With each other, they felt strangely secure in their perceived second-best status.
Back in London in June of 1968, Lee was so upset to hear that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, she could not even drive straight and crashed into another vehicle. Her sister was even more devastated, fearing that America had turned into a land of uncontrolled violence where if your name was Kennedy, you were not safe.
There was only one reasonable solution: Jackie had to get out. She soon found an escape plan: Aristotle Onassis.
That autumn, a distraught Lee called Truman. She had just heard what she considered a betrayal beyond imagination. Jackie had agreed to marry Ari. The Greek shipping magnate should have been hers. He had been hers … until Jackie stole him from under her nose. As far as Lee was concerned, for her sister, it was nothing but a business deal.
“How could she do this to me!” Lee screamed to Truman on the phone. “How could she! How could this happen!” Despite her rage and inner turmoil, to the rest of the world Lee displayed only sisterly devotion and delight in Jackie’s soon-to-be husband.
In the summer of 1971, Lee visited Jackie on Ari’s island of Skorpios. There Jackie introduced her sister to Peter Beard, who was spending most of his summer on the island. The Yale graduate was a wildlife photographer and conservationist. In 1965, he had published The End of the Game, a book of text and photos documenting the destruction of African wildlife and wilderness.
When Beard needed money, the photographer returned from his life in the African bush to shoot models for money, enjoying their pleasures as he did. He dressed in a disheveled, slovenly, sixties-chic that worked only if you were as stunningly handsome as Peter.
Stas had gone off on safari with Peter and considered him a friend, but that was no matter to Lee and Peter, who began an affair on the island. Lee might have asked herself that if her new lover would betray his friendship with her husband so easily, would he not just as easily betray her? But that was not a question to be broached in the throes of passion with a man almost five years younger than thirty-eight-year-old Lee.
Stas had tried to play the sophisticated husband understanding of his wife’s dalliances. Maybe he didn’t know what was going on each night in Peter’s bedroom in the villa near his, but he knew his wife was dismissing him. The pain was there, and his drinking grew worse.
Obsessed with Peter, Lee arranged it so she and Stas could go on an African safari, where she snuck off to have her ecstatic moments with her lover. Then Lee invited Peter to come and stay with her and Stas in London and join them on a Caribbean vacation. Fifty-seven-year-old Stas accepted his diminished circumstances. At his age, he had no grand vision for the future except hanging on to the remnants of his marriage. But Lee had a dream, and that was to divorce Stas and start a new life in America with Peter beside her. She would keep the name “princess.”
Lee still harbored dreams of a life in the arts, and her proximity to “real” artists like Peter and Truman was a source of both inspiration and, often, envy. “My deep regret is that I wasn’t brought up or educated to have a métier,” Lee told Interview. “I am mainly interested in the arts, but because of my kind of education, my interests were never channeled in any particular field until it was too late to make use of them except in a dilettante way.”
Lee seemed not to realize that there are few things less appealing than listening to the whining rich. Her life of privilege had given her almost everything. She’d dropped out of college because she did not have the focus and discipline to follow through and found it boring. That was the pattern of her life, never doing the hard work required in almost anything of consequence, and then moving on when things got difficult.
While trying to sound candid, Lee was not about to tell Andy Warhol’s magazine or any other journalist what truly bothered her. She had tolerated Peter’s other lovers, but he had moved on from her for good to a young model. She had loved the photographer. The affair had been the most daring act in her life, and it was painful to be a cast-aside forty-year-old woman.
“It was the first time that anybody had ever dumped her, because she had always done the dumping, and she was really devastated by it,” said Truman.
Lee had other problems. Jackie had divorced Ari, returning to New York a rich divorcée with a fortune that dwarfed what Lee had. If that was not difficult enough to face, Jackie took an editor’s position at Viking Press without telling her. Maybe that was not as outrageous as Jackie marrying Ari, but it came close, and Lee was infuriated. Jackie had the money, the artistic career, and the cultural cachet that Lee longed for. And what did Lee have but unfulfilled dreams.
Then there was another problem with Jackie that Lee could hardly talk about. Lee’s daughter, Tina, was insecure about her weight, and her thin, elegant mother made the teenager feel even worse. Although Lee loved her two children, she was far from a profoundly concerned, hands-on mother, and Tina had reached the point where she could hardly tolerate being around Lee. She loved her aunt Jackie, who was so much more understanding. Tina packed up and moved a few blocks north to live with Jackie.
At all the parties Lee attended, she always seemed to have a drink in her hand — vodka, preferably. It was perfect. Nobody smelled the liquor on Lee’s breath. She never slurred her words or wobbled across a restaurant floor. She was as impeccably dressed and well-mannered as ever, but vodka had become her closest friend.
She was, after all, used to disguising things.
Knowing how much Lee loved publicity, Truman gave her the greatest gift he could: a one-page celebration in Vogue in June 1976. He called it “Lee: A Fan Letter from Truman Capote,” and it was a sea of hyperbole. There was one assertion after another about how great Lee was with her “first-class intelligence,” her “beautiful eyes wide-apart, gold-brown like a glass of brandy resting on a table in front of a firelight.” That was heavy-duty work for a jigger of brandy.
Truman was not through giving. Later that year, in a cover story on Lee in People, he gave a gushy tribute that opened the piece: “She’s a remarkable girl. She’s all the things people give Jackie credit for. All the looks, style, taste—Jackie never had them at all, and yet it was Lee who lived in the shadow of this super-something person.” It was not enough to praise Lee. Jackie must be denigrated. The sisters were on a teeter-totter. If one rose up, the other must go down.
However she tried, Lee could not jettison Jackie. She was tied to her sister forever. When sixty-four-year-old Jackie died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in May 1994, she left nothing, not even a vase or a rug, to Lee. It was the purest statement possible of what Jackie thought of her sister.
From CAPOTE’S WOMEN: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer with permission from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Laurence Leamer.
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