Latest News

While she has long captivated the public as one of Truman Capote's swans, the sister of Jackie Kennedy and a European princess, with romantic liaisons from Peter Beard to Aristotle Onassis, not one of those labels begins to capture the true woman. The inimitable Radziwill — direct, free spirited and true to her own ideals — offers a rare, personal glimpse into her remarkable world.
"Oo—h. You're here already!" The voice, lively, with its unmistakable husky drop, comes in to the living room. I turn from the balcony that looks out onto the Avenue Montaigne.
"Oo—h" — again, that low last note — "how did you get here so quickly?"
Framed in the evening light, between double doors, is a figure slight as swan's-down, a silhouette in dark, skinny Armani pants and a silk T-shirt. The hair, cut for over half a century by the experts on two, at least, continents, is now a sleek chignon, blond, perhaps, with the light around it, darker as she moves toward me. I explain that the Eurostar now has a service where you order a taxi on the train and, hey, presto! At the Gare du Nord, there is a driver, bearing your name.
"Really? I didn't know that. I must go to London more often. I know, I should, but I am so, so happy in this apartment . . . if I can wade though the scores of Japanese kids fighting their way into Chanel."
The haunting voice and the almost ethereal figure are Lee Radziwill's, and they have been a lifelong part of her enduring identity. But those characteristics are not nearly the whole picture. I am confronted by a subtly strong presence and personality, part wreathed in the glamour of the past, part intensely modern in outlook and awareness. Not for her any all-too-easy reminiscences of "those days." She is, quite clearly, herself.
Video: Lee Radziwill by Sofia Coppola
The filmmaker captured an intimate conversation with T's cover subject, Lee Radziwill, in her New York City apartment. On camera, Radziwill recalls going on tour with the Rolling Stones and Truman Capote, a splendid summer spent with Peter Beard at Andy Warhol's house in Montauk, N.Y., and a childhood so lonely she tried to adopt an orphan.
In a world of passing celebrity, Lee Radziwill, 79, possesses a timeless aura that radiates nowness. Her bang up-to-date personal style, her laid-back — to say pared down would be to demean its ordered luxury — apartment in Paris ("the favorite of any home I've ever had"), in this, her favored city, shows how subtly she has lived, lives now, without the attendant glare of past pomp and present self-glorification that others crave. She is utterly content, and it shows. What she is not is casual. She regulates her life by standards inbuilt by experience, by nurturing her friendships, by staying true, by her irony, by her humor — all qualities that show she is the real deal. That past sorrows and joys have merged into an elegance that permeates her presence, that "something in the air" that indicates class and courage and composure. Though she now rigorously guards her privacy, her free spirit surfaces easily, and her thoughts come crystal clear. A figure of her time, our history, Lee is her own harbinger for an iconic future. Ours, and hers.
One sees why Lee is happy. The apartment, just high up enough to encompass most of the most famous Parisian landmarks, low enough to allow her to sometimes use the stairs to walk Zinnia, a wriggling bundle of snow-white fur, is tailor-made for her lifestyle. The living room, a symphony of light and white and the deep pink of falling rose petals. Around the fireplace, a banquette and armless chairs, covered with crisp white linen printed with tumbling Asian figures ("they go everywhere with me, every house, my apartment in New York, my little men") and against the far wall, a sofa of luscious rose silk, thick and ribbed, its back a relaxed baroque scroll. The art on the walls is mostly contemporary, mostly monochrome, most signed, all highly personal. The flowers, two low glass cylinders, a massed spectrum of pinks and reds ("the man who does them for Dior brings them") fill the Parisian dusk with their heady scent.
"Come sit," Lee says, folding her legs into the sofa's cushioned recesses. "Some vodka?" "Sure!" Over her shoulder to an unseen presence, "Seulement de l'eau plate pour moi." Near her is a photograph, recently discovered, sent to her: Lee in a column of brilliant red taffeta couture, at the height of her astonishing beauty. She has no recollection of where it was taken or when.
"Were you always aware of your beauty?"
"From the word go," she answers simply and honestly. "But no one else was, then. My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn't a patch on my sister. It wasn't much fun growing up with her and her almost irrational social climbing in that huge house of my dull stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss in Washington. I longed to be back in East Hampton, running along the beaches, through the dunes and the miles of potato fields my father's family had owned. And even in summer, when we'd go to to Hammersmith Farm . . . the Auchincloss place in Newport, a house more Victorian or stranger you can't imagine . . . it wasn't much better. Well, at least there was the ocean, but naturally my sister claimed the room overlooking Narragansett Bay, where all the boats passed out. All I could see from my window was the cows named Caroline and Jacqueline. (My real first name is Caroline.) Oh, I longed to go back, to be with my father. He was a wonderful man, you'd have loved him. He had such funny idiosyncrasies, like always wearing his black patent evening shoes with his swimming trunks. One thing which infuriates me is how he's always labeled the drunk black prince. He was never drunk with me, though I'm sure he sometimes drank, due to my mother's constant nagging. You would, and I would. The only time I ever saw him really drunk was at Jackie's wedding. He was to give her away, but my mother refused to let him come to the family dinner the night before. So he went to his hotel and drank from misery and loneliness. It was clear in the morning that he was in no state to do anything, and I remember my mother screaming with joy, 'Hughdie, Hughdie, now you can give Jackie away.' During the wedding party I had to get him onto a plane back to New York. Accompanied by my first husband, also drunk. It was a nightmare.
"But we were talking about the Hamptons. It was so empty then, houses miles apart. We lived fairly near my aunt Edie Beale and I'd play with her daughter, Little Edie, even though she was quite a bit older. Grey Gardens was a beautiful house, but I lost touch when I married and lived in England. Later, I had my own house in East Hampton, and went to visit them, with Peter Beard. My God, you should have seen the place! And them! But they were sweet and funny and happily living in their own world. The original idea for the film was about my return to East Hampton after 30 years and to have my aunt Edith narrate my nostalgia and hers. So we phoned the Maysles brothers. Initially the Edies were against it, but the Maysles charmed them as they only worked with 16-millimeter cameras, and were finally allowed in. . . . The remake is good. Have you seen it? . . . Listen, I booked a table at Voltaire. We should leave at . . . what? . . . 8:15. Is that O.K.?"
The taxi swings into the Place de la Concorde. "You know, Paris — well, at least this part of it — has hardly changed since Jackie and I first came here in 1951. We were so young! It was the first time we felt really close, carefree together, high on the sheer joy of getting away from our mother; the deadly dinner parties of political bores, the Sunday lunches for the same people that lasted hours, Jackie and I not allowed to say a word. Not that we wanted to, except to a lovely man called James Forrestal, our secretary of defense, who had a bit of the culture we craved. Jackie's dream was France, but mine was really art and Italy, as that was all I cared about through school. My history of art teacher, who saved my life at Farmington, was obsessed with Bernard Berenson and I succumbed as well. My first discovery of him was when we were taken to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, better known then as Fenway Court. Berenson had chosen all the most important paintings Isabella should buy. I had another life open.
"I wrote to Berenson at I Tatti, several letters; then out of the blue he replied, asking me to come and see him if I ever came to Italy. Well, that was it. I thought of nothing else. So after we were here, I went to Florence. Florence and Berenson and I Tatti! Imagine! Any artistic intellect I possess is due to that time. He took me under his wing, read to me, encouraged me to write. In fact he published a letter I wrote him. That was my proudest moment. I went back to I Tatti last summer. Though there was no B.B., and no Nicky Mariano, the atmosphere is still the same, though now there are maybe a hundred people there, great scholars-to-be of Renaissance art studying, learning, in those almost monklike surroundings, eating at a beautiful long oak table. He was one of the most fascinating men I ever knew."
The doorman opens the taxi door. "Bonsoir, Princesse." We go inside.

"Madame!"
"Madame la Princesse!"
"Princesse Radziwill, je suis ravi de vous voir!"
This fabulous ancien régime politeness to Lee, who has booked the table, and the taxi, and my hotel room, as Mme. Radziwill. One sees why she likes Paris.
"Believe me, when I used to come here with Nureyev or Lenny Bernstein, there was none of that. I was a pimple beside their stature and genius. When I was young, I used to think that everyone should die at 70 . . . but my closest friends, like Rudolf and Andy [Warhol] and to an extent Capote, let alone most of my close family . . . didn't even reach that age. There is something to be said for being older, and memories. How could I ever forget Rudolf's funeral, here, at the Opera . . . the whole place swathed with deep red roses, and draped in black, as well as the dancers and les petits rats descending the stairs. I've seen some extraordinary funerals in my life, Jack's of course. That had a different kind of sadness, a bleak, brutal, tragic end to hopes for a greater future and the buoyant few years of his presidency . . . the opening up of the White House to artists and musicians; I can't deny those few years were glamorous, being on the presidential yacht for the America's Cup races, the parties with the White House en fête. It was so ravishing. People think it was decorated by Sister Parish . . . well, a bit was . . . but really it was Stéphane Boudin of Jansen, who Jackie had met here in Paris; and, as well, Jack's charismatic charm and enthusiasm for life. I remember the first time Jackie asked Jack to Merrywood, to pick her up for some dinner. You couldn't mention the word 'Democrat' in my stepfather's house or even presence — nor in my father's for that matter — and I felt Jack was in for a rough ride. But he was a senator, so he already had a kind of authority as well as a dazzling personality. He won them over pretty quickly.
"My life could certainly have been different. Not so much because Jackie married a Kennedy, but because he became president. If he'd lost the election, I'd have probably spent most of my life in England with Stas, whom I adored, as did anyone who knew him, and our children, Anthony and Tina. We had this divine house on Buckingham Place behind the palace, and the prettiest country place in Oxfordshire . . . Turville Grange . . . that Mongiardino decorated. He glued the walls of the dining room with Sicilian scarves, and asked Lila di Nobili to paint each child with their favorite animals crisscrossed by bands of flowers. It was enchanting. Sadly Lila lacquered over them, so I couldn't take them when we left. To me, that's the essence of great design. It was a perfect Turgenev room . . . something simple and original that stays in the mind forever. Like I Tatti, and Nancy Lancaster's Ditchley Park. Or Peter Beard's house in Montauk. But I wasn't always so pure in my taste. As a child, the person I admired most in the world was Lana Turner! She seemed the epitome of glamour, and her glitzy surroundings so enviable, the opposite of my mother's extremely banal taste. And of course no one had as much taste as Rudolf, vast 19th-century paintings of naked men on glowing velvet walls, Russian-Oriental fabrics and furs, all on a huge scale. He was so impressed with what Mongiardino did for me that he took him for himself and some of his ballets.
"We weren't taught anything like that as children. In fact, my childhood taught me nothing . . . zero. I never saw a play with my mother until I was 14 and then it was 'Hansel and Gretel.' My father, naturally, spoiled me when I was allowed to see him — flying to New York from Washington, alone, in those terrifying planes. He'd take me to Danny Kaye movies and rent a dog for me to walk in the park on Sunday — a different dog every Sunday — and then to have butterscotch sundaes with almonds at Schrafft's. My mother simply had me, sticking me with a series of horrible governesses. There was one particular beast called Aggie, who I remember well. I hadn't a clue how to be a parent myself, and I expect I put Tina and Anthony through tough times. I find it hard to read people's minds, my own children's minds even harder. But it all worked out and I was blessed with two wonderful children. Anthony and I were wonderfully close in the years before he died, and my daughter, Tina, who leads the most original life, is coming to stay with me in Italy soon for four weeks. . . . I say, it's awfully late, you must be exhausted and I know I am."
It's late in the evening and the apartment is dark now, with only a pool of silvery-pink light on the sofa as Lee walks me to the door, Zinnia bouncing between our feet.
"No, Zinny! Tomorrow!! And you, too, tomorrow . . . let's have breakfast at L'Avenue in the sunshine. Good night!" The door gently shuts, the elevator opens. All so easy, so civilized.
One can see why she likes Paris.
Half awake, I lie collecting thoughts, the bare facts, of the near-legend I have just left . . . Caroline Lee Bouvier . . . born in 1933 to John V. Bouvier III and Janet Lee, four years after her sister Jacqueline. Becomes stepdaughter of Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr.
Married:
1) 1953, Michael Canfield.
2) 1959, Prince Stanislas "Stas" Radziwill; two children, Anthony and Christina ("Tina").
3) 1988, Herbert Ross, film director.
Lives in the United States and France.
The lesser-known facts are the fodder of tabloids. Her duplicitous treatment by the whims of Aristotle Onassis. Her great friend Truman Capote, insisting Lee should act, adapts "Laura" as a vehicle for her, but stage fright prevents her from pursuing a theatrical career. Her romances with the most attractive men of the time — the photographer Peter Beard and Richard Meier, the architect, possibly even Mick Jagger, among them. The last-minute calling off of her wedding to the San Francisco hotelier Newton Cope. Unfulfilling years, exacerbated by her sister's escalating ill health, their difficult relationship and a certain amount of friction with her children, led Lee to bouts of deep depression and occasional dips into alcoholism, both bravely, the latter publicly, divulged and eradicated. Indeed, so much so that she was able to cope, resiliently, with the death of her nephew John F. Kennedy Jr., to whom she was extremely close, followed, shockingly soon after, by that of her son, Anthony, from a rare form of cancer.
These tragedies, compounded by earlier, unforgettably tragic memories, convinced Lee to make, if not a new life, a different one: one where the press is gentler; where her past, good or infamous, is not daily revisited; and where she can be surrounded by so many of the things she grew up with and learned to love about Europe. In 1974 she and Jackie published "One Special Summer," a memoir of their European trip, written originally as a gift to their parents, and in 2001 Lee wrote a second memoir, "Happy Times," published by her friends, the Assoulines. It's an engaging picture of some of the most glorious moments in her vivid life. She says the best part was being hands-on in its production, discussing the layout, the typefaces, selecting photographs from among myriad images.
We meet, as she said we would, in the sunshine, at the chic cafe spitting distance from her building. Chairs are arranged for her, water, espresso and an ashtray brought without a word said.
"Well?" she says, "what's next?"
"Tell me about your marriages."
"Oh." Short now, taken aback, no low note and a long pause. "O.K., where shall we start?" I say, "The first?" Another pause. "Michael Canfield? O.K. . . . I was very young when we met, and he was so good-looking and clever. I wanted so badly to get away from my mother, and he seemed to offer everything . . . looks, privilege, friends, fun. His father was chairman of Harper & Brothers, so he led a very literary life and was a brilliant editor. I was deliriously happy for a while, moving to London, our house in Chester Square . . . but . . . he drank seriously. He was very fragile. One day I couldn't open the front door, he was slumped, out cold, inside. He tried to stop, but nothing worked for any time. He said I was so in tune with life and he wasn't any longer. And besides, I had met Stas . . . Stas was divorcing at the time, and we fell in love and eventually we married. . . . Those were glorious years. Being married to Stas was certainly the happiest part of my life, so he must have been the love of my life: there were other infatuations, other loves even, but never the joy or knowledge of life and living that I experienced with Stas. . . . Jack and my sister would come over, staying in Buckingham Place rather than the embassy, and I'd be included in all the great events, dinners at Buckingham Palace, you know. And the trip to India. The best part of that was meeting
Nehru, he was seductive, mentally rather than physically, not unlike Berenson, and so beautiful, and with the most exquisite soft golden skin. We stayed in his house and he showed us to our rooms every night, showing us the books we should read, which made one feel completely at home.
"Stas and I went to Washington often . . . and then. . . ." Her voice trails off as she stares into the sun, perhaps considering the end of her marriage to Stas. "More coffee? Well, there was Jack's death and . . . and . . . Ari. Listen, I think the world knows more about all that than I do. He was dynamic, irrational, cruel I suppose, but fascinating. He also had the most beautiful skin, and smelled wonderful. Naturally, I mean. Fascinating . . . as my sister discovered!"
"And Herbert Ross?"
"Oh no, do we have to talk about that? O.K., he was certainly different from anybody else I'd been involved with, and the film world sounded exciting. Well, it wasn't. I hated Hollywood, and the provincialism of the industry. . . . Herbert had been married to the ballerina Nora Kaye until she died, and unbeknownst to me was still obsessed by her. It was 'Nora said this, Nora did it like that, Nora liked brown and orange.' . . . If anybody even breathed her name, Herbert would burst into tears. I had to clench my fists every time and was deeply hurt as I thought I had created a wonderful life for him. Thank God we never really settled in Los Angeles. My New York was difficult for Herbert, so we parted. . . . Now, no more on husbands!"
"Then let's go back to the president's assassination," I say. "Do you remember where you were?"
Lee pauses. "As if yesterday. It was in the evening, in London. Stas came running up the stairs, his voice and face in shock. I started crying . . . uncontrollably. For hours. Finally he said, 'Lee, you have to get ahold of yourself, and I stopped, suddenly. It was the last time I have ever cried. I've never cried since, never. Anthony's death was equally soul destroying, but with an illness it's so distressing . . . coupled with his bravery throughout it. I could only cry inner tears. When he died, I was already cried out. And I certainly wouldn't cry about myself, or my life. In some funny way I'm lucky that there was so much more interest in my sister. Which, of course, I understand. I enjoy reading about real celebrities even now, and Jackie certainly qualified in that league. Of course, when you are closely related to someone so in the public eye, you tend to think the interest is dumb or trivial because you know the person, and the truth. But I certainly understand people's fascination. After all, as the young wife of the youngest elected president, she was fascinating.
"As to that interest in her spilling over into my life? Well, at times it was annoying, at times funny. Perhaps the most depressing part was that whatever I did, or tried to do, got disproportionate coverage purely because of Jackie being my sister. But you learn to deal with the scrutiny, even the lies, as long as it's not malicious.
"Regrets? I think everyone has regrets, and people who say they haven't are either liars . . . or narcissists. There have been many things in my life to have regrets about, in the sense I wish I could have changed them, or somehow made them not happen. What I don't have is envy. I'm perfectly content at this time of my life. I've done so many fascinating things and the greatest joy is that I continue to do interesting things and meet fascinating people. Working for Diana Vreeland at Harper's Bazaar was a great learning curve. Working in P.R. for Giorgio Armani taught me a lot about that particular — I almost said 'peculiar' — industry. And I met my dearest friend, Hamilton South, while there.
"Really, the most fulfilling roles have been my friendships — Berenson, Nureyev, Peter, even Andy Warhol because he was so wildly different — then, and now Bernard-Henri Lévy and his wife, Arielle Dombasle, and Giambattista Valli, and Diego Della Valle, who are all angelic to me.
"Am I melancholy by nature? Less so, now, and I certainly don't bounce out to parties and talk all night. One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically. Every day one is confronted by words and visions of human misery. You would have to have a heart of ice not to be a bit melancholy. I've been happy, and am happy now. My life has been exciting, active, changeable. At my age, one is lucky to have old friends, and, fortunately, most of them, like me, can't seriously work a computer and the phone is our link. So I'm not lonely. I have this apartment, this view, my bursting-with-light New York apartment . . . yes, and you, Zinny . . . this 'douceur de vivre,' this city."