Lee Radziwill (born Caroline Lee Bouvier; 3 March 1933 – 15 February 2019)

The Bouvier family lived in a twelve-room duplex apartment at 740 Park Avenue in Manhattan and spent summers at Lasata, their country estate in East Hampton. Lee adored her father but recognized early that he favored Jacqueline. Lee later said she did not resent it, understanding that Jacqueline had been named after him and looked almost exactly like him.

As a child, Lee was light-haired, mischievous, and adventurous. At the age of seven, she took her dog and started across the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to run away from home. She did not get far. She later explained that it was rather difficult to run away in her mother's high heels.

The Bouvier marriage was strained by John Bouvier's alcoholism and extramarital affairs. Her parents separated in 1936 and divorced in 1940. Her mother then married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., an American oil heir, and the family moved to his Merrywood estate in McLean, Virginia. Lee and Jacqueline felt like little orphans entering their stepfather's established family. Their father's financial decline left both sisters with a lifelong awareness of the need for financial security.

Lee attended the Chapin School in New York City, the Potomac School in Washington, and Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. Teachers praised her creativity, though her academic record was overshadowed by Jacqueline's. Lee was a skilled equestrian and had a lifelong fascination with art history, particularly Renaissance art.

In August 1947, at Jacqueline's coming-out party at the Newport clambake club, Lee wore a daring pink strapless dress with rhinestones sprinkled across it. She was fourteen years old. Jacqueline later borrowed the dress for another debutante party.

In 1950, at the age of seventeen, Lee had her own coming-out party as a debutante. She was widely regarded as the leading debutante of her season in New York. A full-page photograph of her in her debutante gown appeared in Life magazine. She briefly worked as an assistant to Diana Vreeland, the American fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, an experience that sparked a lasting passion for fashion.

In the summer of 1951, eighteen-year-old Lee traveled to Europe with Jacqueline, who served as her chaperone. The trip was Lee's graduation present and also a consolation for Jacqueline, who had to turn down a prize at Vogue magazine. 

The sisters traveled in a Hillman Minx, kept a journal illustrated with drawings and poems, and visited the American art historian Bernard Berenson at his Florentine villa, I Tatti. Lee later said she felt as though she had met God. 

Looking at photographs from the trip years later, Lee remarked that she and her sister Jacqueline looked like two criminals arriving off the boat and wondered how any country had let them in.

After returning from Europe, Lee enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College but dropped out after three terms. She pursued art studies in Italy, but not for long. On 18 April 1953, she married Michael Temple Canfield. 

Canfield was a tall, blond, shy American publishing executive. Lee had known and dated him since she was fifteen. She said she married young because she could not wait to be on her own.

The couple moved to London, where Canfield worked as special assistant to the American ambassador Winthrop Williams Aldrich. The marriage was not particularly happy. 

Canfield was a heavy drinker, and the couple was unsuccessful in their attempts to conceive. 

Then Lee had an affair with Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, a Polish aristocrat who had escaped to London after World War II and made his fortune in real estate. He was known as Stas. 

Stas was twenty years older than Lee, big-hearted, larger than life, and sometimes imperious. Lee's marriage to Canfield ended in divorce in 1958. On 19 March 1959, she married Prince Stanisław Radziwiłł. A few years later, in 1962, the Catholic Church declared her marriage to Canfield annulled.

Through Stas Radziwiłł, Lee entered a much grander world. The couple lived at 4 Buckingham Place near Buckingham Palace and at Turville Grange, a seventeenth-century bakehouse in Buckinghamshire with roughly fifty acres of gardens and stables.

Lee worked with the Italian stage designer Lorenzo Mongiardino to transform both residences into showplaces. Their properties were greatly admired and frequently photographed by the British photographer Cecil Beaton and the German-born American photographer Horst P. Horst.

Lee's interiors were dramatic and personal. At her later duplex at 969 Fifth Avenue, she chose cherry-red velvet for the living room and hung a painting by the British painter Francis Bacon in the hall library. The Bacon had been acquired by Stas after covering the artist's gambling debts. 

Their first child, Prince Anthony Stanisław Albert Radziwiłł, was born less than a year after the wedding. Their daughter, Princess Anna Christina Radziwiłł, known as Tina, was born prematurely in August 1960. Her birth had been precarious, and Lee and Stas missed the inauguration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in January 1961 because of it.

Lee's sister Jacqueline became First Lady at the age of thirty-one. The two and a half years of the Kennedy White House brought the sisters closer. 

Jacqueline relied on Lee because she was overwhelmed by her new status and responsibilities. Lee later said that apart from mutual affection, their strongest bond was a shared sense of humor. Lee and Stas frequently visited the White House, where Lee occupied the Queen's Bedroom and Stas occupied the Lincoln Bedroom.

Those who knew both sisters often considered Lee the more stylish. Her taste was more daring and more European than Jacqueline's. 

The American fashion editor André Leon Talley said Lee was the first of the sisters to be dressed in a Paris couture house. Lee wore Courrèges and smuggled Givenchy dresses into the White House because President Kennedy wanted Jacqueline to wear only American designers. For Jacqueline's 1961 trip to Paris. It was Lee who helped her sister select the Givenchy wardrobe. 

At a White House dinner dance hosted for the Radziwills, Lee wore red brocade and nearly upstaged Jacqueline, who wore a white sheath gown. Cecil Beaton wrote that Jacqueline was the most photographed woman in the world but acknowledged Lee as infinitely more beautiful.

In March 1962, Lee accompanied Jacqueline on a month-long goodwill trip via Italy to South Asia including India and Pakistan. In New Delhi, more than one hundred thousand people lined the road shouting "Long live Mrs. Kennedy." Lee sat silently beside her sister. During a ceremonial camel ride, both sisters perched sidesaddle in sleeveless summer dresses, pearls, and high heels. Lee's shoe fell off and was lost.

Lee met the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis through Stas, who was then a director of Olympic Airways. Tabloids speculated about an affair. 

President Kennedy's brother Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy viewed the relationship as a betrayal of the whole family. He tried to draw Lee away, and asked her to accompany President Kennedy on a European tour in June and July of 1963, because Jacqueline was then seven months pregnant and did not want to risk travel after a previous miscarriage. But the child, born Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died on 7 August 1963. 

Lee accompanied the president to Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and Ireland and stood beside him during his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin. She later called the trip the most thrilling experience of her life.

Jacqueline mourned the loss of her child, so Lee contacted Onassis and urged him to invite her sister to recuperate on his yacht, the Christina. Jacqueline accepted and traveled on an extended Aegean Sea cruise with the Radziwills. 

According to some accounts, Jacqueline went on the cruise partly to persuade Lee not to marry Onassis. At the end of the Cruise, Onassis gave Lee three diamond-studded bracelets as a parting gift, but he gave Jacqueline a magnificent diamond-and-ruby necklace. Lee wrote to Jacqueline's brother-in-law Robert Kennedy that she thought Jacqueline's rubies outshone her own bracelets.

After President Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963, Lee flew from London to Washington. She accompanied the president's body to the Capitol and participated in the memorial services at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and Arlington National Cemetery. 

Lee remained composed until Air Force One flew overhead and dipped its wing in homage, at which point she broke down in tears. That night she left a note on Jacqueline's pillow: "Good night my darling Jacks, the bravest and noblest of all. L." She later told Cecil Beaton that she had gone through hell trying to help her sister.

During the 1960s, Lee attempted a career as an actress. The American writer Truman Capote, who had become one of her closest friends, recognized what he called her first-class intelligence. He said he could not think of any woman more feminine than Lee Radziwill, not even the American actress Audrey Hepburn. He had once described her eyes as gold-brown, like a glass of brandy resting on a table in front of firelight.

Capote called her one of his swans, his term for the society women who were his closest friends. He believed she would be the perfect Tracy Lord in a 1967 revival of the The Philadelphia Story, the broadway play originally created by the American playwright Philip Barry in 1939 for American actress Katharine Hepburn. 

Capote organized almost every aspect of the production. He coached Lee, calmed her nerves, and danced to favorite records on a portable phonograph during rehearsals.

The French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent designed all of Lee's costumes for the production. The American hairstylist Kenneth Battelle, professionally known as Mr. Kenneth, was flown in from New York to do her hair. The makeup artist George Masters dyed her hair blond. 

The production opened at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago in 1967. Lee insisted that the credits use her maiden name rather than Princess Radziwill. On opening night, she froze. The first scene required her to write a letter, and she could not move her hand to the end of the paper. She later said she was totally paralyzed. 

The reviews were harsh. One headline read: "Lee Lays Golden Egg." Lee said she believed the reviews had been written before the play even opened. When she appeared on the cover of Life magazine on 14 July 1967, the pull quote read: "Girls who have everything are not supposed to do anything."

Capote also wrote the adaptation for Lee's television movie Laura (television film, 1968), a remake of the 1944 film Laura, with the American producer David Susskind. The production aired on ABC in January 1968 and was fiercely criticized. 

Lee was offered other roles but did not pursue them. Stas had threatened that if she continued acting, he would never let her see the children. She later said she was doing it to be herself, her own person, in a way she had never been allowed to be, and that if one wanted fame, she could think of easier ways of getting it. She also acknowledged that she was not brought up to have a profession.

On 20 October 1968, Jacqueline married Aristotle Onassis on his private island of Skorpios. Lee had not been told of the engagement. She learned about it from Onassis himself, who begged her to come to the wedding. Lee was devastated. She called Truman Capote and asked how her sister could do this to her. Publicly, Lee said she was happy to have been at the origin of the marriage, and she did attended the Greek Orthodox ceremony on Skorpios.

In the summer of 1971, while staying with her sister Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis on his private Greek island, Lee met the American photographer Peter Beard. 

Beard was a diarist, adventurer, and wildlife advocate who was a close friend of Stas. The meeting instantly sparked a passionate, high-profile affair that effectively ended Lee's marriage to her husband Stas.

Beard moved in with Lee at her Manhattan apartment and introduced her to the circle around the American artist Andy Warhol. He also introduced her to the American documentary filmmakers Albert Maysles and David Maysles, when Lee talked about a film project she was planning about the Bouvier family.

Around 1970, Lee established an interior design firm with a handful of affluent clients. Her work was featured in Architectural Digest. The career was short-lived but reinforced her reputation for taste. She once said that taste was an emotion. 

André Leon Talley connected Lee's approach to a remark by the American fashion editor Diana Vreeland: "Elegance is refusal." Talley said Lee applied that editing principle to everything from her wardrobe to her dinner guest lists. 

American designer and artist Ralph Rucci said Lee had always been an original. He said she could put on a coat and know how to turn her shoulder and her head and her arm and hold the coat so that it was perfection.

In the spring of 1972, Lee hired the Maysles brothers to make a film about the Bouvier family in the Hamptons. She intended to use her aunt, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, as narrator. 

The Maysles brothers became fascinated by Big Edie and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Little Edie, who lived in a decaying house in East Hampton. Lee's original project was suspended. 

The brothers returned with their own funding and recorded many additional hours of footage. The resulting documentary, Grey Gardens, became widely ranked among the best documentaries ever made. Lee's role in originating the project, however, was largely omitted from the final film. Omitted footage later showed Lee cleaning the house and moving the refrigerator out of the kitchen. Jacqueline received credit for rescuing Grey Gardens. 

The film was adapted into a 2006 musical and a 2009 HBO television film. Surviving footage of Lee's 1972 visit appeared in the 2017 documentary That Summer.

Lee joined the Rolling Stones on their 1972 North American concert tour, accompanied by Peter Beard and Truman Capote. Truman Capote covered the tour for Rolling Stone magazine, and Beard supplied the photographs. Lee appeared on the cover of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and hosted the British musician Mick Jagger in Montauk.

Lee and Stas divorced in 1974. Stas was heartbroken. His fortunes had dwindled, and he had become a haunted figure. He died of a heart attack in June 1976 at the age of sixty-two, during a weekend party in Essex, England. His estate was discovered to be essentially bankrupt.

In 1979, Lee nearly married Newton Cope, a San Francisco hotelier, but he withdrew shortly before the wedding. Legend hat it that Jacqueline's lawyer had intervened to demand a financial settlement.

From 1986 to 1994, Lee worked in public relations for Giorgio Armani, organizing special events and serving as a brand ambassador. The French public relations director Mathilde Favier, of Christian Dior, described Lee as the height of elegance and a fashion visionary who was always ahead of her time.

Lee married the American film director and choreographer Herbert Ross on 23 September 1988. Ross was known for films including Footloose (film, 1984) and Steel Magnolias (film, 1989). The marriage appeared to provide Lee with security and love. Jacqueline reportedly told friends that Lee had stared into the jaws of hell and was relieved to see her settled.

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1994, Lee rushed to her side. At the funeral, she wept inconsolably.  

Jacqueline's will left substantial cash bequests and valuable mementos to family, friends, and employees, but left Lee no memento. The will stated that Jacqueline had already helped Lee during her lifetime. It established five hundred thousand dollar trust funds for Lee's children, Anthony and Tina.

Lee was named to the Vanity Fair International Best Dressed Hall of Fame in 1996. In March 2013, The Guardian listed her among the fifty best-dressed people over the age of fifty. In February 2013, she was interviewed by the American director Sofia Coppola for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Lee's son, Anthony Radziwill, died of cancer in August 1999, weeks after the death of his cousin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash on 16 July 1999.

Anthony's wife Carole Radziwill later wrote about the marriage in the book What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love (2005). She described Lee Radziwill as gracious even to her former lovers and possessing an elegant casualness that she did not think she had seen since.

Lee and Herbert Ross divorced in 2001. Ross died later that year.

In her later years, Lee maintained a Paris apartment on Avenue Montaigne and a residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. When the American Vanity Fair writer Sam Kashner visited her, she wore tan slacks and a white sweater with a high, ruffled collar, her champagne-colored hair immaculately upswept. She smoked thin cigarettes elegantly. 

Lee Radziwill died on 15 February 2019 at her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her daughter, Anna Christina Radziwill, told The New York Times that the cause was natural causes. She was eighty-five years old. She was buried at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Cemetery.

Near the end of her life, Lee said: "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." She also said: "There is something to be said for being older, and memories."