Betty Landow recalled, “Michael just shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘That’s it. I’m done with you now,’ he told Lee before taking off. Terry and I then watched Lee and Stas and wondered how long it would take before we’d hear that they were together. It was just in the air. Everyone knew it. Stas’s wife knew it, you could tell by looking at her. It was as if we were all playing a bizarre parlor game, which was, ‘Let’s act as if this thing we all know full well is about to happen is not about to happen.’”
Lee had been fascinated with Stas from the beginning and, as she and Michael began spending more time with him and Grace, she became determined to know him even better. Prince Stanisław Albrecht “Stas” Radziwiłł was from one of the wealthiest, most powerful dynasties of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Born on July 21, 1914, he was fifty-two, nineteen years Lee’s senior. Grace, whose full name was Grace Maria Kolin, was Stas’s second wife. She, too, had come from old money, her father a wealthy shipping magnate from Yugoslavia.
Hailing from Volhynia, Poland, and raised in Warsaw, Stas was one of four children born to Janusz Franciszek, Prince Radziwill, and Anna, Princess Lubomirska. After World War I, his father led the Polish Conservative Party in restored Poland. His mother (also from a Polish noble family) would eventually die in a Soviet labor camp. The former deputy governor of the province of Stanislawow, Stas was left in dire financial straits after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. With only the clothes on his back, he drove to the Swiss border and tried to find accommodations at a hotel once favored by his royal family. When it was learned that he had no money, he was turned away. He then spent months living in shelters in Switzerland before meeting a woman who had wealth of her own, Rose de Monléon. They married in 1940 and divorced five years later, but not without a little of her money becoming his own. He then married Grace Maria Kolin, in 1946.
That same year, Stas and Grace went to London in hopes of using the family’s connections there to embark on business ventures that would replenish the family’s dwindled fortune. “They really had to start over,” said their son, John Radziwill, who they had in 1947. (His full name is Jan Stanislaw Albrycht Radziwill.) “They rebuilt from zero. But my father was determined and formidable. He had a lot of charm, was amusing. People liked my father.”
“It didn’t take Stas long to begin making his own fortune in real estate after forming a partnership with property developer Felix Fenston,” explained Chauncey Parker III. “Eventually, he applied for and was afforded a British citizenship. However, in doing so, he would forfeit his right to be called a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, a title his family had carried since the sixteenth century. Still, he continued to demand that he be addressed as Prince Radziwill, even though the idea of it raised more than a few eyebrows in the UK.”
Stas was a round, short man with a large personality. His pencil-thin mustache did little to distinguish a face that was anything but handsome in the classic sense. There was something about him, though, that fascinated Lee. Part of it had to do with the aristocratic way he comported himself—“I have never seen someone with so many manners and so many good habits”—but, of course, the biggest attraction had to do with his royal background. It didn’t matter what people thought; as far as Lee was concerned, he was a true Polish nobleman with an ancient title, and he had the unquestionable pedigree to prove it, unlike Michael, who may—or may not—have been a descendant of Prince George or, maybe, the Lord of Acton.
Stas made his money by being smart on his feet and finding ways to be in the right place at the right time. He had an accent so thick one had to concentrate to understand him. While he was not articulate, he talked and talked and talked and could be completely engaging and persuasive. He had an aura about him, and Lee couldn’t take her eyes off him. It quickly became clear that there was no way Michael could compete with Stas, on any level.
By this time, the beginning of ’57, poor Michael Canfield, only thirty, was beaten down and pretty much out of the game. He was tired of trying to be someone Lee would respect and love. His cushy job was also at its end now that his boss, Winthrop Aldrich, was retiring. Michael would be able to stay on at the embassy long enough to train his replacement, the incoming ambassador’s assistant, but would then be forced to return to Harper’s. The thought of that drove him straight to the bottle.
For her part, Lee was frustrated by Michael’s basic disconnect from what she craved, which was real passion. “Women want to feel desired,” she kept telling him. He didn’t get it, though. For example, around this time the Landows were at Heathrow Airport with Michael, seeing off Lee, who was going to Paris for a week. When Lee went to kiss Michael on the lips, he turned away. She ended up brushing him on the cheek. Everyone noticed. “My God, Michael, when will you learn to kiss me like a man? Why must you insist on humiliating me?” As Michael left the airport terminal, he turned to Terrance and grumbled, “That bitch. Who would want to kiss her? Not me! Kiss like a man? Fuck her. Who does she think she is?”
By this time, everything about Lee seemed to annoy Michael, even her closeness to Jackie. For instance, it unnerved him that the sisters would whisper in each other’s ears, to the exclusion of everyone else. Once, the three of them were in a rowboat, paddling along a lake. As Michael rowed, the sisters sat in the bow of the boat whispering to each other with great intensity. He figured surely they had to have been discussing some urgent family business. When he leaned in to hear what they were saying, he learned that they were talking about … gloves. “Perfect drivel” is how he later described it to Blair Fuller; “they have nothing on their minds but perfect drivel. They never have anything substantive to say about anything, and I’ve had it with the both of them.”
Funny how things change. Michael had once been a perfect mirror reflection of Lee, who had also been accused of not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, who had often been thought of as joyless in Jackie’s shadow. However, Lee had undergone a huge transformation since arriving in Europe. Now she presented herself as a completely free spirit with a real zest for new experiences. She was passionate about life and seemed to want to squeeze in as much as possible, whether it was art or design or fine foods or even sex. Something about Europe had invigorated her, made her come alive. Some felt that getting away from Janet was the best thing Lee ever could have done. “Oh my God, yes, that’s very true,” said Tom Guinzburg. “The distance between her and her mother changed everything for Lee. Also, I would venture to say that the distance between her and Jackie helped tremendously as well. She was able to become her own person in Europe, absolutely.”
She was only twenty-three. Maybe Lee had married the wrong man, and now just needed a way out. If so, that could only happen after she found someone to take his place. She was not going to be alone in the world, not at her age; she needed someone to take care of her, or at least that’s what she’d been raised to believe. Stas was a stocky, older guy who wasn’t as handsome as Michael, nor was he graceful in the least; he was rather lumbering. However, he knew how to please a woman, apparently, or, at the very least, he knew how to please Lee. Sleeping with him behind Michael’s back wasn’t a difficult decision for her. She felt she had no choice. She wasn’t getting it from Michael, and she was a young woman with desires. She wasn’t going to tell Stas no. Once she was in it with him, she was in it with him for good. She didn’t care about anything or anyone else. “I deserve this,” she told her friends, “and goddamn it, I’m going to have it.”
Therefore, by the beginning of the summer of 1957, Lee and Stas were in the midst of an all-out affair. However, she was still married and had commitments to keep, such as a cruise around Italy with Michael that had been planned earlier. Also on the books was an embassy reception for Adlai Stevenson, and then a party given by Mike Todd to celebrate the opening of his film Around the World in 80 Days. On August 3, though, Lee received a telegram from her cousin Michel Bouvier—her uncle Bud’s son—which shook her to the core: her father
, Black Jack, was in a coma.
Jack Bouvier—R.I.P.
Lately, when Jackie and Lee spoke to their father, Jack Bouvier, on the telephone, he would ramble on in such a way that they believed his drinking was out of control. When Jackie saw him in East Hampton back in July, he didn’t seem well but she assumed that his haggard appearance was a consequence of years of alcohol abuse. Yusha, who had also seen Jack, disagreed. He felt that Jack was seriously ill. It wasn’t long before they learned that Jack was suffering from liver cancer, fast-moving and deadly.
As soon as Jackie heard that Jack was in a coma in New York, she rushed to be at his side. She and Jack Kennedy dashed into his room just after he passed away. He was sixty-six. Sobbing, Jackie stayed at her beloved father’s side for a long while until, finally, a nurse asked her and Jack to leave. Lee and Stas arrived shortly thereafter.
The funeral took place on August 6 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Just a couple of dozen people attended, including, of course, his children and other relatives. A few women, strangers to the family, sat in the back of the church, each seeming quite upset.
Lee was beside herself with grief, whereas Jackie was more stoic, as was her wont. “I love you, Lee,” she was overheard telling her sister when Black Jack was laid to rest at St. Philomena’s Cemetery in East Hampton, “and we will get through this.”
Janet was spared the decision as to whether or not to go the church funeral. It just so happened that she was on a cruise with Hugh, Janet Jr., and Jamie. “We got the call, somehow,” Jamie recalled, “maybe when we hit a port. Was Mummy upset? To a degree. I think she would always have a lot of emotion attached to Jack Bouvier. However, she didn’t like talking about it. She had made her peace with all of it when she married my father. She was sad for Jackie and Lee, though. She knew how much they idolized Jack. We all knew.”
A few weeks later, when Janet and the family returned from their cruise, Jackie and Lee went back to Hammersmith Farm to welcome them home, along with many other loved ones, including Yusha and his fiancée, Alice, and Nini Gore Auchincloss, Hugh’s daughter, and her new husband, Newton Steers (a financier worth almost $3 million). The family spent the entire evening talking and laughing and trying to enjoy their connection to one another, but it was strained because no one dared mention Jack Bouvier’s recent death. However, Janet, always the perfect hostess, was still determined that everyone enjoy a nice night. She made sure the cook prepared an enormous amount of gourmet food for everyone’s enjoyment. At one point, she and Hugh began dancing on the patio off the Deck Room to the music of Mel Tormé and Peggy Lee courtesy of Hugh’s new stereo record player. Soon after, Jack and Jackie, Michael and Lee, Yusha and Alice joined in, and then everyone else began to partner up and dance together under a full moon and twinkling stars.
By about four o’clock in the morning, everyone was completely exhausted. It was time to retire. While the family members said good night to one another, they noticed Janet was nowhere to be found. With flashlights in hand, the Bouvier sisters walked down the sloping lawn out to the pier, where they found their mother sitting alone on the dock, where she often found peace of mind. They joined her. Janet, Jackie, and Lee then chatted almost until sunrise, the specifics of their conversation known only to the three of them.
Banished
After Jack Bouvier’s funeral, Lee and Michael spent his thirty-first birthday on September 8 at Hammersmith. Janet could plainly see that things were no better between her daughter and the son-in-law of whom she had lately grown so fond. Around this time, someone told Janet that Lee was having an affair with Stas. It seems that it was probably Michael, but there is no clear proof that it was—it could also have been Jackie.
The blowup between Janet and Lee over Stas was as explosive as the mother and daughter had ever had with each other. Janet couldn’t believe Lee would cheat on Michael. It was such a total violation of everything she believed she had taught her daughters about the sanctity of marriage, especially given what she’d been through with their father. She’d recently tried to counsel Jackie in the face of an unfaithful spouse, but in that case her daughter was the victim. To now find the tables turned in Lee’s marriage, that it was Michael who was the wronged party, was upsetting to Janet. She had met Stas once, and it hadn’t gone well. “Why, he’s nothing but a European version of your father,” she told Lee. Lee would later say that while she was indignant at the remark, it “made me love him all the more.”
Making things worse, Janet had “let” Lee have Michael, hadn’t she? She’d made the decision that if Lee thought she was defying her mother by marrying him, it would be actually good for her psyche. Lee didn’t know that Janet had done so, but to Janet, the (arguably unreasonable) question was: “This is how she thanks me?”
However, Lee was Janet’s child, and as much as Janet liked Michael, she now knew he had to go. The only way she could protect her daughter from herself, at least as she saw it, was to send poor Michael on his lonely way. In doing so, she would also be protecting her family from what promised to be a huge scandal. “I’m going to be very sorry to lose you, Michael,” she told him, according to what he would later recall to Terrance Landow.
Landow remembered, “Michael said that he and Janet were sharing a smoke on the beach, as they often did, when she suddenly said, ‘Michael, I want you to pack your bags in the morning and leave Hammersmith Farm.’ He thought she was angry at him. ‘But I didn’t even do anything, Mummy,’ he protested in that childlike way of his. She said, ‘My point exactly. Here what’s going to happen. You will walk away from your marriage and you will never look back. You have lost the fight, my boy. There’s nothing left for you here,’ she told him. ‘If you don’t leave now, I fear for what will happen to you, to my daughter, and to this entire family. It’s quite simple, Michael,’ she said, ‘you don’t belong here any longer.’ Crying, Michael hugged her and said, ‘No one has ever cared about me. Only you, Mummy. You’re the only one. No one else.’ He then went back to his and Lee’s room, packed his things, and left, right then and there. He didn’t even wait for sunrise. He called a cab and just left.
“The next morning, at least from what I later heard,” said Terrance Landow, “Lee asked, ‘Mummy, where’s Michael?’ Janet, as cold as ice, said, ‘He’s gone, Lee. I took care of it.’ Lee didn’t ask any questions. She just turned around and went back up to her room.”
* * *
Lee and Michael would eventually divorce.
In June 1960, Michael would marry Frances Laura Charteris—who would, later in life, become Duchess of Marlborough. Michael was bitter, though. Around that same time, he ran into his former brother-in-law Jamie at a party in Manhattan. He was very drunk. He said that, once, while he and Lee were on vacation with Jack and Jackie, he overheard Lee having sex with Jack Kennedy in the next room. He then told Gore Vidal the same story, and added that Lee even bragged to him about it. Vidal would then write about it in his memoir, Palimpsest. Years later, Gore’s sister, Nini, repeated the story, but with a twist. She insisted that Lee told her she had sex with Jack while she was staying with the Kennedys after Jackie gave birth to Caroline! Nini says that Lee told her she’d left the bedroom door open, and that Michael could, therefore, hear her and Jack going at it. Could any variation on this story possibly be true? Whatever its veracity, these damaging anecdotes are noteworthy only in that they were bandied about not by strangers or enemies or gossipmongers, but by family members! If Jackie heard these stories—and it’s doubtful that she hadn’t, considering that everyone else in the family seemed to be aware of them—they had to have made some impact on her, at the very least causing her to wonder if they were true.
In December 1960, Michael Canfield would die of a heart attack while on a flight to London, an overdose of alcohol and pills apparently precipitating his demise. He was only forty-three. Ironically, one of the men reputed to have been his father—Prince George—also had an airline-related death at a young age;
he died in a plane crash at thirty-nine.
PART THREE
HEADY TIMES
Lee Marries Her Prince
By the beginning of 1958, Lee Bouvier Canfield, who was about to turn twenty-four, was feeling more alone and desperate than ever. Her marriage to Michael, a huge disappointment, was now over. Though she and Jackie had recently posed for a fashion spread in Ladies’ Home Journal, she knew that she was still just basking in the refracted glory of her sister’s growing popularity. The Bouvier sisters had both been bequeathed about $80,000 after taxes from their father’s estate, which was a sizable amount. However, it was hopelessly tied up in probate court. Frightened for the future, Lee asked her Grampy Lee for an allowance of $3,000 a month, saying she could not live on less than that amount. He refused the specific request, giving her far less.
By this time, Jackie had given birth to her first child, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy. Jackie and Jack were, of course, overjoyed. The family—along with a nurse, cook, butler, and maid—would settle in a lovely four-story Federal house, an early nineteenth-century home in Georgetown, just a few blocks from Janet and Hugh.
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 11