Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Lee would have to go forth without her sister. She had no choice.

  The problem with The Philadelphia Story “starring Lee Bouvier,” as evidenced on opening night, was that—as feared—she simply wasn’t ready for such an undertaking. Mounting a show with an actress at its center who had no prior professional experience was a big mistake, and everyone knew it after that first show. “I did my best to give her a quick course in theater conduct,” recalled her costar Jack DeMave. “It should be second nature but it does come from years of working. How to sit. How to stand. How to pivot. How to use your hands. We were performing in the round with audience on all sides, challenging even for old pros. When I held Lee in a scene, I could feel her trembling.”

  After that first performance, Lee looked drawn, her face gaunt. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for months; she’d felt nauseous every day. Truman Capote had spent a great deal of time in Chicago trying to bolster her confidence. He would sit in the balcony during rehearsals and, under his breath but loud enough for others to hear, utter one-word pronouncements such as “Fabulous!” or “Amazing!” or “Perfection!” However, all the support in the world from him couldn’t make up for what Lee most needed: time and training.

  In the days to follow, the notices would be scathing. There were a couple of good ones, but even those Lee wasn’t able to take seriously. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she later remarked, “all the compliments and nice things in the world can be said to you but if you didn’t hear them as a child—or even thought you didn’t hear them—then you just never believe them.”

  Lee thought it best that Janet and Jamie wait a couple of weeks before seeing her in the show. She wanted time to polish her work. “Unfortunately, it was still pretty bad,” recalled Jamie of the performance he and his mother saw on July 7. “Lee looked nervous and very arch. She’s such an appealing person, but that didn’t come through in her acting. The disconnect made sense, though. After all, we’re from a family used to concealing deep emotions. As an actress, though, Lee needed to be open and transparent. Maybe if she’d had more time.”

  “So, what did you think, Mummy?” Lee asked Janet backstage after the show. “Was I just awful? Tell me the truth.” Wearing a simple white miniskirt and a matching silk blouse, Lee still had her heavy stage makeup on, with her hair teased out theatrically.

  Even Janet didn’t have the heart to be critical. “Lee, my God! How did you ever remember all of those lines?” she asked. “I could never do that! Never!” Then, with her arm around Lee’s waist, Janet turned to Jamie and said, “Your sister didn’t make one mistake, did she, Jamie? Not a single one. Wasn’t it just great?”

  Lee smiled as she hugged her mother. At least Janet was there for her, trying to be supportive. It meant a lot, especially given Jackie’s absence. “I was surprised at how much Lee became unglued every time Jackie’s name was mentioned during the run of the show,” said another of her costars, John Ericson. “We all wondered what their relationship was like. We began to glean that it wasn’t good. The fact that Jackie never showed up seemed to confirm it.”

  The night of her third performance, Lee could be found—as usual—sitting at her vanity in her dressing room before a mirror upon which she had taped a dozen or so good-luck telegrams. Vases of red roses were carefully placed around her, framing her image, sent by friends from around the world. One friend—a relative of Hugh’s late business partner, Chauncey Parker—flew in to see the show. “No Jackie?” she asked. “That’s so odd, isn’t it?” Though Lee said that she didn’t want to discuss it, this friend began apologizing for Jackie, saying that she knew for a fact that Jackie was in Ireland—as if Lee didn’t already know it herself! Running a brush through her hair, Lee stared at her reflection in the mirror. “She couldn’t even be here one night out of four weeks?” Lee asked. “No,” she decided. “She would be here unless she had a very, very good reason.” She then held up her hand; she didn’t want to hear another word about it. “I am telling you, I know my sister better than anyone,” she concluded, “and something is very wrong!”

  No Money from Grampy Lee

  On January 3, 1968, Janet’s father, James T. Lee—“Grampy Lee”—died at the age of ninety. His estate came to $11.6 million, about $80 million in today’s money.

  The family had never really gotten over the fact that James Lee didn’t attend JFK’s inauguration because, he had supposedly explained, that same day he was giving up his job as president and taking over as chairman of the board of Central Savings Bank. Was this true? Jackie always suspected that Janet had talked him out of attending lest he be under scrutiny that might have invited inquiries into his background, which then would have exposed her own fictional history. Others say that she held a grudge against him for the way he treated her back when she was married to Black Jack. Others blamed it on Lee’s long-standing animosity toward Democrats, especially the Kennedys. Jackie wouldn’t forgive her grandfather for his absence from the inauguration. In fact, the entire time she was First Lady, he was never once invited to the White House.

  Much to Janet’s chagrin, when Adora finally was able to track Jackie down so that Janet could tell her about Grampy Lee, she learned that her daughter was with Onassis in Greece. Janet and Jackie had a tense conversation about Janet’s father, during which Jackie told her mother that she wouldn’t be returning for the funeral. (Lee wouldn’t go, either.)

  In the end, because of poor planning, much of Jim T. Lee’s money went to Uncle Sam. Luckily, Lee had also set up the James T. Lee Foundation Inc., with about $1.5 million; that charitable foundation is still in existence today. His heirs received $3.2 million, most going to Janet and her surviving younger sister, Winifred, and Winifred’s children, as well as the offspring of their late older sister, Marion. In fact, pretty much everyone in the family got money from Grampy Lee—Janet Jr. and Jamie included—with two notable exceptions: Jackie and Lee. He didn’t leave either sister one dime. “Figures,” Janet said, and there wasn’t much more she could say about it.

  Apparently, Jackie and Lee were counting on some money when the old man died. It was understandable, at least from their vantage points. After all, from the time they were very young, they understood that they would not inherit anything from the Auchincloss estate. Janet had constantly reinforced in them the thinking that they’d have to marry well, that this was likely the only way they’d be able to continue with the lives to which they’d become accustomed. In the back of their minds, though, the Bouvier sisters had always hoped for a windfall from Grampy Lee.

  Lee actually didn’t need the money as much as Jackie. Stas was doing fairly well in his British real-estate investments, and even though he, too, had certain financial challenges, Lee wasn’t affected by them and really didn’t know much about them. He kept any problems from her. They owned the London town house, the Windsor country estate, and the Fifth Avenue apartment and always seemed to have plenty of money with which to finance rich, full, and contented lives. Jackie, however, was always living beyond her means. Though JFK had left her about $70,000, she went through it quickly. There were also two Kennedy family trusts, valued at about $10 million, but because of numerous restrictions placed upon them, Jackie wasn’t able to access the money. As earlier stated, she was living on an allowance of about $175,000 from the Kennedys, and they were loath to give her any more; as a personal favor, Bobby had already raised it for her from $150,000. “Tell her mother to cash in some of that Auchincloss fortune,” Rose Kennedy had said. “Jackie just doesn’t know how to cut corners.”

  While Jackie was happy dating the successful Jack Warnecke, she really wasn’t content with the status quo of not having her own wealth. She constantly complained to her business manager, Andre Meyer, that she was tired of worrying about money. (Meyer was a senior partner at Lazard, Frères & Co., the preeminent investment company in New York. He had long managed the Kennedy fortune, having been brought into the fold by Stephen Smith, Jean Kennedy Smith’s husb
and, who handled the family’s business affairs.) At a recent meeting with Meyer, Jackie had to acknowledge that “the Kennedys can’t support me forever.” She also confessed that she spent money on clothes and jewelry as if she were a very wealthy woman. “And that’s where all my money is going, I admit it,” she told him, “but I am expected to have nice things, André, and so, yes, I buy nice things. What can I tell you? I like nice things!”

  “And you should have nice things,” Andre told her, according to his memory of the conversation. “You deserve nice things.”

  “Thank you,” Jackie said. “I agree with you.”

  In Jackie’s mind, a girl could never have enough “nice things”; she had really been counting on some inheritance from Grampy Lee. It wasn’t forthcoming, though. Therefore, by the beginning of ’68 she was beginning to realize that she’d have to find some other way to secure her future.

  Laura

  At the beginning of 1968, the letdown Lee Radziwill experienced after The Philadelphia Story was crushing. After having worked so diligently and obsessively on something that was now over and maybe best forgotten, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She also couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on with her sister, and she was pretty sure it had to do with Ari, which was disconcerting. Worried about her, Truman Capote felt that Lee needed another big project. Therefore, he and David Susskind, the accomplished talk show host and television producer, cooked up an idea that Susskind then sold to ABC. It was a two-hour TV special starring Lee in a new version of the Vera Caspary story Laura; Capote planned to write the script.

  Originally dramatized in a 1944 film with Gene Tierney in the starring role (directed by Otto Preminger), Laura was a mystery-thriller about a beautiful socialite who is ultimately murdered, and also about the unsavory characters she allows into her life. “Just imagine the ratings,” Susskind said. “The whole country will tune in to see Jackie Kennedy’s sister and, for God’s sake, she’s a princess too!”

  The idea took off quickly. Argentinian director John Llewellyn Moxey was hired. Hollywood casting director Alan Shayne then assembled a cast that included George Sanders, Robert Stack, and Arlene Francis.

  John Moxey met with Lee at her and Stas’s home to go over the script line by line. Lee observed, “When the detective asks me if I know who would have wanted to murder me, I am supposed to say, ‘I can’t conceive.’ But this is wrong because everyone knows that I can conceive. Why, Stas and I have two children, Tina and Anthony! So, obviously, that line must be changed to: ‘I can’t imagine.’” He thought she was joking. She wasn’t. She also objected to a scene with Farley Granger that was to be played as if the two had just made love. “I just don’t want to do that kind of thing,” she said. “And besides, I’d be too embarrassed to act it!”

  Years later, John Moxey recalled, “I refused to believe she was that empty-headed. I thought there must be something else going on. Her quibbles were so pedestrian, it was as if she had no idea how to act or how to even feel. She, therefore, found moments in the script to take issue with so that it would appear that she was at least somewhat engaged in the process.”

  Another problem for Lee was that as much as she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, she was still an entitled person who expected to be treated a certain way. It’s not as if she—who still had her maid follow her into the bathroom to drop gardenias into the toilet—had ever tried to act like just any fledgling actress. When her London agent, Dick Blodget, met her for the first time during the negotiations for Laura, he recalled of the meeting, “I was greeted by a butler in a white coat who said to me, ‘The princess will see you in the greenroom.’ I was received with a great deal of hauteur and condescension. I come from a theater background. My feeling was that there were princesses, and I presume they belong in palaces, and then there are actresses and they are either on a stage or on a set, and they behave in quite a different way.”

  Alan Shayne recalled the day he was dispatched to Lee’s home to run lines with her. They were working with a prop telephone in a scene in which “Laura” receives a phone call. “Ring,” Shayne said, cuing Lee. She walked over to the prop telephone, picked up the receiver, and, as she was raising it to her ear, she said, “Hel-lo-o.” He stopped the rehearsal. “Lee, you have to wait until the phone is to your ear before you say hello.” She sighed. “I know that,” she told him. They tried it again. He said, “Ring!” She walked over, picked up the phone, and, before it was even halfway to her ear, she said, “Hel-lo-o.” He stopped again. “Lee, as I just told you, you have to wait until you get the phone up to your face before you say hello!” She seemed insulted. “I know that!” she said. “Don’t you think I know that? My God! Obviously, I know that!” He said fine, they would do it again. “Ring!” She grabbed the phone and, as she was raising it to her face, she said out into the air, “Hel-lo-o.” Shayne shook his head in dismay. “Okay, I give up,” he muttered. “Fine. Can we just proceed with the scene,” Lee said, irritated. “I think we have established that, yes, I shall answer the telephone!”

  Laura aired on January 24, 1968. Lee and Stas hosted a viewing party at their home in New York, which Jackie attended. Babysitting John and Caroline back at Jackie’s home was her and Lee’s brother, Jamie. “The kids loved Laura,” he recalled. “Just seeing their auntie on television kissing another man made them both ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah.’ But I knew it was bad. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, thinking, oh, no! My poor sister.”

  Meanwhile, at the Radziwills’, everyone watched the program while paying compliments to its beleaguered star. Jackie sat transfixed in front of the color television. Other than the readings she’d witnessed Lee give for Lee Guber, she’d never seen her sister act before and, from her expression, was surprised. However, Lee felt something was still off with Jackie. For the last six months, she’d been so distant. She hadn’t been returning Lee’s telephone calls, and, in fact, Lee wasn’t even sure she would show up for the screening.

  “That was great, Lee,” Jackie exclaimed when the program was over. “I could never have done anything like that, ever.” After she embraced her sister, she took her leave as quickly as possible, as if she couldn’t wait to go. “Well, that was certainly strange,” Stas said with an arched eyebrow. “Clearly, my sister-in-law has a bus to catch!” It was a funny line and broke the tension. Then the other guests stayed for hours, showering Lee with praise as only friends and relatives can.

  Lee definitely needed the boost from supportive friends because, again, her reviews would be negative. TV Guide called the show “a shoddy effort to cash in on America’s fondness and sympathy for Jackie Kennedy.” The critic for the Chicago Tribune called Lee “taut and brittle-looking,” and dubbed her performance “emotionless.” He recognized, though, that the ratings would likely be through the roof because of Lee’s notoriety. He was right: 38 million people watched the program, which provided a huge rating for the network.

  The stellar ratings didn’t matter much to Lee, though. Of two major acting appearances, she could now count the good notices on one hand. She cared what critics said about her. She didn’t want to, but she did; she cared deeply. It’s just the way she was wired. Many years later, in 2000, she had enough distance from it to be able to admit to The New York Times that Laura was a “perfectly terrible TV show.”

  Lee had wanted to make a difference in her life by doing something worthwhile that wasn’t attached to her sister, to the Kennedys, to Stas, or to anyone else. In years to come, though, she would never truly reconcile the disappointment of her foray into acting. Despite her admirable work ethic, she wasn’t able to survive that with which even the most seasoned professional has to contend—criticism. In her defense, though, what was said about Lee by the media wasn’t always just professional, it was often personal. “Perhaps the most depressing part was that whatever I did or tried to do got disproportionate coverage purely because of Jackie being my sister,” she would recall i
n 2013.

  Discouraged, Lee would never act again. She didn’t actually say, “I quit.” Rather, she just slowly lost interest, stopped talking about it, and, eventually, moved on.

  Jackie understood. She knew criticism was hard for Lee. It was hard for her, too—and it also wasn’t easy for her to hear it about Lee from others. In fact, she would not tolerate it, at least as evidenced by her vociferous defense of Lee at a cocktail party shortly after the broadcast of Laura.

  The scene was at her home in New York with close friends and a few members of the Kennedy family. Janet and Lee were not present. However, Hugh was there, along with the new, young office assistant who’d just been hired at Auchincloss, Parker & Redpath, Garrett Johnston, just twenty-one at the time.

  “One guest, David Burke, Ted Kennedy’s administrative assistant, was chatting with me and a group of people,” recalled Garrett Johnston, “when he said, ‘Lee’s quite nice. However, the poor dear has never had a genuine moment in her entire life. One wonders then what makes her think she can act.’ Jackie, who I had only met for the first time just moments earlier when Mr. Auchincloss introduced us, overheard the comment. ‘How dare you?’ she demanded of Burke. ‘You don’t even know my sister! Have you even met her?’ Though Burke was immediately apologetic, Jackie wouldn’t accept it. She gave him a real dressing-down. Burke just kept apologizing. Finally, Jackie said, ‘It’s one thing to critique my sister’s acting, which, by the way, I think is very good, but it’s quite another to critique her as a person. I’m disappointed in you, David. To think that there is a war going on in Vietnam right now, and that this is what you’re gossiping about is quite astonishing to me!’ With that, she walked away from David Burke, who just stood there with his mouth wide open.”