The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  In 1972, to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary, Jackie threw a party in the Champagne Room of Manhattan’s famous El Morocco. One of their sixty-two guests was the highly respected journalist Gloria Emerson, one of the few women who had covered the war in Vietnam (she would win a National Book Award in 1978 for Winners and Losers, her book about the war’s casualties). Emerson was born into the same debutante class as Jackie and Lee. Through her acquaintance with Jack Kennedy, she and Jackie had become friends, and the journalist wrote about the former First Lady for McCall’s in 1974.

  By then Emerson had traded in her society-page reportage for wartime journalism, but she covered the anniversary party, noting that Jackie “wore a black top, a long white skirt and a heavy gold belt that looked Moroccan. I thought she had the tiniest rib cage of any grown-up woman I had ever seen.” The eight round tables were draped in a pale pink linen, with centerpieces of pink-and-white carnations and tiny pink rosebuds. The Pol Roger 1964 champagne was “very cold and good,” served along with a 1967 Saint-Émilion wine. She also noted that Lee Radziwill was present, wearing orange and being amused by the director and man-about-town Mike Nichols. And she noticed that when a toast was made to the bride and groom, Lee—ever so slightly—grimaced.

  Emerson was delighted to see her old friend looking so well. “She was still herself,” she wrote,

  after all the years that had passed . . . she still wants fresh flowers and the pink tables. Not many women I have known have driven back upon themselves as she had. It is a long and hard journey none of us need envy. She is a survivor, someone who has shown that the world couldn’t finish her off . . .

  * * *

  LEE AND STAS and their children continued to visit Jackie on Skorpios. As far as Lee was concerned, things changed for the better when Jackie invited a new friend to visit: the dashing photographer, diarist, adventurer, and wildlife advocate Peter Beard, who was Kennedyesque in his boyish good looks and his vast appeal to women. The Yale-educated man-about-town was described by one wag as “half-Tarzan and half-Byron,” and Jackie and Lee both delighted in his company. It’s quite possible that Jackie had invited Peter to Skorpios to spend time with Lee, as a kind of consolation prize now that Jackie had married Lee’s former lover.

  As a youth, Beard had been inspired by Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. After graduating from Yale, he’d moved to Kenya and worked at the Tsavo National Park, where he documented and photographed endangered wildlife, including the African elephant, and published his work in several books, beginning with The End of the Game in 1965. He bought a property in East Africa called Hog Ranch, seventeen miles from Nairobi and not far from Baroness Karen Blixen’s (Dinesen’s) coffee farm. He divided his time between his camp in Africa and New York City, supporting himself as a freelance fashion photographer (he was later briefly married to one of the models he photographed, l980s “California Girl” Cheryl Tiegs). An earlier marriage to Minnie Cushing, one of the famous, socially prominent Cushing sisters, lasted only a year. Though born to a prominent family—his great-grandfather James Jerome Hill was a founder of the Great Northern Railway—all that came to him from a once glorious railroad fortune were a few small trust funds that he had to supplement with photography, documentary filmmaking, and book publishing. Thus he was not rich enough for Lee, but she was drawn to his vibrancy and creativity—and to his sun-kissed male beauty. Years later she would write in her second coffee-table book, “Peter Beard changed my whole life. He opened so many windows for me, because he taught me to be insatiably curious.”

  Jackie had invited Peter to visit her in Skorpios in part to entertain and photograph Caroline and John Jr. A talented artist and collagist, he involved Jackie’s children in his creativity, when they weren’t swimming and water-skiing. Besides working on a book titled Longing for Darkness, which retold the tales from Dinesen’s Out of Africa as related by Dinesen’s cook, Kamante Gatura, Peter was always working on his extensive journals. He carried a volume with him wherever he went, and continually added to it, collage-like, pasting in photographs, newspaper clippings, drawings, notes to himself, various musings. It was botanical (including insects and dried flora) and personal and a record of his travels. It also contained “pages and pages of Jackie, Caroline, John-John, and Bobby . . . Hanging out with the Kennedy women was almost a fixation with him,” writes Diana DuBois, who published an unauthorized biography of Lee in 1995.

  If Lee continued to nurse any hurt feelings about Jackie’s marriage to Onassis, by the end of that summer on Skorpios, the sisters seemed to have made a cold peace, made easier when Peter and Lee became lovers.

  Peter was five years younger than Lee, so she had broken the pattern of falling for men who were versions of her father. For the first time Lee had not been drawn to a mate who could provide her with financial security or high social status; this was fascination, lust, discovery—even love. They began a secret affair on Skorpios, which they had to hide because Lee was still married to Stas. She would sneak into Peter’s bedroom at night, in the Pink Villa, leaving her husband and children asleep in nearby rooms. What made it more difficult for Lee was that Stas and Peter became friends; a few months later Stas would go on safaris in Kenya led by Beard. But at least on Skorpios, Stas seems to have suspected nothing.

  At summer’s end, Peter went back to Kenya, and Lee accompanied Stas and their children to Warsaw to attend the funeral for Edmund, Stas’s brother, who had died that August.

  Lee was sorry to see the summer end.

  * * *

  THE EARLY MONTHS of Jackie’s marriage seemed blissful, but there was trouble in paradise. Onassis began to resent the amount of time Jackie spent in Manhattan, as she was virtually commuting from Skorpios. It was easy enough when your husband owned an airline, but the truth was that she felt an obligation to the memory of her late husband to raise their children as Americans, and she wanted to keep them in their Manhattan schools. “To my sister,” Lee said once, “America was New York.”

  He endured her long and frequent absences and, when they were together, her preference for staying in and reading instead of going to nightclubs. Leo Lerman, the legendary Condé Nast editor and a close friend of Maria Callas, noted in his diary for January 6, 1969:

  [She] will not sit in El Morocco with him and his three or four cigar-smoking Greek chums with their lavish, blondine females while the Greek men talk business. Mrs. K likes “intellectuals”—Galbraith, Schlesinger—but this is not why he married her. He wants to display her; she won’t be displayed. Onassis is bored with Mrs. K. They never planned a single day past their wedding day on Skorpios.

  There was another irritant, as far as Onassis was concerned. Almost from the beginning, he found fault with Jackie’s extravagant spending, just as Jack Kennedy had. On frequent visits to Manhattan, she reportedly spent $1.25 million on couture in the first year of their marriage. (“Jackie O continues to fill her bottomless closets,” tattled Women’s Wear Daily. “She’s making Daddy O’s bills bigger than ever with her latest shopping spree. She’s buying in carload lots.”) At one point, when Onassis received a bill from Valentino for a dress costing $9,000, he exclaimed, “What does she do with all the clothes? I never see her in anything but blue jeans.” What Onassis didn’t know was that Jackie embellished her $30,000-a-month allowance from him by buying couture and then, after one or two wearings, selling to consignment shops, usually Encore at 1132 Madison Avenue, three blocks from her New York apartment. (This is a time-tested method for people who are being supported by others to scare up some extra cash.) She would also auction personal possessions, such as picture frames and nursery furniture, at the William Doyle Galleries or Sotheby-Parke Bernet in Manhattan. Profits would be channeled through Nancy Tuckerman—who was placed on Onassis’s payroll as Jackie’s secretary—and would make their way to Jackie’s bank account.

  Jackie spent lavishly on redecorating the Pink Villa, flying in one of her favorite interior decorators, Billy Baldwin, to fi
ll the villa with flowered chintz, which Onassis disliked and had removed. When Onassis discovered that Jackie had lost $300,000 of her prenuptial funds in bad investments made against his advice, he had her allowance reduced to $20,000 a month.

  But an even bigger problem loomed. Soon after their marriage, Onassis saw his luck begin to desert him. Rival ship owners had once looked upon him as the Golden Greek for his success and the fact that he’d lost only one ship in three decades. A year after marrying Jackie, four of his vessels were damaged and he suffered big losses. The good luck that had rained down upon him during their wedding on Skorpios seemed to disappear. His long-cultivated Project Omega, forged with the colonels who had taken over the Greek government, collapsed, in part due to the interference of his rival, Stavros Niarchos. He was threatened with financial ruin, and his once Midas touch was beginning to desert him. Even the military junta felt he was becoming bad luck.

  On July 22, 1970, one of his Olympic Airline flights was hijacked by four Palestinians. Onassis boldly marched onto the blazing-hot tarmac to offer himself as a hostage in place of the eighty passengers and crew, but the hijackers turned him down. He had to persuade the Greek government to meet the hijackers’ demands.

  If Jackie was feeling happy, safe, and cosseted in her marriage to Onassis, a spooked and superstitious Onassis was calling Maria Callas.

  Onassis flew to Paris and showed up at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, home of his spurned lover, by some accounts as early as one week after the wedding. (Lerman once described Callas’s apartment as luxurious, but full of “the emptiness of waiting.”)

  One of the opera star’s servants, Ferruccio Mezzadri, recalled:

  A week after the marriage, he was outside the door . . . shouting, whistling for Madame to let him in. He called from the corner and I spoke to him myself . . .

  In a corroborating account by one of Callas’s American friends, Mary Reed Carter, Onassis came to the apartment and started whistling a sailor’s whistle to call her out, but she refused to see him. Then he called from a nearby bistro and begged to be allowed in. She still refused to see him in her apartment, but after Ari’s multiple entreaties on multiple trips to Paris, she agreed to have dinner with him at Maxim’s.

  After that, as Mezzadri recalled,

  . . . he was in Paris all the time, every four or five days. He would tell her how miserable he was, everything he was doing. He shared everything with her. Even when Mrs. Kennedy [sic] was in Paris, he would go to dinner with his wife, but would come first to Madame, to have a drink and talk.

  Over dinner at Maxim’s, Onassis reportedly confessed that he missed her terribly and that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. Callas laughed at that, and though she relished his confession, she still refused to sleep with him or to believe that he would ever divorce Jackie.

  But Onassis would not be easily deterred. A month after his wedding, according to Lerman, Onassis slipped into her bedroom and undressed, but the diva ran to the window, flinging it open to shriek into the empty Parisian streets, “Shame on you! And on the anniversary of your second wife’s first husband’s death!” It was November 22, 1968, five years after Kennedy’s assassination.

  Callas was still angry at what she saw as Ari’s betrayal, but their bond was deep and passionate. As Mezzadri observed, she “filled his life like no one else . . . Madame adored him, that’s for sure, and he too was strongly bound to her.”

  Onassis continued to woo Callas behind Jackie’s back. On four successive nights, Ari dined with her at Maxim’s, followed by intimate hours spent at Callas’s apartment. She refused to sleep with him as long as he was married to Jackie, but she could no longer deny him her emotional support.

  When Jackie got wind of Onassis’s renewed courtship of Callas, she was, understandably, incensed. She considered divorcing him. Jackie had put up with Jack Kennedy’s countless flings, and she was used to the idea that men of wealth and power could—and would—have mistresses on the side, but this time she did not want that kind of marriage. She flew to Paris, where she and Ari were photographed in an intimate dinner—at Maxim’s.

  When Maria Callas saw photographs in Le Monde of Ari dining with Jackie at “their” table, in “their” restaurant, she became despondent. If Onassis had promised that he would divorce Jackie, here was proof that the marriage was still intact, and that Ari had lied to her yet again. Four days later, Callas was rushed to the hospital, and Radio Luxembourg announced that she had attempted suicide by overdosing on barbiturates. (Callas denied the report, claiming that she had only taken sleeping pills to calm her mind, and in fact she successfully sued Radio Luxembourg and a tabloid that picked up the story, winning 20,000 francs in damages.)

  Against her better judgment, Callas still hoped that Ari would divorce his famous wife and return to her. Ironically, as Lerman would note in a February 1971 diary entry, the Greek public looked upon Jackie as “the other woman” and considered Callas “a wronged woman, splendid in her dignity . . . All of which is an indication of the morality of these times: The mistress is the wronged one, and the loyal wife the villainess.”

  9

  This Side of Paradise: Return to New York

  I felt this terrible claustrophobia . . . these trees closing in on me. I longed for the sea.

  —LEE

  If you are a good mother it does not matter much what else you have done.

  —JACKIE

  Back in London with Stas, Lee missed Peter Beard terribly and wrote him passionate letters. They would meet again in February of 1972, when Lee decided to accompany Stas on a safari in Kenya, something she normally would not have done. She arrived a week ahead of Stas, traveling with a friend, Alan Jay Lerner’s fifth wife, Karen Lerner, who acted as a beard, giving Lee an opportunity to spend time with her lover.

  Despite its humble name, Hog Farm attracted many aristocrats and luminaries. Stas arrived with Baron Ashcombe, with whom he had been on many shoots, and they embarked on the safari with Lee trailing behind. Lee, however, managed to sneak back to camp for an assignation with Peter. She resolved to end her marriage to Stas, yet the deception continued for several more weeks. After the Kenyan safari, Peter stayed with the Radziwills at their London house for several days, and then joined them at a villa in Barbados, lent to them by Baron Ashcombe. Soon Jackie and her two children arrived. If Stas knew that Lee and Peter were in love, he did not let on, nor did he make a scene. Instead, he flew to London after their Barbados idyll, while Lee and her children accompanied Jackie and her children to New York, on a private plane owned by Onassis.

  And that was how Lee’s thirteen-year marriage ended.

  Lee had had enough, not just of her passionless marriage to Stas—whom she still admired and loved in her way—but of her life in London and at Turville Grange. She was lonely. She was homesick. She no longer wanted to live as an expat. She wanted to spend more time with her sister in Manhattan, and in the Hamptons by the ocean that had always nourished her spirit. And she wanted to be with Peter Beard. She was thirty-nine years old, she had recently undergone a hysterectomy, and she felt strongly that it was time for a major change in her life.

  Perhaps Stas was not surprised when Lee left, but it broke his heart.

  * * *

  BACK IN MANHATTAN, Lee continued her love affair with Peter Beard. One night, he invited Lee and Jackie to dine with him in Chinatown, where he introduced the sisters to Andy Warhol, notorious for his entourage of drag queens and dwellers in Manhattan’s drug-infused demimonde. While Peter took endless Polaroid shots throughout the dinner, Lee no doubt relished being in the company of the avant-garde artist, whose unconventional appearance and lifestyle belied his serious gifts as an artist, and the profound, game-changing effect his art and ideas would have on contemporary arts and culture. Lee was usually more open to new ideas, especially in realms of art and design, than Jackie, who was at heart a traditionalist. Lee had a more adventurous spirit.

  In early spring of 1972, Lee an
d Peter joined Warhol and his friend the avant-garde filmmaker Paul Morrissey on a drive out to the fishing village of Montauk at the farthest tip of Long Island’s south shore. Warhol and Morrissey had bought a sprawling compound with stunning views of the ocean, comprising a rustic central lodge surrounded by four whitewashed cottages. Originally a fishing camp built by an Idaho family for summer vacations, it was bought mostly as an investment property, but its seclusion on twenty acres made it especially attractive to the celebrities Warhol had planned to rent to during the summer months. (“Andy just bought it and never spent a night there,” Lee later recalled.) It was a bohemian version of the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, and Lee immediately rented the lodge house, inviting Peter to move in with her. He did.

  It ushered in a glorious summer for Lee, and for her sister as well. When she was in New York, Jackie would drive out for long visits with Caroline and John Jr., who delighted in the company of their cousins. Warhol seldom came out to the compound because he was at heart a city boy who hated the sun and the sea (“It seemed to us he was allergic to air,” Lee later wrote). However, from boyhood he had been a fan of movie stars and celebrities, and he appreciated the value of having the famous sisters as his tenants and guests. He joked about putting up gold plaques that would read, “Lee slept here,” and “Jackie slept here,” and even framing the toilet seats used by the most famous sisters in the world.

  Lee later described staying at Andy’s Montauk lodge as “really roughing it, but it was by the sea, and I adored that.” Indeed, Lee seemed younger, freer, and more alive than she had been in a long time. She loved the lodge house, redolent of pine and cedar and fresh sea air, with its two fireplaces and stone floor. Anthony and Tina loved it, too, and spent long summer days swimming, burying each other in the sand, or taking trips in a Mercedes-Benz convertible, often to the landmark lighthouse on Montauk Point at the tip of the island.