The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Although Jackie is much spoken of, Lee and Jackie do not appear in the documentary, and Grey Gardens is not at all a film about Lee’s memories. Instead, it is the Maysles brothers’ darkly humorous investigation of privilege, penury, and ruined dreams.

  For the two sisters, other fates awaited.

  * * *

  JACKIE’S MINISTRATIONS FAILED to assuage Ari’s grief and rescue their marriage. Onassis’s health was failing; he developed the painful condition of myasthenia gravis, which caused one of his eyelids to droop so severely that he needed to tape it open. He began divorce proceedings, but before they could be finalized, he was rushed to the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, suffering from respiratory failure. He managed to take one item with him to the hospital—a red blanket that had been given to him by Maria Callas.

  On March 15, 1975, at the age of sixty-nine, Aristotle Onassis—whom many had considered a force of nature—died in Paris.

  Jackie, who had found it increasingly difficult to be with Onassis, was in New York at the time of his death. Onassis’s doctors had informed Jackie that he could indeed die at any time, and many criticized her for not staying with him in Paris. John Jr. was visiting with a friend in New York City when his mother called with news of his stepfather’s death. Biographer Christopher Andersen notes that John “registered some small sadness at the news,” but his stepfather’s harsh treatment of his mother after the death of Alexander tempered any sorrow he might have felt.

  Jackie flew to Paris. When she arrived at Orly Airport, she issued a public statement about her controversial and troubled marriage: “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows. He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love.” It was a gracious comment, and it was true.

  John Jr. and Caroline arrived in Athens from New York, accompanied by Ted Kennedy, Janet Auchincloss, and Jackie’s half brother, Jamie Auchincloss. They were descended upon by photographers, though John Jr. tried to hide behind a comic book. Giving up, he stuck out his tongue at the Furies that surrounded them. Onassis’s sister, Artemis, still maintained her friendship with Jackie and greeted her warmly.

  Christina, Onassis’s only daughter, was shattered by her father’s death coming so soon after Alexander’s tragic accident. Emotionally vulnerable and unable to cope with so much loss, Christina attempted suicide. (She was photographed leaving her father’s hospital room with a bandaged wrist.) For Christina, all this misery and misfortune would be laid at her stepmother’s door. She called her the Black Widow. “I don’t dislike her, you know,” Christina had once told a friend. But after her father’s death, Christina’s cold peace with Jackie melted away overnight. “I hate her” was her passionate response of blaming Jackie for her father’s death, although the two women embraced when Jackie arrived in Athens from Paris for the funeral, clinging to each other for emotional support and protection against the swarm of reporters and paparazzi.

  It rained on the day of Onassis’s funeral, as it had on the day of his wedding to Jackie. He was carried aloft in a coffin made from the walnut trees on Skorpios, to be buried next to Alexander.

  In a reverse image of President Kennedy’s funeral, Jackie was elbowed to the back of the line of mourners, far behind Onassis’s grieving family, even though she was the official widow. It was so unusual that the presiding Greek archdeacon was moved to say, “In all my years in the church I don’t recall another funeral where the widow was pushed into the background this way.” There she stood, in black sunglasses and black trench coat, holding on to John Jr. and looking like a tragic Helen of Troy, while Onassis was laid to rest next to the grave of his son.

  “Jackie was humiliated and hurt, and John certainly knew it,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who had remained close to Jackie after Kennedy’s assassination. “Just look at the photos taken at the time. The look of dismay in both their faces, especially John’s, is extraordinary.” John Jr. had always been protective of his mother.

  Lee did not join her sister at the back of the funeral procession. There was speculation that Lee had wanted to attend her former lover’s funeral but that Jackie had forbidden it, claiming that her presence would cause too much of a disturbance. But it’s possible that Jackie, as DuBois notes, “could be just as jealous of Lee as Lee was of her. Jackie sensed with envy that the men in their circle were attracted to Lee for herself rather than for her position. Not only was Lee the more sensuous, some of them considered Jackie to be asexual altogether.” Her fame had made her insecure, understandably, about her suitors’ motives, so if there was something she envied Lee for, it was Lee’s ability to live a more private life, and to trust the affection and love offered by the men around her. If Jackie had power, Lee had passion, and Lee wasn’t as constrained about expressing her emotions.

  For the year and a half following Onassis’s death, Jackie and Christina battled over Onassis’s will and Jackie’s prenuptial agreement. When the two women agreed to meet to work out the financial arrangement, Christina refused to be in the same room with her stepmother, leaving it to their lawyers to work out a settlement while they sat in separate rooms. Christina actually wanted to adhere to the prenuptial agreement, which specified that instead of the 12.5 percent of his entire estate that Jackie was entitled to under Greek law, she was to receive instead $150,000 annually for the rest of her life. Fearing that Jackie might sue for the 12.5 percent of the estate, Christina offered her stepmother a $20 million settlement, plus an additional $6 million to cover taxes, which Jackie had insisted upon. It was a generous settlement—roughly $130 million in today’s dollars—but many of Onassis’s associates were surprised because Jackie would have received far more had she taken her case to the Greek courts.

  “There was not a lot of love lost between them,” recalled Ari’s spokesman Nigel Neilson. Christina would never forgive the Black Widow for blighting her family’s life, leaving her adrift without her father and brother. She was suddenly the world’s richest woman, but it was cold comfort. Many Greeks, including Christina, believed that when the gods turn against you, it is useless to fight back.

  Alone, without her father to protect her, Christina was vulnerable to fortune hunters, something Onassis had always warned her about. She embarked on a series of doomed marriages. Christina quickly abandoned her fiancé, the shipping heir Peter Goulandris, who had had her father’s approval, to take up with the scion of a Greek banking family, Alexander Andreadis, marrying him just four weeks after their first meeting. That marriage lasted fifteen months. Christina then became infatuated with Sergei Kauzov, a Russian bureaucrat rumored to be a KGB agent, and they were married in Moscow. But Christina missed Skorpios and she divorced Kauzov and returned to Greece, giving him an oil tanker as a divorce settlement. In March of 1983, Christina would marry Thierry Roussel, heir to a French pharmaceutical fortune. The wedding took place at the Paris town hall, followed by a celebration dinner at Maxim’s for 125 guests. Roussel became the father of Christina’s only child, Athina, but Christina would soon learn that her husband had also impregnated his mistress, a Swedish model who gave birth to Roussel’s second child shortly after Athina was born. She divorced Roussel in May of 1987. “It was her tragedy to be passionate without being lovable,” one of her suitors cruelly said about Christina.

  In an attempt to stay slim and attractive as the paparazzi buzzed around the richest woman in the world, Christina made use of amphetamines, and her extreme weight fluctuations no doubt contributed to her ill health. In November 1988, the year following her divorce from Roussel, Christina would die in Buenos Aires from an acute pulmonary edema of the lung, which had produced a heart attack. She was just thirty-seven years old. After Christina’s death, her three-year-old daughter, Athina, became the richest girl in the world, sole heir to the Onassis fortune.

  * * *

  IN 1974, AFTER a few summers of renting Warhol’s Montauk lodge, Lee soon fulfilled a lifelong dream
and found a beach house to rent on Gin Lane in Southampton. Settled on three wooded acres at the end of Main Street, it had a pool and two hundred feet of beach access. Though the house was rather modest, it was nestled among some of the most expensive properties in the country; her neighbors included Gloria Vanderbilt, financier Felix Rohatyn, socialite Anne Ford (Henry Ford’s great-granddaughter), and New York Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger.

  As before, Lee took great pleasure in decorating the small A-frame house, transforming it into a year-round showplace. She designed sleek dining chairs and a coffee table and, using wicker and sailcloth upholstery, created an airy, sea-inspired retreat. “I wanted the house . . . for any time of year,” she explained, “a house that focused on the natural environment, an unencumbered place that would constantly renew the spirit.”

  Lee swam every summer day, continued to develop her interests and talents, and worked intermittently on her memoir, which many years later would be published as Happy Times, a book of photographs and reminiscences, by the publisher Assouline. It was a place not only for her to thrive, but for her children as well: “Although they were only a year apart in age,” she later wrote, “Anthony and Tina were completely different. Anthony loved sports and animals; Tina was passionate about ballet and the arts.” But like their mother and aunt, they both loved their summers by the sea.

  Jackie, now an extremely wealthy woman, returned to Manhattan to live full-time. The sisters would enjoy a period of closeness, brought together in part by their friendship with Peter Beard and through the camaraderie among their four now-teenage children. When not spending time in Manhattan or on Long Island with Lee, Jackie vacationed in a country house she owned in the hunt country of Peapack, New Jersey, an hour from the city. There she was able to indulge her lifelong love of horseback riding, a pastime that Caroline also shared. (“Keep her riding,” Jack Bouvier had once advised a young John Kennedy, “and she’ll always be in a good mood.”)

  But there would be one more lonely death in the Onassis family romance.

  In 1975, while Aristo’s health was deteriorating, Callas had begun a world tour. The celebrated diva had not sung publicly for eight years, and she was enthusiastically welcomed back by her ardent fans. In Hamburg, Germany, Callas was given a five-minute standing ovation as soon as she appeared onstage. Four years earlier, Lerman had noted that when Callas simply appeared in the audience of an opera at the Met, she was greeted with “applause and shouts of ‘Brava, Callas!’ Cascades of adulation.”

  Now, however, the critics were not kind, noting that her voice was no longer the fabulous instrument it had once been (one critic compared it to “a monochrome reproduction of an oil painting”).

  When Aristo was hospitalized in Paris, Callas had visited him, making sure to arrive when Christina was not present, and assuming—correctly—that Jackie would not be making an appearance at her husband’s bedside. Knowing he was near death, she reportedly bent down to kiss her former lover good-bye, at which point Aristo roused himself to tell Maria that he loved her.

  After his death, Maria Callas began to decline. She thought about moving permanently to Palm Beach, Florida, but instead returned to her home in Paris, where she became something of a recluse, canceling dates with friends and continuing to mourn the loss of Aristo. She could often be seen peering through her curtained French windows—a haunted, shadowy figure—but mostly she sat alone inside her apartment, watching Westerns on television day and night.

  Lerman noted in his diary that on the morning of September 16, 1977, her maid, Bruna,

  served her breakfast in bed, then [Maria] got up and took a few steps toward the bathroom. She crumpled to the floor, falling against a bureau . . . [Although] Bruna tried to revive her with three spoonfuls of coffee, by the time the doctor arrived, she was dead. [A] Turkish fortune teller had accurately predicted that she would die young, but without suffering. She was 53 years old.

  On the occasion of her death, the New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote:

  Her career was short and toward the end she was displaying only the shreds of a voice . . . But for some 15 years after 1947 she was a symbol fired into the very psyche of the opera goer . . . She drove her audiences wild; she had a kind of electrical transmission that very few musicians have ever approached . . . Callas, dead at 53, blazed through the skies and was burned out very early. But what years those were!

  To their credit, both Lee and Jackie had admired Callas’s artistry, Lee going so far as to describe her as “a force of nature, a gifted child, impossible to please. It took an outsize personality like [Onassis] to tame the hurricane that was Maria.”

  * * *

  “FOR THE FIRST time, I really feel true to myself,” Lee told Judy Klemesrud of the New York Times in a September 1974 interview. Since leaving her marriage to Stas, Lee was experiencing a burst of creative activity. Besides the Rolling Stones tour, her involvement in Jonas Mekas’s and the Maysles brothers’ documentaries, and trying to write her memoir, Lee had embarked on a television career. If Jackie was finally found, Lee refused to be lost.

  Described by Klemesrud as a “society blueblood, ex-princess” and “little sister to one of the world’s most famous women,” Lee swept “into her bright red living room on Fifth Avenue . . . to talk about her latest endeavor: working.” Throughout the 1970s, this was how she was often portrayed—a storm looking for a port. Pencil thin, dressed in a white silk shirt and navy pants, Lee chain-smoked throughout the interview. When Klemesrud asked why someone of her background wanted to “become a working woman”—that old question—Lee answered in the parlance of the times:

  I’m obviously all for women’s lib, but . . . this is no classic case of women’s lib. The most important thing, I’ve found, is to be self-reliant. I just felt I was being true to myself by returning to New York and starting a life of my own. In London, I found I was no longer able to contribute to anyone else’s life except my children’s, and they’re at an age now where they no longer need me very much.

  Her friend William Paley, founder and chairman of CBS and husband of Babe Paley, had agreed to create a pilot of six “Conversations with Lee Radziwill” to be made available to five CBS-owned news programs, with the goal of her own syndicated program. It was Lee’s “dream job”—a half-hour interview show of her own, with one guest at a time. Lee conducted six interviews, mostly with celebrated friends of hers: John Kenneth Galbraith, Gloria Steinem, Rudolf Nureyev, Halston, Jaws author Peter Benchley, and the Harvard psychiatrist and writer Robert Coles. Nureyev rarely appeared on television, but he could not refuse Lee, nor could the fashion designer Halston.

  Lee was often motivated as much by the things she disliked as by the things she admired. She clearly disliked the talk show hosts of the mid-’70s, describing them as “literally offensive. They’re so glib, and have done little homework on their guests’ backgrounds. Their questions have no substance or value . . . The one exception is Barbara Walters, who is absolutely great.”

  Lee had indeed done her homework, impressing Nureyev with her knowledge of ballet, and especially coming to life in her interview with Halston, given her deep appreciation of couture. At one point Lee asked Halston what a woman could buy with twenty-five dollars. “Nothing,” he said.

  Galbraith characterized his interview with Lee as “thoroughly rehearsed spontaneity.” (Lee later described him as “the only man I ever met wearing a nightgown. It was madras with long sleeves, a Moghul idea he got when he was in India.”) When Lee asked Nureyev if he ever planned to get married, the great dancer blushed at the teasing question, but gave back as good as he got: “One doesn’t expect close friends to ask silly questions.”

  The most winning of all the conversations was the one Lee herself was most nervous about because she knew him the least: Peter Benchley. Lee charmed and flirted with the bestselling writer, who later admitted that his time with Lee was “one of the most delightful afternoons I ever spent,”
describing her as “one of the most charming, solicitous, sweetest women I ever met in my life . . . she framed interesting questions and was well prepared.”

  But Benchley, who was himself acquainted with the medium, nonetheless felt that Lee was, if anything, too polite, too eager to avoid controversy. Considering it nothing but “soft news,” most of the local stations turned their backs on Lee’s hard work. The time lag between when the interviews were conducted and when they finally went on the air made them seem out of date, especially in an era when television news was confronting the upheavals of the ’70s counterculture.

  Lee blamed the show’s failure to ignite on Sam Zelman, the CBS news chief at the time, feeling that he had truncated each interview. “They were quite good and people were quite candid,” she said, “but it was traduced to nothing. They had a feast and they turned it into canapes.”

  However, Ray Beindorf, CBS programming executive at the time, observed:

  Talk television had not surfaced yet. It was still in its early stages, so we didn’t know how to present it properly. I thought Lee was coachable, and certainly we all liked her personally. The consensus was that she had a quality that was attractive. She wasn’t Barbara Walters, but she held her own. The problem wasn’t her performance. The problem was that the form had not established itself . . .

  Or, as Lee’s friend Taki Theodoracopulos wrote about Lee in Esquire, when comparing her to other talk show hosts of the day, “Lee came on like a genius.”

  But Lee found another way to shine. That same year—1974—saw the publication of One Special Summer by Delacorte Press, with an initial print run of 100,000 copies (and it was also an alternate selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club). On a visit to Merrywood to see Janet and their stepfather, Jackie and Lee had come together to sort through old diaries, letters, and artifacts stored in the attic. Lee was hoping to use what she found in her ongoing memoir. That’s when the two sisters discovered “A Special Summer,” the sweet, funny, girlish record they had made of their first trip to Europe together in 1952 as a present to their mother. It had survived as an artifact, and a testament to how close they had once been. After some persuading, Lee convinced Jackie—still shy about publicly revealing any aspect of herself—that they should publish it, just as it was.