Lee Radziwill was an accomplished fashion icon who married a Polish aristocrat, but she always felt like she was living in the shadow of her older sister.
National Archives and Records AdministrationLee Radziwill at a White House dinner in 1974.
Lee Radziwill spent her life among the rich and famous. She was friends with Truman Capote. She worked for Giorgio Armani. She married a prince, and her brother-in-law was the president of the United States. Yet, Radziwill spent most of her life overshadowed by her sister, Jackie Kennedy, and the siblings purportedly had a strained relationship by the end of their lives.
But it wasn’t always like that.
While the sisters had been competitive from a young age, they’d always been close. When Jackie became first lady, Radziwill was purportedly consumed with jealousy, but she was also a consistent presence in her sister’s life. And when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Radziwill supported Jackie through the tragedy.
Still, Radziwill and her older sister seemingly drifted apart as time went on. Despite her efforts as an actress, writer, and socialite, Radziwill never quite caught the attention of the public like the beloved first lady did. And when Jackie Kennedy died in 1994, she left her sister nothing in her will, stating that she had already “done so in my lifetime,” amplifying rumors of a rift.
So, who was Lee Radziwill? This is the colorful story of Jackie Kennedy’s overlooked younger sister.
The Early Life Of Caroline Lee Radziwill
Born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933, Lee Radziwill experienced great wealth from a young age, but also great loss. When she was a young girl, her father, a Wall Street broker, lost his fortune. This — alongside his heavy drinking and multiple affairs — led to the dissolution of Radziwill’s parents’ marriage. It also instilled in both Radziwill and her elder sister, Jacqueline, a sense of the precariousness of wealth.
Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, BostonLee Radziwill (front) and Jackie Kennedy (behind) ride a camel in Pakistan in 1962.
Radziwill’s mother swiftly remarried, and, amid the turbulence of acquiring several new step-siblings, Lee and Jackie became “fused,” according to reporting from Vanity Fair in 2016. But they’d also begun establishing their own identities. As PEOPLE reported in 2019, Jackie became known as the “smart one,” while Radziwill was considered the “pretty one.”
Jackie was the better student; Radziwill got more attention from boys. But while the sisters were competitive in the way that siblings often are, they were also very close. In 1951, when Jackie was 21 and Radziwill was 18, they traveled around Europe together, documenting their adventures in a series of jubilant journals, postcards, and poems.
Upon their return, Radziwill briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College but dropped out, and both sisters began careers in the media. Radziwill worked for Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and Jackie found work as an “inquiring camera girl” at the Washington Times-Herald in Washington, D.C. Still, an undercurrent of competition ran beneath the two sisters.
Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, BostonJackie Kennedy (left) and Lee Radziwill (right) stand outside the White House in 1963.
“The competition went on throughout their lives,” J. Randy Taraborrelli, the author of Jackie, Janet & Lee, told PEOPLE. “‘Who’s going to be more popular? Who will marry first?'”
In April 1953, Lee Radziwill beat her older sister to the altar when she married her longtime boyfriend, Michael Temple Canfield. But Jackie’s marriage later that year was the one that would make history.
The Parallel Lives Of The Bouvier Sisters
On Sept. 12, 1953, Jacqueline Bouvier wed John F. Kennedy, a young senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy was not only handsome; he came from the wealthy Kennedy family. Their opulent ceremony made national news and thrust Jackie Kennedy into the national spotlight.
For much of the 1950s, however, Lee Canfield was living a separate life in London. Abroad, she had a sparkling social life, and she began an affair with a Polish aristocrat 20 years her senior, Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwill. Lee divorced Canfield in 1958 and married the prince the following year. They quickly had two children, Anthony and Anna Christina, putting Radziwill on even footing with Jackie, who’d also had two children, Caroline and John Jr.
But in 1960, everything changed when John F. Kennedy was elected president.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumLee Radziwill, in orange, accompanying her sister, in white, on a trip to India in 1962.
“All of that [competition] suddenly came to a crashing halt when Jackie became first lady,” Taraborrelli explained. “Lee [said], ‘How can I compete with that?’ How do you compete with that?”
Though purportedly jealous of her sister’s status, Lee Radziwill also supported Jackie in her new role. She was a frequent guest at the Kennedy White House, which came to be known as Camelot, and provided crucial support for her sister. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who famously flung himself on the president’s car during Kennedy’s assassination, recalled to PEOPLE in 2015 that Jackie “relied on Lee… Anytime there was some kind of an event that was crucial, Lee usually was present.”
Radziwill also remembered being close to her sister during those years.
“With the wedding, Jackie’s destiny led to another life,” she wrote in her memoir, Happy Times. “As the wife of the President of the United States, she was extremely busy. She had to travel a lot, and liked to have me with her as we were very close. Apart from great mutual affection, I think our strongest bond was a shared sense of humor, which was endlessly enjoyable.”
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumJackie Kennedy (left) and Lee Radziwill (right) with their husbands and children (as well as the son of Jackie’s assistant, in red), celebrating Christmas in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1962.
But though they traveled together frequently, Radziwill was painfully overshadowed by her sister wherever they went. And the growing rift between them only deepened when Radziwill introduced Jackie to Aristotle Onassis, a wealthy Greek shipping magnate. Radziwill was purportedly having an affair with Onassis and had invited Jackie to join them on a cruise to cheer her sister up after the loss of her newborn son, Patrick, in 1963. But Onassis — like the rest of the world — seemed to only have eyes for the first lady.
Then, just a few months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas — and everything changed.
How Lee Radziwill Sought To Establish Her Own Identity
In the aftermath of the JFK Assassination, Lee Radziwill flew to Washington, D.C. from London to take care of her sister. She was by Jackie’s side during the president’s funeral, and that night, she purportedly pinned a note on Jackie’s pillow that read: “Good night my darling Jacks — the bravest and noblest of all. L.” Radziwill also helped Jackie through the painful process of moving out of the White House and resettling in New York City.
Public DomainJackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral. Lee Radziwill helped support her through the service, but their relationship allegedly deteriorated in the aftermath.
But there was tension beneath the surface.
Radziwill later told a friend that she “had gone through Hell” trying to support Jackie, according to Vanity Fair. Radziwill fumed: “She’s really more than half round the bend! She can’t sleep at night, she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself!”
Jackie’s marriage to Onassis in 1968 purportedly added a new chill to the sisters’ relationship. But after Kennedy’s assassination, Radziwill also found herself more free to pursue other interests.
She began writing articles for Ladies’ Home Journal and surrounded herself with creatives like the writer Truman Capote, who encouraged Radziwill to try her hand at acting. Though Radziwill’s acting career never took off (her few performances were universally panned), she kept busy. Radziwill launched an interior decorating business, put together a pilot for a talk show that was never made (Conversations with Lee Radziwill), and worked as a public relations executive for Giorgio Armani from 1986 to 1994.
But though Lee Radziwill outlived her sister by 25 years, she never quite escaped Jackie’s shadow. Radziwill had lived a colorful life of her own — replete with love affairs, extravagance, and great highs and lows — but she would also forever be remembered as Jackie Kennedy’s sister. Even after her death on Feb. 15, 2019, at the age of 85, The New York Times memorialized her as the “Sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
CNNLee Radziwill in 2001. She ultimately outlived her sister by 25 years, dying in February 2019 at age 85.
To those who knew her, this seemed deeply unfair.
“She’s a remarkable girl,” Truman Capote remarked of Lee Radziwill in 1976. “She’s all the things people give Jackie credit for. All the looks, style, taste — Jackie never had them at all, and yet it was Lee who lived in the shadow of this super-something person.”
After reading about Lee Radziwill, the glamorous sister of Jackie Kennedy, learn about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. who died alongside him in a 1993 plane crash. Or, go inside the tragic story of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
