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Jacqueline Kennedy and her younger sister Caroline “Lee” Radziwill grew up as close as sisters could be in luxury homes in East Hampton, Virginia, Rhode Island and New York.
As Jackie and Lee Bouvier, they shared a similar destiny: to become debutantes and future stars of American high society. But they also shared an early hardship: Their charismatic father pushed their mother to divorce him with his drinking and womanizing and by losing much of his fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Unfortunately, their father’s favoritism for Jacqueline also forged a path for the sisters’ relationship to one day be marred by jealousy and rivalry — and not just over society status. They also feuded over the two charismatic men Jackie Kennedy married: John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis.
This “fierce competition” between the two sisters is described in a new book, “The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee.”
In the book, summarized by the Daily Mail, authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger make the stunning allegation that Radziwill, now 85, had an affair with John Kennedy, which prompted Jackie to get revenge by later stealing Onassis away from her sister.
Radziwill had met the Greek shipping magnate first, according to the book. She had fallen in love with him and hoped to marry him, even though she was still tied to her second husband, the Polish emigre aristocrat Stas Radziwill, who gave her the title of princess.
The book’s sources for Lee Radziwill’s supposed affair with John Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy’s revenge, include Radziwill’s first husband Michael Canfield and conversations he had with Gore Vidal, the late writer who had been good friends with Kennedy, according to the Daily Mail.
“The relationship between the two was extremely close yet threaded with rivalry, jealousy and competition,” Kashner and Schoenberger write. “Yet it was probably the most important relationship of their lives.”
The authors describe how Jackie Kennedy kept an enemies list and told Vidal about it. Radziwill was on the list, and the list helps to explain why Kennedy didn’t leave anything to her sister in her will when she died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in May of 1994.
According to Vidal, the omission in the will stemmed from the fact that “Lee had gone to bed with Jack.”
Canfield, a publishing executive who was married to Radziwill from 1953 to 1960, had also told Vidal: “There were times when … I think (Lee) went perhaps too far. Like going to bed with Jack in the room next to mine in the south of France and then … boasting about it.”
Radziwill’s alleged affair with John Kennedy took place before he became president and before her marriage to Stas Radziwill helped make her one of the leading ladies of international high society in the early 1960s, according to the Daily Mail’s report of the book.
But Radziwill was restless in her marriage to her Polish prince, Kashner and Schoenberger write in the book. She first had an affair with ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev and then she fell in love with Onassis, despite his own marriage and his longtime affair with opera singer Maria Callas.
But it turns out that Radziwill made the mistake of introducing her big sister to Onassis, first by having the shipping tycoon invite the U.S. first lady to spend some time with him on his Greek island of Scorpios, following the death of her son Patrick who was born prematurely in early 1963.
A friendship between Jackie Kennedy and Onassis developed, especially after the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963. Nearly five years later, Jackie Kennedy returned to that Greek island to marry Onassis. It’s been reported that she may not have been in love with Onassis but she married him because he could provide privacy and security for her and her two young children, Caroline and John Jr.
For Radziwill, her sister’s marriage to Onassis was “a blow from which their relationship would never completely recover,” Kashner and Schoenberger write, according to the Daily Mail.
“What made it more painful was that it was Lee, of course, who had brought Jackie and Ari together,” the authors conclude.
