Lee Radziwill, an icon of style and elegance, left an indelible mark on fashion and design throughout her life.
Lee Radziwill, known then as Caroline Lee Bouvier, lived an intense and extraordinary life, though she was often overshadowed by her sister Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady of the United States.
This rivalry had existed since childhood because their father, banker John Vernou Bouvier III, favored her older sister, while she was her mother Janet Norton Lee’s favorite. Their differences resurfaced when they both fell in love with the same man, Aristotle Onassis, who eventually married Jacqueline.
She married three times, and on her second marriage, she wed Stanislaw Radziwill, a Polish prince from whom she inherited her last name and acquired the title of princess.
Lee was a stylist, art collector, interior designer, actress, writer, and photographer, but above all, she was one of Truman Capote’s favorites, known as one of “Capote’s swans,” a group of New York socialite women who gathered around the writer to discuss their dreamlike lives. She also inspired designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs, Giambattista Valli, and Michael Kors, and shared a close friendship with Capote for many years.
She was one of the guests at the legendary 1968 “Black and White Ball” hosted by Capote and also accompanied the Rolling Stones on their U.S. tour. She passed away in 2019 in New York at the age of 85.
Fashion World Her
Her Impact on the beauty was captured by many artists and photographers, including Peter Beard, with whom she also had a romantic relationship.
She began her fashion career at Harper’s Bazaar, assisting Diane Vreeland, with a very delicate and unique sense of style. “She was incredibly elegant and inspiring, always ahead of her time because she was a fashion visionary,” said Mathilde Favier, Director of Public Relations at Christian Dior, in an interview with WWD.
Her elegance and intelligence were the ideal traits that led her to form relationships with luminaries such as Truman Capote, Yves Saint Laurent, Rudolph Nureyev, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Giorgio Armani, and Sofia Coppola.
Capote’s Betrayal of Lee
The fallout came when Gore Vidal sued Truman Capote after an incident at the ‘White House’. Capote sought Lee to testify on his behalf, but she refused. This upset the writer, and in retaliation, during a 1978 interview with Stanley Siegel, he revealed many of Lee’s secrets that had never been made public. She was angered by this betrayal. Orson Welles once said to Gore Vidal in an interview, “If you want a happy ending, it all depends on where you stop the story.”
Despite this, she eventually forgave Capote, just as she did her daughter-in-law, with whom she had a falling out over the publication of memoirs. In the end, Lee concluded that they were all part of a story that had to be told.
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