Truman Capote had a fascination with many of the dazzling women of American society through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. One of the writer's so-called "swans" was Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Lee Radziwill grew up guarded and that guard only went up further when her sister became first lady. Lee was also enjoying a wonderful life, married to Stanislaw Radziwill, a Polish prince who had left his country. The couple lived in homes in England and later in an apartment in Manhattan.
But eventually, Lee would come to confide in Truman about her biggest secret. The wild speculation that she was jealous of Jackie wasn't just talk. It was very real and it was consuming.
On one hand, the sour feelings between sisters is no surprise. The divide between them was widely speculated about, but both made a point of being cordial to each other in any public setting. But it went a lot deeper than many people but Truman would come to know.
By 1963, Lee was living separately from Stanislaw. She moved on with Aristotle Onassis, according to excerpts of Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer in Vanity Fair. Aristotle was obsessed with Lee, by all accounts, and invited her to spend a weekend on his 325-foot yacht, the Christina.
In October 1963, Lee invited a bereaved Jackie Kennedy to join them. She was mourning the loss of son Patrick and accepted the invite. Lee watched in horror as Aristotle fell for Jackie, who was too consumed with her own issues to notice. Jackie would only become more consumed with grief when a month later, her husband, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated when she was sitting right next to him.
Lee and Jackie both moved to New York and lived near each other for a number of years. But Lee was in London in June 1968 when news John's brother, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated reached her. She was devastated while Jackie, still in the US, was riddled with fear. It was soon after that Jackie reconnected with Aristotle.
When the two announced they were to be married, Lee maintained the role of the happy and supportive sister in public. Behind the scenes, she would tell Truman all about her strong feelings.
"How could she do this to me! How could she! How could this happen!" she allegedly screamed on a phone call with the writer.
"Lee was so jealous of Jackie she could hardly speak," Laurence Leamer commented to People.
"If your older sister is the first lady of the United States, maybe you might be a little bit jealous. … But she was just consumed with jealousy."
Publicly, Lee still refused to take swipes at her sister. "It's just the most ludicrous talk in the world that we're rivals," she told People in 1976.
"We're exceptionally close and always have been."
"Jackie wasn't jealous. Why would Jackie be jealous? … But Lee was just consumed with jealousy," Laurence claimed nonetheless.
"I can't tell you how extraordinary it was. She couldn't even stand to look at her and think about her. Anything Jackie did made her angry."
"These public figures live lives where they're constantly being scrutinized. They have servants around and they have people around them, so they're always, always performing," he said of the sisters' ability to play nice in public.
"And so were they. So when they were together, they could pretend they had this amiable, loving relationship. But apart they didn't have it."
Jackie and Lee did manage to build back some of their relationship in the time before Jackie's death of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in May 1994. It was widely noted that Jackie didn't leave her sister a single thing. She described her sister as someone "for whom I have great affection," before saying she wasn't leaving her anything "because I have already done so during my lifetime."
