In the summer of 1972, Lee Radziwill invited a film crew into a decaying mansion at the far end of Long Island. She was 39, a princess by marriage, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, and a woman who had built her entire life on controlling what people saw when they looked at her. She wanted a flattering portrait of her family’s golden past. Instead, the cameras found something she had spent years keeping out of frame.
That house was Grey Gardens, the East Hampton estate where her aunt, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her cousin, also named Edith, known as Little Edie, were living in squalor. The two women had once been beauties of that coast. By 1972, they were living alone in a mansion of more than two dozen rooms, most of it rotting around them. There was little running water.
Cats roamed everywhere, with raccoons in the attic. Refuse climbed the corners of rooms, and the smell had drawn complaints from neighbors. County health inspectors had raided the property, and it took the quiet money of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis to bring the house up to code. Lee had imagined something charming: a dotty old aunt, a dash of family color.
The filmmakers she brought in, brothers Albert and David Maysles, pioneers of a watchful documentary style, understood within minutes that the story was not what she planned. Big Edie and Little Edie could not stop performing for the lens. They bickered, sang, and confessed fifty years of thwarted hopes in real time. Little Edie danced in costumes pinned together by mood.
Big Edie held court from a stained bed. Lee grasped what such a film would be. It was the reverse of her graceful portrait. She pulled her support and shelved the project.
But in 1974, the Maysles brothers returned without her money and without her blessing, and made the film anyway. When Grey Gardens reached audiences in 1975 and 1976, it became a landmark of documentary cinema, debated for decades. Some critics accused the filmmakers of exploiting two fragile women and dragging the Kennedy name through the mud. Others called it a masterpiece.
Either way, the world now had an unbroken look inside the Bouvier family, and nothing could put that back. The panic Lee felt makes sense against the backdrop of her life. She was a girl who had been ordered to be the best from childhood. Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, called Blackjack, was a charming wreck, a heavy-drinking womanizer who let his fortune slip away.
He gave his two daughters one repeated instruction: be the best. Her mother, Janet, remarried into the wealthy Auchincloss family, and the Bouvier girls arrived as the second family, understanding that their place was not guaranteed. It had to be earned or married into. The sisters were sorted early.
Jacqueline was the clever one. Lee was the beautiful one. Lee married a publishing executive named Michael Canfield in 1953, at age 20. The marriage failed.
Then she reached for a real prince, Stanisław Radziwiłł, a Polish aristocrat. They married in 1959, with Lee already expecting a child. With Kennedy weight behind her, she persuaded the Catholic Church to annul her first marriage in 1962. She was now Princess Lee Radziwiłł, and she never released the title.
The trouble was that a word, even a beautiful one, sits on the outside of a person. In the early 1960s, Lee found something entirely on her own: Aristotle Onassis. The Greek shipping magnate was 27 years older, attached to opera singer Maria Callas, and rich on a scale most people could not picture. Their affair was real, and the gossip columns carried it to Washington.
In the summer of 1963, after Jackie lost a newborn son and sank into grief, Lee arranged a cure. Onassis offered his yacht, the Christina, and Lee carried her shattered sister aboard. President Kennedy did not want Jackie to go. She went anyway.
No one can prove what happened on that boat. But somewhere between the islands and the long dinners, the man Lee had brought for herself began to study her sister instead. Then came Dallas. In November 1963, the president was murdered, and Jackie became the widow at the center of the world’s grief.
In October 1968, the news broke: Jacqueline Kennedy was marrying Aristotle Onassis. There was a detail that made it almost unbearable. Back when Lee had thought about marrying Onassis herself, it was Jackie who talked her out of it. The sister who warned her off the man was the sister who married him.
Lee wept when she heard, then gathered herself and went to the wedding on the island. Around the same years she was losing Onassis, Lee made a choice that startled people who knew her. She was going to be an actress. Her close friend Truman Capote decided he could make her a star.
In 1967, she took the lead in The Philadelphia Story in Chicago. The reviews were rough. Capote was not discouraged. He put together a glossy television movie, an adaptation of the mystery Laura, and packed the cast with seasoned professionals.
On the night of January 24, 1968, an audience estimated at 38 million people watched Lee Radziwill act. A leading television critic named her performance the worst of the year, and the verdict was close to unanimous. She never acted again. It was the first time she had asked the world to judge her on a skill rather than her looks, and the work was found wanting in public, with no second take.
By 1972, her marriage to the prince was finished in all but the paperwork. The acting dream was buried. Onassis had gone to Jackie. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she had no one left to impress.
She took a house in Montauk, at the far end of Long Island, where Andy Warhol had turned the coast into a playground for artists and rock stars. She went barefoot, slept late, and swam. She fell into an affair with Peter Beard, a photographer known for images of African wildlife, younger than her, beautiful, and entirely unmoved by titles. That same summer, she went on the road with the Rolling Stones, with Capote at her side.
She was having the time of her life. It was Beard who handed her the idea for a personal documentary about the world that had made her and the lost old guard of that coast. They brought in the Maysles brothers and settled on a place to begin: Grey Gardens. Lee was certain she knew what the house would offer.
She was wrong. The film the brothers made outlasted her, and it would carry her name. She had spent a lifetime keeping her own image in hand. Here, by her own choice, with her own crew, she let a lens into the single room where that effort came undone.
Once the noise died down, Lee built a steadier life. The prince died in 1976, drawing a final line under that marriage. In that same year, she opened an interior design business under her name. She learned the craft in earnest from the Italian master Renzo Mongiardino and built rooms the design world genuinely admired, not because a princess had decorated them, but because they were good.
For the first time, she was praised for something she had made rather than something she was. In the 1980s, she joined Giorgio Armani, running his special events, and Armani adored her. In 1988, she married the film director Herbert Ross. It held until 2001, when they divorced shortly before his death.
A quiet sadness runs under it. A woman of real gifts who had once reached for a Greek shipping fortune and stardom before millions found her feet at last by arranging other people’s rooms. But it was real, and it answered to no one. After a lifetime of borrowed glory, Lee had made something modest and lasting.
At the end, the two sisters came back together. In the spring of 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was 64 and losing a long fight with cancer. Lee came to be with her. When Jackie died, the country mourned a queen.
Lee mourned the person she had spent a lifetime setting herself against. Then the will was read. Jackie left a fortune to her children and bequests to friends and causes. To her sister Lee, she left nothing.
In warm language, Jackie explained that she had made no provision for Lee because she had already provided for her during her lifetime. She did leave money to Lee’s two children. But the sentence the world seized on was the one that passed Lee over. There was truth in what Jackie wrote.
Over the years, she had quietly helped Lee with money whenever Lee came up short. What she had never done was hand her the one large gift that would have ended the imbalance between them for good. The rivalry did not end with a victor. It ended with Jackie having the last word.
Then came loss of a different kind. Lee’s son, Anthony Radziwill, had quietly built a serious life. Born in 1959, he went into journalism, worked as a television producer, and earned an Emmy for his coverage of the Olympic Games. He had been diagnosed with cancer at the end of the 1980s, beaten it back, and then faced it again, carrying the illness through most of the 1990s without making it public.
His closest friend was his cousin, John Kennedy Jr. , and the two were less like cousins than brothers. In July 1999, John Kennedy Jr. flew his small plane toward Martha’s Vineyard with his wife, Carolyn, and her sister aboard.
The plane went down in the dark over the water, and all three were killed. Anthony, by then gravely ill himself, found the strength to stand at the memorial. Less than a month later, on August 10, 1999, Anthony Radziwill died. He was 40.
Lee had outlived her child. Grief did not care which Lee it found. She mourned the way any mother mourns, mostly out of sight. More than 40 years after Lee shut the project down, the footage she had tried to make disappear came back.
The reels from that 1972 summer had not been destroyed. They had only been lost, sitting in a vault for decades. In 2017, they were assembled into a film of their own and released to the public. Even the footage refused to obey her.
After Anthony died, Lee lived another 20 years, a guarded and elegant figure who gave few interviews. When a filmmaker sat with her late in life and asked about Onassis, the man her sister had married, Lee answered with a single word: no. That was all. She published a little, a memoir of the happy times that stepped carefully around the unhappy ones.
On a winter day in February 2019, Lee died at home in New York. She was 85. The obituaries called her a socialite, a style icon, a princess, and nearly every time, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The line she had spent a lifetime trying to outrun followed her all the way to the end.
The things that outlasted her were the ones that slipped her grip: the film that bared her family, the man she lost to her sister, the night a nation laughed at her, and the grief she could not hide.