The mother who raised Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reportedly repeated one piece of advice to her two eldest daughters over tea throughout their childhood: the secret to a happy life was money and power. Janet Lee Bouvier’s own life would prove far more complicated than that simple lesson suggested, spanning three marriages, four children, and the loss of one child before her own death in 1989. Born Janet Norton Lee on December 3, 1907, in Manhattan, she was the middle daughter of James Thomas Lee, a successful lawyer and real estate developer, and Margaret Merritt. Both parents came from Irish Catholic families, though Janet later made inconsistent claims about her ancestry, at times suggesting a connection to the prominent Lee family of Maryland and Virginia—a claim with little documented basis but one that reflected her lifelong concern with social positioning.
She received an elite education at Miss Spencer’s School, Sweet Briar College, and Barnard College. Janet also displayed genuine talent as an equestrian, winning three national championships at the National Horse Show. That passion shaped her eldest daughter’s life as well: she put young Jacqueline on a horse before the girl was a year old, and Jackie went on to win several national championships of her own by age 11. In 1928, Janet married John Vernou Bouvier III, a wealthy Wall Street stockbroker known as Blackjack.
The match brought together two prominent New York families, and on the surface appeared to be exactly the advantageous union Janet’s own mother might have hoped for. But the marriage quickly unraveled beneath its polished exterior. Blackjack’s persistent womanizing and increasingly serious struggles with alcohol placed enormous strain on the marriage almost from the start. Janet separated from him in 1936, attempted a brief reconciliation in 1937, and finally divorced him in 1940, when Jackie was 10 and Lee was a young girl.
The split reshaped the girls’ relationship with their father for the rest of his life, even as Jackie continued to adore him. In 1942, Janet married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr. , a wealthy Wall Street stockbroker and attorney and heir to a considerable Standard Oil fortune. It was Hugh’s third marriage, and he already had three children of his own.
Combined with Jackie and Lee, the new household included five children before Janet and Hugh had any together. The marriage brought Janet and her daughters into a considerably wealthier and more socially prominent world. The family divided their time between Merrywood, a grand estate in Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, where they spent summers. It was an extraordinary upgrade in wealth and social standing.
Janet and Hugh went on to have two children together: Janet Jennings Auchincloss, born June 13, 1945, and James Lee Auchincloss, born in 1947, who was called Jaime for the rest of his life. While Janet built her new life within the Auchincloss family’s considerable wealth, Blackjack Bouvier’s circumstances grew increasingly difficult. He continued working on Wall Street, but his drinking worsened as he aged, and he spent increasing amounts of time alone in his New York City apartment. Despite the painful distance, Jackie never stopped loving her father and made considerable effort to maintain their connection.
It was Blackjack who gave Jackie away at her wedding to a young congressman named John F. Kennedy in September 1953. Friends described the moment as one of the last truly joyful public moments of his life. Yet even that milestone carried quiet sadness, since his failing health prevented him from attending the wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm.
In 1957, Blackjack received a devastating diagnosis of terminal liver cancer. He fell into a coma on August 1, 1957, and died two days later at age 66. His funeral, arranged by Jackie and Lee, took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, and he was laid to rest in the Bouvier family plot in East Hampton, New York.
Of Janet’s four children, Jackie’s path is the most widely known. She was dubbed Debutante of the Year for the 1947 season, studied at Vassar and George Washington University, where she graduated in 1951 with a degree in French literature, and briefly worked as a photographer and reporter for the Washington Times-Herald. She met John F. Kennedy in 1952, and the two married the following year, setting Jackie on a path that would carry her into the White House as one of the most closely watched first ladies in American history.
Lee charted a different course, one involving three marriages and a genuine lifelong immersion in international high society. She married publishing executive Michael Canfield in 1953, a marriage that ended in divorce by 1958. In March 1959 she married Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, a Polish aristocrat, becoming a princess and settling into London society, where the couple had two children, Anthony and Christina. Following her divorce, she married film and theater director Herbert Ross in 1988, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2001.
Lee spent much of her adult life dividing her time between London, New York, and eventually Paris, cultivating a reputation as one of the most fashionable and internationally connected women of her generation. Her relationship with her more famous older sister remained close throughout most of their lives, though it was not without its own complexities, given the inevitable comparisons the two women faced. Lee Radziwill died on February 15, 2019, in New York City at age 85. Janet Jr.
grew up following the same elite educational path as her older half-sisters, attending Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She made her society debut in 1963 and studied music history at Sarah Lawrence College, though she left before completing her degree in order to marry. On July 30, 1966, she married Lewis Polk Rutherford, a recent Princeton graduate who would build a career as an international financier. Their wedding took place at St.
Mary’s Church in Newport, the same church where Jackie had married John F. Kennedy 13 years earlier. The ceremony reportedly drew as many as 5,000 onlookers. Following the wedding, the couple relocated to Hong Kong, where Janet Jr.
founded an overseas chapter of the League of Women Voters. They had three children together. Tragically, Janet Jr. ’s life was cut short by cancer.
She died on March 13, 1985, in a Boston hospital at just 39 years old, with her older half-sister Jackie by her side during her final days. A private memorial service was held afterward at Trinity Church in Newport. For Janet, watching her second daughter die of cancer at such a young age represented an almost unbearable echo of loss, layered onto a life that had already seen its share of hardship, including the death of her second husband, Hugh Auchincloss, who had passed away in 1976. Jaime, the youngest of Janet’s four children, was born in 1947.
Growing up as the baby of an unusually large blended family, he occupied a unique position among his siblings, considerably younger than both of his famous half-sisters and close enough in age to Janet Jr. that the two shared much of their childhood together. Unlike Jackie’s globally documented public life or Lee’s internationally visible existence, Jaime has generally maintained a far quieter and more private adult life, one that has rarely attracted significant public or media attention. Following Hugh Auchincloss’s death in 1976, Janet married a third time on October 25, 1979, at age 72, to Bingham Willing Morris, an investment broker and childhood friend.
Jackie herself served as a witness at her mother’s third wedding. The marriage did not prove particularly lasting, however, and the couple separated in 1981, though they never formally divorced and remained legally married for the rest of Janet’s life. In her final years, Janet’s health declined significantly as she developed Alzheimer’s disease. She spent her remaining years largely at Hammersmith Farm and in Newport, serving on the boards of both the Newport Historical Society and the Redwood Library, even as her health continued to deteriorate.
Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss Morris died on July 22, 1989, in Newport, Rhode Island, at age 81, from complications arising from her Alzheimer’s disease. In a small, quietly poignant detail, her death fell on the very same date as the birthday of Rose Kennedy, her daughter Jackie’s mother-in-law. Services for Janet drew together the surviving members of her large, complicated, blended family. Looking across the full sweep of Janet’s life, what emerges is a story considerably more layered than the brief mentions she typically receives as simply the mother of America’s most famous first lady.
She was a woman shaped by genuine ambition and a clear-eyed understanding of what social and financial security could provide—lessons she passed down deliberately to her two eldest daughters over countless childhood tea times, lessons that shaped both Jackie’s and Lee’s approaches to marriage, security, and social standing throughout their adult lives. Janet never sought that level of fame for herself, remaining by most accounts considerably more private and reserved than either of her two most famous children. Yet her influence on both of their lives, and by extension on the broader story of American celebrity and political culture throughout the 20th century, remains difficult to overstate. Her four children each carried forward distinctly different pieces of the complicated inheritance she had passed down to them.
What remains today is the fuller story of a woman whose own name rarely appears in the history books, yet whose influence touched nearly every significant chapter of one of America’s most closely watched families.