Just Jackie (14 page)

After Oliver Smith and Jackie finished their drinks, they went upstairs. On the second floor there was another guest apartment, which was frequently used by Tyrone Guthrie, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

“Tyrone must be six foot six, and his wife is a big woman, too,” said Smith. “It is always a puzzle to me how two such huge, flamboyant figures can fit into such a small room.”

Smith’s studio was on the third floor, and it was here that he and Jackie worked side by side at his drafting tables. Smith had studied architecture, and was an accomplished illustrator. But his real skill was as a teacher.

“What do you think of this?” Jackie asked, pointing to the landscape she was working on. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Just a trifle primitive. It looks like a fried egg.”

“A fried egg!” Jackie said, horrified. She looked at her work again, and started laughing. “Well, I suppose it does,” she said.

While they drew, Smith spoke of art and literature. Art was his whole life, and his words flowed in a languid, unforced stream of consciousness. He was a great traveler, too, and extremely well read in most of the world’s literature, and his conversation jumped without a hitch across centuries and disciplines and cultures.

Before Jackie knew it, their time was up. She put away her things and stole a glimpse at Smith’s drawing.

“Why, that’s wonderful, Oliver,” she said.

“This?” he said with a vehemence that Jackie rarely heard in his voice. “This doesn’t mean a thing. It won’t last. What I do is fleeting, and I’ll be forgotten tomorrow. A great painter or writer—now
their
work will last forever.”

I
n April of 1965, Lee gave Jackie a New York coming-out party. She cleared away the furniture in her dining room and placed a five-piece Lester Lanin ensemble at one end of the room beside the windows. She brought in huge bouquets of multicolored spring flowers, and lots of champagne. And she invited all the beautiful people to toast “Her Elegance,” as
Women’s Wear Daily
had recently christened Jackie.

By ten-thirty, however, all but one of the guests had departed.

“The party was a flop,” Lee moaned.

She was standing in the kitchen of her Fifth Avenue duplex, dressed in a lime-green silk crepe Yves Saint Laurent ball gown. She and Stas lived in what many people considered to be the most spectacular apartment in all of New York. Friends were stupefied when they entered the drawing room, which was like a stage set worthy of an Italian opera. Created by the interior designer Renzo Mongiardino, the room had elaborate carved wood paneling and walls upholstered in raspberry-colored velvet, with a painted band of scrollwork up and down the corners and around the top and bottom of the room.

“Oh, God, the party was such a
flop!”
Lee repeated.

“Well, darling, it was just one of those evenings,” said the actress Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was a regular panelist on the television program
To Tell the Truth
and knew
when to be candid with friends. “Something just didn’t click.”

“It was a
big
flop, all right,” Stas agreed. “Jackie’s presence put a crimp on things.”

Lee did not want to admit it, but Stas was right. Jackie
had
put a crimp on things. For the few hours that she had deigned to stay at the party, Jackie had acted like a queen, making everyone feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. It was almost as if Jackie had
wanted
Lee’s party to fail. Jackie could never stand to share the spotlight with Lee.

“Lee was utterly impatient with the public sentiment that had turned her sister into a monument,” wrote Diana DuBois, Lee’s biographer. “As Jackie’s sibling, she knew all too well the weak spots in her character, and the chinks in her psyche. If the key to Lee was held by her relationship to her sister, then the reverse was true, and one could never truly know the one without knowing the other. Once, in an unguarded aside, Lee told a friend, ‘You should see that woman! She wakes up in the morning, and goes through all the newspapers looking for her name, and if she doesn’t find it, she just throws them all away, and when she sees her name, she cuts it out immediately!’ ”

“How about some champagne?” Stas asked. He popped open a fresh bottle.

“I’ve got wonderful news,” Kitty said, trying to inject a note of gaiety. “I’m going to play
Marriage-Go-Round
in summer stock. Stas, how would you like to be in it with me?”

“Of course,” Stas said, going along with the joke. “I would be very good.”

“But you’ll have to learn your lines, Stas,” said Kitty, a veteran trooper, who had appeared with the Marx Brothers in
A Night at the Opera
, and whose recently deceased husband, the famous playwright Moss Hart, had directed the musical
Camelot
.

“Oh, I can’t be bothered learning lines,” Stas said.

“Then you can’t be in my play,” Kitty said. “How about you, Lee?”

“Oh, Kitty, I would
love
to be in it,” said Lee.
“Desperately
. Why don’t you send me the script so I can read it.”

Caught off guard, Kitty took another sip of champagne.

“Well, darling,” she said, “you
should
be on the stage. I’m sure you’d be marvelous. I’ll send the script around tomorrow morning.”

Lee did not know what to do with herself these days. Her marriage to Stas was on its last legs. And she was falling farther and farther behind in her competition with Jackie.

When they were growing up, Lee had been the beautiful one, and the one with a firmer grasp of fashion and style. As a young woman, she worked as a special assistant to Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
who later moved on to run
Vogue
. Then Lee lived in England, traveled with the jet set, and had the richest and most glittering friends. Even when Jackie was First Lady, and went around trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy interpretations made by Oleg Cassini, Lee consoled herself with the thought that it was she, not her older sister, who lived the life of a true sophisticate.

Now, however, everything was topsy-turvy. Lee was about to become an impoverished divorcee, and Jackie was being celebrated as the most beautiful and stylish woman in the world. A poll of American newspaper publishers disclosed that the story that would get the widest readership among their female readers would be entitled, “Jacqueline Kennedy Remarries.”

Magazines were not waiting for that day.
Photoplay
, the magazine of Hollywood celebrities, put Jackie on its cover with the headline
TOO SOON FOR LOVE?
Movie TV Secrets
featured her in a piece called “Jackie’s New Neighbors Tell All …
WHERE SHE GOES, WHO SHE SEES, WHAT SHE DOES!”
Modern Screen’s
March issue offered “Jackie
Kennedy Changes—Her New Life, Her New Look, Her New Love….”

Jackie was stealing all of Lee’s old friends: Vivi Stokes, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, Rudolf Nureyev, Baron and Baroness Fabrizio Serena. The gossip columns kept track of Jackie’s escorts: economist John Kenneth Galbraith, set designer Oliver Smith, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, British diplomat Sir William Ormsby-Gore, man-about-town Roswell Gilpatric, and director Mike Nichols, who had brought her to tonight’s party at Lee’s apartment.

People said that Jackie was more famous than any movie star, perhaps the most famous woman of the twentieth century. She was asked to lunch by United Nations Secretary General U Thant. She was invited to England by Queen Elizabeth II, who planned to dedicate a square mile of Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, as a memorial to President Kennedy. Jackie had become such an important figure that even her private decision not to vote in the 1964 presidential election became a major political issue.

“People in my own family told me I should vote,” Jackie explained. “I said, ‘I’m not going to vote.’ This is very emotional, but maybe you can understand it. You see, I’d never voted until I was married to Jack. I guess my first vote was probably for him for senator, wasn’t it? Then this vote would have been—he would have been alive for that vote. And I thought, ‘I’m not going to vote for any [other person], because this vote would have been his.’ … Bobby said I should vote, and I said, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to vote.’ It was just completely emotional.”

Lyndon Johnson, who viewed Jackie as the dowager queen in the Kennedy government-in-exile, did not see it that way. And his fears seemed justified when Jackie turned down his invitation to attend the dedication of the White House Rose Garden in her honor.

“I’d rather go to Dallas than ever return to Washington while Lyndon Johnson is in the White House,” she told friends in confidence.

“She is a queen in exile on Fifth Avenue, who waits for the restoration of the dynasty,” noted a British journalist.

“Suddenly there [is] a new, beautiful, internationally famous polestar to whirl about, a new peer-person to play status hide-and-seek with, a new ‘In’ personality to invite and hope to be invited by,” Liz Smith wrote about Jackie. “More than anyone else in New York, Jacqueline [typifies] the new society of the metropolitan Eastern Seaboard.”

Lee was driven crazy by the thought that she would have to spend the rest of her life in Jackie’s shadow. She was desperate to steal back some of the spotlight. A career in the theater sounded like just the ticket. After all, hadn’t Kitty Carlisle Hart said that she would be marvelous on the stage?

E
arly the next morning, Lee called Kitty.

“Where’s the script?” she asked. “I’m going to try out for a part.”

“It’ll be right over,” Kitty said.

Kitty then called Lee Guber, the producer of
Marriage-Go-Round
, who owned a string of summer playhouses.

“Lee Radziwill intends to come for a tryout,” she warned him.

To her surprise, Guber sounded interested. “I’m producing a play in Chicago,” he said, “and there’s a cameo role she might be able to do.”

A few days later, Lee Radziwill showed up at the Morosco Theater in a driving rain, clutching a damp copy of the script that Kitty had sent her. She got up on the stage and did a reading for Guber, who was sitting in the empty auditorium.

“I could sell out instantly if I announced your name,” Guber told her when she was through. “But I think it’s important that you don’t go out and fall on your face. Do some studying first, and acquire technique.”

Lee promised to start taking acting lessons. Truman Capote had told her that he could get Milton Goldman, who represented Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, to be her agent. There was nothing like starting at the top.

That same day, Kitty received a call from Jackie.

“Lee told me that you arranged for her to get a part in a play,” Jackie said.

“Yes,” Kitty said brightly, anticipating a thank-you.

But Jackie was not amused. She thought Kitty was
her
friend, not Lee’s. Why was Kitty going out of her way to help Lee? Why would
anyone
help Lee become a professional actress? Lee did not have the slightest chance of making a go of it on the stage. She had no talent. She was trying to steal the spotlight, literally and figuratively, from Jackie. It was just one more example of that old stupid sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head.

“Kitty,” Jackie said, “what the hell are you doing!”

It was hard to tell which sister was the more jealous of the other.