Lee Radziwill 1933 - 2019 - Style & Substance

THE EPITOME OF FASHIONABLE ELEGANCE AND TASTE, JACQUELINE KENNEDY’S YOUNGER SIBLING WAS MORE THAN JUST THE LESSER HALF OF A FAMOUS SISTER ACT

- Liz Mcneil

For most of her 85 years Lee Radziwill steered people away from the topic of her older sister, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. If Jackie wasn’t exactly Lee’s Achilles’ heel, she could be a fly in her ointment. “It’s like we’re Siamese twins,” Lee once said in exasperation. Yet they were sisters, and that bond was strong. After President Kennedy was killed, Lee left a note of love on the widow’s pillow. When in later years both lived in Manhattan, “they wrote each other, sometimes daily,” says a friend. And Lee kept the letters. “They were in a box in her apartment.”

Nearly 25 years after Jackie’s death at age 64, Caroline Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwill Ross died on Feb. 15 at her New York City home. “End of an era,” says Cornelia Guest, who along with her mother, socialite C.Z. Guest, was close to both Jackie and Lee. “There was no one else quite like her. She was elegant, she was charming, she was dazzling.”