Lee Radziwill

Caroline Lee Bouvier was born at Doctors Hospital in New York City to stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and his wife, socialite Janet Norton Lee.[4][1][lower-alpha 1] She attended The Chapin School, in New York City, Potomac School in Washington, D.C., Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, and pursued undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College.[6] In her birth announcement, and from her earliest years, she was known by her middle name "Lee" rather than Caroline.

During the 1960s, Radziwill attempted a career as an actress. Her acting attempt was unsuccessful, if highly publicized. She featured in the 1967 production of The Philadelphia Story as the spoiled Main Line heiress Tracy Lord. The play was staged at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago, and Radziwill's performance was much deprecated. A year later, she appeared in a television adaptation of the 1944 movie Laura, which was also deprecated.[7]

A London townhouse and a manor, Turville Grange (which she shared with her second husband), that she owned had both been decorated by Italian stage designer Lorenzo Mongiardino; they were greatly admired and frequently photographed by Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst. She worked briefly as an interior decorator in a style influenced by her association with Mongiardino. Her clientele were wealthy; she once decorated a house "for people who would not be there more than three days a year".[8] She frequented celebrity company, including travelling with The Rolling Stones during their 1972 tour of North America,[9] which she attended alongside the writer Truman Capote.[10]

Radziwill was named to the Vanity Fair International Best Dressed Hall of Fame in 1996.[11][12] Her Paris (Avenue Montaigne 49)[13] and Manhattan (160 East 72nd Street)[14] apartments were featured in the April 2009 issue of Elle Décor magazine. She was interviewed by director Sofia Coppola in February 2013 about her life as part of Radziwill's cover story for T: The New York Times Style Magazine as well as about Coppola's movie The Bling Ring and the loss of privacy.[15] She was listed as one of the 50 best-dressed people older than age 50 by The Guardian in March 2013.[16]

Radziwill hired documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles in 1972 to work on a movie about the Bouvier family. At the outset, the brothers filmed two eccentric and reclusive members of the extended family, Radziwill's aunt and cousin, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale ("Big Edie") and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale ("Little Edie"). The Beales lived in a rambling, decaying home in East Hampton, New York, and were funded by other members of the family.[17]

Radziwill's original movie project was not completed, and she kept the footage of the Beales. However the Maysles brothers thought the strange lives of the two women would be interesting cinematically, and after raising funds for film and equipment of their own, they returned and recorded 70 more hours of footage with Big Edie and Little Edie. The resulting 1975 film Grey Gardens is widely considered a masterpiece of the documentary genre. It was later adapted as a 2006 musical of the same name, in which the characters Lee and Jackie Bouvier appear as visiting children in retrospect. An HBO television movie based on the lives of the Beales, also named Grey Gardens, appeared in 2009.[18]

The original 1972 footage featuring Radziwill visiting the Beales was released in 2017 as That Summer.[19]

• Radziwill, Lee (2001). Happy Times. New York: Assouline. p. 168. ISBN 9781614280545.
• Radziwill, Lee (2015). Lee. Foreword by Peter Beard, introduction by Richard David Story. New York: Assouline. p. 184. ISBN 9781614284697.

Radziwill was married three times. Her first marriage, in April 1953, was to Michael Temple Canfield, a publishing executive. They divorced in 1958, and the marriage was declared annulled by the Sacred Rota in November 1962.[20]

Her second marriage, on March 19, 1959, was to the Polish aristocrat Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, who divorced his second wife, the former Grace Maria Kolin, and received a Roman Catholic annulment of his first marriage to re-marry. (His second marriage had never been acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church, so no annulment was necessary.)[20] Upon her marriage, she claimed the title of Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Lee Radziwiłł and was sometimes referred to as Princess Radziwill in the American press.[21][22] However, the Second Polish Republic had abolished the legal recognition of noble titles in the March Constitution of 1921 (article 96).[23] Recognition of noble titles has never been reinstituted by any Polish successor state, with the effect that the Radziwills were only pretenders to the title.

They had two children, Anthony (1959–1999) and Christina (b. 1960).[24] Their marriage ended in divorce in 1974.[25]

In 1976, The New York Times reported Peter Tufo was a "frequent escort" of Radziwill.[26]

On September 23, 1988, Radziwill married for a third time, becoming the second wife of American movie director and choreographer Herbert Ross.[27] Their divorce was finalized during 2001; he died later that year, and she returned to using Radziwill, the transliteration of her children's name, Radziwiłł.

Radziwill died on February 15, 2019, aged 85, in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [28][29][30] Half of her ashes are buried at the Bouvier family plot at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Cemetery in East Hampton, New York. The other half of her ashes were scattered on the Amalfi Coast in the Mediterranean Sea, per her wishes.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lee Radziwill.

• Lee Radziwill at IMDb