Lee Radziwill, 85, the younger sister of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has died.
Radziwill, a beauty who worked as a public-relations executive and special events coordinator for fashion icon Giorgio Armani, passed away Friday in New York, Women’s Wear Daily reported.
She had been suffering from “age related” diseases, the trade journal said.
She had tried out two other careers before joining Armani’s company.
Her pal Truman Capote pushed her to play the title role in a TV remake of the film-noir classic “Laura,” as well as other films. But the critics kept trashing her performances.
Then she worked a short stint as an interior designer. She was more successful at that. But she was best known and remembered for her work with Armani.
The Italian designer, 84, recalled Saturday, “She was an extremely elegant woman. When I met her in the early ’80s, I had the impression that she represented a very contemporary irony about American aristocracy, which is almost impossible to define.
“It is one that combined ease and sophistication, spontaneity and respect for the rules.”
She was born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933, to Janet Norton Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III, a stockbroker known variously as “Black Jack” and “the Black Orchid.” That was partly because of his dark tan but mainly for being “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” according to Women’s Wear Daily.
Her dad’s fortunes plummeted along with the stock market in 1929.
Radziwill’s parents eventually divorced and her mother went on to marry Hugh Auchincloss, heir to the Standard Oil fortune.
In the biography “America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” author Sarah Bradford quotes Radziwill saying she loved to go to the oil mogul’s farm in Virginia, saying he’d named two of his cows after her and Jackie.
Radziwill was married three times.
No. 1 was publishing exec Michael Canfield, whom she married a few months before her older sister wed then-Sen. John F. Kennedy.
Polish aristocrat Stanislas Radziwill was No. 2, and film director Herb Ross, No. 3.
All three marriages ended in divorce or annulment.
The sisters apparently were not able to spend all that much time together, but Radziwill fondly recalls in a book, “One Special Summer,” her travels with Jackie through Europe in 1951.
“We were so young,” she writes.
“It was the first time we felt really close, carefree together, high on the sheer joy of getting away from our mother, the deadly dinner parties of political bores, the Sunday lunches for the same people that lasted hours; Jackie and I were not allowed to say a word.”
The book quotes Radziwill laughingly discussing the day when “all her underwear” fell down when she was being introduced to an ambassador.
While married to Canfeld, she had an affair with Stas Radziwell and they later married, bestowing on her the title of “princess,” WWD said. The real estate mogul was 20 years older then her.
She said she “never learned so much from anyone else in her life.”
After her marriage to Ross ended, she dated — but did not marry — a wealthy lawyer named Peter Tufo, and rich real estate investor Newton Cope.
She had a son and a daughter with Stas. Her daughter-in-law Carole Radziwill is a journalist and former star of “The Real Housewives of New York.”
Despite her husbands’ wealth, Radziwill was often profligate with money. She ended up having to sell her Fifth Avenue penthouse.
It turned out she was just as unlucky in finance as she was in love. The sale took place just before New York’s real-estate values went through the roof.