Lee Radziwill found Aristotle Onassis first. In 1963 she brought her sister aboard his yacht, and when the cruise ended, Jackie painted him a thank-you card: two sisters standing on a Greek shore, waving goodbye. Au revoir, Ari, merci. But Lee was not saying goodbye.
That October, a Washington column reported she was ready to leave her husband for him, and that Jackie had gone along to talk her out of it. The president wanted Onassis kept away from America until his re-election was safely over. Five years later, Bobby Kennedy asked Jackie to wait for his. Only one of those waits ended at the altar.
Asked decades later whether she had ever thought of marrying Onassis herself, Lee needed two words. The whole thing began with a White House statement about a borrowed yacht and a friend of the family. On the last Monday of September 1963, the White House explained a holiday. The first lady had lost a baby that summer, and she was going to Greece to rest.
Look at the order in which the statement named everyone. First came her sister and brother-in-law, Prince and Princess Stanislas Radziwill, who would travel with her. Then the yacht, 303 feet long, which they had obtained from a friend of theirs. The owner came last.
The friend was Aristotle Onassis. A reporter asked the obvious question: would Onassis himself be aboard? The first lady’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure, needed four words. “Not to my knowledge.
”
Two days later, Jacqueline Kennedy landed in Athens and spent her first night in a seaside villa at Glyfada that belonged to another ship owner, Markos Nomikos. Guards went through the toolbox of an electrician who came to check the wiring. Out in the bay, the yacht Christina rode at anchor. The Greek papers put her arrival on their front pages, delighted that she had chosen their country a second time.
The plan, as the wire services described it, was a fifteen-day rest among the islands. Every word of that official version could be defended. The yacht did belong to Onassis. The Radziwills did know him, and the press secretary’s four words promised nothing beyond her own knowledge.
Three weeks later, the same trip appeared in a very different light. On the 22nd of October, Drew Pearson’s syndicated column, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, ran in papers across the country. In Cumberland, Maryland, the headline announced that Jackie opposed a marriage between her sister and a shipping magnate. The St.
Joseph Daily Standard in Missouri put it more bluntly on its front page: President Kennedy did not want a Greek shipping magnate as his brother-in-law. The column opened with “the big, brusque Greek ship owner” and a situation that was growing more complicated by the week. It now developed, the column claimed, that one reason for Mrs. Kennedy’s trip to Greece was to dissuade her sister from marrying Onassis.
Princess Radziwill had spent most of the summer with him at his home or on his yacht. She was reported ready to divorce her husband for what the column called “a matrimonial career” with Onassis. Then came the list of reasons the White House might mind. Onassis, the column noted, had divorced his wife Tina, the daughter of another shipping tycoon, and his romance with Maria Callas had somehow been sidetracked.
He had once been indicted by the Justice Department over a shipping deal. Callas, famous for her temper, was said to be boiling over Lee, and a wedding would make the president of the United States brother-in-law to all of it. The column was gossip, and its own verbs admitted as much: “reported,” “said to be. ” Pearson was a reporter who would print a rumor if it was good enough, and this one was very good.
But it put the triangle in writing while it was still happening. It also changed what the White House statement meant. “A friend of theirs” was accurate. Onassis had been Stas Radziwill’s friend before he was Lee’s.
By the account of Lee’s biographer, Diana DuBois, the two men had a lot in common. Both were foreigners in London society. Both had an eye for women, and both carried the same continental polish. The friendship would last until Onassis died.
Once Lee married Stas, entertaining her husband’s friend became part of her routine. The couple gave dinners for him in London, and they cruised on his yacht. What drew Onassis to them, in the view of his biographer Peter Evans, was not the Polish title. Stas had quietly become a plain mister when he took British citizenship in 1951.
What mattered was Lee, because she was the sister-in-law of the most powerful man in the world. Evans, whose books on Onassis are not always kind to the evidence, even gave the ship owner a rueful name for that man: “the guy he had not asked to stay to dinner. ” His associate Costa Gratsos reminded him that he hated the Kennedys. It made no difference.
Through Lee, that family was one dinner away. What the column did not explain was how the friend’s wife had come to spend her summer on his yacht. That began long before the cruise. Onassis had known the Kennedys for years, and he had met them on his own deck.
In the middle of the 1950s, while the young couple were traveling in Europe, he invited them aboard the Christina to dine with Winston Churchill. The senator was thrilled because he had memorized Churchill’s speeches, and he arrived overdressed in a white dinner jacket. Churchill barely acknowledged him. Afterward, Jackie teased her husband that the old man must have taken him for a waiter.
Onassis kept up the acquaintance and dined with Kennedy again in Washington in 1959. The president never warmed to him. According to the historian Sally Bedell Smith, Kennedy gave his secretary Evelyn Lincoln a two-word verdict on the ship owner: a pirate, a crook. So when Onassis turned his attention to the president’s sister-in-law, he was walking through the one door Kennedy had not closed himself.
The opening came once again through Churchill. In 1963, the old man went cruising on the Christina, and for the sake of the Churchills, Maria Callas, the most famous soprano in the world and Onassis’s companion since 1959, was left off the voyage. With Maria absent, in the account of the journalist Nicholas Gage, Onassis took the opportunity to improve his friendship with Lee Radziwill. Shortly after that cruise, the rumors began.
In Bedell Smith’s account, Lee began an affair with Onassis in 1963. His fortune was estimated at $500 million, several billion in today’s money, and it was part of the attraction in her telling. But Lee was just as intrigued by his odd combination of magnetism and ugliness. He was twenty-seven years older.
She was thirty, already drifting in her second marriage, and married to a man who, by one account, did not seem to be the jealous sort. Stas did some rather successful property deals with Onassis’s support, in the recollection of Churchill’s private secretary Anthony Montague Browne. He was also made a director of Olympic Airways, the airline Onassis owned. Vanity Fair described him as accepting his wife’s new friendship with a kind of world-weariness.
Lee herself always denied an affair. The family noticed before the newspapers did. Lee’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, was staying at Claridge’s in London that year when someone mentioned that her daughter was upstairs in the suite of Aristotle Onassis. The way Janet’s son later told the story, she stormed up the stairs, found the door open, and marched down a long hall toward a raised platform at the end.
Onassis sat there at a Napoleonic desk in a silk dressing gown and sunglasses, his feet up, talking on the telephone. Janet demanded her daughter. Onassis looked up, puzzled, and wanted to know who exactly her daughter was. Princess Radziwill.
In that case, came the reply, she had just missed her. Lee had left half an hour before. That August, Lee stood beside Onassis at the opening of the Athens Hilton, and the two of them were seen dining alone in public. Their friends insisted afterward that the carelessness was all his.
Taki Theodoracopulos, a Greek journalist in their circle, maintained that Lee made a real effort at discretion. Onassis, who loved his own publicity, made none. The first person to pay for that was Maria Callas. A friend of hers, Mary Carter, remembered the night Callas learned about Lee.
She was so upset that she missed the E-flat in the mad scene. Back in her dressing room afterward, she kept muttering that she had the note and did not understand what had happened. Onassis’s secretary, Kiki Motsakos, later described another scene with the order of events less certain. Callas saw a newspaper photograph of Onassis with his arm around Lee in an Athens nightclub and asked him to send Lee away.
When he refused, Callas gathered her things, left the yacht, and went to Paris. Her estranged husband saw an opening of his own. Giovanni Battista Meneghini, eager as ever for a press conference, announced in Milan that Onassis had left Maria for Princess Radziwill and that he had always known the friendship would end sadly for her. DuBois even floated the idea that Meneghini passed the item to Drew Pearson to turn Callas against Onassis, though she thought another source more likely.
Over that summer, the gossip found its sharpest line. “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon,” Pearson wondered in print, “hope to become the brother-in-law of the American president? ” The question has been repeated in almost every Kennedy book since, usually without a date. Pearson himself later placed such an item in the middle of November.
What happened between Lee and Onassis in private is something the record cannot settle, and Lee denied that there was anything to settle. DuBois, who spoke with Lee’s own friends, went further. In her telling, the escapade was later blown up out of all proportion, and a single insinuation from Pearson grew into an entire scenario. But Pearson’s question was not really about romance.
It was arithmetic. A divorce, a remarriage, and a brother-in-law with a federal indictment in his past would all land in the year before the president went back to the voters for four more years. In the autumn of 1963, John Kennedy’s calendar ran to one date: November 1964. His friend Ben Bradlee, the journalist, kept a diary of their evenings together.
That October, he noticed the president reaching for the same phrase whenever something looked risky: maybe after 1964. In Bradlee’s words, it was a phrase cropping up more and more. It came up over Onassis, too. At one of those dinners, the president revealed his own ruling on the Greek.
Onassis was to stay out of the United States until after 1964. Bradlee drew the obvious conclusion in the same entry: Kennedy thought the connection could hurt him politically. There was a history behind that fear. After the war, Onassis had acquired surplus American ships through companies that were supposed to be controlled by American citizens.
The government called it fraud and indicted him. He never stood trial. He settled the case by paying $7 million, roughly $80 million in today’s money, and he called the payment a ransom. To a president who needed a clean year, the Greek was a liability sitting in his wife’s family’s front row.
Keeping him out of the country was one thing. Keeping him out of the family was another. Taki Theodoracopulos, the same friend who defended Lee’s discretion, later gave Jackie’s biographer Sarah Bradford his version of what the president did about that. There had been a period, by Taki’s account, when Stas Radziwill was going to marry Charlotte Ford, the daughter of Henry Ford II, and Lee was going to marry Onassis, and the president had told them both to wait until after the election of ’64.
Pressed for his source, he pointed to Lee herself. She had dropped hints, and he had checked them against Charlotte Ford, with whom he was having a little flirtation of his own. Then he offered the sentence on which the whole question rests. He did not know whether Onassis would have married Lee.
In Taki’s words, Lee would certainly have married Onassis. That is secondhand from a society columnist decades after the fact. It is not alone. Betty Spalding, whose husband Charles was a close friend of the president, had several conversations with the Kennedys about Lee and Onassis that year, and she gave her account to the biographer Kitty Kelley.
Lee wanted to marry Onassis at that time, Spalding said, but he was not hell-bent on marrying her. Jackie, in her version, did not want Lee to leave Stas either. Bobby Kennedy, by the same account, was apoplectic. According to the Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas, as Vanity Fair later reported it, Bobby even tried geography.
Lee was invited along on the president’s European tour that summer, as far from the Aegean as protocol could take her. For Lee, it was the most thrilling experience of her life. When it ended, she went back to London, then to Greece, and to a man she found magnetic and not quite presentable. Years later, she still remembered telling Onassis that his bathing trunks were too tight.
She thought they were vulgar. The strongest dissent comes from the biographer closest to Lee’s own circle. DuBois says flatly that marriage between Lee and Onassis was never discussed. In her book, the rumor mill invented the Kennedys’ request to wait until after the re-election, and Lee simply ignored the talk and did as she pleased.
So the record holds two versions of that summer. In one, a younger sister is being held back by a campaign calendar. In the other, a restless woman is enjoying herself while Washington panics about a marriage nobody planned. Accounts differ, and the people best placed to settle it chose not to.
The calendar held either way. The president had a date, and until that date, Onassis was meant to stay out of America and out of the family. In August, something happened that no calendar allowed for. Jackie lost a premature son, Patrick, after thirty-nine hours of life.
Lee flew to Boston for the funeral. In Bedell Smith’s account, she went back aboard the Christina the moment she returned from Washington, though other accounts have the news reaching her on the yacht. Either way, the second half of that August found Lee cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis. Maria Callas was aboard as well.
From the deck, Lee sent her sister a cable. Callas later confided to a friend that she had been astonished Lee did not stay with her sister. On board, Lee talked constantly about how undone Jackie was by the death of her baby. Callas and Onassis both felt badly about it, by her account, and he extended an open invitation to the president and Mrs.
Kennedy. Lee carried the invitation home and made it sound irresistible. In the version Truman Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke tells, her pitch to Jackie was simple: it would be such fun. The president did not think so.
A family friend, Martha Bartlett, remembered him going down on one knee to beg his wife not to go. Jackie could not face Washington yet, and she went anyway. The compromise was a chaperone. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.
, the under secretary of commerce, would sail with the party to give it an official face. Commerce was the department that ran the Maritime Administration, the agency that, according to Pearson, was still tangled up with Onassis over his ships. That is how the White House came to present the yacht on that last Monday of September as a favor from the Radziwills’ friend. The yacht itself was an argument.
It had been a Canadian Navy frigate in the Second World War. Onassis bought the hull for $34,000, roughly its value as scrap, and spent $4 million turning it into the most famous private vessel afloat. There was a fireplace of lapis lazuli and a spiral staircase of onyx. The pool had a mosaic floor that could rise and become a dance floor.
The stools in the bar were covered in whale skin, and Onassis liked to tell his guests precisely which part of the whale they were sitting on. He was aboard, of course. By most accounts, he left the sisters to themselves, keeping to his own stateroom, making business calls and eating lobster thermidor. But the papers counted everything.
They were full of the brilliantly lighted luxury yacht, the lavish shipboard dinners, the dancing, the music, a crew of sixty, two hairdressers, and a dance band. In Istanbul, crowds came out for the most famous woman in the world. A biography published in 1971 has Jackie promising them that she would come back when her husband was no longer president. In Washington, the timing could hardly have been worse.
Oliver Bolton, a Republican congressman from Ohio, rose on the floor of the House to attack the presence of an under secretary of commerce on the Onassis yacht. A man in that job, he argued, was in a position to influence the dealings between the Greek ship owner and the government of the United States. The president did not order his wife home, but she was to keep to the date they had agreed: the 17th of October. In the last days of the cruise, the host handed out presents.
They were not the same. Count what each sister carried off the yacht. Jackie’s present was a necklace of diamonds and rubies made so that it could be taken apart and worn as two bracelets. Lee received three bracelets.
One pictorial biography published in 1994 has Lee gasping over her sister’s necklace, calling it so stunning she could not believe it. The letter she sent her brother-in-law afterward struck a different note. Jackie had been laden with presents, Lee complained, while she had received only “three dinky little bracelets that Caroline would not wear to her own birthday party. ” Caroline Kennedy was five.
A book published in 1970, the earliest source found for the line, calls it a mock complaint and places the writing at Lee’s home outside London. Other writers put it on the yacht. The line itself has been quoted almost word for word for more than half a century, usually as a joke between in-laws. Gerald Clarke read it another way.
Lee’s reward for bringing them together, in his account, was a few small bracelets. And if she had dreams of marrying Onassis, they were soon forgotten. Jackie made a present of her own on a card about sixteen centimeters by twenty-two. She painted their leaving in gouache and pencil.
The Christina rides at sea among dolphins and a siren on the back of a sea monster. On the shore, two small figures wave: Jackie and Lee. Across the picture run the words in French: Au revoir, Ari, merci. With her signature and the date, October 1963.
Remember the two figures on that shore. In October of 1963, it was simply a charming picture of two sisters thanking their host. Jackie came home on the 17th of October. At dinner with the Bradlees not long after, most of the Onassis conversation ran across the table between Jackie and Tony Bradlee.
The papers had been hard on the trip. Jackie defended her host anyway. To her, as Bradlee recorded it, Onassis was “an alive and vital person. ”
Five days after she landed, Pearson’s column appeared with its explanation of why she had really gone.
That explanation has echoes from people much closer to the family. Betty Spalding believed that talking her sister out of Onassis was the real point of the trip, not just to recuperate, but to talk some sense into Lee. Vanity Fair, citing Evan Thomas, went further still: Jackie had been allowed to make the voyage precisely so that she could persuade Lee not to marry Onassis for the sake of the Kennedys. DuBois again insists there was nothing to talk Lee out of.
On that point, the record stays divided. On the next one, it does not. If Jackie had gone to Greece to end her sister’s romance, something ended it for her. Thirty-one days after Pearson’s column, the president was dead.
It was 6:00 in the evening in London when the news from Dallas reached Lee at home at 4 Buckingham Place. She flew to Washington and she stayed on in the White House after the funeral. Aristotle Onassis came too. Sally Bedell Smith, reconstructing the dinners of that weekend, calls him the most incongruous presence in the house.
He had followed Lee to Washington. A few weeks earlier, the president had wanted him kept out of the country until after 1964. Now he was upstairs in the White House as a guest of the family on the weekend they buried the president. The Kennedys handled him the way they handled everything that weekend.
They teased him around the table. The guests joked about cadging time on his yacht the following summer when he was not using it. Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, drew up a mock decree requiring Onassis to give half his fortune to the poor of Latin America. Onassis went along with the joke and signed it in Greek.
The next morning, the new White House curator, James Ketchum, walked into the Yellow Oval Room and found a Greek billionaire asleep on the sofa. The seating upstairs had its own geometry. Stas Radziwill ate with Rose Kennedy in the dining room while Jackie, Lee, Bobby, and Teddy dined together in the West Sitting Hall. One night, Lee left a note on her sister’s pillow: “Good night, my darling Jackie, the bravest and noblest of all.
” It was signed with a single initial. What she confided to the photographer Cecil Beaton afterward was less tender. In his diaries, Lee describes going through hell trying to help her sister, a widow who could not sleep and could not stop feeling sorry for herself. At one point, as the diaries were later quoted, Jackie slapped her across the face.
Lee’s own diagnosis was jealousy. Jackie envied her, she suspected, though she could not tell whether it was for her husband, her two children, or the independent life she had made. Nobody recorded what Onassis was thinking that weekend. Taki offered a guess years later, and it was not flattering.
Then Dallas happened, by his account, and Onassis went for bigger fish. The rule that had kept Onassis away from the family in 1963 was about to be written a second time by the next Kennedy brother for the other sister. For four years, the triangle went quiet in public. Stas and Onassis stayed friends.
Lee stayed married. The gossip moved on to Jackie and to her brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy, who had become the person she leaned on. In the months after Dallas, Onassis did what Lee would one day say he always did. For him, in her description, life was a chess game, and his patience was enduring.
In April of 1968, he turned up among the familiar Washington faces at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. Jackie was surprised to see him there, and not a little pleased, in Barbara Leaming’s account. Afterward, he offered to fly her and the children to Palm Beach for Easter on his private plane, and she accepted. By the spring, marriage was being discussed.
For Jackie, part of the appeal, according to Evan Thomas, was the chance to wall her children off on a Greek island. But Bobby Kennedy was running for president, and the family feared what the news would do to his chances. His request to his sister-in-law was simple: if she did decide to marry Onassis, she should at least put the wedding off until after the election in November. She agreed to wait.
Put the two requests side by side. In 1963, by Taki’s account, Lee was told to wait until after Jack’s election. In 1968, Jackie was told to wait until after Bobby’s. The same man, the same condition, a different brother, and a different sister.
At 4:00 in the morning on the 5th of June, the light on Jackie’s bedside telephone in New York began to flash. She had gone to bed before the California results came in. The caller was Stas Radziwill in London, and Jackie answered with the news she had been waiting for. “Isn’t it wonderful?
” she said. “He’s won. He’s got California. ” Stas asked how he was.
She repeated that he was fine, that he had won. Stas asked again, and then he had to tell her. Bobby had been shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day.
Lee stayed in London. Stas flew out to Los Angeles with Jackie. Afterward, according to Vanity Fair, Jackie’s fear came down to one sentence to a friend. They were killing Kennedys in America, and she was frightened for her children.
The second wait was over, and it had ended the same way as the first. One hundred and thirty-six days after Bobby died, his brother’s widow would be married on an island in the Ionian Sea. On the 15th of October, a Boston newspaper printed what the family had been holding back. The Boston Herald Traveler had the story first: John Kennedy’s widow and Aristotle Onassis were planning to marry soon.
The Kennedys, their worst fears confirmed, moved to limit the damage. Stas had already let Pierre Salinger, the former White House press secretary, in on it on the day Salinger left England, on the understanding that he’d tell no one yet. Lee was traveling in Tunisia. According to one of Lee’s friends, Jackie had not told her.
Years later, Lee put it in two short sentences. “Onassis told me. He begged me to come to the wedding. ”
She telephoned Truman Capote, her closest confidant, and he passed the scene on to his friends.
She was crying and weeping and sobbing, he said. He could not repeat what she had confided, but it would be in the news, the biggest piece of gossip there was, and she was crying her eyes out over it. The writer Eleanor Perry remembered the question Lee put to Capote in those days: how could she do this to me? Capote had his own reading of those tears, and it was not a kind one.
Lee, in his version, really thought she had Onassis nailed down. She was not in love with him, but she liked all those tankers. He also claimed to know the consolation prize. In his telling, Onassis had given Lee a valuable parcel of land on a promontory near Athens, apparently hoping that Jackie would build a house there.
It is Capote’s word alone, and Capote was not a neutral witness. Then Lee flew to Greece, and in public she was flawless. At an airport stop on the way, she told reporters she had more than an ordinary interest in the wedding because she was the one who had introduced Jacqueline to Onassis. She was sure he was the man who would know how to give her sister the life she needed.
It did not make much difference what Americans thought of the marriage, though she perfectly understood their surprise. She was thinking, above all, of the happiness of a sister who had done a great deal for her country. Another version of her statement had her “very happy” to have been at the origin of the marriage. Both versions made Lee its author, and that is how the story has been retold ever since: the younger sister as matchmaker.
Strictly speaking, she was not. Jackie had known Onassis since that dinner with Churchill in the 1950s. What Lee had arranged was the cruise. The matchmaker version lasted because it suited everyone.
For the Kennedys, it turned a summer of gossip into a family introduction. For Lee, it was the only part left in the story that she could still choose for herself. The record gives her a harder one. She had not brought two strangers together.
She had spent a summer at his side and then carried his invitation to her sister. When the reporters pressed her about the ceremony, Lee professed to know nothing. The details were in the hands of her sister and Onassis. She could not even say whether there would be a best man or a bridesmaid.
In Washington, Drew Pearson and his partner Jack Anderson reported that the Kennedys were privately upset and that the most upset of all was Jackie’s mother-in-law, Rose. By remarrying, Jackie gave up the Secret Service protection owed to a president’s widow. And because Onassis was divorced, there was public speculation that her church might excommunicate her. Cardinal Cushing of Boston called that nonsense.
On the eve of the wedding, Jackie stood barefoot in front of the cameras on Skorpios, her arms around her children. “Teli and I are very happy,” she said, using the nickname that came from the Greek spelling of his name. Her statement begged the press to let the wedding be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses, with only the family and the children. Even well-known people, it went on, hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person at the most important moments on earth: marriage and death.
On the 20th of October, 1968, about two dozen guests filled the tiny Chapel of the Little Virgin. Lee and her family were among the last to arrive. Go back to the shore in Jackie’s painting. Five years earlier, the two sisters had stood on it side by side, waving the same man goodbye.
Now one of them was marrying him, and the other had heard the news from the groom. Afterward, the wedding party boarded the Christina for the reception on the same yacht the White House had once described as a favor from a friend. The Associated Press called it “the yacht on which the romance was born. ” It did not say whose.
Two days later, Pearson reminded his readers of something. Back in November of 1963, his column had carried an item about Onassis’s ambition to become the brother-in-law of President Kennedy. Eight days afterward, the president was dead. Five years on, Onassis was the husband of the president’s widow.
The society columnist Doris Lilly found a line for it. Twice in his life, in her version, Onassis had been linked with two sisters, and twice he had married the one nobody was watching. In Paris, Maria Callas had her own reckoning. According to the diaries of the magazine editor Leo Lerman, as Vanity Fair later quoted them, she was still furious at having been thrown over, first for Lee and now for Jackie.
On the 22nd of November, the fifth anniversary of Dallas, she threw Onassis out of her apartment and called after him from the window: shame on him. The sister who had been first was on the guest list, saying the right things into the microphones. The private version would take nearly half a century to surface. When it did, it was two words long.
Aristotle Onassis died in Paris on the 15th of March 1975 at sixty-nine. Lee began making arrangements to go to the funeral. According to DuBois, Jackie would not hear of it, and a bitter row followed. One insider told DuBois that Jackie was brilliant at public relations and wanted to be the center of attention, and that Lee’s own history with Onassis was a distraction.
The row had a financial edge by then. After two years of negotiation, Christina Onassis settled her father’s widow’s claims for $26 million, around $135 million today. Under the care of her companion, the diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, the Onassis money would grow to around $150 million. At some point in those years, by DuBois’s account, Jackie told Lee something to the effect that everything Lee had, she owed to her.
“That really burned Lee up,” DuBois writes, since Onassis had been her catch, not Jackie’s. One friend joked that Lee should have asked for a finder’s fee. The sisters’ marriages kept colliding with money. In 1979, Lee was engaged to a San Francisco hotelier named Newton Cope.
Shortly before the wedding, by Cope’s account, Jackie’s lawyer contacted him privately and suggested he settle $15,000 a month on Lee, roughly $65,000 today. Cope was not, in his own phrase, buying a cow or a celebrity the way Onassis had. He was in love with the woman, and he called off the wedding. The question he could not get past, by his own account, was why on earth she was so afraid of her sister.
Callas’s verdict on the Bouvier sisters survives in Leo Lerman’s diaries. She had never disliked Jackie. It was Lee she hated. Lee herself said almost nothing for decades.
In 2001, promoting a memoir of photographs, she sat down with Larry King. The question was whether she had liked Ari. Enormously, immensely, came the answer. She found something fascinating in this small man who moved like a potentate and always drew people’s attention.
He was magnetic, charismatic, and very warm. She mentioned another gift as well. Jackie had once written and illustrated a book for Onassis on the travels of Ulysses and had it bound with an early Greek coin set into the cover. The sister who painted him a thank-you card in 1963 had gone on to make him a book.
It was a gracious answer about a brother-in-law. It was not an answer about herself. That came in April of 2016, when Lee was eighty-three. The writer Sam Kashner visited her Manhattan apartment for Vanity Fair on the day of the Greek Independence Day parade, which he noted was an irony given the sisters’ history with a Greek shipping magnate.
He put the question directly. Had she ever thought about marrying Onassis? “Who didn’t? ”
Two words from the only person who could settle the question, said lightly enough that they could always be taken back.
She never took them back. She also never went further. When the New York Times put the question of an affair to her, for the obituary it had kept on file, she denied it and scoffed at the very idea. About her relationship with her sister, she had no regrets, none at all.
Lee Radziwill died in her Manhattan apartment on the 15th of February 2019, at eighty-five. Six years later, a small painting of two sisters on a Greek shore came up for auction. The sale was at Bonhams in the spring of 2025. The painting was gouache and pencil on card, 159 millimeters by 218.
The Christina at sea. Dolphins. A siren on a sea monster. Two women waving from the shore.
Au revoir, Ari, merci. October 1963. The estimate was $2,500 to $3,500. It sold for $17,920.
The yacht in the painting is still afloat. After Onassis died, his will offered it to his daughter or to his widow. Both declined, and the Greek state let it rust for years before a shipbuilder rescued it. It sails today as the Christina O, and in 2026 it was on the market for $52 million, cut from $90 million.
Jackie died in 1994. Her will set aside half a million in trust for each of Lee’s two children. It left their mother nothing, not even a keepsake. And said why: her sister had already been provided for during her lifetime.
The filmmaker Jonas Mekas once compared the sisters to two trees whose branches kept getting tangled up until their shadows could not be told apart. The painting shows them that way. Same shore, same gesture, same man sailing off. What it could not show was the calendar behind it.
The first wait belonged to Lee, and it ended in Dallas. The second belonged to Jackie, and it ended in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles. Only one of them ended in a chapel. Nor could it show what the man on the deck had been looking at.
Lee answered for her own side herself, lightly, in two words. His side comes from the men around him, Evans and Taki, and in their accounts, what Onassis was after stood just behind her: a seat inside the president’s family. In 1963, that seat came through Lee. After Dallas, it came through his widow.
Lee did not lose a romance to her sister. She lost a position, and her sister was the one who filled it. Au revoir, Ari.
For one of the two women on that shore, it turned out to be exactly that.
