Review by Heather Mallick (1995)

In Her Sister’s Shadow: An Intimate Biography of Lee Radziwill
By Diana DuBois
Little, Brown, $31

"I guess I am what one might call high strung," Lee Radziwill once said of herself in a (non-recurring) blinding moment of insight she had in the '60s.

High-strung? She's wacko. She's a peeled nerve. She's a Grade A hysteric, an underweight, hard-drinking maker of scenes, a slice-and-dice overspender of male-earned money, a woman so emotionally taut she makes Lorena Bobbitt look like Princess Grace.

Diana DuBois's biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's younger sister is a corker. In a world abounding with biographies of people who are famous for being famous, one wonders why it took so long for a writer to document the shallow and shadowy Lee Radziwill.

"The river of sludge goes on and on," Onassis once said of the media, but her studious disdain was something of a barrier. Lee was Jackie's vulnerable point. Lee knew everything about Jackie, and Lee, as this comparatively fair-minded biography shows, was a loose cannon.

"What I liked and admired about Jackie," Jay Mellon said, "was her hard core of inner sanity. The wheels turned with a smooth hum inside her, and with Lee, they don't at all. Jackie kept herself together very well, whereas Lee was a mess basically.

"It all started at the altar. Women of the Bouvier sisters' generation and class were defined by marriage. Lee, like Zenia of Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bride, was a "man-eater," who climbed from man to man up the ladder of wealth and status.

She married the hapless son of a publisher, discarded him for the richer Stas Radziwill (insisting on a "Princess" title to which she had no right), discarded him for a series of distinguished lovers, all cast aside because they lacked the millions which she yearned to spend, had a mad pash for (gay) Rudolf Nureyev, failed as a stage actress and a writer, arranged parties for Giorgio Armani, and ultimately married Herbert Ross, the bisexual film director. Her life has been defined by manic acquisition, anorexia, an inability to care for her children, relentless social climbing and a jealous hatred of her sister that persisted beyond Jackie's death last year.

Lee has spent her entire life in a "malice-ridden milieu," a Park Avenue/East Hamptons world of people twisted by their wealth into strange corkscrew shapes. She and Jackie grew up amid a great show of wealth, without having any real money of their own. In a sense, they had all the disadvantages of money-they were a case study in insecurity. If ever there was a biography to make one feel fortunate with one's own lot, this is it.

Lee appears to have been a talented, if overly lavish, interior decorator. Her "garden room" in her English country home had "bright, flowery fabrics on the walls and sofas, a profusion of flowers in bowls and jars, and carrot-colored canaries in an airy Victorian pagoda; framed 19th century watercolors of fruits and vegetables hung on the walls, and in one corner, suspended from the ceiling, an antique cage was home to a myna bird; in the opposite corner, an enormous, lime-green, Polish-speaking parrot looked very picturesque against the flowered walls."

Descriptions of her petty, often semi-deranged, behavior are all the more riveting against this eerily perfect and claustrophobic backdrop.

"After church, Lee would sip hot mint tea in her pretty pink, batik-walled bedroom while she mulled over her list of things to do," DuBois writes. "Lee ran her homes like a 17-jewel Swiss clock; many considered them among the best-organized in England," she adds in one of those peculiar remarks that are rife in celebrity biographies.

It's an awful genre and In Her Sister's Shadow has its share of gum-on-the-pavement remarks that have no place in respectable biography. For example, an acquaintance describes Lee as a teenager: "Lee was a real bubblehead and a snippy little b--ch."

But was she really? Is this a fair judgment by a balanced observer? The problem with In Her Sister's Shadow is that, rightly, no one really cares whether Lee is a bore or a bananahead.

All the women of this Social Register gang (no Jews and blacks allowed) are thin and mean, all the men are nasty pieces of work and the kids usually turn out to be emotional wrecks. And they all talk in "fabspeak," a species of girl-gush which is a language all its own. Everything is wonderful, special, marvellous, people give off electric charges, people have such passion, such curiosity, they just live and do and be their own selves with such intensity that ... that one wonders what they say when something genuinely remarkable happens.

In the end, Jackie was able to transcend this pathetic self-aggrandizing sort of life to a certain extent. She had a job - her editing work, as in the case of Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz, was distinguished; she had a stable relationship with a civilized man, a Jew who would have been despised in her earlier social set; she had children and grandchildren she adored.

Lee, on the other hand, was left only with rage that Jackie hadn't shovelled over millions to her in her will. Never mind that Jackie had rescued Lee's children, that she had stepped in to help Lee financially, that she had given Lee a taste of the fame Lee loved and Jackie despised.

Lee felt only ingratitude to the sister who had died too early and in terrible pain. The emotions that flow through In Her Sister's Shadow are mostly base. Love, courtesy, kindness - they're not in common currency on Park Avenue.

It is informative to compare Lee's life to the life of one of those black welfare mothers so hated by Newty Gingrich. Like her sisters in Watts and the South Bronx, Lee was weak, dependent on handouts, a bad judge of male character and basically a parasite. Like so many ghetto-dwellers, she was also an enthusiastic self-medicator.