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Summary
Summary
A poignant, evocative, and wonderfully gossipy account of the two sisters who represented style and class above all else--Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill--from the authors of Furious Love.
When sixty-four-year-old Jackie Kennedy Onassis died in her Fifth Avenue apartment, her younger sister Lee wept inconsolably. Then Jackie's thirty-eight-page will was read. Lee discovered that substantial cash bequests were left to family members, friends, and employees--but nothing to her. "I have made no provision in this my Will for my sister, Lee B. Radziwill, for whom I have great affection, because I have already done so during my lifetime," read Jackie's final testament. Drawing on the authors' candid interviews with Lee Radziwill, The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters explores their complicated relationship, placing them at the center of twentieth-century fashion, design, and style.
In life, Jackie and Lee were alike in so many ways. Both women had a keen eye for beauty--in fashion, design, painting, music, dance, sculpture, poetry--and both were talented artists. Both loved pre-revolutionary Russian culture, and the blinding sunlight, calm seas, and ancient olive groves of Greece. Both loved the siren call of the Atlantic, sharing sweet, early memories of swimming with the rakish father they adored, Jack Vernou Bouvier, at his East Hampton retreat. But Jackie was her father's favorite, and Lee, her mother's. One would grow to become the most iconic woman of her time, while the other lived in her shadow. As they grew up, the two sisters developed an extremely close relationship threaded with rivalry, jealousy, and competition. Yet it was probably the most important relationship of their lives.
For the first time, Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner and acclaimed biographer Nancy Schoenberger tell the complete story of these larger-than-life sisters. Drawing on new information and extensive interviews with Lee, now eighty-four, this dual biography sheds light on the public and private lives of two extraordinary women who lived through immense tragedy in enormous glamour.
Author Notes
Sam Kashner and his wife Nancy Schoenberger are creative writing teachers at William and Mary College.
They have written entertainment industry biographies, including Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant and Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman, which explores the death of George Reeves. Kashner has also written three books of poetry on his own.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Authors Kashner (Sinatraland) and Schoenberger (Furious Love) examine the tangled lives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her younger sister Lee B. Radziwill in this fascinating biography. The story of the two famous sisters begins with their idyllic childhood at the Bouvier summer home in East Hampton, N.Y. At times, they are close conspirators (as seen on a sojourn in France when they were young), and at others jealous, competitive, and nearly estranged (Kennedy Onassis left not even "a trinket" to Radziwill in her will). The authors recreate the turbulent years when the elder sister was First Lady, bringing readers back to the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK (and, later, Sen. Robert Kennedy). While Jackie struggled to rebuild her life, eventually marrying Aristotle Onassis and later becoming an editor at Doubleday, Radziwill fell for offbeat photographer Peter Beard, divorced her second husband, opened an interior design business, and married (and divorced) a film director. Readers drawn to the Kennedy mystique will savor this intricate chronicle rife with romance, tragedy, and surprising details, such as that Jackie may have helped choose JFK's paramours. The authors provide an intimate view of two sisters, both famous in their own rights. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A story of sisterhood that reveals how all the fortune and fame in the world can't assuage sibling rivalry.With the exception of their parent' divorce, it's hard to imagine a more charmed youth than that of young Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier. These two remarkable women, who would go on to become first lady to President John F. Kennedy and princess to Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, had seemingly every possible advantage. However, Vanity Fair vets Kashner and Shoenberger (co-authors: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, 2010, etc.) write, the sisters' relationship was a lifelong balance of love and envy. Case in point: Jackie would go on to marry Aristotle Onassis, Lee's former lover. With entirely opposite personalitiesLee was outgoing and dramatic, Jackie demur and shyeach seemingly wound up with what would have been the other's ideal life. In this well-researched dual biography, the authors describe how that fate would both haunt and help them. But while the story is essentially about the sisters, the narrative favors Lee's perspective, showcasing the often misunderstood socialite's battle with wanting to be more than just a pretty face. Of course, it was hard to shake that label given the philosophy the girls' fatherfailed Wall Street stock broker and alcoholic John Vernou Bouvier IIIingrained in them: "Styleis not a function of how rich you are or even who you are. Style is more a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It's what you are.It's what makes you a Bouvier." Living up to such an ideal would become Lee's Achilles heel, and her illustrious love life often overshadowed her attempts at self-actualization. Not surprisingly, the supporting castsTruman Capote, Peter Beard et al.in the lives of the Bouvier sisters were just as flawed and fascinating.Suffice it to say, more than 50 years on, explorations of the truths and fictions of Camelot continue to mesmerize. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
This land By Dan Barry. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.99.) For a decade, from 2007 to 2017, Barry's column for The Times explored everyday life and everyday people in America - from a hairdresser in Vicco, Ky, to the owner of a small oil company in Dixfield, Me. This book collects nearly 100 of his columns, providing a panoramic view of the country as it passed from Bush to Obama to Trump, the fabulous bouvier sisters By Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. (Harper, $28.99.) A book-length exploration of the complicated sister love between Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill (née Bouvier) - their shared appreciation for fashion and art, as well as the intense jealousy that characterized their relationship, the art of logic in an illogical world By Eugenia Cheng. (Basic, $27.) Cheng is a mathematician who believes we need to appreciate the value of alogic - emotion, that is - if we want to understand a world filled with irrational behavior. Yet she also thinks smartly applied logic might help address some of our problems. accessory to war By Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang. (Norton, $30.) The celebrity astrophysicist and a research associate at the Hayden Planetarium examine the ways military branches have used the science of astrophysics to bolster their power. It's an alliance between science and warmaking that has been, Tyson and Lang write, "curiously complicit." the parting gift By Evan Fallenberg. (Other Press, $19.95.) An erotic, mysterious novel set in Israel that takes the form of a letter. The unnamed narrator describes a consuming love affair that threatens his own well-being and that of the man with whom he has fallen in love. "Most of my reading these days is taken up with a book project that I've been working on for more years than I like to contemplate, but on the advice of a friend, I recently read fly girls, by Keith O'Brien. It's probably the most entertaining book I've looked at this year, a slice of Americana that gives us a sideways glimpse into what life was like in the 1920s and '30s, when aviation was a popular spectator sport. O'Brien's subject is a group of pioneering women aviators who, as one of them put it, had to fight for the same right to die as the men. We all know Amelia Earhart, whom O'Brien manages to diminish somewhat as an icon while elevating her as a human being, but she was only one of many courageous, innovative, barrierbusting women who deserve to be remembered. 'Fly Girls' is feminist history of the best kind. It describes individuals who didn't submerge their identities in feminism, but employed feminism to achieve their identities as individuals." - BARRY GEWEN, AN EDITOR AT THE BOOK REVIEW, ON WHAT HE'S READING.
Library Journal Review
Kashner (When I Was Cool) and Schoenberger (Dangerous Muse) take a close look into the lives of the Bouvier sisters, better known as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-94) and Princess Lee Radizwill (b. 1933). Born four years apart, the sisters seemed to be as similar as they were different. The authors share details about the women's lives that make it easy to understand the tension between them despite their closeness. Interviews with Lee present a well-informed look at both women's early lives that may also account for some bias within this dual biography. That said, readers now gain new insights into the golden age of Camelot, Hollywood, and beyond. VERDICT Fans of the Kennedys will enjoy this deep dive into another side of the dynasty, while all readers will appreciate the nice dose of fame and glamour from the 1930s onward.-Rebecca Kluberdanz, New York P.L. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
