Review by New York Times Review
THE WRITER NANCY MITFORD, One of SIX daughters, once said that sisters "stand between one and life's cruel circumstances." To which the younger Jessica Mitford replied that sisters were life's cruel circumstances. By the end of "Jackie, Janet & Lee," with its riveting exposition of the relationship between the two Bouvier sisters - who became Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Lee Radziwill - one tends to take Jessica's side. Nancy herself was often the Lee figure of the Mitford household: a bright and stylish woman who would have been the star of almost any family on earth. She was constantly confronted by the figure of her sister Diana, a political extremist who possessed an otherworldly power of commanding idolatry. All her life, Nancy was jealous of Diana, partly for her beauty but more for the indomitable and rare self-control that enabled Diana to remain sphinx-like, serene and supremely herself no matter what befell her. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had that same defining quality. J. Randy Taraborrelli presents a woman of passion, both sexual and emotional, whose facade somehow always remains in place. It is strange, in an age of female sound and fury, this enduring fixation on a near-silent woman who put forth the decorous veneer of an aristocratic hostess. But the magic of Jackie's aura is imperishable to this day, which explains why Taraborrelli has written a third book with this one woman's mystery at its heart (following "Jackie, Ethel, Joan" and its sequel, "After Camelot"). Jackie existed (to her own occasional dismay) very much in the eye of the beholder, ever an object of fascination, even worship. Those close to her, however - particularly Lee - could find her intolerably frustrating, just as Diana was to Nancy. In Taraborrelli's account, one gets a sense of Lee's life as a series of reactions against her sister, a hectic parade of attention-seeking antics: three marriages (the second to Prince Stanislaw "Stas" Radziwill) ; and brief brushes against the worlds of fashion, acting, writing. Then there were the high-profile affairs, the most infamous being the one with the Greek millionaire magnate Aristotle Onassis, who from the early 1960s had set his eye on the greater prize, Lee's American royal-sister. Of course, Jackie herself engaged in many of the same behaviors, but to entirely different effect. "My God, how jealous she is of Jackie": so wrote Lee's so-called friend Truman Capote. To be fair, the rise of Jacqueline Bouvier to the status of first lady would have been hard for even the saintliest of sisters to bear. But Lee's reaction was frankly venial: "How can anyone compete with that? It's all over for me now." Yet the competition had been ongoing from the first. In 1941, the 12-year-old Jackie was scheduled to play a piano piece for her school assembly. Despite her best efforts, her performance was rather wretched, only to be followed by an immaculate rendition by the 9-year-old Lee, who had been practicing in secret in order to achieve just such a triumph. Taraborrelli is highly effective at describing this sisterly dynamic - the bond that tensed at the least provocation; the never-fully-sincere exchanges of "I love you"; even, at the height of some ghastly adult trauma, uneasy relapses into games of "You're it." The material, most of which will inevitably be familiar to many readers, is newly enhanced by telling, gossipy details from a satisfying bundle of interviews. The sisters' half brother, Jamie Auchincloss, who became persona non grata after he spoke to the author Kitty Kelley about Jackie circa 1977, provides a running commentary that portrays a society whose tastefully presented aim is to keep its chalice of wealth and privilege filled to the brim. "Money is power," as Jackie once said to Jack Warnecke, the lover she took after Kennedy's death - the architect who designed the gravesite memorial at Arlington, and whom she later left for the unassailably rich Onassis. For all the sisters' dramatics, the true star of this particular show is decidedly neither the directionless Lee nor the determined Jackie. It is, in fact, the third figure in the book: Janet Bouvier Auchincloss, their diet-pill-popping "Mummy," hostess of the "mother-daughter teas" to which she was still inviting her girls as they appreached 40. Descended from Irish Catholics, just like the Kennedys, whom she regarded with a hauteur only leavened with a respect for their money, Janet claimed kinship with the English upper class broadly, and even a specific relation to the lineage of Robert E. Lee. The well-to-do mother had a taste for thrillingly bracing aphorisms: "Weakness isn't something you're born with. ... You learn it." When Jackie at 21 accepted an engagement ring from a man who earned what Janet considered a pitifully inadequate $17,000 a year (the equivalent of around $160,000 today): "She must have fallen off her horse and hit her head." When Jackie began to host teas during Jack's presidential campaign: "Perfect strangers in the home sitting on your antique furniture?. ... It is a new world, isn't it?" Less comically, when Jackie was still in a trance of post-traumatic stress disorder in mid-1964: "We've all lost Jack, but it's been eight months! You have to snap out of it." In Jamie's recollection, Jackie's response to this exhortation was: "I guess it takes a mother to say 'snap out of it,' doesn't it?" The resulting impression of Jackie as resentful and respectful in equal measure, these twin emotions running far too deep within her for expression, is probably accurate. To be sure, certain cruelties were perpetrated upon Janet by her precious "Jacqueline": Though she could have used the fortune she inherited from Onassis to preserve the family's ownership of Hammersmith Farm, the glorious Auchincloss estate at Newport, Jackie instead allowed it to be sold. Was this revenge for Janet's harsh mothering? Surely. Yet it was Janet who had infused her daughters with the ineffable standards that carried them both through life, and helped to create Jackie's matchless iconography. THIS ASTONISHING MATRIARCH - who married the sexy "Black Jack" Bouvier and then the impotent Hugh Auchincloss; who impregnated herself with Hugh's sperm (using a spoon to do so, in his stepson Gore Vidal's account) and thus conceived two children - is by no means unknown, although Taraborrelli brings her to splendid renewed life. His trick of turning incidents into highly colored tableaus threaded with dialogue makes excellent use of welltrodden material. The image of Jackie shuffling elegantly up the aisle toward Onassis at a little Greek chapel, Janet all the while hissing in her ear that there was still time to call the whole thing off - "Don't do it. ... It's not too late to back out!" as the bride seethed back, "Mummy, please!" - is perfectly rendered in all its poignant absurdity. Janet wanted her girls to marry rich men who would also treat them as ladies, as her own beloved Jack had failed to do. She boldly confronted Onassis over his lack of commitment to Lee, and advocated divorce when Kennedy remained on a Mediterranean cruise after learning that Jackie had lost their first baby, Arabella. By today's reckoning, Janet was a monster of a mother; but Taraborrelli paints her with a kind of superb pathos, a profound belief in appearances that no longer holds today yet underpins our ongoing fascination with this tale. These women dealt in surfaces, but that doesn't mean they lacked depth. They made no achievements by any modern standard, but this deliciously readable book is not in the business of judging: It knows its value better than that. In Jackie, Taraborrelli presents a woman of passion whose facade remains somehow in place. LAURA THOMPSON is the author, most recently, of "The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters." Her next book, "Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life," will be published in March.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A formidable mother teaches her daughters to rise in the world by putting cold calculation before romance in this canny family portrait. Taraborrelli (Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot) traces the fraught relationship between First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her rivalrous celebrity sister Lee Radziwill as they dueled for popularity, men, and the approval of their mother Janet Auchincloss, an imperious matriarch who manipulated them as sternly as Joseph P. Kennedy did his offspring. Auchincloss's battle between heart and head-she married first a charming, virile womanizer, then a stolid, impotent plutocrat to secure her finances-laid the template for her daughters: Kennedy Onassis rehashed it by rejecting merely affluent suitors (usually at her mother's insistence) to marry into the "real money" of charming, womanizing J.F.K. and Aristotle Onassis (after wrestling him away from an affair with Radziwill-always the lesser marital strategist-and negotiating a $5 million prenuptial payment for her hand). Taraborrelli's gossipy narrative revels in luxurious decor, stunning outfits, and soap-operatic fights ("Janet just hauled off and slapped her daughter across the face, twice") in this entertaining saga of how wealthy, fashionable women got that way. Photos. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Those enamored of the Kennedy mystique will enjoy this intimate look into the intertwined lives of the Bouvier, Auchincloss, Kennedy, and Radziwill families. Taraborrelli, a prolific author of popular biographies including the best-selling After Camelot, creates a tabloid-style story of money, power, politics, and family-a voyeuristic look into a world of patrician privilege. While Jackie Kennedy Onassis has been the subject of countless chronicles, less is known about details of her relationship with her mother, Janet Auchincloss, and sister Lee Radziwill. This sweeping account traces their relationships over the decades, including familiar events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and obscure ones such as how Jackie's mother shared her "formula for good living" with her daughter. Relying on interviews, oral histories, original documents, and published sources, the author reveals personal details of the lives of these three women: the competitive tension between the sisters; poignant accounts of troubled marriages; and the tangled web that linked Lee, Jackie, and Aristotle -Onassis. Readers are also introduced to the "other side of Camelot;" the lives of Jackie's half brother and half sister, for example. VERDICT Engrossing for general readers. Historians may challenge some of the anecdotes and interpretations presented.-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific celebrity biographer returns to Camelot, this time to examine some of the women involved in the glamorous proceedings.Taraborrelli (Becoming Beyonc: The Untold Story, 2015, etc.) tells the story of Janet Lee Bouvier, mother to Jackie and Lee, a woman whose life's work was the acquisition of money and power. Indeed, Janet never let either of her daughters marry without understanding the suitor's finances and connections. After divorcing John Bouvier, Janet married Hugh Auchincloss, a Standard Oil heir with two magnificent estates, one in McLean, Virginia, and the other in Newport, Rhode Island. Once married to Auchincloss, Janet wanted more children, and she was able to bear two more. This is much more the story of Lee and Jackie and their lifelong competition with and devotion to each other. Janet fostered and fed their competition, praising Jackie and criticizing Lee. Even in their games, Jackie was the princess and Lee the handmaiden; everything seemed to come to Jackie easily, while Lee struggled. Throughout their lives, Janet told the girls what to do and how. She even caused the end of Lee's first marriage. Her greatest failure was Aristotle Onassis. Lee was ready to leave her husband, Prince Radziwill, for Onassis but was convinced it would be fatal for John F. Kennedy's re-election, and she backed off. Even after Kennedy was killed, Lee hoped, but then Jackie moved in. Lee stepped aside gracefully, but Janet was furious. Throughout their lives, especially Lee's, Janet vetted every attachment, with demands for settlements and monthly allowances (in the tens of thousands) before marriage. Jackie learned from the master, securing $3 million from Onassis along with at least $30,000 a month. Ultimately, this is a narrative about money and the seemingly unlimited power that goes with it. It's a sad story, but anyone desperately questing for wealth could learn from it.The aura of Camelot lives on in a book for Kennedy completists and those who enjoy tales of the rich and powerful. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
