Who was Lee Radziwill? Meet Truman Capote’s ‘swan’ and sister to Jackie Kennedy

After writing classic novels like “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Truman Capote climbed the social ladder as high as he could, not stopping until he reached high society. There, he found the friends he nicknamed his “swans.”

His ultimate goal? To write his magnum opus titled “Answered Prayers,” a novel that would expose the upper class, including all of his new friends' secrets.

This betrayal is the premise of the second season of “Feud.” The show, based on Laurence Leamer’s novel “Capote’s Women,” focuses on Capote’s six swans — all powerful, wealthy and sophisticated socialites — including Babe Paley and Lee Radziwill, portrayed by actress Calista Flockhart.

“Lee is defined mostly by her spending her life looking for her own identity. She was the little sister of Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Onassis, and so she really lived in the shadow of her sister,” Flockhart told TODAY.com at a press junket.

Truman Capote was skilled at finding and providing what each of his swans needed in a friend, according to Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, author of “Swan Song.” Greenberg-Jephcott dedicated years of her life to researching the author and his relationships.

“With Lee, I think she was looking for anyone who saw her as her sister Jackie’s equal, or better still, Jackie’s better, and here was Truman... who was telling her everything she wanted to hear,” Greenberg-Jephcott tells TODAY.com.

What earned Lee Radziwill the title of ‘swan’?

Capote reserved the title of “swan” only for his closest, most polished female friends, so what earned Lee Radziwill the title?

“She was a woman who had it all. She was a princess. She was very rich. She had houses in London. She had a beautiful apartment in Manhattan. She had yachts. She had fancy vacations, jewelry, and she had a really good instinct about fashion,” Flockhart said of her character.

Daughter to stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and socialite Janet Lee Bouvier, Lee Bouvier was raised by a wealthy family that prioritized its status, and she was widely viewed as the leading debutante in 1950.

Yet her reputation as a beautiful, bright and wealthy young woman was not good enough for her, as she was often competing with her older sister, Jackie Bouvier, who would later become First Lady Jackie Kennedy, wife to John F. Kennedy. She would later marry Aristotle Onassis.

“It was natural that Lee would be somewhat covetous of a sister who was the First Lady and the most admired woman in the world, but her feelings went far beyond an understandable or controllable emotion. She was consumed with jealousy,” Leamer writes.

Even prior to Jackie’s White House stay, the two sisters fought, and Lee often felt overshadowed by her older sister throughout their upbringing, per Leamer's book. However, Capote found Lee more beautiful and more interesting than her older sister. As a result, Lee found in him a friend she she thought she could trust.

Who was Lee Radziwill married to?

Like Capote’s other swans, Lee set out to marry a rich and successful husband, and she succeeded not once, not twice, but three times. Her first marriage was in 1953 to Michael Temple Canfield, an American diplomat aide and secretary at the US Embassy in London. They divorced five years later in 1958.

One year after her divorce, she married Polish aristcrat Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, to whom she remained married until 1972.

“Lee had a gilded lifestyle. She was married to Stanislaw Radziwill, a Polish prince who had left his native land with a title that no longer had any meaning, and she lived in two grand homes in England— and later a major apartment in Manhattan too,” Leamer writes.

After her marriage to the prince — during which she and Truman had remained friends — she moved on to marry Herbert Ross, an actor and director, in 1988. The pair were married until 2001, shortly before Ross died.

What was Lee Radziwill’s friendship with Truman Capote like?

Capote and Radziwill had a unique friendship. The princess confided in Capote about her sister in a way she never had before. She couldn’t admit her jealousy to anyone else in the world but him.

“It was a measure of the emotional pain Lee was suffering that, despite Truman’s reputation, she told him the most painful secret of her life: she was wildly jealous of Jackie,” Leamer writes in “Capote’s Women.”

Radziwill struggled to escape her sister’s shadow and for that reason, she kept her guard up around everyone. But she found a friend and confidante in Truman that she had not found in anyone else, not even her fellow swans.

Greenberg-Jephcott says the bond between the women “was very interesting” and “that they were both friends and rivals with one another.” While Lee couldn’t admit her faults to her competition, she could share them with Truman, someone who listened and admired her more than her famous sister.

“She took her guard down and told him everything and then had to regret it,” Flockhart explained.

What happened to their friendship?

Truman Capote used his socialite friends to write his masterpiece, “Answered Prayers.” Although he never finished the novel, he published a few excerpts on Esquire. The most widely known was titled “La Côte Basque 1965.”

He wrote what Leamer described as a “string of gossipy vignettes, repeating the kind of ugly stories that were whispered at dinner parties.” Although he exposed and betrayed all of the swans in his writing, he most heavily slandered Babe Paley and Slim Keith. In the excerpt, Capote writes about Babe’s husband’s affair using Slim as the narrator, a gossip spreading her friends’ tragedy for the world to read.

Capote actually praises Lee in the excerpt, describing her as “marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine” and “feminine without being effeminate” while describing her sister as “unrefined, exaggerated” looking.

Radziwill was one of the only swans to stick by Truman’s side, along with C.Z. Guest, after the excerpt was published. Yet there was more to come.

In 1975, Truman had given an interview to Playgirl where he told a story about Gore Vidal, a fellow writer who he detested. He recalled a party at the White House in 1961 where Gore had gotten drunk and touched Jackie Kennedy’s back. In typical Capote fashion, the author exaggerated the story, leading to a lawsuit. He asked Lee, who had also been at the party, to back him up.

“When Gore’s lawyers came to Lee toward the end of 1977, she gave them an affidavit saying she did ‘not recall ever discussing with Truman Capote the incident or the evening which I understand is the subject of his lawsuit,’” Leamer writes of the situation.

Radziwill ignored Truman’s calls after that, and eventually gave an interview to a gossip columnist where she used a hateful slur against homosexuals to describe her former friend. Capote was both saddened and infuriated by Lee, swearing that he would make her pay.

After their fallout, Capote went on The Stanley Siegel Show to expose Radziwill for what she said about him. He told all the viewers at home all of Lee’s secrets, including how jealous she was of her sister, Jackie.

Radziwill joined her fellow swans in their protest against the author, resulting in Truman losing one of the only friends he had left. She died in 2019 at 85.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com