Sibling Revelry: The parallels of Pippa Middleton and Lee Radziwill
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Midway through the seventies, Lee Radziwill—her cheekbones Chopard-sharp and her heels Louboutin-high—was the society mountaineer of the decade. Having held court on the international party circuit, the former princess and sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis grew tired of being known solely as the belle of all balls and decided it was high time she got a job. She snapped up a plum TV position hosting a CBS talk show called Conversations With Lee Radziwill, an opportunity offered to her by good friend and broadcast impresario Bill Paley (husband of Babe). The show’s MO seemed right up Radziwill’s alley as it involved purring sit-downs with the famous (translation: her friends). Filmed in the sitting room of her Fifth Avenue pad, her show’s subjects ran the gamut from Gloria Steinem to Rudolf Nureyev to Jaws scribe Peter Benchley. Unfortunately, the show was bludgeoned in the ratings. One particular interview with Halston left few limbs intact: When Radziwill asked the famed designer what clothes from his label women could purchase for $25 or less, he gravely shot back, “Nothing.” The show was cancelled after six episodes.
“I’m nobody’s kid sister,” coursed the cover quote next to Lee Radziwill’s visage on the front of People magazine in November 1976, cresting her Easy Breezy hair and artichoke-sized diamond studs. That magazine tag could easily be attached to another professional kid sister—Pippa Middleton.
A tabloid bull’s eye, Kate Middleton’s younger sibling is the closest thing we have to a 21st-century other Boleyn girl. According to the Daily Mail’s royal writer, Katie Nicholl, there is no template for Pippa’s role. The author of William and Harry: Behind the Palace Walls has hinted in print that this is what makes the younger Middleton both riveting and dangerous. But there is one template, and one dusty script, found in the trajectory of a swan known during the JFK reign as America’s “first sister-in-law.” Eons before Middleton and the derrière that was said to launch a thousand hits, there was Lee Radziwill with her piggyback fame.
Take, perchance, the wicked Truman Capote, who delivered a not uncommon psychological assessment in a letter to Cecil Beaton in 1962. After a lunch he had with Radziwill, he revealed this of her to his friend: “My God, how jealous she is of Jackie: I never knew.” Or take the theory espoused by Radziwill’s biographer Diana DuBois, who maintains that her subject served a useful role in the cultural narrative: “Lee was always the whipping post, the underside of the public’s feelings about Jackie. They had Jackie walking on water, but Lee could never do anything right.”
In an effort to both capitalize on and recalibrate her fame (like Radziwill before her), Middleton has spun herself off with a party-planning book, Celebrate. Unlike the last time the sybarite seriously lit up the wires (earlier this year, she was caught in a contretemps in Paris, papped in a convertible with three frisky Frenchmen, one of whom aimed a fake gun at a pack of photographers), Pippa Middleton is back in the glue-gun and party how-to safe zone. One quart Martha Stewart, another Colin Cowie, the brand is questionable indeed.
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