I hope you all saw the beautiful Lee Radziwill grace the cover of yesterday’s T Magazine. Sister of Jacqueline Onassis, and an actual princess, Ms. Radziwill is the epitome of timeless class and can be considered a true and authentic celebrity. She currently resides in Paris but frequents her home in the Upper West Side. Friends with Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Truman Capote, the stories she can recall are above and beyond just legendary.
Below is just a brief exerpt from the article which Lee takes with her the reader on her daily “errands”, escapeds, encounters of her daily life.
“While she has long captivated the public as one of Truman Capote’s swans, the sister of Jackie Kennedy and a European princess, with romantic liaisons from Peter Beard to Aristotle Onassis, not one of those labels begins to capture the true woman. The inimitable Radziwill — direct, free spirited and true to her own ideals — offers a rare, personal glimpse into her remarkable world.
In a world of passing celebrity, Lee Radziwill, 79, possesses a timeless aura that radiates nowness. Her bang up-to-date personal style, her laid-back — to say pared down would be to demean its ordered luxury — apartment in Paris (‘the favorite of any home I’ve ever had’), in this, her favored city, shows how subtly she has lived, lives now, without the attendant glare of past pomp and present self-glorification that others crave. She is utterly content, and it shows. What she is not is casual. She regulates her life by standards inbuilt by experience, by nurturing her friendships, by staying true, by her irony, by her humor — all qualities that show she is the real deal. That past sorrows and joys have merged into an elegance that permeates her presence, that “something in the air” that indicates class and courage and composure. Though she now rigorously guards her privacy, her free spirit surfaces easily, and her thoughts come crystal clear. A figure of her time, our history, Lee is her own harbinger for an iconic future. Ours, and hers.
One sees why Lee is happy. The apartment, just high up enough to encompass most of the most famous Parisian landmarks, low enough to allow her to sometimes use the stairs to walk Zinnia, a wriggling bundle of snow-white fur, is tailor-made for her lifestyle. The living room, a symphony of light and white and the deep pink of falling rose petals. Around the fireplace, a banquette and armless chairs, covered with crisp white linen printed with tumbling Asian figures (“they go everywhere with me, every house, my apartment in New York, my little men”) and against the far wall, a sofa of luscious rose silk, thick and ribbed, its back a relaxed baroque scroll. The art on the walls is mostly contemporary, mostly monochrome, most signed, all highly personal. The flowers, two low glass cylinders, a massed spectrum of pinks and reds (‘the man who does them for Dior brings them’) fill the Parisian dusk with their heady scent.”
Story and images via T Magazine.
