Lee Radziwill - Lee. Foreword by Peter Beard - 2015

Lee by Lee Radziwill. Foreword by Peter Beard. Introduction by Richard David Story. New York, Assouline, 2015. First edition. Black-and-white and color photographs. Rare and sought-after autobiography in pictures. In excellent condition - slight signs of time. In auction without reserve!!!!


Caroline Lee Bouvier, known as Princess Lee Radziwill after her second marriage, (New York, March 3, 1933 – New York, February 15, 2019), was an American socialite and interior designer.

Younger sister of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, she was a central figure in social life among New York, London and Paris from the mid-twentieth century.

Biography
Origins and education
Daughter of stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and socialite Janet Norton Lee, she was born at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan with the given names Caroline Lee; from childhood she used the nickname Lee as her common name.[1][2] She attended the Chapin School in New York, the Potomac School in Washington, D.C., and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut; she then studied at Sarah Lawrence College.[1]

In postwar New York society she officially debuted in 1950, drawing wide media attention in pages dedicated to social introductions and fashion.[3]

First marriage
In 1953 she married publisher Michael Temple Canfield; the marriage ended in divorce in 1958 and was subsequently annulled in canonical proceedings in 1962.[4]

Second marriage
On March 19, 1959 she married in Oxford the Polish prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł of the Radziwiłł family. Following the union she socially assumed the title of Princess, although in Poland the legal recognition of noble titles had been abolished by the Constitution of March 1921.[5] The marriage was dissolved in 1974.[6]

Career
Attempts in theater and television
In the 1960s she undertook a brief acting career, appearing in a Chicago production of The Philadelphia Story (1967) and in a television adaptation of Laura (1968), experiences widely reviewed by the press and contemporary biographical scholarship.[7]

Public relations and interior design
From the late sixties she directed her activity toward public relations and interior design. Her London residences and the country home at Turville Grange, styled with stage design by Lorenzo Mongiardino, were often the subject of photographic features and influenced her later work as an interior designer for an international, high-profile clientele.[8] In the seventies she maintained close contact with American and European cultural and musical circuits, as documented by memoirs and travel reportage.[9][10]

Style recognitions and media
A benchmark figure for fashion press and magazines, she was inducted into Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed Hall of Fame in 1996.[11] Her apartments in Paris and Manhattan were the subject of features in international interior design magazines.[12]

Relations with Grey Gardens
In 1972 she commissioned documentarians Albert and David Maysles to undertake a film project about the Bouvier family. The footage shot at the Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale residence and at East Hampton with Edith Bouvier Beale ultimately led, after the suspension of the original project, to the standalone documentary Grey Gardens (1975), now considered a classic of the genre. Archive material shot in 1972 was later included in the film That Summer (2017).[13][14][15]

Third marriage
On September 23, 1988 she married American director and choreographer Herbert Ross; the marriage ended in divorce in 2001.[16]

Later years and death
In the twenty-first century she devoted herself to autobiographical editorial projects and collaborations in fashion and interior design. She died on February 15, 2019 at her Upper East Side residence in Manhattan, at the age of 85.[17][18]