![]() ![]() ![]() Stas had gone off on safari with Peter and considered him a friend, but that was no matter to Lee and Peter, who began an affair on the island. He dressed in a disheveled, slovenly, sixties-chic that worked only if you were as stunningly handsome as Peter. When Beard needed money, the photographer returned from his life in the African bush to shoot models for money, enjoying their pleasures as he did. In 1965, he had published The End of the Game, a book of text and photos documenting the destruction of African wildlife and wilderness. The Yale graduate was a wildlife photographer and conservationist. There Jackie introduced her sister to Peter Beard, who was spending most of his summer on the island. In the summer of 1971, Lee visited Jackie on Ari’s island of Skorpios. “How could she! How could this happen!” Despite her rage and inner turmoil, to the rest of the world Lee displayed only sisterly devotion and delight in Jackie’s soon-to-be husband. “How could she do this to me!” Lee screamed to Truman on the phone. As far as Lee was concerned, for her sister, it was nothing but a business deal. He had been hers … until Jackie stole him from under her nose. The Greek shipping magnate should have been hers. She had just heard what she considered a betrayal beyond imagination. That autumn, a distraught Lee called Truman. With each other, they felt strangely secure in their perceived second-best status. As for Truman, as a gay man he felt that when he went into the salons of the powerful and elegant, he could always be spurned, no matter how successful he was as a writer. Whatever Lee did, wherever she went, she felt she was second best, always standing in the gigantic shadow of her older sister. In New York, she started writing about fashion for women’s magazine, but the disciplined routine of a magazine writer was not for her, and she soon sought other diversions that her friend Truman was happy to provide. She dressed well and lived well, but she didn’t have the self-control to channel her talents in any tangible way. Lee had creative instincts that she never seemed able to focus into a sustained career or expertise. Lee took the large bedroom as her own and shuttled her husband off into the antechamber, no bigger than a maid’s room Lee needed something new in her life too, and in 1964, she and Stas also purchased an apartment in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Eighth Street, near the Metropolitan Museum, nine blocks south of her sister’s apartment. As bereft as she was, Jackie was not going to wear widow’s weeds all her life, and she moved with her two children to New York to start a new life. Lee flew back to Washington a month later to aid and comfort Jackie once again, after the horrific assassination of President Kennedy. Ari gave Lee three bracelets so dinky that she believed even Jackie’s five-year-old daughter, Caroline, wouldn’t have worn them to her own birthday party. Jackie received an exquisite necklace of diamonds and rubies. Ari made little attempt to hide his feelings toward Jackie, and this was compounded by the gifts he gave the sisters when they left the yacht.
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