Does the name Princess Lee Radziwill ring a bell? If you’re a member of my boomer generation, it should. Caroline Lee Bouvier was Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister. A failed actress but an active, on-the-prowl socialite, her second of three marriages was to a Polish aristocrat, Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill. He divorced his second wife to marry Lee, and because his second marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church, he was free to marry.
For a while, it looked like Lee had beaten her big sister in the husband-hunting game. Jackie had to settle for a congressman from Massachusetts. But we all know how that turned out.
Anyway, when she got married, Lee began using the title Her Serene Highness Princess Caroline Lee Radziwill. The royalty-besotted American press ate it up and referred to her as Princess Radziwill. However, that was all stuff and nonsense. The Radziwills could no longer call themselves prince, princess, etc. as of 1921 when Poland established its constitution. That document abolished the legal recognition of titles. That didn’t matter to Lee and the Radziwills; as far as they were concerned, they were still royalty.
But who were these Radziwills, anyway? According to “Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate history of a Divided Land,” by Jacob Mikanowski, the Radziwills were “an immensely rich Lithuanian family with a bottomless appetite for power and pleasure.” Many of the Roma, or gypsies as they also were called, had settled in Lithuania and went to work for the Radziwills.
The family’s roots go back to the 15th Century. They had immense wealth and longed to be kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The other aristocrats and nobles successfully blocked that ambition, so the Radziwills developed expertise in other areas.
The coolest of these endeavors? The training of dancing bears.
If you lived in the Eighteenth Century and wanted a dancing bear for your royal court, you would send your animal to the Bear Academy in Smarhon, which is in today’s Belarus. The Radziwills owned that town. At the academy, on the Street of the Skoromokhs (jesters), the Romas trained the Radziwills’ dancing bears. They also took on the bears of private clients; you had to pay the animals’ room and board for the duration of their training period.
The Roma taught the bears not only to dance, but also to play the role of servants, waiting on tables, bringing water to the table, and so on.
One of the most famous feats took place in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Princess Karol Radziwill, known as Lord Lovey, owned the town. He was “preposterously rich, possessing sixteen cities, 683 villages, and 25 forests, as well as a mansion in Paris.” Lord Lovey was also “a drunk, a womanizer with a fondness for Jewish women, and a teller of talk tales.”
One day, the leader of the Roma, “king” Jan Marcinkiewicz, decided to play a trick on Lord Lovey. He had his Gypsies teach a group of bears how to pull a horse carriage. He then harnessed six of them and rode off to Lovey’s castle. The prince got such a kick out it that he treated Marcinkiewicz like a real king. Hed threw a feast that lasted several days. At the end, they all rode off to the prince’s summer palace, trailed by crowds of bears, Gypsies, burghers, and noblemen.
That’s the way the super-rich used to play in those days. Nowadays, they build spaceships and send their girlfriends up to the exosphere or rent the entire city of Venice for their wedding. I think it must have been more fun in Lord Lovey’s time.
And that’s the family into whom Jackie Bouvier’s sister married. Lee and Prince got divorced in 1974 after 15 years of marriage. They had two kids. She married a third time, and that one lasted 13 years. After third divorce, she again began calling herself Radziwill. On one Saturday Night Live episode, Roseanne Roseannadanna referred to her a “one of those classy ladies where you don’t know what she’s the princess of.” Lee lived her final years in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, so I guess she had no room for those Radziwill dancing bears.
Now you know the rest of the story.
Veteranscribe's Blog 