Bonus Episode - J. Randy Taraborrelli (Full Interview)

J. Randy Taraborrelli

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Bridget Todd

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another delightful episode of bonus content for Beef with me, Bridget Todd. Today I'm chomping at the bit to get right in the middle of the messy mayhem that went on between two of the most iconic sisters in american history, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Lee Radswell. Picking through the pieces left behind by these dueling debutantes, with me today is journalist and author J. Randy Terraborelli. He's a frequent contributing entertainment reporter for Entertainment Tonight, Good Morning America today, and CB's this Morning.

And he's written multiple New York Times best selling celebrity biographies, several covering Jackie and her family, including his most recent book, Public Private Secret. Randy, welcome to beef. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Okay, so first I have to ask, how did you become such an expert into the lives of celebrities like Cher and Sinatra and Madonna and Beyonce?

J. Randy Taraborrelli

When I was a kid, I was a reporter for a newspaper, and I had done a series of interviews with Diana Ross for the newspaper. It was, you know, her entire life. And how I got started in this business was that I got a phone call one day, and believe it or not, it was Jacqueline Onassis calling me from New York at Doubleday, where she was working a publishing company in New York called Doubleday. Of course, I didn't think it was really her. I mean, I thought it was my sister playing a practical joke on me.

Whoever thinks you're going to pick up the phone, it's going to be Jackie Onassis, you know? And she assured me that it was her. And she said that she had read the series of interviews that I did with Diana Ross, and she had been trying to get Diana to do an autobiography. And Diana was reluctant. She didn't want to do it.

And so Jackie thought, well, if we can't get her, maybe we can get Randy to write a book about, about her. She asked me if I would be interested in that, and it sounded like a very overwhelming project because I was used to writing thousand word magazine articles, and this was going to be 200,000 words edited by Jacqueline Onassis. And I just didn't see myself doing it. So I turned her down. And then about six months later, the magazine went out of business.

And then I didn't have a job. I was talking to my mom and I said, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do now because I don't have a job. And I'm stuck out here in Los Angeles. I'm from Philadelphia, and I was in LA. I was only, like, 18.

And she said that thing that you never think you're going to hear your mom say, which is you should call Jackie Kennedy. Right? What was it, do you think, about your writing that intrigued her so much that had her reach out to you like that? She told me later, I did reach out to her again. I did call her, and I said, you know, remember me?

And she did. And then she sent for me, and I went to New York, and then I had a chance to meet her and have conversations with her. And she told me that what struck her about the article was that she just felt like she was really there. It was written in a way that made her feel very present in the moment. And that's what she and Doubleday imagined a book by me would be like.

And that's been something that I brought to all of my books about Jackie, was the experience of knowing her and working with her. And it's kept me honest. It's kept me on the straight and narrow, because I have her in my head all the time. She told me something that I wrote about in my last book, Jackie public private secrets. She told me, you know, what is the point of biography if it doesn't tell a person's secrets?

And I thought that was such an ironic thing for a woman who had protected her own secrets so vigorously for so many years. But she was fascinating because she was able to take off her celebrity hat and put on her editor hat. And those are two very different concepts. And she understood that as an editor, if a book isn't revealing, it's not going to sell. And she was in the business of selling books at that point, and I never forgot that.

You know, she taught me a lot of very interesting things, and that was one of the things that really stuck in my mind, was try to find a way to be revealing without being salacious. You know, my job as a biographer is to invade a person's privacy, obviously, but you want. You need to do it in a way. I need to do it in a way that doesn't feel assaultive, it doesn't feel invasive and does and doesn't make my readers cringe. And that's why I think I've had such success with my books, and especially with my Kennedy books, is because they don't make people cringe.

Bridget Todd

How do you choose your celebrity subjects? You know, what criteria are you looking for that you might think makes one celebrity more interesting or revealing without being cringy? What are you looking for? It's a funny thing, you know, because the things I want to write about wouldn't necessarily sell a lot of books. You know, I mean, if it was up to me, I'd be doing a book on the supremes, sorry to say.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

Nobody's gonna buy that book. I would buy that book. I would want you to read it, too. Cause it would be good. I have to have an eye toward what is going to be a New York Times bestseller.

And I don't get to have final say over my books because I pitch them to my publisher, and nine times out of ten, they turn them down. And we have to keep going back to the well until we find one that works for them. Either it's going to be thumbs up or thumbs down. And if it's thumbs down, then I don't get to write it. I've had a lot of ideas that have been turned down, and then I've had a lot of ideas that were turned down that then come back years later.

You know, I pitched Elizabeth Taylor years before I actually had a chance to write it. And Grace Kelly as well. Jackie Jannon Lee was turned down by the publisher I had been with for 20 years. And I was like, no, this is a great idea. Like, I know that this is going to work.

So I went somewhere else, and I went to St. Martin's Press, and they published it, and it was an instant New York Times bestseller. So sometimes, if I really feel strongly about it, I'll figure out a way to get it going. But most of the time, you know, I just decide to just put it on the back burner, and I'll wait until the time is right. As somebody who has written so many of these biographies, why do you think that we, as a culture, have such a fascination with celebrities?

Bridget Todd

Their lives and their histories and their legacies? You know, I think that it's not as easy an answer to understand why the public is so invested in celebrity culture is not as easy as it was to once understand that, because before Instagram and X and Snapchat and everything else that we've got going, people didn't have as much access to celebrities, and they really wanted to know more. And we're talking maybe, you know, as recently as ten years ago, celebrities just weren't as accessible. Today. You know, you could say some terrible thing to a celebrity on X, and that person will respond.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

I mean, Cher gets into fights all the time with her fans. Right? Love her Twitter feed. Yeah, she's always, like, going up against him. You know, when I was a kid, I would send a letter to Diana Ross, and then I'd wait a year, and then I'd get a postcard back a year later signed by somebody else.

But today, you just go on, you know, TikTok and send a DM, and you. You're gonna reach that person. They may or may not respond, but they're gonna get it. So for me, as a biographer, this has worked against me. And I'll tell you, when it really worked against me was with my Beyonce biography called Becoming Beyonce.

I loved doing that book. I love Beyonce. Anytime I ever had a chance to be with her, she is great. I love her family, I love her life. I love her story.

I love destiny's child. I love all that stuff. So I was really excited about writing this book, becoming Beyonce. And my publisher thought it was going to be the biggest book of my career because I'm the guy that will call her Miss Ross. And we thought, coming from the guy who will call her Miss Ross, this Beyonce book is going to be through the roof.

So I wrote it. I interviewed a million people. I wrote, like, the definitive, and you should go to Amazon and buy it because it is the definitive Beyonce book. And it's like this thick. And, man, that book came out and it flopped so bad.

I was on the Wendy Williams show, and they put books underneath of everybody's chairs, and at the end of the segment, they told the audience, there's a book under your chair. And people went crazy. It was like Oprah giving them a car. And, I mean, we did so much great promotion for it. I was on the COVID of magazines.

I was on television. I did everything you could possibly do, and nobody bought that book. And it really was a lesson for me, you know, that people feel like they get enough of contemporary stars from social media, they don't need a guy like me giving them a big, gigantic book. That's why I don't do. You're not going to see me do Taylor Swift, like, I'm not doing Justin Bieber.

I'm not doing. I'm not doing any contemporary. I learned my lesson. These folks have their audience, and their audience wants to know this much about that much. They're interested in a very small portion of a person's life.

They don't need a gigantic J ratey terra broly biography to. To tell them every detail. It does. It doesn't, and it makes so much sense. You know, I do have your Michael Jackson book, which I love, by the way.

Bridget Todd

I wonder, like, do you think that the way that we fixate on celebrities at any given point in history says something about our society. Like when we are having a national conversation about Jackie Onassis or Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson fixating on them, do you think that says something about where we are at as a people, the things that we're grappling with? I do think that a national conversation about a celebrity or about one of my books, first of all, if you can inspire people to have a conversation about something that you wrote, that is unbelievable thing, because we are in an age right now where nothing lasts more than 5 seconds, you can have the biggest scandal in the world and the next day it's over. I mean, how many scandals a week do the british royals have? I can't even keep track.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

It's like every single day Meghan Markle has done a thing that people are outraged about. We are not a nation that focuses very long on anything. So if you can get people to be invested and have prolonged conversations about something, that's really saying a lot. Not about me as a biographer, but about the subject. I look at my reviews on Amazon of Jackie and I read them, and I'm really sort of taken aback by how important that book is to people.

You know, that this is a book about a woman who didn't always make the best choices. She was fallible. You know, she had moments when she wasn't her best self, and she was always working on herself. She considered herself a work in progress before the phrase was even used. She made mistakes, and then she tried to go back and rectify them.

And I think that resonates with people. You know, that when you have an icon who is fallible, it makes people feel that they might be able to learn something from that person's life. And that's really the only reason that I write biography anyway, is because I want us to see a little bit of ourselves in a person that we would think we would never be able to identify with. You mentioned Michael Jackson. You know, and I knew Michael Jackson.

And the thing that made that book work was that people felt like they could not identify with Michael Jackson. And what can I possibly have in common with Michael Jackson? Well, guess what? Michael Jackson is very insecure. We're all very insecure.

Michael Jackson had a difficult relationship with his parents, who doesn't? You know, Michael Jackson had a lot of problems with his siblings. Who doesn't? You know, like we. I was able to find commonality with Michael that made others feel like his story resonated with them.

And that's what I think is important in having a conversation about any celebrity. We only do that if we feel that it touches us in some way. We don't really have conversations about people that we can't relate to. The reason why the Kardashians are so famous is because you would think that we can't relate to them because of all their money and their wealth and their prestige. Like, that looks like a family you can ever relate to.

But the reason that their show was so and is so successful is because of the way they are with each other. It's very relatable, the problems that they have with each other, the problems they have with their mother, this sort of overbearing mother whose mother has not been overbearing at times, this jealousy between sisters who's not been envious of their siblings. That's what I think is important in understanding celebrity culture, is that if we can understand them and empathize with them, that means something. And it can cut through the noise, because otherwise, it's just a blur of constantly being bombarded and inundated with stuff on our phones, on our laptops. And so for to cut through that, it really means something.

It really does. Do you think there are hidden pressures and challenges that we might not see or be aware of, that folks who are in these high society positions are facing, that the average, like, non rich person might not even realize? And do you think that was that a different situation in the forties and the fifties than in the present, where people might have just been quietly dealing with these challenges while putting on this face of, you know, I'm so polished, when in reality, they have all of these secret foibles and challenges that we might not even know about. I think that it's as prevalent today as it was in the forties for people to have private lives. We think we know everything there is to know.

How was Janet Jackson married for ten years and we didn't know that? Yes. How did that happen? Right? I don't know.

It was ten years. But I do know that Janet Jackson was married for a big chunk of time, and we didn't know it until her husband filed for divorce. And we were like, what? I think celebrities do have private lives. We don't know for sure what's going on with Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.

All we know is every time we see them, he looks pissed off. Right? Am I right? You're right. I'm gonna watch that documentary about their love life.

Bridget Todd

Maybe we'll get some curated answers. Maybe we'll get some answers I just think that celebrities are used to finding ways to have private lives. And if you really are determined, it can happen. For instance, speaking of Jackie, Jackie Kennedy was the most famous woman in the world in the sixties after JFK was assassinated. You can't overstate how famous she was.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

She was viewed as really America's widow at that point. How is it possible then that she had a three year romance with the architect who designed JFK's memorial at Arlington between 1964 and 1967? They were together. They were engaged to be married. And how is it that the public didn't know about it until I wrote about it 50 years later?

Like, how is that possible? And I interviewed him, Jack Warnecke, and I said, how could you possibly keep secret the fact that you were engaged to Jackie Kennedy when she was the most famous person in the world? And he said it was easy. We just didn't go around blabbing to everybody.

It is possible to have a private life. You have to just sort of make sure that you trust the people in your circle to keep your secrets. And when you find out that somebody in your circle is blabbing to other people, you got to cut that person out. I've talked to a lot of celebrities about this, people who feel betrayed by their friends. It's ironic because part of my job is to make sure that those friends betray them.

Right. That must be an interesting dance. It is. You know, but, you know, I've had a lot of interviews with people I've decided not to use because I just thought, you know what? This is going to ruin your relationship with X, Y and Z.

I appreciate the interview, and I think we should just hold this for a minute, because if you value your friendship with this person and you're going to say these things about this person in public, your friendship with that person is going to be over. And, you know, no story for me is so important that it's going to ruin a relationship. One of the things that Jackie told me is that there are a million stories in the big city. She said. She said, you don't have to tell them all.

All you have to do is find your story and tell it. And that's what I've tried to do. And in doing that, I've not told many, many stories that I just think would be too damaging and just not worth it. So that's actually a great segue into talking more about Jackie and Lee. What do you see as some of the essential differences between these two figures?

Well, as I wrote in my book, Jackie, Janet and Lee, you know, there was always this sort of competition between these two women. And I think that what's important to understand is that the competition was really sort of fostered by their mom, Janet, very early on, in the sense that when they were little girls, Janet would say to Jackie and Lee, you two are all that you have. You should never compete with one another. You should always be there for each other. And then she would take Jackie off to have tea at the plaza, and she would leave Lee behind by herself in her bedroom.

And if you do that enough times, that girl who's left behind is going to start to feel very competitive to the one who gets to have tea with the mom. And that competition lasted for pretty much their entire lives. I think that the way that we see somebody as a child is often the way that we see that person for the rest of our lives, because the competition between Jackie and Lee was one sided. Jackie wasn't competing with Lee ever. Jackie always got everything she wanted.

Lee dated JFK first and would have maybe ended up with JFK if the mom hadn't decided. Well, I think we should let Jackie have this one. Jackie's older. She's 23. She needs to get settled.

It's time for her to get married. She needs to have children. She's 23. Back in the fifties, that was way late to be single. Lee was 19.

So the mom said, you got plenty of time. Let's let Jackie have this guy. Imagine if the mom hadn't interfered. And imagine if Lee had ended up with JFK. As I wrote in my book, the chapter's called what if?

Would Lee have had Jackie's life? Would Lee have ended up being first lady if the mama just stayed out of it? Maybe Lee might have had a very different life. And maybe Jackie might have had a different life, too. It's hard to know the answer to these questions, you know, because also Jackie.

I mean, also Lee dated Onassis first, and Jackie ended up with him, too. If you're Lee, you're like, dang, what do I have to do to be on the upside of this? And she never really was. Well, it does seem like Lee was kind of desperate for the spotlight, but was constantly rebuffed by the public's sort of general preference toward Jackie. Do you feel like, in what ways did this impact their relationship?

I think it impacted their relationship quite a lot that the public was in love with Jackie and not with Lee. And what's ironic is that Lee had so much going for her. Many people felt that Lee was more beautiful than Jackie. If you look at pictures of Lee, she is more classically beautiful. Jackie is beautiful in a different way.

But Jackie's beauty sort of came from within, whereas Lee was just beautiful. Take a look at some pictures of Lee, like Google pictures of Lee Radzwell, and you will see a stunning woman. And she had a lot of style, and she was very classy, and she spoke languages, and she was smart, and she was total, total package. But the public really didn't care because Jackie was Jackie, and Lee tried everything. I mean, my gosh, Lee was a fashion designer.

Lee was a model. You know, Lee was a writer. She had every career you can imagine. I mean, it wasn't like she wasn't trying to distinguish herself. It wasn't like she was satisfied with just being Jackie's sister.

She worked really hard to distinguish herself and to be her own woman. But her problem, her challenge, was that she never stuck with anything. If something didn't really take off right away, then she would move on to the next thing. She was so determined to chart her own course that she was never able to chart her own course because she wouldn't stick around long enough for it to chart. Lee was just bouncing from one thing to the next in sort of a very anxious and desperate journey to prove that she had something going on.

And that was more than just being Jackie's sister. You talk about how Lee did have so much going for her. And I do know that Lee was sort of widely considered to be this stylish person, but Jackie also was considered to be very stylish. And I wonder, do you think it bothered Lee that Jackie was known for being this beauty with a great eye and great style when she. That was also her thing.

Bridget Todd

She also was a great beauty who had great style and was known for her great eye. I know that Lee was frustrated. It's really complicated. Sisters are a trip, am I right? Sisters are.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

I mean, it's complicated because the bottom line is that they loved each other very much. And when you love somebody that much, it's hard, I think, to figure out your relationship with that person when you're also jealous of that person. On one hand, Lee was very proud of Jackie, you know, being the first lady, and she ended up, you know, the wife of a senator, and. But Lee was, you know, ended up with a prince. She was a princess, but the guy had no money, so, like, he's a good guy.

Stanislaw Radziwell, he's a really good guy, but he was kind of a prince just in name only. He was an exile from Poland, living in England, and the queen let him use a prince moniker. But it wasn't kind of, not really a prince. I mean, Jackie Lee's mom, Janet, said, well, he's a prince. If you kind of squint at it real hard, you know, ouch, ouch.

But, you know, to answer your question, I think it was really frustrating for Lee because she knew she had a lot going for herself and she wished that people would acknowledge it. But I think she also wished her mother would acknowledge it. Like, when you're not acknowledged by your mom, then you don't feel acknowledged ever by the world when all you really want. I actually think that Lee's frustration with the world was sort of spun off of her frustration with her mom. You know, she knew she wasn't going to get her mom's acclamation, and she just hoped that maybe she'd get the worlds instead.

And then she didn't get that either. I think she's a great character in history. And one of the last times I ever had a conversation with her, I asked her, are you happy at this point? She was, like, in her sixties, maybe seventies, and she said, I'll never forget it. She said, I'm almost happy.

Oh, wow. That really struck me. Imagine that. Almost happy. You're in your seventies and you're almost happy.

So I think it's a sad story, and I'm happy I was able to write about it in Jackie, Janet and Lee. Some of the nuances that you pull out of their relationship, it's so complex. And, you know, do you think that Jackie having this need to protect her sister was purely motivated by empathy and concern? Or do you think it was sort of a way to patronize Lee a little bit? Or, like, was that not even something that was part of their relationship?

Well, I think what happened is that when you know that your sister is jealous of you and this is just a thing that is a part of your dynamic, I think that Jackie began to feel not loved by Lee, and then she began to act out. I think that Jackie wished that Lee wasn't so competitive. But then I think that Jackie inadvertently fostered that competition. Look, she could have said no to JFK. She could have said no, mummy.

You know, he's Lis. Jackie was engaged to somebody else at that time. By the way. Jackie was already engaged to somebody when she met JFK, but the mom didn't approve of the guy, and so she, you know, steered Jackie to JFK. She's 23 years old.

She's old enough to make her own decisions. She could have said no, but she didn't. She went right for JFK. She could have not gone for onassis. Jackie was already engaged somebody else when she met Onassis, she was engaged to Jack Warnocke.

She could have said, no, I'm going to stick with Jack Warnecke. Lee should have onassis. Lee's been dating onassis for, like, the last six or seven years. Let her have onassis. But no, Jackie took Onassis.

So Lee's not being paranoid. You know, it's like, it's not like this sort of unfounded situation. She had good reason to feel this the way she felt. Jackie always did end up on, you know, on the upside of every equation. I want to just say that, you know, it's not just Lee's fault if there's fault to be found.

You know, Jackie participated in this. And when Jackie was in therapy in the 1970s, trying to work all this stuff out, that's when she realized. When her therapist, Marianne Chris, said, wait a second. You're not blameless in all of this. You know, you participated in this rivalry.

Like, you fostered this competition. Your mom started it and you continued it. And that's when Jackie really started to figure out, wow, she's right. A lot of this is my own fault. That's part of the journey.

You know, that's what happens when you go into therapy, is that, you know, you start to realize, wait a second. You know, I got some problems, too. I think of Jackie as this confident, progressive, intelligent woman. Why? Do you think she was okay with JFK's philandering, or was she okay with it?

Well, I want to say, you know, it's a complicated question, but there's an easy answer. No, she was not okay with it. And she was ready to divorce him a couple times along the way. But they're a complicated couple because I just never felt like they were really meant for each other as much as they were thrown together. When JFK asked Jackie to marry him, Janet was the mom, not 100% sure how Jackie felt about him.

You know, the mom really wanted JFK in Jackie's life because he was rich and he was, you know, a senator, and. And she said to her, you know, are you in love with him? And Jackie was like, well, I don't know. I don't know. And Janet said, are you in love with him?

She punctuated each word, and Jackie thought it over and she said, I enjoy him. That's not the same as being in love. And JFK, you know, didn't act like he was in love with Jackie either, and they weren't, like, crazy for each other. So I think that they, you know, they grew to love each other in their marriage because they started having shared history, and they grew together and they bonded together, and then they had children, and then that brings you together, and you have more reasons to be in love with each other when you have more things going on than just each other. But at the core, if you take it all back to the very beginning, I never got the sense that they were, like, crazy in love with each other.

JFK, to answer your question, his infidelity, in part, was because Jackie maybe wasn't the woman for him. Maybe JFK was in a bad marriage and felt stuck. And I think that Jackie didn't like it, but she began to put up with it because they had children, and then, you know, it was. And she. They were Catholic, and you didn't get divorced that easily in the sixties when you're Catholic, you know, it was a big deal.

He's in the public eye. What's it going to be like if he, if he. If he gets divorced? It could affect him running for president. There'd never been a catholic president before that was big enough to deal with.

How is he going to get to be president if he's Catholic? Back in the sixties, that was a big deal. And people were like, does this mean he's going to be going to the pope for policy? People were so dumb about this back in the fifties and sixties. So Jackie knew this as well.

And having a catholic president who was divorced, how's that going to go? That's never going to go. You know, she had other things on her mind. The big question for me is, after JFK was finished with his second term, because he would have won another term if he hadn't been assassinated, would she have stayed with him? I've always sort of speculated that she wouldn't have.

Bridget Todd

Wow. You know, my speculation is that he would have had two terms, and then in 1968, he would have been out, and Bobby probably would have come in and then, you know, would Jackie have stayed with JFK? I kind of don't think that she would have. And, you know, Lee had her own kind of complicated relationships. I know that a lot of her romantic relationships end because of her own infidelities.

Why do you think she had this self destructive streak? Well, it's funny, you know, when you talk about Lee's infidelities, Jackie never had infidelities. And it's because what's interesting is that their father, Jack Bouvier, had been chronically unfaithful to their mother, Janet. And Jackie and Lee both saw this, and they took from it two different things. Jackie took from it.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

I'll never let a man do that to me, you know? And of course, she ended up being in the exact same situation that her mom was in, but she was never going to do it herself. Like, she saw what her mom went through, and she didn't want to be on the other side of that. She didn't want to be the person perpetrating that to another, to the spouse. So Jackie was never unfaithful.

But what Lee got from it was, it's okay. My father did it. My mother survived it. Maybe it's okay. And so Lee was pretty chronically unfaithful to her spouses.

And Janet and Jackie both disagreed with that. You know, they were like, how could you do this? You saw how your father treated our mother. How could you do this to your husband? You know?

But Lee didn't. Lee was more of a free spirit in that regard. She just felt like, you know, she was searching for love, and she was always hoping she was going to find it. And, you know, maybe this next one would be the one. It's so interesting, though, if you think about it.

She didn't have it here, which is why she was looking for it externally. She didn't have it because it was never fostered in her by her mom, you know, so she always was looking for validation elsewhere. Jackie was much more confident. It's one of the reasons why her marriage to JFK was so difficult, especially in the beginning, because she just didn't understand why she should have to put up with that from him. You know, she was just like, no, I'm just not going to do it.

You know, ultimately, she did, but she didn't like it. And that's why when people say to me, you know, Jackie looked the other way, I don't like hearing that, because it's not the case that portrays her in a way that's not true. She often confronted JFK about it. You know, she was really upset about Marilyn Monroe. You know, she just felt like.

She just felt like Marilyn Monroe was a suicide waiting to happen. And she was worried that, you know, JFK and Bobby, you know, were sort of starting something with Marilyn that they would not be able to finish, you know? So Jackie had a lot of concerns about JFK's infidelity but, you know, ultimately, she let them go. But I just think that the woman that she became in the 1970s, with the advent of the women's lib movement and when she began working and being self sufficient and not depending on men for anything, I just think that that would have been the end of her marriage to JFK. Why do you think she is so often remembered or portrayed as, you know, quote, being fine with it or looking the other way when that wasn't the case?

I think the reason that people just always thought that she was looking the other way when that wasn't the case was because they couldn't understand any other reason why she would allow it on the outside looking in. And you think, wait a minute, she's got everything going for her. She must be looking the other way or else she wouldn't stay. It's funny, because when I wrote the book Jackie, Ethel and Joan, which was about the three women who married into the family, Jackie Bouvier, Ethel Skakel, and Joan Bennett, married Jack, Bobby and Ted. And I wanted to write a book about these three women who had this experience of marrying into this family.

And Joan was really upset about the fact that Ted was so chronically unfaithful to her. And she went to Jackie and asked her, how do you do it? What is your secret? How do you survive this? And Jackie told her, you have to find a way to build a life for yourself inside this family.

Like, you've got to find something other than your husband. You can't just be an adjunct to your husband. You need to have more in your life than him because he's not going to be there for you. So you need to have more in your life. And Jackie, her way forward was finding purpose in remodeling and renovating and refurnishing the White House.

And she thought Joe needed to do the same thing in some other way, find a sense of purpose so that your husband isn't your whole life, because if he's your whole life, it's going to be life ruining for you. And it turned out to be life ruining for Joan because Joan became an alcoholic. And Joan had a very, very difficult life because of the way Ted treated her and because she just was not able to handle all the infidelities, you know, that came her way with Ted Kennedy. Do you think there's any truth to Gore Vidal's rumor that Lee had an affair with JFK? You know, I love that question because that's the kind of rumor that I love debunking.

But it's not that hard to debunk that rumor. First of all, it's not true. It's also like this, similar to the rumor that Jackie and Bobby had an affair after JFK was killed. It's the same kind of untrue story that people want to believe. But when you do believe something like that, you have to also believe that these are not real human beings.

Like, no real human being is going to, you know, seduce her sister's husband, who's the president. It's like fan fiction, right? Like, that doesn't happen in the real world. That's the cartoon version of the Kennedys lives. No real human being is going to watch her husband be murdered, like, in her lap, and then two weeks later, go to bed with her brother in law, her husband's brother.

Like, that doesn't happen in the real world. In the real world, you're so traumatized as Jackie was that you're still dealing with the trauma all the way into the 1990s. Like, you have such PTSD that you've been in therapy with Ford for many, many years. And in the 1990s, before you. You die, you have a conversation with somebody in my book, and you say to him, you know, I wish that this thing hadn't ruined my entire life.

This one thing that I could not control. I could never get over it. That's real. You know, Gore Vidal was a great. I mean, I interviewed Gore Vidal way back when I was a kid.

He was a novelist. Like, you know, he was. You know, he loved fiction. He loved stories. I mean, that's what he did really well, was he wrote.

He wrote great stories. And so when you get a story like that from Gore Vidal, you know, that that's just something that he came up with that would have been fun and interesting to people, but not a thing a real person would do in the end. Why do you think things ended so badly with them? And also, given how much they both were obsessed with money, how insulting was Jackie's will? Well, you know, how insulting was Jackie's will in the sense that Jackie didn't leave Lee, you know, anything.

And that's really a complicated thing. People have asked me about that a lot, and, you know, there's a context to that. And the big part of the context has to do with Janet's Alzheimer's. The mother suffered from Alzheimer's, and Jackie became Janet's primary caregiver. And this was really difficult, as anybody who has ever had to deal with an Alzheimer's parent can tell you.

That is a hard, hard road and Jackie was going to Newport every weekend from New York. And she managed to do this, by the way, secretly speaking of celebrities having secrets. No one knew about this until my book came out that this was going on, and this was back in the seventies and eighties, and they were able to keep it secret. Jackie was caring for her mom, and it was very difficult. And Lee just couldn't do it.

She just didn't have the strength. She just didn't have it in her. And I think that I've known this in the real world, where siblings often have an animosity toward each other when one sibling taking care of a parent and the other one is not. And, you know, you get, like. You get this, like, resentment, you know, like, why won't you be there for her?

Jackie used to say that Janet had become such a different person during the Alzheimer's years, that she was sweeter, she was nicer, they had great talks. You know, there were hard moments, but there were also really lovely moments. And Jackie used to tell Lee, you're missing out on something that is hard but is also beautiful. Over a period of time. I think this really got to Jackie, and I really think that.

That her decision to not leave her money was partly based on this moment in time. You know, because Janet died in 1989 and Jackie died in 1994, it was just a five year period where I think that if she had more time to work this out, she might have changed her mind about that. You know, it's the funny thing is that, you know, we go through changes, right? And as human beings, we feel one way one year, we feel another way, another year, four years later, we don't feel that way anymore. And who knows?

If Jackie had lived another few years, maybe she would have changed her mind. She would have gotten over the fact that Lee had let her down. She might have gotten over the fact that Lee wasn't there for her mother. She might have figured out, well, it's not Lee's fault. Lee just didn't have it in her.

You know, she might have worked her way through that, but she died before she had a chance to. And in her will, she left her sister no money. And, man, people just have not been able to get past it. And I know that probably Lee was not able to get past it, either. So what do you think Jackie was thinking when she married Aristotle Onassis?

I think what's maybe a better question is what was Lee thinking when she allowed it? I know what Jackie was thinking. You know, Jackie was looking for financial security. You know, Jackie was looking for protection because Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated. And Jackie said, if they're coming after Kennedys, my children are next.

And Aristotle and Nasus had this huge army of security, and Jackie felt that she and the kids would be safe with him. But I think what's more interesting to me is that one of the reasons why Lee let this happen was because Lee felt that if something happened to her sister, because she had been so selfish that she wanted Onassis for herself, that she would not be able to live with herself. You know, like Lee felt, what if something happens to Jackie? Because I've stood in the way of her and Onassis, and that's why she let her have him. So it wasn't.

It was an act of love and selflessness, because Lee could have stood in the way of that, and she could have raised a lot of hell, and it would have been miserable for everybody. And who knows how it might have ended? It might have ended with Jackie just saying, you know what? Forget it. I'm not.

It's not worth it. Or it might have ended with Jackie saying, you know what? I'm doing it anyway. But it would have been a big deal. And Lee did not make it a big deal.

Wow. You know what? A thing to do. Because she was worried about her sister. She was worried about her niece and nephew, and she just stepped aside.

That's something else, man. Like when you have a woman who has felt sort of victimized by this competition for her entire life, for her to still love her sister that much, that she steps aside and lets her have the man because she's worried about her, that says a lot. Randy, this has been absolutely illuminating. Thank you so much for being here. I learned so much.

Bridget Todd

You're fascinating. I could talk to you for another hour. Thank you. I had a lot of fun. I love talking about these people.

J. Randy Taraborrelli

So thank you for having me.

Next chapter, podcast.

Bonus Episode - J. Randy Taraborrelli (Full Interview)

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1: Career Beginnings

2: Nature of Celebrity Biographies

3: Ethical Considerations

4: Sibling Dynamics

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