Celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli is working on a book about Jackie Onassis, her sister, Lee Radziwill, and their mother, Janet Auchincloss, to be published by St. Martin’s Press next year.
“Lee is adamantly against the book and has told her friends not to talk,” one source told me.
Among those Taraborrelli wants to interview for “Jackie, Janet and Lee” are Lee’s former lovers photographer Peter Beard and architect Richard Meier and friends such as fashion designer Marc Jacobs, Broadway costumer William Ivey Long, Carolina Herrera, André Leon Talley and couturier Ralph Rucci.
Radziwill hates being compared to her older, more accomplished sister, and told Vanity Fair last spring, “Please tell me this is not a story about my sister and me. I’m just sick of that! It’s like we’re Siamese twins!”
Taraborrelli — whose 18 books include bios of Madonna, Cher and Diana Ross — will cover the rivalry between the sisters, who competed for the attention of men such as Aristotle Onassis.
Onassis was pursuing Lee until JFK was assassinated. Then the Greek mogul shifted his romantic focus to Jackie and married the former first lady in 1968.