Anthony Radziwill
Anthony Radziwill (born
Antoni Radziwiłł;
August 4,
1959–
August 10,
1999) was a television executive and filmmaker.
Born in
Lausanne,
Switzerland, Radziwill was the only son of
Lee Bouvier (younger sister of
Jacqueline Kennedy) and Prince
Stanislas Radziwill. He married a former
ABC colleague,
Emmy Award-winning journalist
Carole Ann Di Falco on
August 27,
1994 on
Long Island, New York. He had one sibling,
Anna Christina Radziwill, who married Ottavio Arancio in September 1999.
Anthony Radziwill was raised
Roman Catholic in
England, where his parents lived at the time. In
1982, he finished his studies at
Boston University, earning a
bachelor's degree in
broadcast journalism. His career began at
NBC Sports, as an
associate producer. During the
1988 Summer Olympics in
Seoul, he contributed
Emmy Award-winning work. In 1989, he joined
ABC News as a
producer for
Prime Time Live. Around 1989 he was diagnosed with testicular
cancer, undergoing treatment which left him sterile, but in apparent
remission. In
1990, Radziwill won television's prestigious
Peabody Award for an investigation on the resurgence of
Nazism in the
United States. He later won two more Emmys.
Radziwill battled
metastasizing cancer throughout his five years of marriage, his wife serving as his primary caretaker through a succession of oncologists, hospitals, operations and experimental treatments. The couple lived in New York, and both Radzwill and his wife tried to maintain their careers as journalists between his periods of hospitalization. During this period, Radziwill became especially close to his aunt
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was also terminally ill with cancer.
Radziwill was also close to his first cousin
John F. Kennedy, Jr.. In 1996, during Kennedy´s secret wedding ceremony in
Georgia to
Carolyn Bessette, Anthony Radziwill was the best man. The cousins' wives became best friends. During one episode of Radziwill's illness he slipped into unconsciousness and was believed to be near death. Kennedy was summoned to his hospital bedside from a White House gala, embraced his cousin and sang him nursery rhymes from their shared childhood. Remarkably, Radziwill revived, joined in the singing, and rallied enough to be released from the hospital. After Kennedy broke his leg in the spring of 1994, the two couples shared a summer home while the husbands convalesced and the wives nursed them. But as Radziwill's condition continued to deteriorate, Kennedy tried to convince Carole Radziwill to help him face his imminent death through dialogue. Unable to bring herself to engage Radziwill, she and Kennedy quarreled. Later, she would write that not once during the course of his disease did Anthony Radziwill ever acknowledge that it was likely to prove fatal. Since that was how he preferred to handle it, she acquiesced, "Anthony had the cancer, and I took care of it," she would later say.
On July 16, 1999, Radziwill awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of his wife talking frantically on the telephone in another room. On entering the kitchen he saw that she was carrying on a distraught conversation, and that she had covered the walls with notes the way reporters do when gathering facts in a breaking news story. Listening and reading the notes, he learned that his cousin, John Kennedy, Kennedy's wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and the latter's sister,
Lauren Bessette, were several hours overdue at the
Martha's Vineyard airport from New Jersey's
Essex County Airport from which they had embarked with Kennedy piloting the small aircraft. As he read his wife's futile efforts to track their whereabouts and reach family members, Radziwill crumpled to the floor weeping, knowing that his cousin and best friend had died.
Strangely, the crisis rallied Radziwill's strength. His wife had been unable to get through to Kennedy's sister,
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg at a midwest retreat, and feared she would hear of the missing plane first from television or prying reporters. Radziwill got on the phone and persuaded the local sheriff to send deputies out with an urgent message. When his cousin finally called, Radziwill broke the news to her. As
executor of John Kennedy's large estate, Radziwill was called upon to leave bed and home to tend to business over the next few days, and to participate in the memorial service held at sea once the bodies were recovered. His wife sank into depression after the funerals, and Radziwill confronted her, "We have to get on with our lives!" The following week, he too died. He was forty years old.
Although he never used it in the United States, as a member of one of
Poland's most renowned
noble famiies, the
Radziwiłłs, on the European continent Anthony Radziwill was customarily accorded the
title of
prince and styled ''
His Serene Highness. He descended from King
Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and King
George I of Great Britain. In fact, the family's hereditary fortune had been lost during
World War II.
Carole Radziwill wrote memoirs of her marriage to Anthony Radziwill. Entitled, "What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love," the book was published (Fall 2005) by Scribner Publishing, made the New York Times Best Sellers List, and is widely read for the not particularly flattering insights it offers into the
Bouvier and
Kennedy families at the end of the
20th century.
A
fund was set up by his mother
Lee Radziwill and his wife, Carole Radziwill, in
2000, to help emerging documentary filmmakers.
*
Boston University*
List of Boston University people*
The Anthony Radziwill Documentary Fund
