Janet Lee Bouvier

Janet Norton Lee was born on December 3, 1907, in Manhattan, New York City. She was the middle daughter of James Thomas Aloysius Lee (1877–1968), a lawyer and real estate developer,[2][3] and Margaret A. Merritt (1880–1943). Her parents were both of Irish Catholic descent.[4][5] She had two sisters; Marion Merritt Lee (1904–1947), who married John J. Ryan Jr.,[6] and Margaret Winifred Lee (1910–1991), who married Franklin D'Olier.

Janet graduated from Miss Spence's School and attended Sweet Briar and Barnard Colleges. She was a member of the Barnard College class of 1929 but records show that she did not graduate.[7] She was a three-time winner of the hunter championship at the National Horse Show.[8]

She served as a board member of the Newport Historical Society and the Redwood Library. She was also the honorary director of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association in Stratford, Virginia.[8]

Janet was married three times. In 1928,[6] she married her first husband, John Vernou Bouvier III (1891–1957).[9] He was the son of Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr. (1866–1948), a successful attorney, and Maude Frances Sergeant (1870–1940).[10] He was also the brother of Edith Bouvier Beale (1895–1977), later known as the subject of the documentary film, Grey Gardens.[11] Together, they were the parents of two daughters:

• Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (1929–1994), who married John F. Kennedy in 1953.[12] After his assassination in 1963, she later married Aristotle Onassis in 1968 and remained married to Onassis until his death in 1975.[13]
• Caroline Lee Bouvier (1933–2019), who married Michael Temple Canfield in 1953. Their marriage was annulled in 1959,[14] and later that same year she married Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł. They divorced in 1974.[15] In 1988 she married the director Herbert Ross. They also divorced in 2001.[16]

Mr. Bouvier's womanizing and drinking led to a separation in 1936, a brief reconciliation for a few months in 1937, and then a divorce in 1940.[17]

In 1942, she married her second husband, Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., an attorney and Standard Oil heir; becoming his third wife.[18] Together, they had two children:

• Janet Jennings Auchincloss (1945–1985),[19] who was married to Lewis Polk Rutherfurd in 1966.[20][21]
• James Lee Auchincloss (born 1947)[22][23][24]

Hugh Auchincloss died in 1976. In 1979, she married for a third time,[25] to her childhood friend Bingham Willing "Booch" Morris (1906–1996).[26] Jacqueline served as her witness.[27] Morris, a widower, was a retired investment banker who lived in Southampton, New York,[25] a graduate of St. George's School and Harvard, where he was a member of the Iroquois and Hasty Pudding Clubs, and was the son of Violet Lee (née Willing) Morris and John Boucher Morris of Baltimore.[28] His late wife, Mary (née Rawlins) Morris,[6][29] was a bridesmaid at Janet's first wedding.[30] They separated in 1981, but remained married until her death from complications arising from Alzheimer's disease in 1989.[8][31][32]

• 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, by Michael Gross
• Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Onassis, by Jan Pottke.
• "Obituary of James Thomas Lee", The New York Times, January 4, 1968.