Anthony Radziwill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthony Radziwill (born Antoni Radziwiłł; August 4, 1959 – August 10, 1999) was an American 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.
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 television producer for Prime Time Live. 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.
Around 1989 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, undergoing treatment which left him sterile, but in apparent remission. But shortly before his wedding, new tumors emerged. 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 bouts 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 open dialogue. Unable to bring herself to engage her husband, 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 following their departure from New Jersey's Essex County Airport in a small aircraft piloted by Kennedy. 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.
Anthony Radziwill was survived by his sister, Anna Christina Radziwill, who was born in 1960 and married Ottavio Arancio in September 1999. His elder half-brother, Jan Stanislas Radziwill, was born in 1947 of their father's second marriage to Grace Kolin, and is the father of two sons, Jan Michal (born 1979), and Filip (born 1981), by his wife Eugenia Carras.
Although he never used it in the United States, as a member of the Radziwiłłs, one of Poland's most renowned noble famiies, 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 vast hereditary fortune had been lost during World War II, and Anthony's branch of the family emigrated to England where they became British subjects.
Carole Radziwill wrote an autobiography, focused largely on her marriage to Anthony Radziwill. Entitled, "What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love," the book was published in 2005 by Scribner Publishing, made the New York Times Best Sellers List, and is widely read for the not particularly flattering glimpses 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.
