Carole Radziwill, a current star on Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York, is a Kennedy. Well she’s a Radziwill, which is like being a Kennedy but probably better. The most famous Radziwill is Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill, who married a Polish prince. The Housewives star Carole married Lee Radziwill’s son Anthony. Her husband’s cousin was John F. Kennedy Jr., who died with his wife and her sister in a 1999 plane crash. Carole wrote a book about that and other things called What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love. It sold pretty well and now she’s on Real Housewives of New York, where one of the big story arcs is the accusation by another housewife, Aviva Drescher, that Carole Radziwill had a ghostwriter for her book. (The ghostwriter accusation implies that Carole has no real talent–quite a mouthful coming from someone starring on Real Housewives of New York, but anyway…)
Radziwill is very upset about this–it’s a Twitter-worthy scandal (#bookgate). She feels she is a damn fine human being and doesn’t want her talents impugned. But she ought to take a page, so to speak, out of the Kennedy book. JFK won a Pulitzer Prize for “his” book, Profiles in Courage, but most people think Kennedy barely put pen to paper. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy family friend and longtime speechwriter, is said to have authored the book. At most JFK waved the virtual vermouth bottle over it before Sorensen poured. But the ghostwriting didn’t stop Kennedy’s ascent–just the opposite. Radziwill should respond with the same aplomb. Maybe Radziwill should just acknowledge that someone did for her what Sorensen said he did for Profiles–simply “helped choose the words of many of its sentences.” And be done with it.
