Christina Oxenberg is the kind of deliciously wicked society writer whose work begs to be enjoyed with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine.

The 56-year-old bon vivant is the daughter of a Serbian princess; cousin to the British royal family, and sister of the Hollywood actress, Catherine Oxenberg. Over the years she has run with an uptown-downtown cross section of New York society from Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd to the Kennedys, and her address book is full of movie stars. (Her ex-husband is the artist Damian Elwes, brother of The Princess Bride star Cary Elwes.)

It’s everything I’ve been asked never to repeat. But after the age of 50, the gloves have to come off.

The author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, she is now serializing a tell-all memoir every week on the crowd-funded content platform, Patreon (entries are published on Sundays and Thursdays). There, for the past six months, she has been unspooling the secrets of her A-list set for a subscription starting at $1 a month.

Recent entries have dished on Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein; her mother’s alleged affairs with John F. Kennedy, Peter Beard, and Warren Beatty; and her sister’s nine-day marriage to producer Robert Evans. There are also gossipy stories about John F. Kennedy Jr. and being snubbed by Jackie Onassis when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took her to a family wedding.

Oxenberg, in the hat, poses with Ivana Trump, Princess Katherine of Serbia, and Kick Kennedy at an event at Le Cirque in 2017. Gonzalo Marroquin Getty Images

“It’s everything I’ve been asked never to repeat,” she tells T&C from her home in Palm Beach, where she has lived since Hurricane Irma destroyed her Key West residence in 2017. “But I feel that after the age of 50, the gloves have to come off.”

That’s putting it mildly.

A 2013 photo of Christina's sister Catherine and mother Princess Elizabeth, who are flanked by Catherine's then-husband, actor Casper Van Dien, and Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Prince Michael of Kent. The four attended a London book party for The Queen of Four Kingdoms by Princess Michael of Kent. Nick Harvey Getty Images

Oxenberg is estranged from her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, as well as her sister—who remains best-known for a two-year run on Dynasty in the 1980s—and writes unsparingly about them both. Recently, she referred to the former as “Genghis Khan,” and the latter as “a veritable drooling sinkhole of want.”

“Tina’s comments sadden me,” Catherine tells T&C. “I won’t say anything disparaging about my sister," but, she added, "I do not consider my sister a reliable or truthful source."

Princess Elizabeth told T&C via email: “I am very proud of all my children and their accomplishments. Christina is very clever, a good writer and brilliant at marketing. She knows how to combine imagination with facts as this way she promotes her blogs and stories.”

The Kennedy Connection

The original wound from which Oxenberg’s pain seems to flow is her parents’ bitterly unhappy six-year marriage. It was the first of three for her mother (who was also engaged to Richard Burton, in 1974, between his marriages to Elizabeth Taylor) and one of five for her father.

Catherine Oxenberg with Richard Burton and her mother, Princess Elizabeth, in 1974. Mirrorpix Getty Images

“Mom is a princess from a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and Dad”—Howard Oxenberg, who died in 2010—"was Jewish, from Brooklyn, in the garment industry. He was the first to mass market maternity clothes, which was very clever,” Oxenberg says.

“They both had a lot of affairs and were very naughty, very badly behaved. My mom had an affair with J.F.K. when she got pregnant with me, and everybody knew about it. It was very public, and she did it to poke her finger in the eye of Howard, who was screwing around. As a princess she was able to outdo him and get the president.”

Among the piquant details Oxenberg shares is that when her father discovered the liaison, he traveled to Washington with a pistol. President Kennedy, meanwhile, “died believing that I was his child, the poor thing.”

She also told Warren Beatty that he could be her father. At this point, some readers may be wondering if they should, as her sister seemed to imply, be adding a pinch of salt to Oxenberg’s dish. But her delectable bonbons are served too fast and plentifully to linger over any particular one.

Like her take on the British royals, for example.

Royal Tell-All

After their parents’ marriage disintegrated when they were young children, the Oxenberg sisters moved to England, giving them an opportunity to mingle with their Windsor kin.

“I met the Queen at Buckingham Palace for tea. Her husband [Prince Philip] is Greek, and my grandmother [Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark] is Greek, so they are very closely related,” Oxenberg says (first cousins to be precise). “But how I was brought up, everybody I was ever introduced to had a title. It was completely par for the course. In fact, movie stars were spoken of so disparagingly—it was like they were showgirls.”

In ‘90s New York, she entered the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein, whose dinner parties she attended at his Upper East Side townhouse, “a plush, professionally decorated showpiece in shades of beige.” It was owned at the time by Epstein’s billionaire patron, Leslie Wexner, whom she recalls as being “awkward and round and rumpled and damp and nervous and so decidedly lacking in all social graces.”

Christina Oxenberg, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia at Oxenberg’s 2013 book party for Life is Short: Read Short Stories. Patrick McMullan Getty Images

Also in the mix was Epstein’s alleged fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell. “If I saw her she would say, ‘You’re my poorest friend!” Oxenberg writes. “And she’d laugh, it gave her pleasure, made her feel in control perhaps.”

It would not be long before those circles and her royal relatives collided. She speculates that Epstein and Maxwell, known for drawing influential and wealthy people into their orbit, saw a high-status target in Prince Andrew, her second cousin once removed. “They were grifters and he was low-hanging fruit,” she says now. “He really was a hapless sap. But he’s my cousin so I love him, and I understand that being a dummy doesn’t make you a bad guy.”

Christina Oxenberg in 1986. She holds a copy of her book Taxi. Time & Life Pictures

Oxenberg also said Maxwell asked if she would ghost-write a novel for her. The inspiration was Oxenberg’s 1997 roman-a-clef, , about a dysfunctional clan of minor European royals. The depiction of certain characters (the protagonist’s mother is described as “a self-centered, gold-digging tart,” and her father as “a shameless social climber”) placed a chill on her family relationships that endures to this day.

Oxenberg says her entire interaction with her mother in the last quarter century has been one lunch, three years ago, “where she talked about the weather,” followed by a single “like” on one of her Facebook posts this November.

“Obviously she’s unblocked me,” Oxenberg said, sounding mildly surprised.

Judging by the content of her Patreon, a fuller reconciliation is not likely any time soon. Recently, Oxenberg wrote that the princess once asked a psychic about an upcoming plane flight her third husband was planning. “Do you have the power to bring the airplane down?”

Princess Elizabeth did not address an emailed question about the accuracy of that anecdote, although Oxenberg said that was the Facebook post she “liked.” But putting such racy allegations in writing, isn’t she afraid of being sued?

“I welcome it and look forward to it,” Oxenberg says. “I will win because I cannot be faulted for telling the truth.”

Ben Widdicombe Ben Widdicombe reports for T&C on the nexus of privilege and power, and the bad—and occasionally good—behavior of the very rich.

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