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Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Colorist Slams Ryan Murphy’s "Totally Wrong" JFK Jr. Series
Carolyn Bessette didn't say yes when John F. Kennedy Jr. first proposed to her.
She didn't say no, either.
But the 29-year-old Calvin Klein publicist, who had been dating New York's most eligible bachelor for about a year (after several years of getting the run-around), wasn't sure that she was ready for what marrying him would entail. Namely, a merging of lives that would require a daunting amount of self-sacrifice, not even including the matter-of-fact assault on her privacy.
Hence all the fodder for the upcoming Ryan Murphy-produced American Love Story, which doesn't premiere until next year but has already courted controversy for its aesthetic and sheer existence, let alone whatever its dramatization of JFK Jr. and Carolyn's doomed romance will ultimately entail.
Carolyn had spent enough time with John's family at their Hyannis Port compound to know that there was no exaggerating the legend behind the name, a family technically made up of flesh and blood just like any other but which had embedded itself in the fabric of American culture over the greater part of the 20th century.
And she wasn't bowled over by the Kennedy bond. Rather, the clannishness was a turnoff.
In what would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives, Carolyn didn't particularly enjoy spending holidays and weekends with his sprawling family on Cape Cod, where their comings and goings were formally presided over by surviving matriarch Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow.
Photo by Justin Ide
Born in White Plains, N.Y., and raised in posh Greenwich, Conn., by her mother and orthopedic surgeon stepfather, Caroliyn was hardly outclassed, but she still felt like an outsider. And on the beach of Hyannis Port, she witnessed John being a cog in the Kennedy machine, rather than the dashing man about town he was in New York. Independent and confident on her own, being around the Kennedys made the 5-foot-10 beauty feel small and insecure.
"We don't do insecurity very well," John told his childhood friend Gustavo Peredes, whose mother, longtime Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis aide Providencia Paredes, was close to the young couple. "That's definitely not on the Kennedy menu."
But red flags aside, Bessette was in love.
They only had a few more years together, but the time that they did have remains the stuff of legend.
How did John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette meet?
John met Carolyn in 1992 when she was summoned to oversee a VIP Calvin Klein fitting for the former first son. He was instantly smitten and she played it real cool.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
"Early on, he would be frustrated," attorney Brian Steel, who met John when they both worked in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, recalled in the 2018 ABC News special The Last Days of JFK Jr. "He would say, 'I called her and she hasn't called me back.' And John did not like that."
Gustavo told People in 2014 that Carolyn "didn't think he was serious. He couldn't believe she turned him down. It had never happened before."
Obviously she did eventually start calling him back.
"She was exactly the kind of girl I imagined would date someone like John Kennedy Jr.," John's former executive assistant RoseMarie Terenzio wrote in her 2012 book Fairy Tale Interrupted, "and she intimidated the hell out of me." When she first met Carolyn, though, RoseMarie could tell she "was different from the typical gorgeous girls you see around Manhattan. She wasn't trying too hard. She wasn't trying at all."
But she was acutely aware of who John was. "I kept having to say, 'Snap out of it, he's just a guy," Carolyn told the future Carole Radziwill (née DiFalco), who was about to marry John's cousin and best friend Anthony Radziwill in August 1994.
John had romanced the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Madonna and Daryl Hannah, but by the mid-'90s the crown prince of the fallen kingdom of Camelot did want a true partner by his side.
He was at least partly motivated to take that next step by grief: His mother, who he was extremely close to, died in May 1994 and, in the summer of 1995, Anthony was given a dire prognosis when the testicular cancer he successfully battled in the 1980s returned.
So, after a year of being with Carolyn, he was ready to seize the day, personally and professionally.
About three weeks after People's Sexiest Man Alive circa 1988 popped the question over Fourth of July weekend on Martha's Vineyard, Carolyn did finally accept.
That September, with his fiancée by his side, John announced the launch of his glossy magazine George, a publication he envisioned would uniquely meld the worlds of politics and celebrity. Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington, photographed by Herb Ritts, famously graced the cover of the inaugural October/November 1995 issue.
"It felt like a victory not just for John, but for Carolyn," Richard Bradley, who served as executive editor at George as Richard Blow, was quoted in J. Randy Taraborrelli's 2019 book The Kennedy Heirs. "She was excited about John, about his drive and determination and the fact that he'd found something that gave him purpose. She wanted to be with him the whole way."
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"When you were with them," Richard continued, "you felt John had really put forth a new power couple in the family, and there had been a lot of them, like Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice [Shriver]. John had always had a thing about the Kennedy power couples of the past, and this was how he wanted to view himself and Carolyn. So, I guess one could say that Carolyn was becoming the woman behind the man, and John was happy and proud about it."
But importantly for Carolyn, John wasn't too old-fashioned.
"I see what goes on in this family, and it scares me," she admitted to her friend Stewart Price, according to The Kennedy Heirs. He reminded her that John was different, to which she replied, "It's a good thing, too. I know myself and I'm definitely not that pathetic Kennedy wife who'll stay home with the kids while her husband is out screwing around. No. I'm that pissed-off Kennedy wife who'll be in prison because she took matters into her own hands."
What Did Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. fight about?
Numerous issues would plague John and Carolyn's relationship in the months and too-few years to come. But by multiple accounts, infidelity wasn't one of them—though, according to some, Carolyn would tell John during fights that she was seeing an ex-boyfriend.
"Carolyn, more than anyone who John had been with, would stand up to him, and confront him, and I think that John to an extent needed that," historian Steven M. Gillon, a classmate of John's at Brown University and a contributing editor at George, told InStyle in 2019.
Evan Agostini/Liaison
That being said, John was still a headstrong Kennedy, possessed of an explosive temper that wasn't usually mentioned in the rapturous accounts of the political scion's inimitable charm and infinite potential—though his ex-girlfriends knew better.
The media had a field day when John and Carolyn were photographed and caught on video heatedly arguing in Washington Square Park on Feb. 25, 1996. They had been walking their dog Friday, when, according to onlookers, they started screaming at each other.
She shoved him and John grabbed her wrist and tried to pull Carolyn's engagement ring off of her finger, per various reports. She was holding Friday's leash and, according to the New York Daily News synopsis headlined "Sunday in the Park With the George Editor," he yelled, "You've got my ring, you're not getting my dog!"
As the story continued, John sat down on the curb in apparent anguish and Carolyn knelt down to console him, after which they left the park hand-in-hand.
"From a public relations standpoint where George was concerned, the fight was very bad," Richard Bradley recalled. "We were afraid of how it would affect advertisers, especially women's fashions and cosmetics. I know John regretted it, but unfortunately it was Carolyn who suffered the most in the court of public opinion. On the video, she definitely looked like the aggressor. It helped to set in stone an unflattering image of her as being dramatic and unhappy. We all knew John had a temper, but the public didn't."
"It looked like Carolyn had brought out the worst in America's prince, that she was changing him, and a lot of people held that against her," he continued. "In the end I think Carolyn was more angry at herself that she'd left John get to her in public than she'd been at whatever they were arguing about."
Never mind what Carolyn was facing on a daily basis with the paparazzi, which waited for her outside her building and would do and say anything to get a rise out of her.
John, who used to have a little fun with the photographers by wearing a dress and a lady's wig so they wouldn't notice him whizzing by on his bicycle, urged Carolyn to relax and ignore them. Autograph seekers and camera flashes had been part of his daily life forever.
Friends of the couple encouraged Carolyn not to engage with the press—don't worry if they call you names, they advised, you can't win either way—and equally encouraged John to be more sensitive to Carolyn's concerns. After all, she didn't grow up with that life.
At the same time, however, the rumor that John had hit Carolyn in the park was spreading like wildfire, even ending up the topic of one of David Spade's "Hollywood Minute" segments on Saturday Night Live.
"Why don't you stop hitting your girlfriend and pretending to run a magazine?" the comedian cracked.
"I knew that John had a temper and that Carolyn was no shrinking violet," Richard Bradley recalled in his 2002 best-seller American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. "But the violence of their rage [seen in the park video] presented a harsh contrast to the tenderness I'd seen between them."
"They were fiery," Ariel Paredes, Gustavo's daughter and a friend of Carolyn's, remembered to People in 2014. "They would love hard and they would fight hard but they were very much a couple."
Russell Turiak/Getty Images
Gillon wrote in his 2019 book America's Reluctant Prince: The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr., "The cause of this infamous fight, and the many that followed, stemmed from Carolyn's ongoing complaint that John let people walk all over him."
According to Gillon, Carolyn had still been mad about a wedding they had recently attended for a couple they barely knew, where it became obvious to her that the groom had finagled New York Times society page coverage by asking her husband to be his best man.
"She may or may not have been right," Gillon continued, "but she was furious at John for not making a statement by walking out. It was a familiar argument, one she had belabored frequently in private, but this time it leaked into public view."
Meanwhile, count John's sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, among his family members who thought the fight in the park was a bad sign.
She thought, according to Taraborrelli, that her future sister-in-law should have known to "avoid those triggers while in public."
Their uncle Sen. Ted Kennedy "spoke to John about it to sort of parent him through it, but he told me he didn't get far because the kid was so shaken and embarrassed," the late Sen. John Tunney, a close friend of Ted's, once said about the incident. "This kind of thing reflected poorly not just on John, but on the entire Kennedy family. Also, Ted knew John wanted to be taken seriously as a businessman with George. What had happened had been at odds with the image he was hoping to project in that regard."
Ethel decided to have a chat with Carolyn after the park incident, so she sent a plane to pick up her nephew's fiancée and bring her to Hickory Hill, the RFK family estate in Virginia.
Widowed at 40 in 1968 and left to raise 11 children, Ethel—who died at 96 in October 2024—sought to infuse her nephew's partner with some of her own hard-fought stoicism. She certainly understood what it felt like to exist in the shadow of a man's overwhelming presence.
"I went through that with Bobby at first," Ethel said, according to the unnamed friend Carolyn brought with her to Hickory Hill that day for moral support, who shared the story with Taraborrelli. "Then I finally got it that the only way to survive in this family is to look in the mirror in the morning every single day and say, 'You know what? I am enough.' Plain and simple. That's it. 'I am enough.' Eventually it sinks in that, yes, you are enough, and that no one can ever take that away from you. Not even the Kennedys."
Ethel also said, according to the friend, "Carolyn, I will tell you what I've told my daughters and my daughters-in-law. Be there for your husbands, but do not let them influence you into bad behavior. They will bait you. They always do. I've seen it for years. But you can't take the bait. You must be stronger than that."
Meaning, keep your issues behind closed doors.
"Never in public," Ethel stressed. "These men are hotheads. Don't let them goad you into acting improperly in front of the whole world."
She also reportedly told Carolyn, "I think you're more powerful than any of the other women John has dated. You know why? Because you're smart, and because you have heart. So don't let John or those reporters or photographers or anyone else change who you are in here [tapping her chest for effect]. Do you understand?"
How did JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette keep their wedding a secret?
John and Carolyn at least pulled off the wedding of the year without anyone aside from their closest family and friends knowing anything about it.
They tied the knot at First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia—reachable only by ferry, private boat or helicopter—on Sept. 21, 1996.
The Kennedys booked up all the rooms at the Greyfield Inn, the only hotel on the island, and rented a few private homes. Carolyn printed the wedding programs at the George office and RoseMarie helped with all the planning, including printing a fake itinerary that would put the betrothed duo in Ireland that weekend. John personally called their guests a week beforehand to invite them to a party.
Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
At one point a helicopter came into view as guests were leaving for the church, but after briefly circling overhead, it went away.
Carolyn wore an instantly iconic Narciso Rodriguez crepe silk slip dress and Manolo Blahnik heels. John wore a dark blue suit and his father's watch. At John's request, Caroline was Carolyn's matron of honor, while her daughters Rose Schlossberg and Tatiana Schlossberg were flower girls and son Jack Schlossberg was the ringbearer. Anthony Radziwill was John's best man.
They enlisted trusted Kennedy wedding photographer Denis Reggie to document their big day, and his was the lens behind the one photo released to the press of John kissing his bride's hand as they left the church.
"The elegance and less being more and not making it a grand occasion but a warm and loving, memorable weekend—I thought that they pulled it off magnificently," Denis remembered to TODAY in 2021. Of that storied moment he captured, "I thought there was a magic there. You can see in her face, in Carolyn's face, surprise and elation and love and romance and all those wonderful things."
On Sept. 23, 1996, a memo went out to the staff at George, as shared by the magazine's creative director, Matt Berman, in his 2014 book JFK Jr., George, & Me:
"To: All the Gentlewomen and Gentlemen of George
"From: John
"Re: Breaking News
"I just wanted to let you all know that while you were all toiling away, I went and got myself married. I had to be a bit sneaky for reasons that by now I imagine are obvious."
What was John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's marriage really like?
Carolyn's mother, Ann Freeman, openly questioned during her wedding toast whether John was the right man for her daughter, according to America's Reluctant Prince.
Anthony then tempered the awkwardness with his best man speech.
"We all know why John would marry Carolyn," he said. "She is smart, beautiful and charming...What does she see in John? A person who over the years has taken pleasure in teasing me, playing nasty tricks and, in general, torturing me. Well, some of the things that I guess might have attracted Carolyn to John are his caring, his charm, and his very big heart of gold."
Dave Allocca/DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
But making it official didn't change John and Carolyn's clashing temperaments or communication issues, and it certainly didn't deter the paparazzi.
In July 1997, Carolyn went to Milan to attend the funeral for Gianni Versace, who had been murdered outside his Miami Beach mansion. Sitting right in front of her was Princess Diana, who John once had tea with at the Four Seasons in New York in an unsuccessful effort to persuade her to be on the cover of George..
Five weeks after Carolyn met Diana, the princess was killed in a car crash in Paris with her friend Dodi Fayed. The driver Henri Paul, who also died, had been speeding through a tunnel trying to lose the paparazzi on their tail when he slammed into a pillar.
And Carolyn, who was followed practically everywhere she went, was shook.
"I'm not sure what I'm going to do about Carolyn," John told his friend Billy Noonan. "She's really spooked now."
The former rising star in the fashion PR world had also become increasingly involved with George, much to the consternation of John's business partner Michael Berman, who ended up selling his half of the magazine in 1997. Incidentally, Carolyn missed having her own career, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do next.
When did John F. Kennedy Jr. start flying planes?
John's mother did not want him to take up flying.
"Please don't do it," Jackie told her only son, according to Christopher Andersen's The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved. "There have been too many deaths in the family already."
Two of John's uncles, Joseph Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, were killed in air crashes in the 1940s, while Ethel lost both of her parents in a plane crash in 1955 and, 11 years later, one of her brothers. Ted Kennedy had also been severely injured in a crash that killed two other people in 1964. Jackie's stepson, Alexander Onassis, was killed in a crash shortly after takeoff in 1974. According to Maurice Tempelsman, Jackie's partner for the last 14 years of her life, she had a premonition of John dying behind the controls of a plane.
But John started training toward the end of 1997 and, on April 22, 1998, received his private pilot's license.
Familiar with his short attention span and knowing how absentminded he could be—he was always losing his wallet or keys, she said—Carolyn never flew with her husband without an instructor onboard.
"I don't trust him," she told a waitress at the Martha's Vineyard airport café while waiting for her husband one day, per Andersen.
In May 1999, John crashed an ultralight powered parachute (basically a glider, but with a propeller) and broke his right ankle.
Where were John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette going when their plane crashed?
Six weeks after his parachute accident and still hobbling along on crutches, John was planning to fly himself and Carolyn—with an instructor—to Hyannis Port for his cousin Rory Kennedy's wedding.
Carolyn didn't want to go. Among the other issues they were having, her lack of interest in spending time with John's family was among the many things that hadn't changed over the course of their relationship.
"They had a pretty big argument over it," a close friend of Carolyn's said in The Kennedy Heirs. "What was at stake for her was more than just getting her way. It had to do with respect, with being visible in her marriage, with being recognized... acknowledged. In a family full of loud voices, one thing Carolyn had learned about being around the Kennedys was that she had to speak up if she ever wanted to be heard."
On July 12, 1999, John went to stay at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue, while Carolyn started sleeping in one of the guest rooms at home.
AP/Shutterstock
Were JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette planning to get divorced when they died?
RoseMarie, worried what Carolyn's absence from the wedding would look like to the outside world, told John that he had to bring Carolyn with him.
She also told Carolyn matter-of-factly, as detailed in her 2012 book, "Carolyn, are you f--king kidding me? What are you doing? You're smarter than this. You don't want to put John in a position where he has to explain where you are, and you don't want to put yourself in a position of being judged. You get enough of that."
Lauren Bessette agreed with her brother-in-law during lunch with the couple on July 14, 1999, that her younger sister Carolyn would have fun. The 34-year-old Morgan Stanley investment banker also arranged to hitch a ride to Martha's Vineyard on their way to Hyannis Port.
John promised Carolyn he'd never make her go to another big Kennedy compound affair after Rory's wedding.
Yet Richard Bradley told Vanity Fair that he overheard John screaming at Carolyn "in startling, staccato bursts of rage" on the phone through his George office door on July 14.
"His yells would be followed by silences, then John's fury would resume," Richard said. "At first I could not make out the words. Then after a particularly long pause, I heard John shout, 'Well, goddamnit, Carolyn. You're the reason I was up at three o'clock last night!'"
That night at the Stanhope, according to Edward Klein's 2003 book The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years, John told a friend on the phone, "I want to have kids, but whenever I raise the subject with Carolyn, she turns away and refuses to have sex with me."
"'It's not just about sex,'" he added. "'It's impossible to talk to Carolyn about anything. We've become like total strangers.'"
John exclaimed, per Klein, "I've had it with her! It's got to stop. Otherwise we're headed for divorce."
As it turned out, he and Carolyn were on the same page about something having to give, or else—albeit for different reasons.
"She told me she felt manipulated and compromised, as if she had no authority over her own life," Carolyn's friend told Taraborrelli. "She said she was putting John on probation. 'I'm going to give it three more months and see how I feel,' she said."
St. Martin's Press
Carolyn acknowledged she might be over-dramatizing the situation, the friend added, but said she needed "a cooling-off period and that in a few months she'd have more clarity. They'd been having a lot of marital problems lately, she said, and she was worn down by then."
But, the friend admittedly wondered at the time, "Who divorces John Kennedy Jr.? You'd have to be insane, or at least that's what people will think."
The couple had started marriage counseling in March 1999. "It's all falling apart," John lamented to another friend from the Stanhope.
And he didn't just mean his marriage. George was in serious financial trouble and John flew himself (with a copilot) to Toronto in early July to meet with potential investors.
But even if he lost his magazine, he was determined not to lose Carolyn, and he was looking forward to putting that plan into action somehow during Rory's wedding weekend.
"Had he not crashed the plane, it would have been a meaningless few weeks of tension," a close friend of John's told People in 2017 about John and Carolyn's much-dissected troubles, "but it took on a life of its own because it was the last chapter of their life. One week they could have been at war, and the next week they could be right back in love—we'll never know."
What happened during JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's final hours?
The day started off normally for John on July 16, 1999. He went to work, had lunch with a group of George editors and attended an afternoon staff meeting, after which he"was in really great spirits," a staffer later told the Washington Post.
Lauren met John at the George office after work and they drove together to Essex County Airport in New Jersey, where John kept his single-engine Piper Saratoga. There was traffic and they arrived closer to 8 p.m. Carolyn hired a car service to meet them.
The instructor who was scheduled to accompany them on the short trip to Cape Cod had to cancel. John, by then a licensed pilot for more than a year, didn't have his instrument rating yet—the qualification to fly at night or with limited visibility—but he didn't seek out another instructor to accompany them on the 57-minute flight to Martha's Vineyard.
The sun was beginning to set as the 38-year-old went through his pre-flight preparation and was cleared for takeoff at 8:38 p.m.
At 9:26 p.m., they passed Westerly, R.I., at 5,600 feet and headed out over the Atlantic, toward Martha's Vineyard. John hadn't filed a flight plan with the Federal Aviation Administration because he was flying under visual flight rules, as opposed to using instruments.
When you can't see any lights below, which hazy conditions that night would have prevented John from doing, "you are totally, completely in the dark—literally as well as figuratively—if you don't know how to rely on your instruments," local pilot Tom Freeman told Andersen. "It's a sickening, scary feeling."
Air traffic control on Martha's Vineyard radioed at 10:05 p.m., that the Piper Saratoga hadn't arrived.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remembered going with his then-wife Mary Kennedy to his cousin's home several times, only to find out that they still hadn't arrived, per diary entries reported on by the New York Post in 2013. By 3 a.m. on July 17 they got the news that John's plane was officially missing. "The water was 68 degrees," Robert wrote, "so some people had hope they might still be alive but I had none."
Navy divers recovered the bodies of John, Carolyn and Lauren, who were still strapped into their seats, from the Atlantic Ocean on July 21. Investigators determined that the trio had died instantly upon impact. The plane's splash point was figured to be just off the western tip of Martha's Vineyard, near a private beach left to Caroline and John by their mother.
There was dissension within the Kennedy family how best to honor John and his wife in the wake of the latest sick twist of fate to befall their storied dynasty. But ultimately John, Carolyn and Lauren were cremated and their ashes were placed in Tiffany-blue boxes and scattered off the coast of the Vineyard on July 22.
Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Ted delivered the eulogy at a memorial service held July 23 at the Church of St. Thomas More on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
John was a devoted son and brother, "and for a thousand days, he was a husband who adored the wife who became his perfect soul mate," the senator, who died in 2009, said. "John's father taught us all to reach for the moon and the stars. John did that in all he did—and he found his shining star when he married Carolyn Bessette."
For more insight into the couple's last days, read on for the biggest revelations from Elizabeth Beller's Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy:
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The Untold Story
Carolyn Bessette was inarguably a trendsetter during her life, from her effortless downtown ensembles of long skirts, snug white tees and Chuck Taylors that turned heads during her days in sales and PR at Calvin Klein, to her impeccable Narciso Rodriguez silk crepe wedding dress, to the parade of flawless monochromatic looks she chose for events once she was the toast of society with John F. Kennedy Jr.
The admiration for her style has only evolved into worship since she died in a plane crash with her husband and sister Lauren Bessette on July 16, 1999.
But she didn't just add a little polish to her innate flair once she entered the Kennedy orbit, according to Elizabeth Beller's 2024 book Once Upon a Time.
Gallery Books
Carolyn Changes Clothes
Rather, Carolyn changed to meet the standards of what she thought John's late mother Jacqueline Kennedy would have wanted for her only son.
After a heady summer romance in 1992, John unceremoniously broke it off after a friend sent him a letter detailing why Carolyn was bad news. She resisted his efforts to apologize for more than a year, even changing her phone number.
So John, also entangled with off-and-on girlfriend Daryl Hannah during this time, never introduced Carolyn to his beloved mom before she died of non-Hodgkins lymphona on May 19, 1994—one of his great regrets and a reason Carolyn gave for breaking up with him several times.
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How I Dressed for Your Mother
But the world knew Jackie was synonymous with taste and elegance. In February 1996, Carolyn went from light brunette with highlights to the cornflower blonde hair she was known for, courtesy of colorist Brad Johns, started plucking her eyebrows ultra thin and lost weight from her already willowy 5-foot-10 frame.
"All of it" wasn't the real Carolyn, longtime friend MJ Bettenhausen told Beller, but "eventually she would have centered. She was always fit and had a beautiful figure, but she became so thin and pale…I think she felt she had to fit in, to be what she thought people expected a Kennedy to be."
Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Armed for Battle
In 1997 Carolyn started regularly wearing designer Yohji Yamamoto. She looked invariably fabulous, but the neutral colors and sleek silhouettes (he made "clothing like armor," he noted in the 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes, to "protect the clothes from fashion" and "the woman's body from something") may have been her way of trying to hide in plain sight.
Which was impossible, but she was sick of all eyes being on her, always.
Carolyn "would have laughed at being called a fashion icon," her friend Michelle Kessler told Beller. "She was trying to be nothing of the sort. Carolyn was trying to have an interesting life and go about her day without interruption."
NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Carolyn Was Never Left Alone
It wasn't just posthumously that everyone knew John and Carolyn's address. She had already moved several times since meeting him in 1992—from the East Village, where she first lived upon moving to New York from Greenwich, Conn., in 1989, to Greenwich Village in 1993 when paparazzi started staking out her apartment, and then to new West Village digs in 1994 after they tracked her down again.
Carolyn moved into John's Tribeca loft with no doorman and no security at 20 North Moore in 1995.
While John and countless others assured her that the paps would chill out once they were married, the photographers waited outside for her every morning. And by many accounts, the coverage of their relationship—feverish and intrusive as it was before—only got worse.
In the media's eyes, John had always been a generous public figure as he rollerbladed or bicycled around town, romanced stars like Daryl and Madonna, and accepted press attention as part of his life. So when he asked them to give his girlfriend, and then wife, a break—sometimes with daggers in his eyes, another time jumping on the hood of a photographer's car—Carolyn ended up blamed for the dip in his tolerance.
As Beller notes, it apparently didn't occur to the press that John's hackles were up because he loved Carolyn, who was so obviously distressed, and wanted to protect her.
Lawrence Schwartzwald/Sygma via Getty Images
Like a "Caged Animal"
Other than never really enjoying having her picture taken, even as a teenager, Carolyn's increasingly reclusive ways were the antithesis of her actual character.
According to friends in the book, she didn't like to be alone and was always on the go during her single days. She was described as a fiercely caring friend who'd be first at the hospital if someone was sick or who would call because she'd seen a look on a colleague's face earlier in the day and guessed correctly that she needed someone to talk to.
A "super empath," friend Michelle called her. (Though she also flirted with an out-of-town colleague's boyfriend when she needed a confidence boost, according to an unnamed pal, but apparently felt bad enough to never do it again.)
As she grew warier of leaving the house because of the photographers who could make five-figures from one picture—and the sadder or angrier she looked, the more lucrative the payday—multiple people invoked a similar metaphor for what those days were like for her.
MJ said Carolyn felt like "a caged animal." And John's friend and former Brown University roommate Chris Oberbeck told Beller that the more she retreated, the nastier the press got, leaving Carolyn "like a tiger in its cage; pacing back and forth and understandably angry."
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The Papers of Record
As Beller points out, even the non-tabloid media (seemingly every newspaper, from the Washington Post and the New York Times to the Detroit Free Press and the Spokane, Wash. Spokesman-Review was on the gossip beat) had instances of treating Carolyn like a very unserious person, her substance unapparent and her career in fashion a little louche for John's blue blood.
An Oct. 6, 1996, NY Times op-Ed speculated as to whether she would have met not just Jackie's standards, but appearance-conscious family patriarch Joe Kennedy's—as if the Kennedys weren't known just as much for scandal as they were being a powerful political dynasty.
The argument actually concluded that Carolyn was a perfect match for "a pleasant young man who also has a talent for promotion," so in the end, everyone was complicit in the cultural degradation.
Evan Agostini / Liaison Agency
Off the Clock
Carolyn had worked at some job or other since high school, and in three years went from VIP sales at Calvin Klein's Saks Fifth Avenue boutique to becoming director of PR for the Calvin Klein Collection in 1992.
But she resigned from Calvin Klein after seven years in March 1996. A couple of weeks beforehand she and John had a drawn-out fight in Washington Square Park that was recorded for all of America to watch in nightly segments and turned into an 11-page spread in the National Enquirer.
Aside from not wanting to be a distraction from the brand, Beller writes, "It had become increasingly impossible for her to walk into the office due to the stalking paparazzi's presence."
Former Improper Bostonian reporter Jonathan Soroff told Beller that he ran into Carolyn at an event and she told him she'd love to be working but couldn't anymore, that "'life has become a circus.'"
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At a Loss for What to Do Next
Carolyn did serve as one of John's closest—albeit unofficial—advisors as he prepared to open his magazine George, but she didn't want to detract from his passion project and even stayed away from the Sept. 7, 1995, launch so that the moment would be his and not about her and them.
And then came the era of What-does-Carolyn-do? coverage.
A question she also asked herself, according to many friends, including Carole Radziwill, who had no doubt she would've found her next calling, if only allowed the time. The daughter-in-law of Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill, Carole was married to John's best friend and cousin Anthony Radziwill for five years until his death from cancer in August 1999. (John had been writing Anthony's obituary before he died, but Anthony ended up reading Psalm 23 at John and Carolyn's funeral.)
In Beller's book, Carole, who was working at ABC News at the time, recalled talking to Carolyn about documentary filmmaking in the spring of 1999 and thinking that could be a promising road for her friend. The Real Housewives of New York City alum said Carolyn also expressed interest in going back to school to study psychology, "making use of her innate talent at homing in on the heart of someone's troubles and uplifting them."
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A Vicious Cycle
For most of her time in the public eye with John, Carolyn didn't hide her aversion to the press, turning her gaze downward (like the similarly hounded Princess Diana, Beller notes) as she made her way into events and not bothering to force a smile. She also eschewed the advice she got from John and others to appease the paparazzi by posing for one good shot to get them to go away.
The more she resisted, the more the photographers got in her face (some yelled vile slurs at her to elicit a reaction) and the more she was portrayed as difficult or cold.
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Never-Ending Bump Watch
While the first suggestion of pregnancy was raised and shut down as early as March 1996, Carolyn seemingly spent the entirety of her marriage—basically the last 34 months of her life—as the subject of bump speculation.
"Carolyn 'Bassinet' Kennedy," read one headline when she and John returned from a trip to Italy (during which they had to switch hotels to elude paparazzi) in June 1997.
Friends painted Carolyn to Beller as a real baby whisperer type who loved children. She got her degree in education from Boston University and at one point considered being a preschool teacher, but, as she reportedly told Women's Wear Daily in 1992, she felt that teaching ultimately wasn't "provocative enough" for her.
While tabloids put the no-children-yet onus on Carolyn as the years went by, she was admittedly scared of bringing a child into the mix when she couldn't even cross the street without cameras in her face. Moreover, John was putting work first, spending long hours at George and traveling constantly to meet with potential investors and advertisers.
But friends told Beller that, in the months before they died, John and Carolyn were working on their marriage and spoke of having children.
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The Doom Loop
The fall and winter of 1997 were a particularly fraught time for John and Carolyn, Beller notes, with tabloids reporting they were fighting constantly and on the verge of divorce.
Eventually the rumors of marital troubles caused actual marital troubles, and by early 1998, Beller writes, Carolyn was "falling apart" and, according to John's longtime friend Jack Merrill, "in the midst of several crises."
Carole described what was happening to Carolyn as a sort of "gaslighting," that constantly hearing from people who are trying to find out if what they just read about you is true "interrupts the navigation of these relationships...and you can find yourself as confused as the tabloids are."
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Hard to Believe
Friends Carole, MJ, Michelle, Hamilton South and Betsy Reisinger Siegel all scoffed at the persistent rumor at the time that Carolyn was having an affair with an ex-flame.
She "would have never jeopardized her marriage by an affair, she was way too smart for that," Michelle told Beller, while Carole and Hamilton just laughed, according to the author.
Multiple people in the book also said that, while Carolyn loved to have a good time, they never saw her drink more than a few glasses of wine or dirty vodka martinis. And everyone quoted said they never saw her use drugs, contrary to rumors from that time that she was doing a lot of cocaine in 1998.
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The Way They Were
One of the most tragic elements of Carolyn's story—her own and the one she shared with John—is simply that everyone who knew her, no matter how depressed she was by the press and how uncertain she was about the long-term health of her marriage, was confident that she was going to be just fine…eventually.
What could have been a blip—he was always working, they had trust issues—turned into the totality. Maybe their problems would have proved insurmountable. Or perhaps they would have powered through.
Either way, the roller coaster became their forever story.
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Carolyn Was Turning a Corner
Friends told Beller that Carolyn was starting to find herself again in the last year of her life.
She started to spend more time at sister Lauren's apartment a few blocks away, even spending the night occasionally, according to Bessette family friend William Peter Owen. As Beller writes, "The message seemed to be: I still have my own life. Take me for granted, and I won't be there."
And in early 1999, Carolyn—who, wary of hangers-on and faux friends who didn't have John's best interests at heart, never stopped being her husband's No. 1 supporter—returned to the George offices. She had stayed away for almost two years, not wanting to interfere while her husband tried to keep the struggling publication afloat.
She had even, as dutifully noted by the press, started smiling again when she was out.
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The Happy Times
Nothing is more heartbreaking than recalling Carolyn and John's happiest moments, the times when they were truly able to enjoy each other without feeling intruded upon or compelled to perform for the public.
Case in point, their candlelit Sept. 21, 1996, wedding ceremony in front of only 40 guests on Cumberland Island, the spot so low-key the church didn't even have electricity.
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Love of Her Life
Gustavo Paredes, the longtime manager of the Hyannis Port house Jackie left John and his sister Caroline Kennedy, recalled how John told him in the summer of 1994 that he'd never believed in stories about meeting "the one," that such an "instant connection doesn't happen in real life."
Then, Gustavo said, John added, "Well, that happened to me."
His daughter Ariel Paredes told Beller, "They would love hard and they would fight hard, but they were very much a couple."
Friend Betsy said that photos from her March 1998 wedding in Miami showed that "Carolyn and John were deeply in love, and in love with life. That is how I remember them, when they felt safe."
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The Mob Turns Into Mourners
On July 18, 1999, when officials announced the search for John's plane had gone from a rescue to a recovery mission, 20 North Moore turned into a shrine.
With Carolyn never to emerge again, photographers instead took photos of the candles and flowers piled outside the front door and the horde of people who made a pilgrimage to Tribeca to pay their respects.
Photo by Justin Ide
Hindsight Hurts
Even those who were privy to the issues Carolyn and John were having told Beller that it took years—long after the couple were gone—to really get what the once-private person caught up in Kennedy mania went through.
"At the time, it could seem like she was blowing it out of proportion," said Sasha Chermayeff, a longtime friend of John's who ended up close to Carolyn too. "Even her closest friends and husband sometimes couldn't see it for what it was."
Sasha continued, "Everyone thought, Come on, figure this out… Only in hindsight, from this perspective now, I see that no one was really fully there for her in that way. That proved to be further isolating for her, compounding her fear and anger, but her anger was healthy given the situation."
(Originally published July 16, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT)
English (US)