America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  Despite his exhaustion, John built loyalty, trust, and admiration among those who worked with him. “He was an incredibly charismatic leader of an embryonic organization,” said Ginsberg. With his usual discernment, John excelled at identifying talent and encouraging individual improvement. “He did a good job of caring and being involved while allowing people to do their own thing,” Ginsberg claimed. Even those staffers who had originally been starstruck—and many were—found John to be unpretentious and down-to-earth once they got to know him. “John treated everyone the same,” Lindgren recalled. “He was not one of these people who was your best friend one day and then ignores you the next. I remember being amazed by that.” He exhibited a dry sense of humor and enjoyed mimicking famous people. Everyone’s favorite continued to be his imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger bragging about a recent sexual conquest.

  Perhaps because he had such a young staff, John took time to encourage and nurture their talent. “He told me something I use all the time now with people I manage,” Ned Martel observed in 2018. “You are going to need my approval on a lot of day-to-day issues,” Martel recalled John telling him. “Try to think of the one thing that nobody else knows that you really want for yourself and for your career, and I will help you get it.” He went on to say, “You don’t need to darken my door to win small battles, because we will have this one goal that you and I are working to achieve together.”

  Because he took care to hire people who would work well together, John preferred a casual atmosphere at the magazine. On weekends, he would stroll into the office wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He would sneak his dog Friday, a black-and-white Canaan, past security in a duffel bag and allow him to run freely around the offices. He also demonstrated enormous generosity, handing out courtside seats to Knicks games and even calling New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to secure thirty tickets to a sold-out playoff game. Fashion designers sent him clothes all the time in hopes that he would be photographed wearing them. On one occasion, John sent a memo to the staff: “Re: Fine neckwear. Due to oversupply and under-demand (too many ties and not enough neck), I am parting with some fine neck drapery. If you are interested in acquiring any of said booty, it’s hanging in the back-hall closet.”

  John could still be absentminded, but he now had a support system in place. RoseMarie organized his life, constantly reminded him of appointments, and, for the most part, kept him on time. John often carried around the office a leather binder where he kept reminders to himself. It was also where he kept track of ideas that popped into his head or recorded important points made by the staff. George meant a great deal to John, and he was determined not to allow his bad habits to get in the way of success. John was probably just as forgetful in his thirties as he was in his twenties. The difference was that he recognized his limitations and deliberately tried to compensate for them.

  Over time the staff bonded with John not because he was famous but because he was a decent and kindhearted guy. When he learned that Ned Martel had turned thirty, John announced that he was hosting a party for him that evening after work. He invited everyone from the magazine, along with a handful of Ned’s friends, to join him at a lounge in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, where they drank champagne and told funny stories.

  John’s sensitivity toward his colleagues mirrored his hands-on approach as editor. “He would try to read everything in the magazine and give editorial comments,” Biz Mitchell reflected. If editors submitted pieces to him at an early stage, they could expect extensive and comprehensive comments. He would have sessions with front-of-the-book people, who were responsible for shorter features, and often added novel ideas. Because of his broad and eclectic interests, he could not only pinpoint stories with good potential but also identify missing elements or flip pieces around to create a more interesting structure.

  In addition to developing stories that highlighted the magazine’s mix of politics and pop culture, John needed to find images that would grab reader attention. He and Matt Berman struggled extensively with whom to put on the cover of the inaugural issue. The cover was key, since it would offer the first glimpse of John’s brainchild. It needed to instantly captivate while also conveying the message that George stood apart, enticing the reader to venture inside and see if the articles lived up to the hype. To help strategize, John invited Matt to his apartment one night to meet the famed photographer Herb Ritts. Over dinner at a local restaurant, the three of them began to list as many celebrities as they could. Berman noted that the person who graced the cover “had to be [as] American as apple pie but with an edge.” John suggested President Clinton, but Matt and Ritts nixed the idea. Then Ritts proposed, “What about Cindy?” The photographer, who was on a first-name basis with the biggest models in the world, was referring to Cindy Crawford. “That settled the issue,” Berman recalled.

  Now that they had chosen their cover model, a new question arose: the cover concept. Ritts suggested dressing Crawford as George Washington, and John loved the idea. However, many senior editors were not impressed, complaining that the cover would diminish the magazine’s effort to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. John disagreed and stuck with the peculiar idea. By superimposing a political icon on a popular star, he was “announcing to the world that George was not a typical political magazine,” reflected Matt Berman.

  Although they had nailed down the cover, John continued to struggle with many of the articles. He expected the first feature piece to be an essay by Gore Vidal about George Washington, expanding on the cover theme. Everyone was delighted at the prospect of having an author of Vidal’s stature writing for the first issue. But Vidal turned in what amounted to a prolonged assault on the nation’s Founding Father. Blow, assigned to edit the piece, faxed a letter asking for revisions. Vidal responded with a phone call: “People don’t edit my work. They either use it—or they don’t.” John killed the piece.

  As mentioned, John’s regular Editor’s Letter and his interviews were among the magazine’s most popular features. Although he would have preferred to be a behind-the-scenes editor, John knew that Hachette wanted him to appear in the magazine—ideally, photographed with his shirt off. He thus searched for a way to reveal part of himself without distracting from his main role as editor. The solution was for him to write a letter and conduct an interview of some historical figure for each issue. Most intriguing, he wanted to create historical tension by interviewing leaders who had butted heads with his father, thus highlighting lingering questions from JFK’s presidency. At the top of the list was George Wallace, the pugnacious segregationist Alabama governor known for blocking the schoolhouse door to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama in June 1963. That act of defiance led John’s father to give one of the most memorable speeches of his presidency. On June 11 JFK went on national television to declare “civil rights” a moral cause and introduced national legislation that paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  John spent days preparing for the Wallace meeting. “We took it very seriously,” recalled Ginsberg, who traveled with John to conduct the interview in Montgomery. Although John was already well read on his father’s presidency, he doubled down on books that focused on civil rights. He also met with Nick Katzenbach, the assistant attorney general whom his father had dispatched to Alabama to confront Wallace back in 1963.

  Although John knew that Wallace was in bad health, he was shocked by how enfeebled the seventy-five-year-old former governor had become. “He couldn’t hear; he could barely speak,” recalled Ginsberg. “He was in severe pain the entire time we spent with him.” Most troubling, Wallace’s memory was fuzzy, his answers incoherent. Because of Wallace’s hearing problem, Ginsberg and Kennedy had to shout their questions to him, often to no avail. Eventually they needed to write down the questions so that he could read them. On the last of the three days they visited him, they conducted their interview at Wallace’s home. The former governor was st
ill suffering from the physical trauma of a failed 1972 assassination attempt that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He suffered from so much pain that he was lying in a hospital bed set up in the middle of his living room. Kennedy and Ginsberg stood at his bedside and peppered him with questions, but Wallace was too incapacitated by powerful painkillers to offer useful answers.

  That evening, two friends of the governor invited Gary and John to dinner at a quiet roadside restaurant. As they approached, they saw a hundred cars packed in the parking lot and along the road leading to the restaurant. “I’m not doing it,” John said. “I’m going back to the hotel.” He realized that he had been set up. The supposedly private dinner had turned into a public event. “He was really debilitated by his thyroid condition,” Ginsberg recalled, “and had lost a lot of weight. He was clearly both physically and, to some extent, mentally, just feeling exhausted.” Ginsberg, however, managed to convince John to enter the restaurant. If not, he warned, “you are going to disappoint a lot of people, and you are going to embarrass our host. As pissed as you are about it, you can’t take it out on the people who have traveled, presumably, long distances.” John realized that he had to switch into his John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. role. He exited the car, strode into the restaurant, and turned on the charm. For two hours, he enchanted everyone, signing pictures of his father, posing for dozens of others, and listening to stories of people who claimed a connection to his extended family.

  The two men returned to New York believing they had pulled enough information out of Wallace to submit a piece. They were wrong. The transcript of their interview was incomprehensible. John dispatched Ginsberg and Blow to go back and try to obtain a few coherent sentences. They found Wallace propped up in bed wearing striped pajamas. On his lap sat an ashtray holding seven cigar butts. They needed to extract useful material from the ex-governor, but Blow called the experience “ghoulish, as if we were pilfering loose change from beneath a pauper’s mattress.” Ginsberg and Blow scribbled their questions on legal-sized paper and placed them in front of Wallace. “Do you think there will be blacks in heaven?” Blow asked. A fiery Wallace shot back, “Of course there will.” The question, however, never made it into the published interview. John nixed it, judging it too confrontational and something he never would have asked.

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  While preparing to launch the magazine, John arrived at another important decision: to marry Carolyn. Their relationship had deepened in the year since Jackie’s death, and John had grown convinced that Carolyn was the one for him. He considered her the first girlfriend who could see beyond the veneer of his fame and celebrity. She teased him and stood up to him because of her independent, passionate personality—qualities that John found attractive. Naturally, their relationship veered between extremes of emotion. Sometimes, they could not seem to take their hands off each other, while at other times, they fought with equal intensity. “They were fiery,” recalled Ariel Paredes, a mutual friend. “They would love hard and they would fight hard but they were very much a couple.”

  In November 1994, John officially introduced Carolyn to his only remaining immediate family members—his sister, Caroline, and her husband, Ed. Carole Radziwill, who was there with her husband, Anthony, described the encounter as awkward. Caroline hugged John “warmly” but hesitated for a moment before greeting Carolyn with, “So nice to meet you.” A few weeks later at Christmas, Carole and Anthony shared dinner with Caroline and Ed and began trading New Year’s resolutions and predictions. “I think John and Carolyn will get married,” Carole said. As soon as she made that statement, the room fell silent. “No, he won’t,” Ed insisted. “Caroline doesn’t even know her.” This exchange was the first indication of what would be a rocky relationship between Carolyn and her in-laws.

  The possibility of marriage became more likely that spring when Carolyn moved into the 2,600-square-foot penthouse co-op in Tribeca that John had purchased shortly after his mother died. At the time, it was a large industrial space, so John hired an architect to add a kitchen, two bathrooms, and one bedroom. According to Carole Radziwill, although John spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the design, it still looked like “the ultimate bachelor pad.” Carole and Carolyn gave it a nickname: “Home Depot, the warehouse.”

  Over July 4 weekend in 1995, they went to Martha’s Vineyard, and John invited Carolyn to go fishing. “I wanted to go fishing like I wanted to cut off my right arm,” Carolyn later told RoseMarie. John took her out on the boat, knelt down on one knee, and said, “Fishing is so much better with a partner,” as he pulled out a platinum band sparkling with diamonds and sapphires—a replica of the ring his mother had worn.

  Oddly, Carolyn did not say yes, although she wore the ring and told friends they agreed they would eventually get married. The truth was that she was in no hurry. It’s possible that Carolyn, who had obsessed over John since at least 1988, came to realize that marriage with him would be very different from fantasizing about it. Carole Radziwill had the impression that Carolyn would have preferred to remain secretly engaged forever without having to actually get married. “I’m only twenty-nine years old,” Carolyn confessed to RoseMarie. “I don’t think I’m ready to settle down.” Furthermore, she rightly worried about the expectations that would be imposed upon her by marrying the heir to the Kennedy legacy. At one point, she confessed to him, “I can’t be like your mother. I’ll never be the person she was. I fear that is the standard by which I will be judged.”

  Carolyn’s reluctance puzzled John. Women had fawned over him his entire life and he could have married just about anyone he wanted—famous celebrities, beautiful models, celebrated actresses. But he chose a stylist from Calvin Klein who now seemed less than enthusiastic. He assured her that he lived an independent life separate from his family and that he wanted to marry her, not his mother. From his mistaken perspective, the public and the paparazzi would lose interest and stop hounding him once he was no longer an eligible bachelor. While John wanted to marry Carolyn because he loved her, he also saw marriage as the route to a more normal life.

  They managed to keep the engagement a secret from all but a few friends until the New York Post ran a story before Labor Day showcasing a close-up shot of Carolyn’s left hand with the engagement ring. Suddenly, their engagement became hot news. For Berman the timing could not have been worse, coming mere days before a press conference announcing George to the world. Michael feared that every question at this conference would now revolve around the engagement news, overshadowing the introduction of the magazine that they had spent the last year putting together.

  Initially John wanted to ignore the story, but Michael convinced him that it would distract from the George launch and potentially sink their business venture. John agreed that he needed to publicly deny the engagement, but neither he nor Berman wanted to be the one responsible for lying to the press. So they dumped the job on Rose, who then called Carolyn to tell her what was happening. Carolyn was not pleased to have to deny their engagement but she understood the compromises involved in having a relationship with John. She also insisted that Rose make the announcement. “If anyone is going to make a statement about my personal life, it should be you. You’re the only one I fucking trust.”

  Later that day Rose released a statement: “Once again, John Kennedy seems to be bearing the brunt of a slow news day. The story circulating regarding an engagement is untrue. He is not engaged. While it is not our habit to comment on John’s personal life, the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, and we feel it necessary to respond.”

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  Michael and John debated how they should announce the magazine to the world. Michael insisted that they hold a large press conference and invite all the major news organizations. John resisted the idea, fearing that it would degenerate into a feeding frenzy on his private life. But the other option was even less attractive: an
endless number of satellite interviews with major news outlets. The staff knew that given his short attention span and inability to sit still for long periods of time, John would perform well for the first two or three and then get bored, and that would be a disaster for him and for the magazine. Over time John warmed up to the idea of a single press conference. Michael convinced him that they could manage the event so that the press would stay focused on the magazine. Blow recalled John saying, “Public relations is what you do, so if you think a press conference is a good idea, I’ll do it. But everything I know tells me not to.”

  Their top choice for holding the conference was historic Federal Hall in downtown Manhattan. The site of Federal Hall has played a significant role in American history for centuries. In the 1700s, before it became Federal Hall, it functioned as New York City’s city hall, where John Peter Zenger was tried and acquitted of libel for exposing government corruption in his newspaper, an event considered an early victory for freedom of the press. It was also here, in October 1765, that the Stamp Act Congress gathered to protest “taxation without representation.” After the American Revolution, the Continental Congress assembled at city hall under the Articles of Confederation. Following the US Constitution’s ratification, it was renamed Federal Hall and served as the first Capitol of the newly created United States. The First Congress met there to draft the Bill of Rights, and, most fitting of all, George Washington was sworn in on its steps as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789. While the original building had been demolished in 1812, it was rebuilt in 1842 as the current structure. In 1939 it became classified as the Federal Hall National Memorial in recognition of the historic events that have occurred at that location.