Although the staff did not agree with Michael’s wholesale opposition to Carolyn, it was inappropriate for her to be involved so directly in important decisions impacting the magazine. As the girlfriend of one of the founders, she overreached the moment she started injecting herself into internal debates at George. Michael Berman was not a big fan of celebrity covers and felt the magazine needed to reduce its emphasis on popular culture. Matt Berman, on the other hand, found the magazine too content heavy and envisioned more photographs, graphics, and celebrities. When Michael nixed some of Matt’s ideas, the creative director complained to Carolyn, who, in turn, argued his case with John. As a result, a tug-of-war emerged, with Matt and Carolyn lobbying for more creative content and less dense stories, and Michael prodding the magazine in the opposite direction.
Carolyn seriously complicated Michael’s already difficult relationship with John. After the initial success of the Herb Ritts photo of Cindy Crawford, John and Michael agreed that they would try to re-create the same excitement for the second issue by asking Ritts to do the cover photo again. Herb agreed but cautioned that he was under contract with the publishing giant Condé Nast, so John and Michael would need to get permission for him to work for George a second time. A few weeks before the scheduled meeting with Condé Nast, John and Michael traveled to Florida to talk to advertisers. Carolyn accompanied John on the trip. At one point, John approached Michael and said ominously, “I need to talk to you.” Berman braced himself for the worst.
“Carolyn thinks that it would be better if I went to Condé Nast by myself because they might be more inclined to say yes if it’s just me alone than if you were sitting there, too,” John explained. “Let’s face it, they are taking the meeting because they want to see me.” Surprisingly, Michael agreed to the idea and suggested that they come up with something they could offer Condé Nast in return. John cut him off. “Well, I am not being totally honest. I already had the meeting, and it didn’t go well. They said no.” Berman went ballistic. “How do you have the nerve to look me in the face and tell me that? What kind of partnership is this?”
Infuriated, Berman returned to his room, where he received an unexpected visit from Carolyn. “Honey, honey, I am so sorry. Don’t blame John,” she pleaded. “It’s not his fault, it’s my fault. I thought I was doing what was right for the magazine, and I am so sorry, and you know you can’t be mad at him.” She then asked for sympathy, claiming that John was in the bathtub, crying. “You have no idea, he’s so volatile.” Berman was taken aback by her sweet and complimentary tone. “She didn’t say one bad thing,” he observed. Michael was also puzzled as to why John, who had been ignoring his advice and doing his best to create distance between them, would now be so distraught about having offended him. Michael did not believe that John was upset, and his instincts were proven right the next morning when both John and Carolyn seemed in high spirits.
* * *
—
For understandable reasons, Michael resented having to negotiate with the girlfriend of his cofounder. Sensing Michael’s hostility, Carolyn tried to charm him the same way she did everyone else. She worked to establish a relationship with Michael and Victoria by flattering them and inviting them to dinner. Initially, her behavior could border on the flirtatious, suggesting that she and Michael shared insider knowledge. “Honey,” she would say, “you and I, we are the only ones that really understand John. He relies on us. The rest of these people, they are freaks and sycophants.”
But the charm offensive did not work, nor did it last very long. As Michael’s relationship with John soured, Carolyn reverted to the role she relished most: a fierce protector of her boyfriend. “She hated him,” recalled a senior editor. “She wanted Berman gone.” One of her friends told the author Edward Klein that Carolyn “thought Michael wasn’t on the up-and-up and that he had a vested interest” in her boyfriend. The friend went on to say that she intentionally “poisoned” John’s relationship with Michael. “I don’t believe Michael’s your real friend,” she told John. “The only reason he’s close to you is because you’re John F. Kennedy Jr.”
Meanwhile, John found himself trapped between a troubled girlfriend and an angry business partner. Realizing that their conflict was hurting the magazine, John could have pulled them together into a room and imposed a truce. But he never did. In fact, as the battle escalated, he remained largely passive. It’s hard to know why John chose not to act. Most likely, he was more concerned with placating Carolyn and preserving his relationship than he was with defending Berman. Maybe he also hoped that these tensions would die down on their own.
But such a resolution would never happen.
* * *
—
Beginning in the spring of 1996, Carolyn escalated the conflict by harassing Michael over the phone multiple times a day. On one occasion, she screamed at him, telling Berman that he had no idea how difficult life was with John. “He’s irresponsible! He doesn’t give a shit about me. He doesn’t give a shit about anybody but himself!” she shouted into the phone. She shared embarrassingly private details of their sex life before turning her ire on Michael.
“All of you enable this,” she snarled. “Why don’t you tell him to get home? You just want to be around him. You don’t care about his magazine. You just want him around your office. That’s all you want.” She was just warming up. “And it’s not just you, it’s everybody—everybody wants him there.” She then proceeded to attack John’s friends, seeing them as part of a conspiracy to keep John away from home. Berman listened patiently to the tirade but could not understand why she was telling him all these things. “It made absolutely no sense,” he reflected.
Some of the calls came in the middle of the night. “Stay the fuck out of my life!” she shouted on another occasion. “No one in the office wants to deal with you. You’re bringing down the business and you’re bringing down John. Why don’t you go away?” Michael demanded that she stop calling him. “Carolyn, I really can’t have this conversation with you,” he recalled saying. “You have to stay out of the business. You’re causing trouble and friction between the two of us and between me and the rest of the staff. And with me and Hachette. Don’t call me again.”
When John arrived at the office the next day, Michael revealed what had happened and asked his partner to talk to Carolyn. “She’s acting crazy,” Michael told him. Berman was floored when John later repeated everything he had said to Carolyn. “Yeah, yeah, I told her that Michael Berman says you are crazy, and that you should stay out of the office.” John naturally defended his girlfriend, saying that she admitted to calling, “but she says some of the things were somewhat misrepresented. She was just upset.” Any chance of reconciliation between Berman and Carolyn, however slight, ended that day.
And the calls kept coming, just as frantic and frequent as before. Berman recalled being on a business trip when the phone in his hotel room rang at two in the morning. A “hysterical” Carolyn screamed, “You should leave! John could be so much more successful if you weren’t there! John can’t stand you!” Berman responded firmly, “Carolyn, I can’t listen to this anymore. You can’t call me anymore. You just can’t do this. I am going to tell John.” “Go ahead,” she challenged. “John’s right here.”
In some cases, specific incidents set off Carolyn’s rage. Once, she had a conversation with an executive at Condé Nast who complained that John had canceled lunch with him three times. When she asked John about it, he said he never had a lunch scheduled. She discovered that Michael had made the appointments, promising John’s attendance, and then canceled.
On another occasion, John and Michael had scheduled an eight o’clock breakfast meeting with a major advertiser, who called Berman an hour before and switched restaurants. Berman contacted John to notify him of the switch, but John had changed his number and had not given Michael the new one. Berman went alone, while John showed up at the original location.
“It was embarrassing for me because the advertiser wasn’t coming to see me,” said Berman. “I had met with him many times before.” When Berman returned to the office, he found John irate. “Why didn’t you call me?” John shouted. “You made me look bad! Why did you do this?” Berman told him, “I did honestly call your number, but it’s disconnected.” John shot back bitterly that they’d had the number disconnected because “Carolyn doesn’t want you calling our house.” Actually, John changed his number often to stay one step ahead of paparazzi, who somehow managed to get hold of it. Besides, Berman insisted that he called the house only when he could not find John in the office or needed to reach him in the evening.
Carolyn saw Berman the same way she viewed many others in John’s life: clinging to his fame and offering little value. “He’s a fucking schemer,” she told John. “He’s using you.” But while Michael may have been overzealous in his efforts to manage John and offensive in the way he treated him, what he wanted most was to publish a successful magazine. Had he been so enthralled by John’s celebrity status, he would not have risked his professional relationship with critiques and fights. In his eyes, it was Carolyn who deserved blame for interfering in his business relationship with John by undermining his authority.
* * *
—
Although John and Carolyn had denied they were engaged, by the summer of 1996 they were actively planning a secret September wedding. Neither wanted a media circus. They preferred an intimate celebration with only a handful of close friends and family. But organizing such an event and keeping it secret would prove challenging, considering that they were two of the most photographed people on the planet. John made it clear that he did not want to follow his sister’s example, holding the ceremony on Cape Cod with an elaborate reception at the family compound in Hyannis Port. New York, the media capital of the world, was also not an option. Instead, they searched for places that would be private and inaccessible to the press but also peaceful and romantic. At RoseMarie’s suggestion they traveled to Nova Scotia, but soon after they arrived, Carolyn called RoseMarie. “Honey,” she said, “what the fuck are you doing to me? This is the most depressing place in the whole world. I’m not getting married here.”
With Nova Scotia scratched off the list, John suggested Cumberland Island, where he had once vacationed with Christina Haag. Georgia’s southernmost barrier island, located twenty miles off the coast, offered both isolation and romance. Fewer than thirty-five people lived on Cumberland for just part of the year and it was accessible only by ferry, private boat, or helicopter. “If Mr. Kennedy wanted privacy, this was a good place to find it,” Newton Sikes, chief of operations for the National Park Service, which owned most of the island, told The New York Times.
No landlines existed on the island, only a radiophone for emergencies, and there was only one place to stay, the Greyfield Inn. The Southern Colonial–style inn, which had been constructed for Andrew Carnegie in 1900, had fewer than twenty rooms. John rented the entire space for the weekend of September 21, even buying out the reservations of those who had already booked rooms. He also booked a few private homes nearby for guests who could not be accommodated at Greyfield.
Carolyn and RoseMarie handled the logistics in the months leading up to the event. So as not to trigger any suspicions, they sent everything needed for the wedding—wine, plates, glasses, silverware, tents—in a series of small shipments, making them appear as routine supplies for the inn. RoseMarie had travel agents create fake itineraries showing John and Carolyn traveling to Ireland that weekend. No one on the island, including the caterers and hotel staff, was allowed to leave that weekend, and they were required to sign confidentiality agreements. In case an industrious photographer managed to make it to the island, they hired a small security force to guard the entry to the ceremony. To help identify intruders, a security guard handed each of the guests an Indian Head nickel to keep with them at all times.
Devising the guest list proved tricky. John had many friends and a large family, leading to some difficult decisions about whom to exclude. In addition to his sister and her husband, Ed, John invited one member to represent each branch of the extended Kennedy family. He chose Anthony Radziwill as his best man. John also cut a few friends who he feared could not keep a secret, later admitting that Carolyn had nixed the friend who had delivered the critical report about her. The week before the wedding, John called each of the guests to invite them to an unspecified party on Cumberland Island. He asked them to make plane reservations and say nothing. Many of those traveling there had no idea they were attending a wedding.
John rented a Learjet for the weekend, and he and Carolyn flew to a small airport in St. Marys, Georgia, accompanied by Billy Noonan and his wife, Kathleen; and Rob Littell and his wife, Fran. According to Rob, John and Carolyn giggled the whole way down. Once they landed, they climbed into an old fishing boat and motored across the bay to Cumberland Island, reaching the Greyfield Inn just in time for the rehearsal dinner.
Friday night’s rehearsal dinner on the veranda was a “boisterous and lighthearted” affair, interrupted only by the toast delivered by Carolyn’s mother, Ann Freeman. No one seems to remember exactly what she said, but the message was shockingly clear. With John sitting a few feet away, she openly questioned whether he was the right partner for her daughter. According to Littell, her remarks left John “visibly stung.”
That same night they headed to the beach, where a bar had been set up under a giant tent and a bonfire blazed nearby. Their guests stayed up until the early-morning hours, but John and Carolyn turned in early. The following afternoon, John invited a number of friends to his suite and handed out wedding party gifts. Instead of more traditional gifts, such as cuff links, John gave everyone a pair of blue silk boxer shorts, with John’s initials embroidered on the right leg, and his guest’s on the left. “Wear them well, my friends,” he said. “Think of me when you wear them.”
The ceremony was scheduled for Saturday at dusk at the First African Baptist Church, which had been founded by slaves in 1893. Since the church was on the northern end of the island, John and Carolyn arranged for jeeps to shuttle guests from the inn. It was a reflection of John’s unpretentious style and down-to-earth manner that he—one of the wealthiest, most famous people in the world—held his wedding at a rustic church in the middle of a muddy field filled with pig dung.
Not surprisingly, John arrived late to his own wedding. Some accounts say that he could not find his tie; others, his shirt. Either way, the event began rather uncomfortably, with guests gathered outside, swatting away swarms of mosquitoes and watching dusk turn to dark before the bride and groom finally appeared. Because of the oppressive heat inside the church, the doors stayed open to catch a breeze while everyone clustered in the eleven weathered pews. Since the church had no electricity, the guests used candles and a few flashlights to observe the service. Standing at the altar before a cross made of sticks and twine, John, thirty-five, and Carolyn, twenty-nine, exchanged vows.
When the ceremony ended, everyone hopped back into the open-top jeeps for the reception at the inn. Even a light shower did not dampen the celebratory mood. Back at the Greyfield, they had set up two large tents near a giant mangrove tree for the DJ, dance floor, and bar. The occasion proceeded joyously. People drank, some to excess, and an abundant supply of marijuana and cocaine was available for those who wanted it. The highlight of the evening, however, was Anthony’s Radziwill’s heartfelt toast to his cousin and best friend. “We all know why John would marry Carolyn,” he announced at dinner. “She is smart, beautiful, and charming.” But, he continued, “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.”
Now married, John and Carolyn assumed that the paparazzi
would lose interest, taking only a few pictures before leaving them alone. Precisely the opposite happened. They became even more relentless and aggressive. Every day, between eight and twenty photographers could be found hanging outside their apartment. “This is out of hand,” John told Rose over the phone. “I’m going downstairs to give a statement, and then Carolyn and I will take a few pictures.” Carolyn, however, did not favor this strategy. She pulled the phone away from John. “I don’t want to go down there,” she insisted. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.” Rose reassured her that she should trust John’s instincts. “They just want a shot of you two together, the newlyweds. And then they have it. I think it’s a good idea. You don’t have to say anything or even smile. Just stand there.”
After the phone call, John and Carolyn went downstairs holding hands and, standing on their building’s steps, asked the photographers to respect their privacy. According to paparazzo Lawrence Schwartzwald, the photographers appreciated John’s gesture and remained polite and respectful as he spoke. But the truce lasted the length of John’s statement. As soon as John and Carolyn started walking toward their car, the cluster of photographers “broke rank” as everyone scrambled to get the “money shot”—the one picture that no one else could capture. The scene petrified Carolyn. After that moment, she realized that there would always be another “first” photo—the first time wearing black shoes or red shoes; her hair up or down; walking the dog; going to the deli. The pursuit would never end. “It was very demoralizing,” recalled Carole.
Michael Berman remembers watching clips of the press conference that night on the local news. He thought to himself, “What is he thinking? They just made it so much worse for her. He’s asked the paparazzi to leave her alone? It will just entice them even more.” Despite his many clashes with her, Berman empathized with Carolyn’s plight and blamed John for not doing more to protect her. “He knew better,” Berman reflected in 2019. “He certainly understood how important it was to have someone run interference for people in the public eye. He left her on her own, and that seemed ill-advised and very unkind to me.”
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