Carolyn complained that John let people take advantage of him, that he was too passive and refused to confront people—such as Michael Berman—who she felt were not acting in his best interest. His friends soon became the object of her suspicion and scorn. As Carolyn grew increasingly paranoid and reclusive, she started reducing her and John’s exposure to outsiders. She cut down on the number of visitors, even barring some from visiting the Cape. According to Littell, Carolyn divided John’s friends into three groups. There were “regular Joes,” a small group who remained unfazed by John’s celebrity; the “windblown,” who were essentially good people but clearly trapped in John’s cult of celebrity; and the “freaks,” who were consumed by John’s celebrity and would do anything to kiss up to him. “The freaks didn’t last long,” he said.
But her attempted purge went much deeper than just limiting contact. She came to resent some of the people who surrounded John, even those who had been his friends for a long time. According to Gustavo Paredes, she had a special dislike for the privileged Andover and Brown friends who she complained were living off John. Some of her criticisms were not off the mark. “A lot of his friends had an agenda that was not necessarily in his best interest,” recalled RoseMarie. “They got angry when Carolyn intervened and tried to put a stop to it. His friends were angry because she’s calling bullshit on something that had always been done before. That pissed everyone off.” In reality, however, it appears that jealousy, and not a rational concern for John’s welfare, motivated Carolyn. As her relationship with John grew more troubled and distant, she begrudged the closeness that he shared with his old friends and deliberately tried to push them out of his life.
An element of paranoia definitely underlay Carolyn’s efforts to segregate John from his friends. She wanted people around John who were loyal to her as well as to him. After helping to force out Berman, Carolyn later turned her attention to John’s closest confidante at the magazine: RoseMarie. Carolyn knew that he entrusted RoseMarie with private information, and Rose made it clear from the beginning that her loyalty remained with John. One night Carolyn came by Rose’s apartment to vent about John. “She was crying, and she sat on my couch, and we drank wine and we smoked cigarettes,” Rose recalled. When Carolyn left, she warned Rose: “Don’t tell John I was here.” But Rose could not keep secrets from John. “I went right in the next morning and told him what happened. I pleaded with him not to tell her. ‘You will ruin my relationship with her if you go back and tell her this, and it won’t be pretty for either one of us,’” she said.
But as he had done in the past with Michael Berman, who shared his views of Carolyn on the condition of confidentiality, John told Carolyn everything that Rose had reported. Carolyn called Rose the next morning. “Did John pry it out of you?” she asked. “He pried it out of you that I was there last night, right?” Rose took the easy road out. “Yes, he pried it out of me.”
This episode marked a turning point in Rose’s relationship with Carolyn, who became increasingly distant. She even lobbied John to fire Rose and replace her with someone more “professional.” Carolyn insisted that Rose’s assistant bring packages to the house and perform other personal errands for her. At one point, John pulled RoseMarie into the office and said, “Carolyn said that you call the house too much and if you don’t really have a reason that you shouldn’t call the house.” When RoseMarie told him that she called the house only for official business, John told her to confront Carolyn. “I want you to say to her, ‘How dare you,’” John told Rose. But John refused to say anything that might antagonize his wife. “I am not getting involved in that,” he stated, showing that he would hang RoseMarie out to dry the same way he had Michael Berman. The two most important parts of his life—his wife and his job—were at odds, but he refused to be proactive and resolve the problem, partly because he usually depended on others to handle conflict. He refused to recognize that in this case, he was the only one who could have nipped the tension in the bud.
Despite Carolyn’s increasingly mercurial nature, she could also be warm, charming, and exceedingly generous. She stood by Anthony throughout his illness and served as a constant source of emotional support for Carole. She paid the therapy bills for one of John’s closest but most troubled friends. At restaurants, she would leave extravagant tips. She would take George staff members out for expensive lunches and dinners, often spontaneously showing up with gifts. Once, Billy Noonan and his wife received in the mail a box from Tiffany’s containing five or six smaller blue boxes with gifts for their young children. But her generosity did not always please John. “She’s doing this all over town,” he complained to Noonan. “She’s sending presents to everyone. I can’t imagine what my bill is going to be.”
Several other flashpoints plagued their marriage. On the most basic level, John and Carolyn did not share the same interests. John loved to exercise and play sports, whether it be touch football in the park or kayaking on the Hudson. None of these activities interested Carolyn. Most nights, she was content to stay home with their dog, Friday, and cat, Ruby. She used to be a fixture on the New York party scene, but now she was afraid to leave the apartment. One time, John remarked, “I just can’t come home and talk about the cat and the dog all evening.” On other nights, she preferred to sit on the sofa, drink wine, smoke cigarettes, and gossip with her friends in the fashion industry. On a few occasions, John came home early to spend a quiet evening with his wife only to find her spread out on the sofa with a handful of pals, many of whom had keys to the apartment so they could come and go as they pleased.
Furthermore, they had different priorities when it came to raising a family: John was ready to have kids; Carolyn was not. “How can I bring JFK III into this world?” she asked Noonan. “They’ll never leave me alone. They treat John like a national treasure, so what are they going to do to his son?” She echoed similar sentiments to Rob Littell. “Can you see me trying to push a carriage down the street? With all of them running behind me?”
One thing they did agree on was finding a second home closer than their place on Martha’s Vineyard. If they were to have a family, Carolyn did not want to raise children in New York City. “If I’m going to have a kid at some point, I’m not walking around by myself in the streets in New York City with a stroller with every psycho in the world,” she said. “They barely let me get across the street now.” Ideally, they wanted a home base from which they could commute. They searched as far north as Columbia County, where Sasha lived, near Albany, because of its plentiful rivers and lakes. They also scouted out properties at historic Snedens Landing, a secluded town of about a hundred homes that sat along the Hudson River in the Palisades hamlet of Orangetown, New York. But they never found a place that they could agree on.
By 1998, John had grown increasingly desperate. Nothing he did seemed to make Carolyn happy. Rather than growing into her role, she was spiraling out of control, becoming more dependent on drugs and warring with many of his friends, including staff at George. Though he recognized how rudely the paparazzi acted, he felt she needed to ignore them and continue on with her life. Eventually, he believed, they would hound her less. But the more reclusive she became, the more precious and financially rewarding each photo of her became.
John begged Sasha to find a way to lure Carolyn from the apartment. “Can you convince her to go out? Can you convince her to go out to dinner with you? Can you convince her to go out and have a glass of wine with you?” he pleaded. “Please just get her out of the apartment.” Sasha recalled that one night she managed to drag Carolyn out for a glass of wine. The first question that Carolyn asked was, “How do you keep passion in your relationship when you have been with somebody so long? How do you keep the passion?” The question shocked Sasha. “Well,” she responded dismissively, “it’s not something you are going to need to worry about for a long time. You have only known John for a few years.” But it was a point that Carolyn would revisit often. �
��He’s not my type,” she would claim to friends. For some reason, she seemed to relish telling people that she was not sexually attracted to her husband, as if she alone did not share the common perception of him as one of the sexiest men alive.
Friends were puzzled: How could Carolyn be worried about losing passion when they had been married for only two years? They learned the answer in 2004 when former Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin published his book The Other Man: A Love Story—John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette, & Me. Bergin had carried on a torrid romance with Carolyn while she was dating John. Once, John showed up downstairs at her apartment building while she was in bed with Michael. “Would you do me a favor?” she asked Bergin. “Would you go down and wait for me at our bagel place?” Once he left, she buzzed John up. Carolyn seemed to know that she could depend on Bergin’s presence on the sidelines. The month after John and Carolyn’s notorious fight in Washington Square Park, Carolyn visited his apartment.
Even after their marriage, the scandalous relationship continued. Bergin claimed that Carolyn called him often, professing her love for him. They met and had sex in a Los Angeles hotel in September 1997 and met again at a seedy Connecticut hotel around Thanksgiving. While John went kayaking in Iceland, Carolyn headed to Los Angeles and lived with Bergin for eleven days. Six months later, they met again. This time Carolyn, weeping hysterically, declared her love for Bergin. She justified the affair by saying that John was doing the same.
“We shouldn’t be doing this, should we?” Bergin asked.
“I think John’s having an affair,” she said.
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
In September she called Bergin again and insisted that she needed to see him. She told John that she was going to visit a girlfriend in Los Angeles. They spent a few nights together at a Days Inn on Sunset Boulevard. Apparently, John was not the only one in their marriage who welcomed danger. In the spring of 1998, they met again at a bed-and-breakfast in Seattle. Bergin noticed that she looked unhappy. “Save me,” she pleaded. She wanted out of her marriage.
It’s impossible to know the intimate details of John’s and Carolyn’s private lives, but from all the available evidence, it appears highly unlikely that John was having an affair. In fact, he confessed to friends, “I wish I could cheat on her.” But he did not want to humiliate Carolyn the way his father had done to his mother. John often complained that Carolyn held a more casual view of marriage. “Carolyn looks at marriage like a man does, that it’s not necessarily a lifetime thing, because of the way her mother got burned,” John said. “It’s made her cynical about marriage. Carolyn’s father left her mother with three little kids.”
When Bergin’s book came out, two of John’s friends matched enough logistical details to confirm the accuracy of many of its claims. “We figured it out,” one recalled. “While John and Carolyn were married, she was in love with another man. And then everything changed in my mind. Maybe she had always been torn between John and her other lover.”
* * *
—
Amid all the drama with Carolyn, George remained John’s primary focus, a source of both great pride and considerable worry. Three years after its launch, the magazine was still struggling to turn a profit and earn the respect of established political journalists. On the surface, it seemed to be prospering. It had snared four hundred thousand readers and lured an array of blue-chip advertisers, from Tommy Hilfiger to General Motors. Such numbers seemed to indicate that George was considerably outpacing its political rivals, The New Republic (one hundred thousand) and its conservative counterpart, The Weekly Standard (sixty thousand). George, however, was still desperate to add subscribers and was heavily dependent on newsstand sales, which could swing wildly from month to month.
What struck Michael Voss when he joined George as marketing director in early 1999 was that no one was talking about the success of the magazine. “Everything was about John,” he reflected. “George’s circulation was higher than the total combined paid circulation of all the other political magazines in the United States.” The magazine, he pointed out, also had “great demos.” It had a “thought-leader audience” that was “made up of readers in the thirties who were highly educated, affluent, or emerging affluent.” George’s readership was “younger than readers of The New Yorker or Vanity Fair but had high disposable income and a wide variety of different interests.”
However, signs of trouble brewed beneath the surface. Total ad pages had been declining since the first two issues in 1995, and this decline seemed only to be gaining momentum. By November 1998, George’s total ad pages had dropped 5 percent from the previous year. But the very next month, ad pages dipped by 20 percent in relation to December 1997. Compounding the problem of fewer ad pages, George was also discounting the ads it did sell—especially compared with its newsstand competitors. George received $24,000 for a four-color full-page ad. By contrast, Men’s Journal, which boasted a similar circulation, earned $43,400, while Vanity Fair charged $67,800 for a onetime full-page advertisement.
Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that many advertisers remained skeptical of George’s focus on politics and popular culture. Even though it had entered its third year, the publication had yet to find its niche in the crowded magazine marketplace. And even at this juncture, George still struggled with the same issue that had existed since its launch: lacking a clear identity. “They are selling the political ads, but they are really much more an entertainment-oriented magazine,” stated Michael Neiss from ad agency Lowe & Partners/SMS. “Vanity Fair is really their closest competitor, and when people find out George is just Vanity Fair light, they may say, ‘Why read it?’” One magazine consultant judged that George was able to attract ads from Armani, DKNY, and Polo Ralph Lauren because its cover paraded stars such as Claudia Schiffer, Julia Roberts, and Cindy Crawford. Advertisers had limited budgets, and they put their money where they knew there would be celebrities. “It’s simple,” the consultant said. “The Hollywood publicity machine exists to turn down interview requests, except to the chosen few who will treat their clients with kid gloves. In return, those who get the access to celebrities know they can name their price with advertisers.”
Even Joe Armstrong, who had educated John and Michael about the business and guided them toward launching the magazine, worried that George was “too light.” “I wish they had done more investigative journalism,” he reflected two decades later. “It could have been less Vanity Fair and People and a little bit more substantive. I felt George could have made a bigger name for itself with more investigative journalism and with more hard-hitting and provocative profiles. The editorial needed to have more substance, more teeth, more bite. And they could have made more news with their content.” Armstrong had also hoped that John would make the magazine “a clearinghouse to connect readers with how to get involved in political activities and with volunteer and charity efforts.” But that never happened.
As suggested by George’s association with celebrities, the magazine faced another more troubling identity problem. It remained unclear whether people were buying the magazine because they liked the stories or because they saw it as an avenue into John’s private life. “The average consumer of George is not buying it to learn about politics,” declared The New Republic’s Andrew Sullivan. “She is buying it to feel some intimate connection with John F. Kennedy Jr.” Some critics dismissed it as nothing more than a “Kennedy fanzine” full of “editorial cotton candy.” An editor at a competing publication claimed, “If Kennedy quit, that magazine would shut down in six weeks.” Some publishers did not even call the magazine by its name, instead referring to it as “Kennedy.” Such criticisms puzzled David Pecker. “I’ve never seen a community so negative about a person and wanting him to fail,” he lamented. “People are very surprised that he was successful.”
It is true that pe
ople still packed auditoriums to hear John speak, but they were more interested in getting a peek of him than they were in learning about the magazine. In February 1998 John gave a speech to an overflowing crowd at an advertising convention in the grand ballroom of the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. One attendee traveled all the way from New York to hear John. “I think it’s neat to have a celebrity here,” he said. “But from a business point of view, I could care less. He’s been in the business for two-plus years. If he says something that will affect us, it will be amazing.”
Yet in the face of such criticism, John remained unfazed and unapologetic. He complained that some critics judged the magazine solely by its colorful and provocative covers. “This is wrapping,” he said. “And if there is anything that I feel somewhat frustrated about, it’s that I think they suggest more frivolity than the magazine has inside.” Though he acknowledged that George was more commercial than standard political magazines, he insisted that this quality was intentional: he wanted to reach a bigger audience. “I am an editor and I am an owner and a businessman,” he asserted. “We owe an obligation to the magazine and to our advertisers and to our partners to make something that’s going to sell and not sit back at night and be content that we delivered something highbrow.”
On rare occasions John did get tired of the sniping. When veteran journalist Morton Kondracke, the editor of the congressional newspaper Roll Call, called George boring, John fired off a note. “I was crushed to hear we here at George have been guilty of boring you. But I don’t feel too remorseful. Roll Call and a warm glass of milk [do] wonders for my insomnia.” Another editor at Roll Call retorted, “He is supposed to be married to one of the most beautiful women in America—you’d think she’d be the one making sure he was tired enough to fall asleep at night.”
Although George’s critics made some valid points, they failed to appreciate that John had launched a different type of magazine, and that it was far more robust than most assumed. It had hired gifted writers and, though the numbers had declined significantly, it still hosted some of the most exclusive advertisers in the world. The problem did not stem from the quality of the individual articles, some of which were first-rate, or the talent of its writers. Rather, George never solved the fundamental issue of its identity. “The magazine had this idea of what it wanted to be but never found a way to make it work,” reflected Ned Martel. This indecisiveness regarding style and message was reflected in the constant aesthetic experimentation as well. Every month, George’s covers and designs would vary drastically. “It looked like a bunch of young people trying new stuff,” said Martel.
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