America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  John had been slow to realize that Anthony was dying, but now it was impossible to ignore. “John, for the most part of the five years, was really stoic,” Carole reflected in 2019. “He thought he could call the person who had the cure. Get us to the right doctor. He thought he could fix it. And when he realized that was not going to happen, it weighed heavily on him. It did not matter if we had the top doctor at the NIH. It did not matter that he got us into a clinical trial with some experimental medicine. He was not going to save Anthony. He was having difficulty dealing with it.”

  It was still hard for all of them—Carole, Carolyn, and John—to comprehend a future without Anthony. Carole noticed that John was coming to their house as if he were “frantically trying to create memories,” even though he “still wanted to believe that everything was going to be fine.” They all did. With Anthony withering away, they talked about future plans, including a trip to Cuba. John suggested that they all go back to Scorpios—the magical place where John and Anthony had once played in the sand and blue waters. “I suppose this was nothing more than nostalgic, since Anthony was not well enough to make these big trips,” Carole recalled.

  The reality of Anthony’s impending death hit John hard, but once he accepted it, he pushed Carole to prepare her husband for the end. “Right after Anthony had the heart operation and it was clear that he would only live for a few more weeks, John called me early one morning,” Carole recalled. “Hey, sorry to wake you,” he said. “I need to talk.” He thought the time had come to have an honest conversation with Anthony about his prognosis. “He’s in denial,” John said, “and he needs to come to terms with this.” John had been reading a book, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, which described the five stages of death: anger, denial, fear, acceptance, peace. Carole found John “oddly formal,” almost rehearsed. John believed that Anthony was holding on because he thought Carole was afraid to let go. “You have to tell him,” John insisted. “Carole, he can’t go on like he is. He needs to accept that he is going to die.” For a moment, John’s voice cracked. But Anthony’s wife was not buying the stages-of-grief argument. “Don’t you think that’s a conversation I wanted to have with him for months? Years?” John was silent and then whispered quietly, “No, I don’t.”

  “I’m not telling him,” she responded, “because he did not want to know. Anthony does not want to think about dying. He does not want to talk about it.” In his case, she reflected, “denial outlasted death, which is rare. But Anthony was determined to live until the very end.”

  Very few people were aware of the enormous pressure John was under in the summer of 1999. “To say that John was complicated is an understatement,” recalled a close friend. “There was a lot of stuff going on in his head.” Anthony’s illness and the declining revenue at George, along with the problems plaguing his marriage, added to the many burdens he carried already. In the past, John had always channeled stress and anxiety into activity. “He was like a shark that needed to be constantly in motion,” Carole recalled. That restiveness explains why a Memorial Day weekend accident at his home in Martha’s Vineyard involving his latest flying contraption, the Buckeye, would prove so devastating.

  John had purchased the three-wheeled go-kart with a parachute (dubbed “the flying lawnmower” by friends) from a manufacturer in Ohio. The contraption rolled across the grass until it had enough lift to take off, but John struggled to gain altitude and crashed to the ground. Friends watched in horror before rushing to rescue him. “We were the first people there,” recalled Sasha Chermayeff. Although he had crushed his ankle and was in horrible pain, John reassured Sasha’s six-year-old son, Phineas (Finn), that he was not seriously hurt. Struggling to remove his helmet, which bore the insignia of his uncle Joe’s old flying squadron, John joked that he needed a smaller head. As they carried John back to the house, he kept repeating, “Finney, I hurt my leg. I hurt my leg, Finney. I’m fine. I just hurt my leg.”

  They rushed him to the local emergency room, where doctors told him he needed surgery, which John scheduled later at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. John always looked forward to summertime, because that was when he could play a wide range of activities. Now he faced surgery and six weeks locked in a cast, unable to exercise. Initially, John was angry with himself, but he never dwelled on negative thoughts, and he refused to feel sorry for himself. Instead, he viewed the accident as an opportunity. “That night, he was very emotional,” recalled Sasha. He talked about how he needed to spend the summer with Anthony. “I am literally going to be sitting in a rocking chair next to Anthony for the next six weeks,” he concluded. “And that is exactly where I belong.” The plan was for Anthony to come to Martha’s Vineyard for the Fourth of July weekend and spend the rest of his life there. They would be staying at Jackie’s massive 366-acre Red Gate Farm, which she had purchased in 1978 and left to John and Caroline following her death. “They were going to be sitting there in their two rocking chairs,” Sasha reflected.

  Meanwhile, John’s accident seemed to overwhelm an already fragile Carolyn. While at the hospital, Carolyn noticed people staring at John as he lay helplessly on a stretcher. Normally she would have ignored the gawkers, but not this time. “Haven’t you seen a guy in a cast before?” she snapped. “Stop staring! Please!” She then called Carole to vent her frustration. “I don’t know if we can survive a broken ankle,” she said. “It’s such a goddamn bad time for this.” Carole described her at this moment as “angry, exhausted.” She sensed that Carolyn had neared the end of her rope and could not deal with any more stress.

  “Six weeks in a cast!” Carolyn shouted. “No kayaking, no waterskiing, no swimming. No physical activity of any kind.” Carolyn knew how emotionally difficult it would be for John to stay still and how such inactivity would only add more tension to their already troubled marriage. “I heard in her voice, she didn’t have a lot of fight left in her,” Carole recalled. “‘We’re not going to make it through the summer with him like this.’ Looking back, it was an ominous foreshadowing.”

  The following weekend, they were all gathered on Martha’s Vineyard. Carole and Anthony were staying at a friend’s house because John needed to rearrange the beds in his house so that Anthony could sleep on the first floor. To cheer them up, Carole and Carolyn suggested they walk the fifty yards to the beach. Both John and Anthony loved the ocean. John hobbled out on one leg with crutches. Anthony had a cane to steady him. When Anthony got to the water’s edge, he took off his sweatshirt. “He probably weighed ninety pounds,” Carole recalled. “His chest and back were crisscrossed with five years’ worth of scars.” John, who had never seen the scars, put his head into his hands and sobbed. Anthony could not hear John crying because of the deafening sound of the crashing waves. “Come on, Johnny!” he yelled. “John’s shoulders were heaving,” Carole recalled. “The denial and stoicism just fell away.”

  Eventually the accident sent Carolyn into an emotional tailspin. Carole believed that at that point Carolyn gave up on any ambitions she had of improving her life. She stopped seeing her therapist, refused to go to the gym, and abandoned plans to enroll in college and take classes toward earning a degree. She became a bundle of anger and resentment. Friends noticed the change in her personality. Some George staff members used to welcome her visits because she was so energetic, irreverent, and full of life. Not anymore. One confidant described her as “dark and paranoid.” She had already turned against Michael Berman and RoseMarie. Surprisingly, creative director Matt Berman, perhaps her closest ally at the magazine, became her next target.

  As she had sensed, her relationship with John hit a new low. “The constant scrutiny of their marriage had taken a toll,” RoseMarie observed. “Where they once laughed off problems or misunderstandings, they now blew them out of proportion and were both too stubborn to work things out on their own.” Since John could often be thoughtless, Carolyn decided to retaliate by not showing up for lunch dates or
by going out with her girlfriends all evening and not telling him anything. John would frequently call Rose to see if she knew Carolyn’s whereabouts. Rose would then try to defuse the situation by joking, “Oh, she’s probably just blowing you off like you’ve done to her a million times.” But John could not be humored.

  The relentless travel to meet with advertisers and potential investors was also a burden. In the spring, John and Carolyn had traveled to London. She did not want to be there, and the trip ended up being a disaster. At one point, Carolyn called Carole to ask about Runnymede, the memorial garden dedicated to President Kennedy that John had visited as a child. “He wants to go to Runnymede, and I want to come home. I think he was mad because I didn’t know what Runnymede was,” she told Carole. Even when they returned home, John seemed to be constantly traveling or attending events: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the Profile in Courage Award announcement, and the Newman’s Own–George Awards dinner where John and actor Paul Newman teamed up to recognize the most philanthropic companies in America. Carolyn reluctantly attended the most important public events, but more often she hid at home, stewing in private and relying on cocaine to deal with the loneliness.

  Yet they continued to carry on, inviting friends to Martha’s Vineyard as they did every Fourth of July weekend. It was always an enjoyable holiday full of long days on the beach, fun games, and plenty of physical activity. But this year was different. On July 3 Anthony and Carole moved into the main house. It was here that Anthony planned to spend his final days. John placed a bed in a downstairs room off the patio so that Anthony would not have to climb stairs. He also arranged to have his mother’s former assistant Effie stay to cook and manage the house. John was spending a great deal of time traveling for George, but he planned to spend every weekend at the Vineyard with his cousin.

  It soon grew clear to many guests that something was not right in John and Carolyn’s relationship. At one point during the weekend, John stood in front of the fireplace, venting candidly to Billy Noonan about the state of his marriage. He wondered out loud whether having a baby would save it. “I really need to start thinking about having a family,” Billy recalled him saying. “This is going to suck—a baby makes everything better, right?” He quizzed Billy about how long he and his wife had been married before having kids, and then announced that he had already settled on a name for his son: “Flynn. Flynn Kennedy—now, that’s a name. What do you think?”

  But Carolyn, for good reason, had grown more adamant that it was not time to have a baby. As Rose reflected, “Anthony is dying. The magazine is struggling. Carolyn is a basket case, and John says to her, ‘Let’s start a family and buy a house.’” Carolyn was not opposed to having children but found John’s timing mind-boggling. “We are in the middle of complete chaos here,” she told him. “You are flying around trying to find funding for a magazine, we are dealing with Anthony literally 24/7, wondering who’s at the hospital with him, and you want to start a family.” Still, John could not understand her reluctance. “What does she want?” John asked Rose. “Like her life is so hard.”

  According to Noonan, John disappeared for hours the day after this latest quarrel with Carolyn over the weekend. Without telling anyone, he flew his plane to the Cape to check on the family house. Furious, Billy confronted John, explaining how difficult it had been for him to get to the Vineyard and how rude it was of John to leave him alone. “Well,” John responded, “I wanted to be alone, and I didn’t think you’d want to fly with me.” Billy believed that John had changed into someone “selfish and insensitive and scattered.” But that judgment was harsh, for although John had always possessed a rather callous and thoughtless streak, his mind was currently preoccupied by too many thoughts. It made sense that John needed to clear his head, and what better place to retreat to than his father’s Hyannis Port home, which John had been using as an occasional weekend refuge?

  It’s possible that John found the inspiration he was seeking, because the next day, he had a candid conversation with Sasha about his marriage. John was lying on the lawn of Red Gate Farm, gazing up at the sky. Sasha, who was also part of the weekend group, was standing next to him. “He told me how fucked up it had gotten with Carolyn, and that they were emotionally very distant,” she recalled. Carolyn refused to have sex with him, and they seemed to be leading entirely separate lives. He never used the word divorce, but it was clear to Sasha that that was what he was alluding to. “Oh my God, this is it,” Sasha thought. Carolyn, she realized, “has no idea how badly this is going to take her out, because her whole life revolves around the fact that she is this important person who is JFK Jr.’s wife, and when he tells her that this marriage is falling apart and he’s done, it’s going to be so hard for her.” Sasha predicted that while divorce would be difficult for both, John would recover more quickly. “It’s going to be shitty for him for a while—like, two or three years—and then he is going to be fine.”

  Although John and I had an unspoken arrangement that we would not talk about our private lives, he confessed to me once in the spring, while we were sitting in the steam room at the New York Athletic Club, that he had “blue balls.” I honestly did not know what the expression meant and was afraid to ask a follow-up question that would sound stupid. I thought for a second about looking over to see if his balls really were blue but realized that he would probably not appreciate the gesture. Only later did someone explain to me that it meant that he had been denied sex for so long that his balls were (figuratively) turning blue.

  Carole Radziwill, however, saw no evidence that weekend that John and Carolyn’s marriage was careening toward divorce. “There was nothing, not one conversation, not anything to indicate that there was an impending divorce,” she recalled. “It’s certainly easy to sit around and talk about arguments and fights and divorces, but very few people knew really what was going on.” The last six months of their lives were stressful: they were fighting over many different issues, and the shadow of Anthony’s death hung over them. Carole used the metaphor of a husband and wife having an argument in a fast-moving car when they crash into a wall and are killed. No one knows how that conversation would have ended. The same was true of John and Carolyn, she maintained. “He loved her, and she loved him,” she reflected. But they also “drove each other crazy.”

  The weekend before the plane crash, Carolyn invited close friends Christiane Amanpour and her husband, Jamie Rubin, to the Vineyard to help cheer everyone up. Anthony’s impending death, which they all knew could happen any day, put a lot of pressure on all of them. The tension between John and Carolyn was palpable. Christiane and Jamie provided them with a break and lightened the moment. “We spent the days on the beach and had fun dinners,” Carole recalled. “Except for the dying, it was a weekend like any other, with great friends and laughs and good food.”

  At the end of the weekend, John hit the road again in search of a new publishing partner to replace Hachette. During his travels, John made sure to call Carole late every night to check in on Anthony. He discussed what he planned to say in his eulogy. “Big life stuff,” Carole reflected. “We talked about how hard a lot of this has been on Carolyn and how he felt a large responsibility for that.” He did not mention his own life and dreams. Instead, he talked about “how he had lived his life with Anthony by his side, an ally in a sometimes confusing world. He couldn’t believe that he was going to be gone.” Carole described his mood as melancholy. “There was a softness in his voice that I hadn’t heard before,” she said. “I suppose it was resignation.”

  On Monday, July 12, John flew from Martha’s Vineyard to Toronto with a flight instructor to meet with potential investors Keith Stein, Leslie Marshall, and Belinda Stronach. John may have finally accepted that he could not save Anthony, but he was not resigned to allowing George to die. He had already found several leads, including Rupert Murdoch and the auto parts consortium Magna International in Canada. Stein met John’s Pipe
r Saratoga at the hangar and escorted him to the meeting. Stein began the conversation by asking John why Magna and why Toronto. “I like to do things off the radar,” John responded. Stein remembered the meeting as very casual and informal. “It was a forty-thousand-foot conversation,” he recalled. It was clear to him and his colleagues, however, that John was committed to George and looking for the right partner. “We were interested,” Stein reflected, “because George was ahead of its times,” and also because of the opportunity to be associated with John. “That publication was about John,” he said. Stein and his colleagues came away impressed by John and convinced that he could be a good partner. The next step would have been for John to meet with the company’s founder, billionaire Frank Stronach. “The window was open,” Stein said.

  As the meeting ended, John offered Marshall, who had flown commercial from New York, a ride if she wanted to fly back with him. She was tempted, but Keith intervened. He was not impressed by the plane or the young copilot who accompanied John on the trip. “Leslie,” he said, “I flew you in, and I’m flying you out.”

  But John continued to fear that most potential investors and partners were more interested in him than his magazine, a problem that, he believed, had doomed his relationship with Hachette. “It was a tough time for John, who hated flying around the globe with his hat in his hand,” Rob Littell reflected. John confided to Rob that he worried the magazine would likely come to an end. His efforts to keep George afloat had clearly taken a toll on him. According to Rob, “he gained weight, he looked tired, his hair was noticeably grayer.”