The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  The magazine was launched as a co-owned property of John’s holding company, Random Ventures, and Hachette Filipacchi. John earned his stake by reaching certain advertising and circulation goals. It was a good deal for both sides, especially since John’s primary motivation for launching George wasn’t to create a source of income. Thanks to his grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy’s success and foresight, as well as his mother’s financial wisdom, he had a portfolio of trusts kicking out plenty of yearly cash flow. He once tossed a thick bound annual report of his personal assets, prepared by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, at me and asked what it all meant. After reviewing it for five minutes, I summed things up by saying, “It means you’re rich for life.”

  He replied, “I know that already.”

  Though John liked being an editor, he didn’t like the nickel-and-dime side of publishing. From the start, he dreaded the dog-eat-dog meetings with David Pecker, the chief executive of Hachette known for “his hellbent quest to make his magazines spend less and make more,” as the New York Observer once described him. The fact is that no political magazine has ever made a dime, and it was no fun getting beaten up with his magazine’s bad numbers. “Ad pages this, newsstand circulation that. Jeez!” John once complained after a strategy session with management. The magazine was a business, though, and Hachette was logically trying to maximize John’s value. Hachette paid $80 million for more than just an idea—they paid for a man. John knew this and did what he could to make it work. He would say to me and others, “George isn’t about me.” But really, in many ways, it was. The question boiled down to whether George was an honorable way to use the Kennedy family name. John thought it was.

  In 1999, David Pecker left Hachette for the tabloid realm of American Media and was replaced by Jack Kliger, who told John that he wasn’t going to renew Hachette’s contract with Random Ventures. What this meant was that George would fold unless John could find new backers. And John took the blow hard. It was serious business now. Feeling a large responsibility to his staff, he tried. He had several partners in mind, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the auto parts consortium Magna up in Canada. But he worried that they were more interested in him than in the magazine. It was as though the magazine was the ugly stepsister you had to invite over if you wanted to have dinner with John. It was a tough time for John, who hated flying around the globe with his hat in his hand.

  Negotiations were still going on when John died, but he was close to shutting down the magazine. In the spring of 1999, he told me that he “might have to wind it up by the end of this year.” The efforts to keep George afloat had taken a visible toll on John: He’d gained weight, he looked tired, his hair was noticeably grayer. He was becoming resigned to the fact that it would close, though. And as hard as he worked to make George a success, it was not his life’s dream to run a magazine. He had already begun exploring other avenues to keep the concept alive, regardless of the magazine’s ultimate fate, including an Internet project with a political focus similar to that of George. Dan Samson, one of John’s closest buddies, was making plans to move his family east from Seattle to head up the venture. Dan was, in fact, waiting for John in Hyannis Port the night he died.

  John’s sister received his interest in George from his estate and sold it (for nothing, I’d bet) back to Hachette. They pulled the plug soon after. In some ways, it had already served its purpose. John had risked his reputation to make people care about politics, pioneering a trail between the country’s leaders and its people. That the magazine didn’t make money was no surprise—magazines are notoriously hard to launch. (Talk magazine, which folded in 2002, reportedly burned through $50 million despite the talents of übereditor Tina Brown.) John had mixed feelings on the subject: happy that he’d tried to make it work, upset that his staff might lose their jobs. He surprised me with a quote from Vince Lombardi one night over a beer at the DAC. Discussing the potential demise of the magazine, he used the old coach’s classic: “In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” And then he looked a little sad.

  Fifteen

  SOUL MATES

  “SHE’S THE BEST shot I got,” John whispered to me as we walked off the racquetball court one spring evening.

  We were headed to the steam room at the Downtown Athletic Club and there was no one was around. He didn’t have to whisper. But John was talking about marrying Carolyn Bessette, and for him the subject was wrapped in excitement and sealed with secrecy.

  By then I’d come to know Carolyn well enough to believe that John had met his perfect match. Which isn’t to say that she was easy to get to know. She was both shy and fierce, skilled in the acid-tongued banter that vulnerable people use to cover their soft spots. If you saw her hanging out with her friends—most of them members of New York’s small, self-contained fashion world—you’d think she was glamorous, interesting, and unapproachable. Carolyn had a quick wit and a seductive mix of manners, able to swear like a sailor and converse easily with heads of state. As I mentioned earlier, she was keenly aware of her effect on people and in control of the impression she made. If she wanted you to like her, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t. And if she didn’t like you, she could be harsh.

  More than anything, though, Carolyn had an uncanny ability to read people. This could manifest itself as compassion or as wary surveillance, but she was never not paying attention. Frannie, who adored Carolyn, used to tell her she was a witch because she could read people’s minds. And it did seem that way. Again and again Carolyn would meet someone, often a person we’d known for years, and sum him or her up in a sentence. She loved to analyze people, and her insights, though not always kind, were remarkably accurate. In a way, this heightened perception was disabling—she was so aware of the swirl of ambition, judgment, and emotion around her that it became like noise, drowning out the more important sounds of her own thoughts and needs.

  Carolyn had a kind of startling beauty. She was dazzling to look at, with a narrow face, bright blue eyes, a strong but slim build, and that white blond mane of hair. But she never looked exactly the way I’d last remembered her, even from morning to night. There was something unpredictable about her face that refused to stay put in the mind. Which was fascinating in and of itself. A lot has been written about the energy Carolyn devoted to her appearance. It’s true—she worked hard on her looks, though she was naturally beautiful. And from what I could see, she usually enjoyed the game. I’m not sure why wanting to look good is something to criticize, since most of the women in my life spend time and money to improve what they see in the mirror. I suppose it seems excessive to some, but I’d bet they don’t live in the overlapping worlds of New York, high fashion, the society pages, and tabloid covers the world over. Carolyn felt a pressure to measure up to her image as John’s gorgeous and glamorous wife, and she did.

  When Carolyn let down her guard, which wasn’t often, you could sense something wounded about her. I always chalked it up to the father who was so conspicuously absent from her life. But then again, maybe that’s just who she was. Her vulnerability, while hidden beneath a tough, funny exterior, made her deeply empathetic to others. She saw herself as an underdog—unbelievable, but true—and she went out of her way to protect anyone in whom she sensed unease or unhappiness.

  Carolyn’s closest friends were a small group of people she knew from her days at Calvin Klein. They included Narciso Rodriguez, the designer who made her wedding gown and is now a bona fide fashion star; Gordon Henderson, another designer who once worked at Calvin Klein; Hamilton South, then a marketing executive at Ralph Lauren; and Jessica Weinstein, a friend of many years. She was also close to her sisters, Lauren and Lisa, twins who were as talented and beautiful as she was. The three of them were not at all alike, though. Lauren lived in Hong Kong at the time, where she was a driven, successful investment banker; Lisa, whom Carolyn described as shy and brilliant, was in graduate school, working on her Ph.D. in medieval studies.

  Carolyn and I had an
easy rapport, not deep but uncomplicated. We liked each other by virtue of the fact that we both loved John. And we trusted each other right away to make him happy. It was as simple as that. True to her nature, once Carolyn had accepted Frannie and me into her world, she began worrying about us. She would call Frannie several days before a planned weekend at the Vineyard to make a shopping list for our diet-deranged family. Talking fast and low, without any opening small talk, she’d say, “Frannie, it’s Carolyn. Which Cheerios does Colette [my daughter] eat, regular or Honey Nut? Will Rob eat steak?” She stressed over the guest list, calling once in a half-serious panic to say, “There’s a lot of alpha dogs this weekend. Too much testosterone. I’m not sure it’s going to work.” Another time, the four of us went to the art exhibit opening of a friend. The crowd was talented, glamorous—all very accomplished. Frannie, never particularly at ease among the glitterati, immediately started looking for a hole to climb into. Carolyn watched her from across the room for about ten minutes. Quietly, without saying a word, she made her way across the gallery and took my eager-to-escape wife by the arm. She led her to a couch, they sat down together, and Carolyn proceeded to narrate the event, in hilarious fashion, into Frannie’s ear until it was time for us all to go to dinner.

  She was, basically, a complex and talented woman with a great sense of humor and sparkle to spare. I think she had no idea if she could handle being married to John. According to him, she resisted his proposal for an entire year. Playing hard to get? Maybe. I can’t imagine that too many women would have refused John, though, knowing he was madly in love. Which he was. But she was also aware, no doubt, that saying yes meant stepping into a ring where she couldn’t control all the punches thrown.

  Back at the Downtown Athletic Club, over a steam and an onion soup, John continued to whisper that big plans were in the works. He didn’t have a doubt in his mind that he’d found the right woman. I gave him one piece of advice, which is that marriage is a decision. I said that once you make the decision to get married, you can’t spend your time longing for the greener grass over the fence. John replied, without any hesitation, “I know that.”

  It was hugely important to John that the wedding take place in private. Which is odd when you think of how John had lived his entire life in public. But his beloved did not want a big, elaborate wedding, and he agreed. “Carolyn wants to avoid a circus, and so do I,” he told me. He loved the challenge of keeping the event a secret—it was like a great game. The only problem for John, a man with numerous friends, was that Cumberland Island, the place they’d chosen for the wedding, was tiny. A lovely, rambling old home called Greyfield Inn, once owned by the Carnegie family, offered the only accommodations, and it had fewer than twenty rooms. John was sorry that he couldn’t invite many of the people who mattered to him. On the other hand, as the southernmost barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Cumberland was beautiful and inaccessible: designated a national seashore, it could be reached only by ferry, and the number of visitors was kept low. There wasn’t even a phone there, only a radio phone for emergencies. It was the ideal spot for a clandestine celebration.

  The wedding took place over a long weekend in September. Guests were sworn to secrecy about the event and given no information about where it would take place. John wasn’t that good at keeping secrets, though, and he did in fact tell me about Cumberland Island once, saying that he’d been there before and that it was beautiful and secluded. But I didn’t hear another word about it in the months that followed. Most of the guests flew to Jacksonville, Florida, where they were met and taken to Fernandina Beach and then ferried to Cumberland Island. We were flying down with John and Carolyn and another couple, so our known itinerary went only as far as New Jersey. Frannie and I, who had never left Colette for even a single night, asked my mother to stay with her and explained that we couldn’t say what was going on or where we’d be. We didn’t own a cell phone yet, and the prospect of being completely out of touch for days was nerve-racking.

  But the adrenaline had started to flow. John’s exhilaration was contagious and we were about to attend what would be one of the most-talked-about weddings of the year. We climbed into our Taurus station wagon and drove to a small private airport in Teterboro, New Jersey. There we met John’s boyhood friend Billy Noonan and his wife, Kathleen, in the airport lounge. About twenty minutes later, John and Carolyn came flashing in, like creatures from a diamantine planet. John had rented a Learjet for the weekend and we whisked down the East Coast in high style, landing at a small airport in St. Mary’s, Georgia, just after darkness. The soon-to-be bride and groom giggled the whole way down. We all had this tingly sense of “Can you believe this is happening?” A local hired hand with a Chuck Yeager drawl and a big old Buick drove us from the airport to Bubba Gump’s shrimp dock. I swear. We climbed into an old fishing boat and motored through empty waterways and across an otherwise silent bay to Cumberland Island, reaching the Greyfield Inn just in time for dinner with about a dozen other early comers.

  The Greyfield Inn was built in 1900 as a home for Thomas Carnegie’s daughters, Thomas being the lesser-known brother of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Converted to a hotel in 1962, the two-hundred-acre estate is overseen by a sixth-generation Carnegie and local beauty named Gogo Ferguson and her husband, David Sayre. It is low-key and lovely, with a sort of lost-in-time air. We couldn’t see much of the island or the grounds because it was dark by then, but it felt and sounded both peaceful and a little wild. After tossing our bags in our rooms, which were decorated with turn-of-the-century furniture, we made our way down to the dining room.

  Cocktails were served in a parlor as we waited for everyone to come downstairs for dinner. John’s friend Kevin Ruff, a stand-up comedian and actor, had arrived earlier from Los Angeles and was making us all laugh. John and Carolyn were glowing, happy to begin celebrating this thing they’d been planning for months. As we were all chatting and catching up, Carolyn asked me where Frannie was. I said she probably hadn’t finished changing yet. Half an hour passed and she asked me again. I shrugged. Carolyn looked at me for a second, turned on her heel, and ran up the stairs to our room. She knocked on the door, went inside, and found, as she somehow must have known, my wife sitting on the bed looking miserable. Carolyn walked over, gave her a hug, and said, “Hey, hon. Are you missing Colette? Is this the first time you’ve ever left her?” At which point my wife, to her embarrassment, burst into tears. Carolyn stayed for a few minutes, talking away and waving off Frannie’s apology for blubbering like a baby on the eve of Carolyn’s wedding. Then she said, “Okay, babe, take your time,” and went back downstairs. My wife made it down a few minutes later.

  Carolyn’s friends, especially Narciso, Gordon, and Jessica, worked incredibly hard that weekend, fitting the dress, tending to Carolyn and her family, and generally using their top-notch talents to create a beautiful wedding. If one measure of people is the love and loyalty of their friends, John and Carolyn, together and separately, scored off the chart. And the two groups of friends got along swimmingly. I remember being surprised at how close John seemed to Carolyn’s buddies—I guess he’d spent more time with them than I knew. We all woke up Friday to a sunny day that revealed the full natural beauty of Cumberland Island, a place like the mythical South you read about, with huge oaks hung with moss and wild horses roaming the beach. We rode bikes, poked around the property, and kept our eyes open for the tabloid spies we imagined behind every tree. By then we were all fully engaged in John’s quest for secrecy, and with each minute we were more excited at the thought that he was going to pull it off.

  There was a rehearsal dinner on the veranda Friday night. It was boisterous and lighthearted, for the most part, except for a toast made by Carolyn’s mother, Ann Freeman. I don’t remember her exact words, but she implied that she was worried for her daughter, unsure if this union was in her best interest. In hindsight, it’s chilling. At the time, I was surprised at her bluntness and felt bad for John, who was visibly
stung by the remarks. But the emotional ripple was absorbed by the crowd, most of whom had no such worries, and after dinner we all piled out to the beach, where a bonfire blazed and a bar had been set up under a big tent in the dunes. Some people went to bed, others kept the party going. Although I’ve hardly seen them since, I felt related to Narciso and Gordon by the wee hours. The heartiest souls ended up talking in a small house, set to the side of the inn, that was serving as Carolyn’s wedding suite that weekend. She, wise woman, had gone to sleep hours ago. The rest of us turned in at dawn.

  Saturday, when we made it out of bed, was also spent at the beach, a seventeen-mile-long ribbon of unsullied sand and dunes where we swam and played football and watched the occasional single-engine plane fly slowly overhead. Word had gotten out that John and Carolyn were on the island, possibly to get married, and the National Enquirer managed to get a few shots of the picnic. We were all in such good spirits that we waved each time it passed by. (I’m the guy holding the football in the October 8 issue.) I remember Kissy and Maurice talking earnestly about world events. Bobby Kennedy and John’s little nephew Jack were fishing as if it were a new religion. Ed Schlossberg did not want to play touch football.

  “Hey, Ed, do you wanna—” I asked.

  “No,” said Ed.

  “You might want to think about it a little more,” I replied, getting a laugh from him and Caroline.

  Carolyn’s twin sisters, Lauren and Lisa, whom most of us had never met before, showed up on the beach that afternoon. They sat down on a blanket a good hundred yards from anyone else and coolly looked us over. Obviously, they weren’t sure we were good enough for Carolyn. Several guys ventured over to say hello and came back smitten, though also a bit frightened. I ventured over to their blanket for a five-minute introduction and came away impressed. Though they were visibly happy to see Carolyn’s buddies, they kept their distance from the rest of us that day.