The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  Not coincidentally, nearly everyone in John’s tight circle of friends had a story about some near brush with disaster. Usually the situation was either created or abetted by John, whose own desire to live on the edge often put his friends in jeopardy. There were the documented incidents: when his boat took on water and began to sink, when the Coast Guard had been alerted after he lost his way in the fog and began drifting out into the Atlantic, when he nearly caused an avalanche while helicopter skiing in a restricted area, when he lost control of his bicycle as he tried to outrun a light in midtown Manhattan, when he had to bring his plane down sooner than expected because he suddenly realized he was running dangerously low on fuel. In that last instance, John employed a favorite battle cry to bolster his passengers’ spirits: Coraggio!

  More than once as he paddled his kayak in New York Harbor, John came close to losing a battle of chicken with the Staten Island Ferry. While the captain would frantically blow his horn warning John to get out of the way—in a couple of instances the ferry was brought to a complete stop—JFK Jr. waited until the last minute, waving his arms wildly at the startled passengers. Then there was the Fourth of July when he and a friend kayaked into the middle of New York Harbor to watch the fireworks. Instead of obeying the harbor police and leaving the area, John stayed—and was nearly swamped by dozens of other, considerably larger vessels.

  Daredevil John never acknowledged or apologized for scaring his friends—or for exposing them to more danger than perhaps they’d bargained for. When they nearly drowned more than once while exploring the waters off Jamaica in a two-person folding kayak, Christina Haag confronted him. “But John,” she said angrily, “we could have died.”

  “Yeah, Chief,” he answered, “but what a way to go!”

  Expert kayaker Ralph Diaz did not see the humor in his friend’s attitude. “John showed an overly casual approach” to the sport, Diaz said. “I was watching him one Saturday taking a kayak into the Hudson—no life jacket, no safety equipment of any kind. It all adds up to a person kind of oblivious to his surroundings. All I kept thinking was, ‘This guy is going to get hurt some day.’ I was worried that something was going to happen to him.”

  When it came to Daryl, it was usually John who did the worrying. In September 1992 he got word that Hannah had been hospitalized in Los Angeles once again, for undisclosed reasons. He rushed to her side, packed her up, and brought her back to New York. Soon they were living together in her West Side apartment.

  Now that they were back together—Hannah told a none-too-pleased Browne that she was leaving him for JFK Jr.—Daryl and John did nothing to conceal their affair. Paparazzi had a field day photographing them making out on a bench in the park, on a West Side stoop, against a parked car, and on an Amtrak train bound for Providence.

  Not every romantic moment was captured on film. One neighbor told the New York Daily News that she peered out her kitchen window to see Hannah and John—she wearing a flimsy nightgown, he shirtless—slow-dancing on the roof of her building.

  IT’S LOVE, proclaimed the cover of People, which described the glamorous pair as having “fame, fortune, fabulous bone structure—and each other.” Soon the affair went international, as the lovebirds were spotted vacationing in Switzerland, England, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.

  In important ways, John and Daryl were there for each other. He comforted her after the death of her stepfather Jerry Wexler, flying out to Chicago for the glitzy memorial tribute at the Drake Hotel. She, in turn, started behaving like an aunt to John’s nieces and to Caroline’s third child, John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, born on January 19, 1993. Hannah tagged along when “Grand Jackie,” as Rose and Tatiana called her, took everyone to Serendipity’s for hamburgers and hot fudge sundaes.

  Jackie was smitten with her grandchildren, and could be spotted with them several times a week—pushing Rose and Tatiana on the swings at the East Seventy-ninth Street playground, sharing an ice-cream cone on a park bench with Tatiana, buying cotton candy for Rose. Usually with a little help from one of the nannies, Caroline (John now called her “Old Married Lady”) brought the kids to see Grand Jackie at 1040 at least once a week. There Jackie would empty her red wooden treasure chest of its glittering contents—trinkets, scarves, costume jewelry—dress the children up like princesses and pirates, and then lead them on what she called a “fantasy adventure” through the sprawling apartment.

  Caroline also loved bringing her kids to Red Gate Farm, where they spent lazy days boating, swimming, and fishing. The grandchildren were also given the run of the house, where Jackie would sit on the floor for hours coloring and playing with them. (Caroline would recall the day neighbor Carly Simon dropped by and helped the irretrievably tone-deaf Grand Jackie teach little Jack Schlossberg to sing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”)

  “I have never seen my mother so happy,” Caroline said, “as when she’s around the kids.” Despite Hannah’s efforts, Jackie was not about to let Daryl into this special world she had created. It wasn’t because she didn’t like Daryl—she did. Jackie was also suitably impressed by the size of Hannah’s fortune—several times larger than the $100 million plus in net assets Tempelsman had helped Jackie accumulate since Ari’s death.

  Jackie felt that a famously flaky Hollywood sex symbol who had already been photographed squabbling on street corners with her son might not be the best choice for John. Caroline agreed. “She didn’t like the position Daryl kept putting her brother in,” a friend of Caroline said. “She was always telling John to watch out for himself and not be taken advantage of by any woman.”

  In the end, she left no doubt as to where she stood on the Hannah issue. “Kiddo, she’s nice,” Caroline told her little brother. “But she’s not the one.”

  Daryl took another step into Jackie’s doghouse on Memorial Day weekend, 1993. With his mother and Maurice vacationing in the south of France, John and Daryl threw a party for friends at Red Gate Farm. When the maid arrived the next morning, she was shocked by what she saw.

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Marian Ronan said. “The house was strewn all over with empty champagne, beer, and wine bottles. The carpets were stained, and there were half-eaten plates of food discarded in every room, and food had even been splashed onto the walls.” There were also the remnants of joints and bongs in all the bedrooms and in every bathroom. Feeling even less kindly toward Hannah in the wake of this incident, Jackie restricted the couple to “the Barn,” the silo-shaped guest wing that John had occupied from the beginning.

  John left the prosecutor’s office in July, and spent the rest of the summer with Daryl in New York, Massachusetts, and California. Now that she had apparently dumped Jackson Browne in favor of a serious relationship with John, Hannah was angling for a real commitment. “She was,” Daryl’s friend Sugar Rautbord said, “desperate to marry him.”

  Hannah came close to doing just that. In late July 1993, she and John took out a marriage license in Santa Monica, and Daryl bought an antique wedding dress at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena. After another round of petty quarreling, they decided to put their marriage plans on hold.

  By September 1993, Jackie dropped all pretense and began openly shunning Hannah. Whenever John showed up with Daryl at 1040, they sat in the dining room while Jackie stayed in her room eating dinner off a tray. In October, all the Kennedys were set to attend Ted Kennedy Jr.’s wedding in October—until John announced he was bringing Daryl along. Jackie and Caroline canceled at the last minute, leaving John and Daryl alone to dodge the paparazzi. At one point, a visibly frustrated John grasped Hannah’s hand, yanking her past the crowd of photographers and into the church.

  Not long after Ted Kennedy Jr.’s nuptials, John hastily alerted friends that in two days he and Daryl were going to exchange vows in a top-secret ceremony on Martha’s Vineyard. Three hours later, he called them back to say the wedding was off.

  * * *

  HANNAH MAY HAVE sensed that another rival for John
’s affections was already on the horizon. John first encountered Carolyn Bessette while jogging in Central Park in the early fall of 1993. A personal shopper at Calvin Klein, twenty-seven-year-old Bessette counted socialite Blaine Trump, actress Annette Bening, and broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer among her celebrity clients. When John asked her to help him buy a suit for his cousin Teddy’s wedding, he wound up with three suits, a half dozen shirts, several ties—and Carolyn’s phone number.

  Blond, blue-eyed, and sleek at five feet eleven inches tall and 135 pounds, Bessette was not just stunningly beautiful. She was everything the fragile, needy, charmingly flaky Daryl was not—cool, poised, chic, irreverent, and, like Jackie, very much in control. She was also intense. There was, Littell said, “an electricity about her that nearly, though not quite, distracted you from her physical beauty.” In these ways, she also resembled her future mother-in-law. “I think,” Jamie Auchincloss said, “she may have reminded him more of his mother.”

  On Veterans Day, John and Carolyn were spotted cuddling and holding hands on a bench in Central Park. Not long after, they sat close to each other on a curb with thousands of others watching the New York City Marathon. The photo of John and his “mystery woman” was published in the New York Post and picked up by People.

  As it turned out, that weekend Bessette was supposed to have been spending time in Connecticut with the family of the man she had been seriously involved with for years, Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin. At the time Bergin, who at twenty-five was nearly a decade younger than John, loomed over Times Square on a billboard advertising Calvin Klein briefs; his looks would later help him win a role on the worldwide hit television series Baywatch. As her romance with John blossomed, Bessette clearly did not share the fact that she was pregnant with Bergin’s baby and would soon go through with an abortion.

  After spotting the photo of Carolyn and John sitting on the curb, Bergin angrily confronted Carolyn. “He’s just a friend,” she protested disingenuously. “We just chatted. I think he’s seeing Daryl Hannah. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing!” Bergin protested. “Don’t act so innocent.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Carolyn shot back, full of righteous indignation. “I told you already: he doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  At the Manhattan disco Tramps, John confided in John Perry Barlow that he was torn between his loyalty to Hannah and this woman who was having “a major effect on him. He was really struggling,” Barlow said. “He just couldn’t get his mind off this girl.”

  Daryl and Carolyn aside, John had more than his share of drama to handle. Tensions were running high for other reasons as well. On November 22, 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of Dallas was marked by prime-time television specials and memorial events scattered across the globe. Dreading the solemn date in history that fell so close to their birthdays, John and Caroline stuck close to home.

  Jackie, on the other hand, had made the conscious decision not to live the rest of her life playing the widow. During her brief reign as first lady, Jackie had seized every opportunity to tear through the Virginia countryside on horseback. “Keep her riding,” Black Jack Bouvier advised his son-in-law JFK, “and she’ll always be in a good mood.”

  That particular November 22, Jackie ignored the inevitable public relations fallout and spent the day jumping horses at the Piedmont Hunt Club. Midway through the event, the horse that preceded her in the competition knocked some stones off a fence. Jackie’s gelding, Clown, sailed over the fence but stumbled on the stones, hurling her to the ground.

  Knocked cold, Jackie was rushed to the hospital. She remained unconscious for an alarming thirty minutes, and by the time she came to, doctors discovered a swelling in her abdomen. The consensus at the time was that Jackie had probably suffered a slight groin injury that became infected. That diagnosis seemed to be proven right when, after antibiotics were administered, the swelling went down.

  Jackie seemed to have escaped paralysis or worse, but it wasn’t her only close call that day. While she was riding in Virginia, an unemployed Indiana man was arrested as he drove through New Jersey asking directions to Jackie’s country house in Bernardsville. In his 1982 Dodge pickup, police found a hundred-page manuscript in which the man described himself as a “special agent” in a “paramilitary unit.” Concealed beneath a blue pillow they also discovered a .44-caliber handgun and a box of bullets.

  John had learned to brush aside such incidents, nearly all of which were never divulged to the public. Nor did he share even with his closest friends the number of times he received phone calls in the middle of the night from someone claiming that his uncle Teddy had been shot, or his mother killed.

  His mother’s tumble in the Virginia countryside gave him a scare, but otherwise she seemed, as one tabloid breathlessly proclaimed, “64 AND FIT AS FIDDLE. WOW! LOOK AT JACKIE NOW!” Thirty years after Dallas, Jackie had changed remarkably little. To illustrate the point, newspapers ran photos of “Grandma Jackie” running in Central Park, in a sexy two-piece swimsuit on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard, outshining everyone in haut couture at a gala in Manhattan. She was, gushed one writer, “the very picture of radiant health.”

  But one month after her fall, Jackie and Maurice were cruising in the Caribbean aboard his boat the Relemar (named after Tempelsman’s children Rena, Leon, Marcy) when she suddenly became ill. John’s mother was rushed back to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center, where a biopsy of swollen lymph nodes in her neck indicated she was suffering from an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  The next day, John and his sister arrived at 1040 and took their places on the couch opposite their mother. As she held on tight to Maurice’s hand, Jackie told her children the devastating news—and the doctors’ unanimous belief that, if she had any chance of making it at all, she would have to begin chemotherapy without delay.

  John and Caroline jumped up and embraced their mother. All three wept—a shared moment of sadness that the preternaturally dignified Jackie tolerated just so long. Brushing away her own tears, she reassured her children that she intended to beat the odds.

  Still, just a few days after receiving her grim prognosis Jackie instructed her attorneys to draw up a living will that specified no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong her life. The memory of Janet’s painful death was still fresh in her mind as Jackie began receiving steroid drugs and chemotherapy. “She was horrified at how much her sister Janet had suffered,” Tish Baldrige said, “and she wasn’t about to let that happen to her. Jackie always had to be in total control of her own life—that was one thing about her that never changed.”

  Now she conspired with Maurice and her children to keep her lymphoma a secret. Given the Kennedy family’s proven lack of discretion, only Teddy was told that his sister-in-law was battling cancer.

  Jackie’s first reaction was one of stunned disbelief. “I don’t get it,” she told Arthur Schlesinger, joking that her disease was “a kind of hubris. I was so proud at being so fit. I did everything right to take care of myself. I swim, and I jog . . . and walk around the reservoir—and now this suddenly happens. Why in the world did I do all those push-ups?”

  “She was laughing when she said it,” Schlesinger recalled. “She seemed cheery and hopeful, perhaps to keep up the spirits of her friends, and her own.”

  Incredibly, it was only now that Jackie was finally willing to quit the two-pack-a-day smoking habit she had somehow managed to hide from the public for more than forty years.

  After learning that his mother was now in the fight of her life, John no longer seemed willing to put up with Hannah’s emotional demands. That January, the couple was walking toward 1040 Fifth—she clutching a bag from the Madison Avenue gourmet store E.A.T., a wrapped package for John’s mother tucked under his arm. What happened next would be captured by an enterprising window-shopper with a video camera.

  Startling others on the street, John stopped in his tracks and began yelling at Daryl. “Ma
ke up your mind!” he shouted. “Where do you want to go?”

  Daryl begged him to calm down, but John only grew more aggravated. “So what do you want me to do?” he bellowed, waving his arms in the air. With his thumb, John gestured for Daryl, now crying, to “beat it.”

  Instead, Daryl, dabbing at her eyes with Kleenex, trailed John as he stomped off in the direction of his mother’s apartment. They stayed only a few minutes at 1040, then walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch. John and Hannah emerged forty minutes later, and this time he was angrier than ever. As she moved beseechingly toward him, John kept backing away. Eventually, John hailed a taxi, jumped in, closed the door on Hannah and left her standing, shocked and shivering, on the sidewalk.

  None of John’s friends were surprised when the JFK Jr.–Daryl Hannah affair imploded. “They were wonderful apart,” one said. “But when they walked into a room together, they were just these two huge celebrities competing for the same space. It was exhausting to be around them.”

  Besides, other things were weighing on John’s mind. It soon became apparent that Jackie wouldn’t be able to conceal her illness any longer. The side effects of chemotherapy—blotchy skin, hair loss, bloating—could not be effectively hidden under wigs, floppy coats, hats, and scarves. When a photographer tried to take a close-up of Jackie as she left 1040 for a walk in the park, Maurice charged at him. Chastened, the paparazzo backed off.

  After the Christmas holidays, rumors that Jackie was suffering from a mysterious ailment proliferated. After consulting John and Caroline, she instructed Nancy Tuckerman to contact Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times. On February 11, 1994, Tuckerman confirmed that Jackie was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and added that the doctors were “very, very optimistic.”

  The announcement made front-page headlines around the world, and once again Jackie was in the unfortunate position of having to bear her private pain in public. “Most people think having the world share in your grief lessens your burden,” she had once told Teddy White. “It magnifies it.”