Then there was 1040. Since Caroline’s family was firmly rooted in their apartment on Park Avenue, it seemed logical for John to move into the stunning Fifth Avenue apartment he once called home.
But he couldn’t. “Too many memories,” he said. “Can’t handle it.” Instead, John set up housekeeping far away from the Upper East Side, in a $700,000, 2,600-square-foot tenth-floor penthouse co-op at 20 North Moore Street in TriBeCa.
Since neither John nor Caroline had any intention of using 1040, Maurice urged them to sell it. In January 1995, billionaire David Koch bought Jackie’s apartment for $9.5 million—all of which went to pay estate taxes. (By 2014 David Koch would be the fourth-richest man in the United States and New York’s wealthiest citizen. He and his older brother Charles would be best known for bankrolling conservative causes.)
Caroline could not bring herself to watch movers empty the apartment of her mother’s belongings, but John sat alone on the curb across the street and watched the transition without saying a word. “That’s the kind of thing you’d expect John to do,” John Perry Barlow said. “John was a very sentimental guy.”
A few days later, John suffered another loss when his grandmother Rose died at the age of 104. In reality, John had never been especially close to the Kennedy matriarch. “Jackie kept John, in particular, away from Rose,” said Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson. “Jackie didn’t want the children to be ‘too Kennedy.’ I noticed that she felt most strongly about John not being too close to his grandmother. Jackie seemed to want to keep him really close to her. In the end, it worked, because although Caroline and Rose were close—writing to each other regularly—Rose hardly had much to do with John at all.”
On January 25, 1995, John and Caroline were among the hundreds of mourners who attended Rose’s funeral at St. Stephen’s Church in Boston. The eldest daughter of legendary Boston mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and the wife of one of America’s wealthiest men, Rose attended Mass at Stephen’s every Sunday and always placed a single dollar bill in the collection plate.
Over the previous six months, Random Venture cofounders John and Michael Berman had also been passing the collection plate, trying to raise start-up capital for George. Finally, in March 1995, Hachette Filipacchi, publishers of twenty-two magazines ranging from Women’s Day and Elle to Road & Track, agreed to bankroll George to the tune of $20 million over five years or until it turned a profit—whichever came first.
Caroline was still wary of George, seeing it mainly as just another way for someone else to trade on the family name. About this, John had no illusions. Despite his frequent protestations that “George isn’t about me,” of course it was and he knew it. “Having John Kennedy as editor in chief,” said Hachette’s bottom-line-driven U.S. chief, David Pecker, “is going to be a big benefit to the magazine. He has access to almost everyone.”
John’s unsurpassed celebrity status certainly gave him an upper hand in journalism’s game of the “get.” It was difficult to imagine the movie star or politician who wouldn’t at least take a call from JFK Jr. Even more important was JFK Jr.’s value as a frontman for the magazine, as well as a magnet for subscribers and advertisers. In the end, Pecker and Hachette would wind up reportedly sinking millions more than the originally promised $20 million into George—“that,” said one Hachette executive, “is how charming John could be.”
As eager as John was to try his hand at journalism—and on his own terms—George served another important purpose. For years John had been pressured by party operatives in Massachusetts and New York to run for office, and for years he had skirted the issue. “You’d better be damned sure it’s what you want to do,” he said, “and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I’ve seen it personally. So if I were to do it, I would make sure it was what I wanted to do and that I didn’t do it because people thought I should.”
George was a tentative first step toward a life in politics. “I didn’t understand why movie actors were the only ones who could sell magazines and why people in entertainment were the only heroes of popular culture,” John said. “I thought if I could parachute behind enemy lines, in a way, and join the journalistic profession, that I could begin to let my perspective about politics seep in and maybe influence the presentation of politics.”
John hastened to remind his critics that his father had covered the founding of the United Nations in 1945 as a working reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain. “For me,” John explained, “the marriage of publishing and politics simply weaves together the two family businesses.”
One month after Hachette inked its deal with Random Ventures, Carolyn moved in with John. She had her work cut out for her. John’s TriBeCa loft was an industrial space when he bought it, and he paid an architect over $300,000 to transform it into a stylish bachelor pad. What he ended up getting was an industrial space with a kitchen, one bedroom, one office, two basic bathrooms, and two small closets. It was badly lit, and furnished with pieces from 1040 that didn’t match. Carolyn called the place “the Warehouse” or, alternately, “Home Depot.”
While the new woman of the house thought of ways to make it more livable, John was putting in fifteen-hour days on the launch of George. As the September deadline approached, he was looking pale and drawn. In the span of three weeks, he dropped fifteen pounds. During a run with his friend Gary Ginsberg, who had come aboard as an editor at George, the normally indefatigable John nearly collapsed; at one point, Ginsberg looked back to see his friend gasping for air, slumped against a tree.
Carolyn and Caroline were worried. In view of his father’s history of Addison’s disease—a potentially fatal autoimmune disorder—and Jackie’s lymphoma, the women in John’s life urged him to see a doctor.
John checked into New York Hospital, and after undergoing a series of tests phoned Caroline with the news. According to noted New York endocrinologist James Hurley, John was suffering from Grave’s disease, an incurable hyperthyroid condition. John quickly brought the disease under control with drugs that, he was told by his doctors, he would have to take for the rest of his life.
That wasn’t the only thing, apparently, that was hyperactive about John in the summer of 1995. He told a business colleague that, before her marriage to Antonio Banderas, actress Melanie Griffith was persistent in her attempts to start up a relationship. “I had to bolt the door,” he joked.
In late July, Carolyn and John accepted an invitation to dine with Sharon Stone at Tashmoo Farm, the waterfront Martha’s Vineyard estate the actress was leasing for the season. A week later, John returned to Martha’s Vineyard and Stone, only this time alone.
Carolyn only learned of John’s solo rendezvous with the alluring Basic Instinct star in late August, when the National Enquirer trumpeted news of a “sizzling secret romance” between JFK Jr. and Stone on its front page. Carolyn was unable to dig up evidence of a romance, sizzling or otherwise. But she did confirm that John had gone to the Vineyard to spend time with Stone, and that was enough. After an angry confrontation—one of the many that punctuated their relationship—Carolyn threatened to move out.
As they always did, Carolyn and John made up within hours. On September 1, John reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box. Dropping to one knee, he opened the box to reveal a sapphire-and-diamond band. This was a copy of Jackie’s favorite everyday piece of jewelry, designed for her by Maurice Tempelsman. Since she wore it everywhere—even in the water—Jackie called it her “Swimming Ring.”
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
Carolyn was speechless. She later told Carole Radziwill that she was taken by surprise, even though by this point she knew a proposal was inevitable. She also felt at the time that, while the ring was nice and she appreciated its sentimental value, it certainly wasn’t the engagement ring she would have picked out.
John expected to hear an immediate and resounding “Yes!”
But he didn’t. Instead, Carolyn equivocated. “I’ll think about it,” she replied, only half in jest.
“She loves him,” Radziwill said after Carolyn confided in her just a few days after the proposal. “But she isn’t in a hurry to be his wife.” Perhaps she dreaded the prospect of forever being pursued by the paparazzi, or having to second-guess her every move as the wife of a future politician. Maybe she was reluctant to submerge so much of her own identity, to exist as a mere appendage to one of the nation’s most celebrated—even beloved—figures. For the time being, their quasi-engagement was top secret. Observed Radziwill: “She would like to stay secretly engaged forever, I think.”
If he was hurt by Carolyn’s reluctance to say yes—tabloids were reporting the rumor that she was “stringing him along”—John gave no indication of it. When Carolyn dropped into the George offices, magazine staffer Richard Blow recalled, John was “ecstatic . . . He would gaze upon her as if he couldn’t believe what his eyes were taking in. He could not stop touching her, running his fingers through her hair, stroking her arms.” Carolyn seldom responded in kind.
Carolyn’s puzzling reluctance to commit and his Graves disease aside, John looked confident and fit as he waited to step before more than two hundred reporters on the morning of September 8, 1995, to announce the birth of George. The setting—New York’s neoclassical Federal Hall—was chosen by John for its historic significance: It was here that George Washington was first sworn in as president in 1789.
Carolyn helped him pick out the dark blue suit he wore for this occasion, but one sartorial touch—a pocket square—was distinctly his; John wore a pocket square for luck when he considered an event particularly important.
Worried that reporters would simply bombard him with questions about his private life, John had already tapped Clinton spinmeisters Paul Begala and Michael Sheehan for advice. By way of rehearsal, they staged a mock press conference, peppering John with potentially embarrassing questions:
“You failed the bar exam two times. Are you lazy or just stupid?” “Who is your new girlfriend?” “Do you wear boxers or briefs?”
At the unveiling, Michael Berman spoke first. “I feel a little bit like Barry Manilow right before introducing Bruce Springsteen,” he quipped. “Being John Kennedy’s partner,” Berman continued, “is a lot like being Dolly Parton’s feet. It’s nice, but you tend to get overshadowed.”
John then walked to the podium and looked out at the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “meet George.” Out swung a mounted display of the cover: supermodel Cindy Crawford as a bare-midriffed, bewigged George Washington. In a seldom-seen gesture, reporters burst into applause.
“I don’t think I’ve seen as many of you in one place,” John began, “since they announced the results of my first bar exam.” After conceding that he hoped to wind up as president “of a very successful publishing venture,” John volunteered answers to a series of personal questions before anyone could ask them: “Yes. No. We’re merely good friends. None of your business. Honest, she’s my cousin from Rhode Island. I’ve worn both. Maybe someday, but not in New Jersey.”
Now that his audience had been won over by his disarming self-deprecation and easy grace, John explained what he hoped to accomplish with George. “Politics isn’t dull—why should a magazine covering it be? Politics is about triumph and loss. Politics is about the pursuit of power and the price of ambition.” As for John’s insistence that George would be nonpartisan: “Uncle Ted said, ‘John, if I’m still talking to you by Thanksgiving, you’re not doing your job.’ ”
“How do you feel about joining the media,” one reporter blurted out, “that has made your life hell?”
John cocked his head and smiled. “You didn’t make my life hell,” he replied.
“What would your mother say if she could see George?” someone else called out.
The room fell suddenly silent. John took a moment, and then admitted that he was glad she wasn’t at the press conference—that it would have made him nervous. But, he added, “My mother would be mildly amused to see me up here, and very proud.”
In addition to being the face of the magazine, John agreed to contribute an interview to every issue—a regular feature that, given his ability to woo practically anyone, was a cornerstone of George’s editorial content. The first issue contained John’s interview with wheelchair-bound George Wallace, the firebrand former governor of Alabama who had been shot and paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1972. There was also a piece by John’s old flame Madonna, titled “What Would I Do If I Were President?”
Keeping up his end of the bargain, John produced newsmaking interviews with the divergent likes of Fidel Castro, Garth Brooks, Louis Farrakhan, and two of his personal heroes: Muhammad Ali and Billy Graham. Taking a hands-on approach, John also came up with story ideas, wrote the editor’s note, edited copy, crafted headlines, and oversaw the layout of the magazine. He also picked up the phone to charm established writers into contributing to the magazine and the biggest names in entertainment, politics, business, fashion, music, sports, and foreign affairs into being profiled in its pages.
John clearly reveled in the fact that he was doing something wholly unexpected—something the die-hard “Kennedyphiles,” as he called them, might find unsettling. “I have a slightly contrarian impulse I can’t seem to shake,” he admitted. “It’s kind of drenched in irony, right? Me in a media conglomerate.”
George racked up an unheard-of 175 ad pages and sold out its first printing of a half million copies in days. A second printing of 100,000 copies was rushed out and vanished just as quickly. By any measure, the magazine appeared to be a massive hit.
Curiosity was the major selling factor—that, and the simple fact that John was willing to do whatever it took to sell George to the American public. While he would never put himself on the cover, other magazines jumped at the chance. The week George went on sale, John graced the cover of New York, Esquire, and Newsweek. To hype his creation, John, who had never agreed to do a lengthy TV interview before, sat down before the cameras with Rosie O’Donnell, Oprah Winfrey, and Barbara Walters—to name a few. “Sometimes the weight of expectations, of doing anything,” he confessed to the Washington Post, “can be a little heavy . . .”
Determined to have some fun along the way, John seized the opportunity to make his TV acting debut on the hit prime-time sitcom Murphy Brown. The ninety-second cameo had John offering Brown, played by Candice Bergen, a copy of George with her face on the cover. When John tells her he plans to give her a subscription as a wedding gift, Brown laughs it off. “Don’t come crying to me,” John tells her as he leaves in a huff, “when you have to pay full newsstand price.”
As he did everything he could to keep his magazine front and center, John seemed more and more confident that he had made the right choice. “It’s pretty cool,” he said of his now all-consuming mission. “I think everyone needs to feel that they’ve created something that was their own, on their own terms.”
Rather than join the Kennedy clan, Carolyn and John spent Thanksgiving 1995 at a secluded resort in Guanaja, Honduras. Writer Peter Alson, who was among the dozen or so friends who went along on the trip, casually asked John where he would normally be spending the Thanksgiving holiday. When John suddenly became emotional, Alson realized that the day was November 22, the thirty-second anniversary of Dallas, and this was only the second Thanksgiving since Jackie passed away. Alson felt “moved” that his friend “could even for a moment be so vulnerable.”
Increasingly, John was able to lose himself in his work, leaving Carolyn alone for longer and longer stretches of time. Unable to venture outside without being set upon by photographers, she spent hours at home with their black-and-white Canaan puppy, Friday. As smitten as she was with the dog (“They were both insanely in love with Friday—he was more like their rambunctious child,” a friend said), Carolyn felt trapped.
Overnight, Barlow explained, Carolyn had become �
��a thing in the eyes of the public, and she was treated accordingly. She had no concept of what it was going to be like—people camped out on your doorstep day and night. She felt like a refugee.” Or, as Carolyn herself put it, like “a hunted animal.”
It didn’t help that John, in addition to being absent much of the time, could also be massively inconsiderate. It was not uncommon for him to forget that they had plans for the evening and go straight from the office to the gym instead, leaving Carolyn to cool her heels for hours. Other times he might show up at home with dinner guests he had never bothered to tell her about, leaving Carolyn to scramble for something to serve. “It wasn’t that he was mean,” one of their friends said. “John was just like a little kid, and she was the grown-up.”
By early 1996, friends were noticing a distinct change in Carolyn’s behavior. “She was still warm and friendly and drop-dead gorgeous,” one said, “but now there were mood swings and periods of depression. She was upset, distracted.” Everyone chalked it up to the pressures of being JFK Jr.’s fiancée. What they didn’t know—and what she hadn’t told John—was that she was pregnant.
Had he known, John would have been thrilled. He had been telling his closest friends for months that he was ready to become a father, and that he had even picked out a name that would work for both a boy and a girl: Flynn.
Trouble was, Carolyn was not sure she was ready for motherhood. Moreover, she worried about subjecting a child to the media onslaught she now struggled with. Carolyn, who had never told John that she had already had two abortions, knew he would never allow her to have a third.
Their next big blowup would have nothing to do with the baby issue, although the secret she was keeping from John must have contributed to Carolyn’s precarious mental state. On February 25, 1996, as they took a Sunday-morning stroll with their dog, Friday, through New York’s Washington Square Park, they both snapped. Without warning, John grabbed Carolyn’s hand and tore Jackie’s “Swimming Ring”—their engagement ring—off her finger. “What’s your problem?” Carolyn hollered at him. Then, as several bystanders looked on, John took the leash from her hand and stormed off with Friday.
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 32
