The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  Screaming through her sobs, Carolyn chased after John and grabbed him by the throat. The skirmish continued as they left the park, and eventually John, defeated, sat on the curb and cried. Carolyn walked up to him and demanded the ring. “Give it to me!” she shouted. John did, and she knelt down next to him.

  They were both sobbing now, and for one tender moment it looked as if they had reconciled—until John pushed her away, reigniting the conflict. Carolyn grappled for the leash. “You’ve got your ring!” he yelled. “You’re not getting my dog!”

  “It’s our dog!” she fired back before marching off with Friday. Later, Carolyn returned and led John to a bench for a quiet talk. Through their tears, they made up with a passionate embrace.

  An enterprising paparazzo had captured the entire incident on videotape, and what quickly became known as “the Brawl in the Park” was being talked about everywhere. Still trying to establish his credentials a serious publishing executive, John was humiliated. “It was very undignified,” Barlow said, “and so unlike John.” Just days after the tape was aired on national television, John appeared on Howard Stern’s syndicated radio show. Had he seen the tape? the shock jock asked.

  “I didn’t have to see it,” John replied coolly. “I was in it.”

  * * *

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER their celebrated brawl, Carolyn miscarried. Although she had lived with John on North Moore Street, she had never given up her own one-bedroom in Greenwich Village. Instead of telling John about her pregnancy and miscarriage, she invited her ex-lover, Michael Bergin, to the apartment and told him everything. Then they made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Early the next morning, a friend pounded on Carolyn’s door, warning her that John was worried that she hadn’t returned home, and was on his way over. Bergin, half dressed, fled Carolyn’s apartment in a panic. “I knew it was wrong, and she knew it was wrong,” Bergin later reflected, “but we both found ways to justify our behavior . . . What did that say about their relationship? And what did it say about ours?”

  Caroline also had her doubts, fueled by the tabloid rumors, the controversial “Brawl in the Park” videotape, and the obvious hold Carolyn had over her brother. When friends asked if a wedding was imminent, Ed Schlossberg shot down the idea. “Caroline,” he sniffed, “doesn’t know her.”

  Yet one week after Carolyn’s tryst with Bergin, she and John looked very much like a couple in love as they walked arm in arm along Paris’s Left Bank. He had wanted to be at least an ocean away when some 1,195 lots from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis went under the gavel at Sotheby’s in New York—the most-ballyhooed estate sale in memory.

  The historic auction, which had Jackie’s blessing, raised an astonishing $34,461,495—enough to pay off the taxes on the estate. Only $200,000 remained for John and Caroline from the sale—“After all that? A lousy $100,000 each?” John complained—yet they still wound up splitting an after-tax estate of more than $100 million.

  In the months before Sotheby’s cataloged Jackie’s possessions, John and Caroline faced the arduous and often emotional task of culling through their mother’s things—separating what they might want to keep for sentimental reasons from what they might donate to the Kennedy Library. Ultimately, they donated two hundreds works of art and artifacts—including the wedding dress Jackie wore when she married JFK—as well as 4,500 photographs and 38,000 pages of documents to the library.

  Inevitably, there were those who questioned whether selling JFK’s rocking chair, golf clubs, and humidor—not to mention Jackie’s clothes and jewelry and John-John’s high chair—was in the best of taste. What would Jackie have thought of this record-smashing fire sale of her personal belongings? “Are you kidding?” said her friend Dina Merrill, the actress who was also heir to the Post cereal fortune. “I’m sure Jackie would have been thrilled.”

  “Thrilled” is probably not the word to describe what Jackie would have thought about George—at least not the September 1996 cover, for which Drew Barrymore reenacted Marilyn Monroe’s infamous “Happy Birthday, Mr. Pres-i-dent” song to JFK.

  “It’s reprising a song sung to my father in 1962,” John said with a shrug. “I don’t see what possible taste questions could be involved. If I don’t find it tasteless, I don’t know why anyone would.” He went on to describe it as “part of the iconography of American politics—an enduring image.” That “enduring image” had the desired effect, stirring up controversy and newsstand sales.

  John was willing to take his button-pushing even further. When Hillary Clinton refused to pose for the cover, he came up with the idea of dressing up his former lover Madonna as his mother. “Wouldn’t that be a riot?” he asked his dumbfounded assistant, RoseMarie Terenzio. “We’ll have her in a pillbox hat, sitting on a stack of books.”

  John dashed off a note describing his idea, but she said no. “Dear Johnny Boy,” Madonna answered in her distinctive, loopy handwriting.

  Thanks for asking me to be your mother but I’m afraid I could never do her justice. My eyebrows aren’t thick enough, for one. When you want me to portray Eva Braun or Pamela Harriman I might say yes! Hope you’re well.

  Love, Madonna

  It seemed unimaginable, but John and Carolyn had been married two full days before the press reported the story. To John’s credit, their September 21, 1996, wedding was pulled off with all the precision and stealth of a commando raid. “It required the skill of a James Bond and the whole CIA,” Tish Baldrige said. “Jackie must be smiling in heaven.”

  Three days earlier, some forty guests—mostly family—started arriving by private plane and boat on tiny Cumberland Island (population 21), just off the Georgia coast. Everyone checked into the island’s only hotel, the Greyfield Inn, which had once been the winter retreat of the Carnegie family.

  According to the caterer, Jodee Sadowsky, guests were “forced to really rough it. The inn only has bathtubs. There’s only one shower, and it’s outdoors. So every morning everyone stood in line. Maria Shriver was right behind me in her fuzzy slippers.”

  That night at the rehearsal dinner, John stood up to toast his bride. With a nod to the People magazine cover that launched him as a sex symbol, John declared himself to be “the luckiest man alive.”

  The next evening, John and Carolyn exchanged vows during a candlelight ceremony in the Brack Chapel of the First African Baptist Church, an unadorned white clapboard structure that had been built in 1893 by former slaves.

  The bride wore a $40,000 pearl-colored Narciso Rodriguez silk crepe floor-length gown, long gloves, and a veil of silk tulle. Her platinum hair was pulled back in a chignon, held in place with a comb that had belonged to Jackie—a gift to Carolyn from her new sister-in-law. She walked in, John Perry Barlow said, “looking like a beautiful ghost.”

  John, meanwhile, made several sartorial nods to his dad. He wore a midnight-blue wool suit and white vest, one of his father’s white shirts, and his father’s watch. All the men in the wedding party also wore a blue cornflower—JFK’s favorite—as a boutonniere.

  It was very much a family affair. Carolyn’s sister Lisa, her stepfather, and her mother were there. So was the last love of Jackie’s life, Maurice, as well as Uncle Ted, Aunt Lee, and John’s surrogate mom, Marta Sgubin. Caroline, so instrumental in planning the clandestine nuptials, was also matron of honor. Her son Jack Schlossberg was the ring bearer, while John’s nieces, Rose and Tatiana, were flower girls. Caroline and Sgubin became emotional when they realized Carolyn was holding a bouquet of lilies of the valley, Jackie’s favorite flower.

  John’s cousin and best friend, Tony Radziwill, was best man. Tony’s ongoing battle with cancer would be a heavy burden for John to bear, but for now he was holding his own.

  “I shed tears of absolute joy as John and his bride exchanged vows,” Marta said. “He has always been a very, very sensitive boy, and as I watched him I could read in his eyes how much he wished his mother could have been there to see him m
arried.”

  At the wedding dinner, Ted once again invoked Camelot to reduce half the guests to tears. “I know that Jack and Jackie would be very proud of them,” he said, “and so full of love for them as they begin their future together.”

  Carolyn never stopped agonizing about the kind of life that lay ahead—the expectations, the loss of privacy, how it all would affect any children they might have.

  Maintaining her own identity was another pressing issue for John’s bride. While she and John were filling out the necessary paperwork and getting blood tests, Camden County Court Clerk Shirley Wise asked if Carolyn was taking John’s surname.

  “I still want to be known as Bessette—Bessette-Kennedy,” she said. “I want the name with a hyphen.”

  Wise was taken aback. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” she said. “After all this, she didn’t want to take the world’s most famous name!”

  Before the world knew of the wedding—and Carolyn was crowned “the New Queen of Camelot” by a hyperventilating press—they had embarked on their honeymoon: three days in Turkey, followed by a ten-day cruise of the Aegean aboard the 123-foot double-masted schooner Althea.

  Once they were back in New York, John and Carolyn stepped outside their North Moore Street building for the first time as man and wife. Polite to a fault, John gently pleaded with his fellow journalists as solemn-faced Carolyn looked on.

  “This is a big change for anyone, and for a private citizen even more so,” John said. “I ask that you give Carolyn all the privacy and room you can.”

  Not likely. As she tried to make her way into Caroline’s Park Avenue building for a post-wedding party, Carolyn was blinded by photographer’s flashbulbs. “Please!” she yelled as she shielded her eyes. “I can’t see!”

  It was clear from the outset that the photographers and reporters who were so charmed by John felt the opposite way about her. “John was a real gentleman,” photographer David McGough said. “He was very polite to photographers at events, and would stop and smile for them. He knew how to give—but she never did. She could be cold as ice.”

  The grudge match between Carolyn and the press had been going on for some time. At first, she said, she had viewed the paparazzi as “a kind of a joke. But then it just got bizarre. I realized that a lot of the photographers really didn’t like me. They wanted me to do something wrong, so they could photograph it.”

  She had a point. When she fell down the stairs outside 20 North Moore, photographers swung into action, but no one came to Carolyn’s aid. “They just went crazy,” said Carolyn, who pulled herself together and gathered her belongings. “Nobody helped me up. They just kept snapping.”

  Now that she was Mrs. Bessette-Kennedy, Carolyn had to put up with photographers shouting “whore,” “bitch,” and even more graphic expletives at her in an attempt to elicit an angry response.

  Jackie would have been sympathetic. She had fought for years to keep the press at bay, ultimately realizing that it was an unwinnable war. Rather than defeat the press, she had learned, at least to some extent, to manipulate it.

  Yet John understood that the ground rules had changed considerably since the days when, as the wife of a young senator bound for the White House, Jackie was first thrust into the limelight. Now photographers were willing to do whatever it took to snare that dramatic photo that might fetch six figures from a tabloid.

  “My wife went from being a private citizen to a public one overnight . . . It was taxing,” John later said, not willing to publicly concede that she was cracking under the pressure. “I have a thick skin about it, but I think people sort of forget how hard that can be. Carolyn is a very private woman. It’s like you go from having a life you’ve built on your own terms and all of a sudden it’s being snatched away from you. It’s hard.”

  In the end, Carolyn had no interest in playing the game the way John and Jackie did. Instead, she and her husband found refuge in places like Socrates on Hudson Street, where waitress Bia Ayiotis served John breakfast three or four times a week.

  She was taken aback when John first ordered in Greek. “My stepfather,” he explained, “was Greek.”

  “He’d sit at the counter or in a booth with his baseball cap on and read his paper in peace,” Ayiotis said. “For his power and his money, he was a very plain person. He was a sweetheart.”

  The inevitable stares and whispers didn’t bother John; like his mother, who often grabbed a sandwich at the counter or ate a hot dog she had purchased from a vendor on the street, he was able to screen out the distractions. It was a skill Carolyn had yet to master. Even at out-of-the-way places like Socrates and Bubby’s, she was uneasy. “She would have to hide out in here,” Bubby’s co-owner, Seth Price, recalled. “She’d go out the back door to get out. It was just horrible. She just wanted to spend time with her husband.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Carolyn complained to RoseMarie Terenzio. “They chase me down the street.” John’s assistant knew what Carolyn knew—that the paparazzi had reached “new levels of viciousness” and were “patiently waiting for her to mess up, act out, or go crazy.” Terenzio “pitied her. The girl was a sitting duck.”

  Given enough time, Carolyn might have learned how to hide in plain sight from the master. “John was a magician. He could just flat-out disappear,” Barlow said, recalling the time photographers tried to corner the two friends as they left a Bruce Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden. Barlow turned to talk to John “and he had vanished.” While the paparazzi scattered to find him, Barlow heard someone whispering. “Psst. Psst, over here,” John called before materializing from behind a concrete column. “He’d been standing there, right in the middle of everything the whole time,” Barlow said. “John knew how not to be seen if he didn’t want to be seen, and he did it often.”

  Knowing, as Jackie did, that the press ramped up its coverage considerably whenever November 22 rolled around, John spirited Carolyn out of town on the thirty-third anniversary of his father’s murder. This time they sneaked off to Argos, Indiana, to visit Lloyd Howard, design engineer for Buckeye Industries. The year before, John purchased his first ultralight Buckeye powered parachute, and since then he and Howard had become friends.

  “My mother was always afraid for me,” John admitted to Howard. “She didn’t want me flying.” Howard believed John was “more cautious than most people because of his mother—that was ingrained in him. He still heard her voice whispering in his ear, you know: ‘Please be careful.’ ”

  Despite Howard’s conviction that John was a cautious flyer, he actually had several close calls piloting his ultralight. In Hyannis Port, police rushed to the Kennedy compound when locals dialed 911, claiming that a man flying a flimsy-looking contraption was being blown out over the Atlantic. Struggling with the controls, John finally guided the ultalight Buckeye back to land. “You could have been killed,” one police officer told him.

  “I wasn’t worried,” John replied confidently.

  During the Kennedys’ visit to Indiana, John also told Howard that he had every intention of running for office—although not right now. “My mom sort of pressured me to get into politics,” he told Howard. “She expected me to follow in my father’s footsteps, and of course I will. But I don’t think the time is right just yet.”

  As for Carolyn, Howard echoed the sentiment expressed by most people who got to know her. Having seen photographs of John’s cool blond spouse in the newspapers, Howard expected Carolyn to be aloof. Instead, when they met, she gave Howard a “big bear hug. Carolyn was even more outgoing than John was. She was very open, very warm, very friendly.”

  Carolyn also exhibited a motherly concern for John’s welfare that Jackie would have appreciated. “She babied John; she treated him like her child—always asking how he felt, reminding him to wear a scarf, that sort of thing,” Howard said. “I’d heard all the rumors about trouble in their marriage, but they said it wasn’t true. They seemed to me to be about as in l
ove with each other as two people could get.”

  They now had new nicknames for each other. He called her “Kitty Cat,” and she called him “Mouse.” Yet for all the outward signs of marital bliss, the constant drumbeat of unsavory speculation continued. Carolyn was now said to be abusing drugs (specifically antidepressants and cocaine), to have suffered a miscarriage (which turned out to be true), and to be seeking treatment for infertility.

  It was all clearly taking its toll. At one point, John jumped onto the hood of a Jeep being driven by celebrity photographer Angie Coqueran and banged on the window. Coqueran, he believed, had been responsible for the “Brawl in the Park” video. After screaming threats at Coqueran—“I know who you are, and I’m going to get you!”—John grabbed her by the collar. Then he went after Coqueran’s male partner, screaming, “Leave us the hell alone!”

  This time Carolyn tried to stop her husband, but he would have none of it. Now furious at Carolyn as well as the paparazzi, John took off alone, leaving his wife sobbing on the sidewalk. “I didn’t blame him one bit for getting angry,” said Coqueran, who described John as being “gentle as a bunny with us—even when he was pissed off. He tried to strangle me and I still love the guy—that’s how great he was.”

  John was not unaware of the effect he had on people, and now that George was well into its second year, John began to seriously consider a run for office. When New York’s longtime Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced in 2000 that he would not seek reelection, Democratic leaders approached John. In January 1997, before Hillary Clinton expressed interest in the seat, John told New York State Democratic chairwoman Judith Hope that he wanted to run. He had good reason to believe now was the time: a straw poll done at the time showed that, out of all the probable Democratic candidates—including Hillary—John would win handily.