While John now resolved to run for office, he also worked on keeping George afloat in the face of declining circulation and ad revenues. Carolyn, meanwhile, flew to Milan in July 1997 to attend the funeral of her friend, fashion designer Gianni Versace, who had been senselessly gunned down in front of his Miami Beach mansion.
At the funeral, Carolyn just happened to be seated directly behind Princess Diana. Not long before, Diana had praised Jackie for the way she raised her children, and said she hoped her sons, William and Harry, would be able to handle the media as gracefully as John had. Even before her generous comments, John had been won over by the People’s Princess. “Diana had the most unusual upwards glance,” he told a friend, “really seductive . . . the most unusual blue eyes.”
Five weeks after Carolyn spoke briefly with Diana in Milan, the princess was killed in a crash after a high-speed chase through the streets of Paris. Like many, Carolyn blamed the paparazzi. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do about Carolyn,” John told Billy Noonan. “She’s really spooked now.”
Diana’s death only served to harden Carolyn’s resolve not to have children anytime soon. “How can I bring JFK III into his world?” she asked. “They’ll never leave me alone.” Having a child would be “just too cruel,” she added. “Just another form of child abuse.”
These are not the words Jackie would have wanted to hear. As first lady and the widow of an assassinated president, she faced unimaginable hardships yet still succeeded in raising two happy, well-adjusted children.
Jackie had accomplished this, of course, by shielding John and Caroline from their problematic Kennedy cousins, who seemed to be getting into more trouble than ever. Michael Kennedy, the sixth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children, now stood accused of sleeping with his family’s underage babysitter. Michael’s older brother Joe, meanwhile, was under fire for engineering the annulment of his twelve-year marriage to Sheila Rauch—an unfolding scandal that would cause Joe to drop out of the race for Massachusetts governor.
What John did next would have horrified Jackie, who, if not always enthusiastic about supporting her Kennedy in-laws, never publicly criticized them. In an effort to generate controversy and give newsstand sales a much-needed shot in the arm, John used the editorial page of George to pillory his cousins as “poster boys for bad behavior.”
To ensure that his piece would garner maximum attention, John struck a nude pose—albeit discreetly obscured by a shadow—for the accompanying photograph. Under the headline “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” John was shown sitting on the ground, his gaze directed upward at the forbidden fruit.
Joe’s retort was brief and stinging. “Ask not what you can do for your cousin,” he sneered, “but what you can do for his magazine.”
John tried, somewhat disingenuously, to explain to his cousins that his George commentary was intended to be ironic—that it was designed to show that the press was unfairly piling on Joe and Michael merely because they were Kennedys. “If they’re too stupid to understand,” he finally said, throwing up his hands, “then screw it.”
As the 1997 holidays approached, there were more heated confrontations with the press. One afternoon, John turned a video camera on the paparazzi and threatened to use it as Exhibit A in a lawsuit against them. Carolyn grew so fed up at one point that she chased down a female photographer, grabbed her by the shoulders, and spit in her face.
Confronted with tensions at the office, the ever-insatiable tabloid press, and mounting strain in his marriage, John sought avenues of escape. In December, he secretly began taking flying lessons at the Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida.
* * *
CAROLYN SHARED JACKIE’S concerns about the notoriously unfocused John piloting a plane. “I mean it, John, I have a bad feeling about this,” she was overheard telling him the day after Christmas 1997. “I don’t want you taking flying lessons.” With some additional prodding from Uncle Teddy, John promised to give up his dream of piloting his own plane. For the time being, he claimed, he was willing to settle for flying the Buckeye ultralight (his aptly nicknamed “flying lawn mower”), which did not require a pilot’s license.
Not all risks required leaving the ground. The family “curse” reared its head yet again on New Year’s Eve, when Michael Kennedy, vacationing with his family in Aspen, slammed headlong into a tree while playing a typically reckless Kennedy game of night football on skis. John’s cousin Rory desperately tried to revive her brother with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When that failed, she cradled Michael’s bleeding head as his children knelt in the snow, crying.
At Michael’s funeral on Cape Cod, John appeared far more distraught than he had been at any of the previous funerals he had attended—even his mother’s. After the service, John, weeping openly, threw his arms around Douglas Kennedy, one of Michael’s brothers. Eldest brother Joe, clearly unimpressed, ignored his Kennedy-Bouvier cousin.
Michael’s death only made those who loved John more aware than ever that he was tempting fate by taking to the skies, even in the ultralight that didn’t require a pilot’s license. Carolyn never stopped hinting at her concern. At her thirty-second birthday party, Carolyn paused before blowing out candles on her cake. “What’s your wish?” he asked. “To know,” she said, “that you’ll always be around.”
A month later, they were among the guests invited to attend a state dinner for British prime minister Tony Blair at the White House. Did John remember living here? someone asked. “Only vaguely,” he said. Did he want to again? “Only vaguely.” John smiled.
That final year, John and Carolyn seemed, on balance, to be happier than they had ever been. At the White House Correspondents Association dinner that spring, she plopped in John’s lap and they cuddled and giggled for the cameras. “They laughed a lot together,” Paul Wilmot said. “They were a very warm, happy couple. He had probably found his true soul mate in her.”
The reason for Carolyn’s positive new attitude, she told the New York Daily News, was that she simply stopped reading what was written about her in the newspapers. Unlike Jackie, who eagerly lapped up every syllable, Carolyn claimed she was “a happier person, and maybe a better person, for not knowing.”
That, and the fact that Carolyn was now taking antidepressants (recreational drugs were no longer in the picture) and undergoing intense psychotherapy five days a week. Even with all the pharmaceutical and psychiatric help, it was difficult to hear what John had to tell her that April: Not only had he reneged on his promise to give up his flying lessons, but John had already secretly earned his pilot’s license.
John’s sister told a friend that she felt like crying when she heard the news. “You know Mummy didn’t want you to fly,” she told John. “I think you know how angry she’d be with you right now—and how worried she’d be . . .”
Although there had always been tension between Carolyn and Caroline, this was one subject on which they agreed. After a time, however, it became clear there was nothing either could do or say to change his mind. The only person who would have succeeded in doing that was Jackie.
Not that any friend or fellow Kennedy was particularly eager to fly with the novice aviator, no matter how hard he tried to convince them that it was perfectly safe. “John may have pushed his limitations getting his pilot’s license,” Willie Smith said half in jest, “but he hasn’t overcome them yet. He’s yet to persuade any of his relatives to fly with him.”
In 1998, John took to the skies alone in his new Cessna with N529JFK on the fuselage. In time, he was able to persuade a handful of acquaintances to join him. All summer long, John buzzed Red Gate Farm, recalled his Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Tony DiLorenzo. “Not only that, John would buzz it, go up, dive down, and show all his friends where his house was.” By the summer of 1999, John was back in the skies over his mother’s house, swooping down and pulling up at the last minute—only now in his more powerful, souped-up Piper Saratoga. “A great guy,” DiLorenzo said, “but sadly, h
e was a showboater.”
In this, he was nothing at all like his mother, who rarely ventured from her secluded Shangri-la when she was on the Vineyard. While Jackie contented herself running along her 4,620 feet of private beach, swimming in the Atlantic, or paddling her canoe on Squibnocket Pond, John made a point of getting out and mingling with tourists as well as the locals.
On most weekends during the summer months, John could be seen pulling up to the Harbor House in Edgartown in his vintage black GTO convertible, standing with his bike on the tiny ferry that linked Edgartown to Chappaquiddick, Rollerblading toward Menemsha, or downing margaritas with Carolyn at an Oak Bluffs dive called the Lampost.
The couple would rendezvous at Red Gate Farm nearly every weekend that summer. Carolyn flew up with him in the Piper Saratoga a few times—but only when an instructor tagged along or, if John was flying without a copilot, strictly during daylight hours. She preferred, however, to take a scheduled flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport or the ferry from Hyannis.
* * *
THAT SUMMER OF 1999, Carolyn and John hosted two very special guests on the Vineyard. Tony Radziwill had been battling cancer for more than a decade, but now the outcome was clear. “Tony’s illness was really tearing John up,” Barlow said. “He did everything he could for Tony, but he knew he was dying . . .” At John’s insistence, Tony Radziwill was spending his final few weeks with his wife, Carole, at Red Gate Farm. “It’s what Mummy would have wanted,” John told Carolyn. “She loved Tony like a son.”
The imminent loss of his surrogate brother was not the only cross John had to bear that summer. In addition to the nonstop round of galas, openings, and fund-raisers in New York, Boston, and Washington, John was in the process of buying out his sister’s share in Red Gate Farm. Now he and Caroline were reportedly squabbling over certain items of furniture that were left to them by their mother. John confided in his cousin Bobby Kennedy Jr. that he was “hurt” by his sister Caroline’s actions, while Carolyn told Bobby’s wife, Mary, that the bitter feud with his sister over Jackie’s belongings had left John “so depressed” he was finding it hard to function. “He’s under a lot of stress, you know,” Carolyn explained, “and it’s killing him.”
One of the biggest challenges facing John was finding a way to save George from extinction. After a wildly successful beginning—fueled almost entirely by John’s celebrity and personal charisma—the magazine, which never found its footing with advertisers, was drowning in a sea of red ink. Now Hachette was ready to pull the plug, forcing John to scramble for investors to keep George alive. “He loves his staff,” Carolyn told one of her fashion world friends. “He’ll feel terrible if they lose their jobs. He’ll feel responsible.”
By mid-July, however, John realized he was fighting a losing battle. He was ready to shut the magazine down and finally make the big leap into politics. Only months before, Barlow and former Republican senator from New York Alphonse D’Amato teamed up to convince John to run for mayor of New York—as a Republican. “John was really thinking it over,” Barlow said. “In many ways, John was quite conservative. Socially, I think he was more of a Republican than a Democrat. He would have made a great mayor. He really understood New York and he loved it deeply.”
In the end, John was still convinced his best shot was at running for Moynihan’s Senate seat. Hillary Clinton had hesitated to enter the race largely because she feared John, who was being touted behind the scenes as her principal rival for the nomination, would be a formidable foe. John was both heir to the Kennedy magic and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” as well as the consummate New Yorker, a resident of the city since the age of three. Although New York had no residency requirements, Hillary, who had never spent more than a few days at a time in New York, would almost certainly be branded a carpetbagger.
There were other, more personal reasons for Hillary’s initial reluctance to battle John for the nomination. She and Bill had forged a close friendship with Jackie, and Hillary felt a special attachment to her children; Caroline, in fact, had become a close confidante of daughter Chelsea Clinton. “She was really torn,” said one of Hillary’s supporters in New York. “She liked John and hated the idea of running against him, and she also felt he would be impossible to beat on his home turf.” This had been Bobby Kennedy’s seat, Hillary pointed out, and she felt “if John wanted it, he should have it.”
As late as the summer of 1999, Hillary actively worried about JFK Jr. and sought assurances from state party officials that he would not be a last-minute entry into the race. “People love John,” she conceded, “more than they love me.” Ed Koch agreed. “I love Hillary,” he said, “but if John Kennedy had been in the race, there is no way she could have won the nomination. He had the Kennedy name, and a charisma all his own. The Senate seat was his for the asking.”
In early July, Hillary finally made her move and formally announced her candidacy. But she was still concerned about the possibility that John might decide to toss his hat into the ring. As it turned out, she was right. John was now more confident than ever that he could easily beat her at the polls. He believed Hillary was vulnerable not only because of the Monica Lewinsky affair, her husband’s subsequent impeachment, and a slew of brewing scandals in the Clinton White House, but mainly because she simply had no connection to the state he loved.
As Hillary had feared, young Kennedy planned on making much of Hillary’s carpetbagger status. “Wait until she gets here,” John told his friend Billy Noonan. “She’s gonna get her head handed to her.” He was going to fill Noonan in on the details of his upcoming campaign for the U.S. Senate—how and when he intended to make the announcement, what advice he was getting from Uncle Teddy, the endorsements and backing he was already lining up—when they all got together on Nantucket to celebrate Noonan’s fifth wedding anniversary on July 16. Then they’d be off to attend his cousin Rory’s wedding in Hyannis Port.
If, of course, all went according to plan.
* * *
EXCEPT FOR THOSE few close friends who expected John—their seemingly indestructible “Master of Disaster”—to survive any tight situation, the world held its breath and prepared for the worst. The plane had been missing only a matter of hours when the first bits of debris—Lauren Bessette’s black overnight bag, a square aqua duffel bag, a plane wheel—began washing up on Philbin Beach, virtually at the doorstep of Red Gate Farm. Then, after a four-day search by the Navy and Coast Guard—the most expensive for a private aircraft in U.S. history—John’s plane was finally found lying upside down at a depth of 116 feet some seven and a half miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard.
Unaware that the spot where John’s plane went down was within sight of where he was standing, Tony had been the first to call Caroline on vacation in Idaho and tell her John’s plane was missing. Now, after four days during which the nation had held its breath but not its tears, it was left to Caroline to decide how best to say goodbye.
An emotional Bill Clinton, who at sixteen had shaken hands with JFK in the White House Rose Garden, solemnly offered words of support on the behalf of the nation. “For more than forty years now,” he said, “the Kennedy family has inspired Americans . . . Through it all, they have suffered much and given more.”
Once the bodies were found, it fell to Uncle Teddy to speak for the family. “We are all filled with unspeakable grief and sadness,” the senator’s statement read. “John was a shining light in all our lives, and in the lives of the nation and the world that came to know him as a little boy.”
* * *
NOW CAROLINE STOOD alone, insisting on a relatively modest family service in the church that had meant so much to their little family of three—St. Thomas More, the modest neo-Gothic stone church just a few blocks from 1040 Fifth Avenue where Jackie took her children to Mass every Sunday and where Caroline still worshipped. A Mass was said at St. Thomas More for John’s mother and father on their birthdays. Now, it occurred to Caroline, one would be said
there for John on his birthday, as well.
Caroline, known among the Kennedys for her will of steel, prevailed. Addressing 315 mourners—including the first family—Uncle Teddy at first tried to lighten the mood. “Once,” he began, “they asked John what he would do if he went into politics and was elected president, he said, ‘I guess the first thing is call up Uncle Teddy and gloat.’ I loved that. It was so like his father.”
Teddy delivered the rest of his touching eulogy in a quavering voice, against a backdrop of muffled sobs. John was “one of Jackie’s two miracles,” the senator said, and would “live forever in our beguiled and broken hearts.”
Yet even before Uncle Teddy could say goodbye, Caroline had to decide where her brother’s cremated remains would be interred. It was widely assumed that John would be buried alongside his parents and his siblings at Arlington, and President Clinton personally approved plans to lay John to rest next to the Eternal Flame. But when it became clear that Carolyn would not be permitted to join him, her mother, Ann Freeman, objected.
There was another possibility—that John and Carolyn be buried at the Brookline cemetery that was the resting place of a number of Kennedy family members, including Joe and Rose. The Bessettes nixed this idea as well, on the grounds that Carolyn’s family had no ties to Massachusetts.
Searching for a solution—she was keenly aware that Ann Freeman had lost two children in a plane piloted by John—Caroline remembered that her brother had once said in passing that he wanted to be buried at sea. He may have given it thought, or it may have been an idle musing—either way, it seemed right to Caroline.
On Thursday, July 22, 1999 at 9 a.m., seventeen of John’s and Carolyn’s relatives boarded the cutter Sanibel and were taken to the Navy destroyer USS Briscoe. With an escort of three additional cutters, the Briscoe headed out to sea. Their red and swollen eyes concealed behind dark glasses, mourners sat in folding chairs until the ship stopped not far from where John’s plane went down.
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 34
