After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Carolyn Bessette

  Carolyn Bessette was born in White Plains, New York, on January 7, 1966, the youngest child of William and Ann Marie Bessette. The couple also had twin daughters, Lauren and Lisa. Her father was an architectural engineer, her mother a schoolteacher and school administrator. When Carolyn was four, her parents separated and soon after divorced, her mother later marrying an orthopedic surgeon with three daughters of his own. The blended family then moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Carolyn went to elementary and high school. In 1983, she enrolled at her mother’s alma mater, Boston University, from which she graduated in January 1988 with a BA in elementary education.

  “She was a popular, very interesting girl,” said Mary Cullen, who knew Carolyn very well at this time, having been raised in the same neighborhood. “She was one of those girls who seemed to have it all, good looks, a great personality, smarts. She could be self-involved, though. I remember spending many nights with her over coffees where all we would do would be to talk about her and her life and her boyfriends. As we would be walking out the door at the end of the night, she would turn to me and say, ‘And what about you? We never talked about you!’ But she was so entertaining, you didn’t mind the moments of self-absorption. She would say, ‘I’m not self-absorbed, am I? Tell me the truth.’ Then we would spend a half hour talking about whether or not she was self-absorbed.”

  From all accounts, Carolyn was not only model beautiful with her long brown—and later blonde—tresses and deep, penetrating eyes, but she was also funny and warm, the kind of young woman most men found irresistible. “Guys loved her,” said Stewart Price, who knew her after she graduated from college. “She was tall—five feet ten and, I guess, a size six—flirty, fun, stunning. We’d laugh because I knew her motto with men was something like, ‘Get them. Train then. Drop them.’ The other thing about her is that she was a hugger,” he continued. “She was constantly hugging everyone as they came and went from her day, and not just a polite hug but a real bear hug. She would also touch you a lot when talking to you, always making contact with you.”

  Richard Bradley, who would be the executive editor of John’s George magazine in a couple of years, said of Carolyn, “She had so much physical charisma. John had a charisma to him too, obviously, but he had charisma that was borne of a cultural obsession with him. Carolyn didn’t have any of that but she could walk into a room and command the room by sheer physical presence, not because of what people knew of her family or what they thought of her, but merely because of her physical intensity.”

  In 1988, Carolyn appeared on the cover of a cheesecake calendar called The Girls of Boston. Afterward, she posed for fashion photographer Bobby DiMarzo, flirting with the idea of maybe becoming a fashion model. She certainly had what it took in terms of physical appeal, though, as described by Oleg Cassini, who met her in Boston at a fashion show, “It was almost extreme—the sharp features, the alabaster skin, bright fire engine red lipstick, long blonde hair pulled tightly back, simple jewelry, little makeup other than lipstick. It was very spare, the look of the future, a kind of WASP-patrician appearance, the sort of thing that appealed to Calvin Klein. She had expressive eyes and a fetching way of moving her head and smiling. Her appearance made a statement—the vibrant big-city female professional.”

  Eventually, Carolyn ended up working in retail at a Calvin Klein boutique in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston. That job eventually led to another in the corporate headquarters of Calvin Klein in New York. Calvin Klein was a big fan of hers and felt she was a terrific representative of his company, eventually moving her into the public relations department.

  John actually first met Carolyn a year before he began to get serious about her. At the time, he was still with Darryl Hannah. His friend John Perry Barlow—the American poet, essayist, and political activist—recalled, “It was a difficult time in his life. John wanted to do the right thing. We were at Tramps, a nightclub [in the fall of 1993]. He was in a sad mood. He told me, ‘I have met a woman and I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t want to act on this now because I want to be true to Darryl.’ He said, ‘Darryl and I are having some difficulties, but I truly want for this thing to work out between us.’ I asked, ‘Who is she?’ He said, ‘She’s an employee of Calvin Klein. Somebody ordinary.’ I responded by saying, ‘John, if you can’t stop thinking about her, she must not be that ordinary.’ ”

  One thing led to another and Darryl decided that she wanted to “take a break” in her relationship with John. It seemed to not be going anywhere. She wanted marriage, but for years he had been resistant. Therefore, she was now thinking about going back to Jackson Browne—or maybe it was just a ploy to make John jealous. At any rate, John wasn’t sure how he felt about it. However, he did know that if Darryl was to be out of the picture, he wanted to get to know Carolyn Bessette. So he took Carolyn away for the weekend, to the sleepy beach town of Emerald Isle on the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they stayed at a rental resort called Sea Song. They were accompanied on the trip by John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill and his wife, Carole, both of whom liked Carolyn a lot and in fact decided that she was much better for John than Darryl. However, as often happens in long, complicated relationships, John and Darryl reunited when Darryl said she wanted to give it one more try, and John felt he owed it to her. Within days of his weekend getaway with Carolyn, John came clean with her, telling her that he was in an on-again/off-again relationship with someone else, that it was troubled, that they had been “on a break” but that now he was going to try again with her. Though Carolyn would say that she admired John’s honesty, he would one day live to regret ever having opened up to her about Darryl.

  A year later, John and Darryl were close to ending it—again. Meanwhile, Calvin Klein’s wife at the time, Kelly Rector Klein, invited John to a charity function and then to the showroom for the fitting of some custom-made suits. It was she who reintroduced him to Carolyn. Upon meeting her again, John was, this time, bowled over by her. He immediately ended whatever was left of his relationship with Darryl Hannah.

  “It was like one day we turned around and Carolyn Bessette was in the picture, and she stayed,” recalled Gayle Fee, who works for the Boston Herald. “The first time he was spotted with Carolyn was in Martha’s Vineyard. It was my scoop. They were out boating. A paparazzi got a photo of them and JFK Jr. was sort of helping her either out of or into a sort of diaphanous black skirt, and she was quickly known as this mystery girl in the white thong. Since everyone thought he was still with Darryl, this was quite a big deal. If I recall, her hair was more brown at the time than it was blonde. Everyone wanted to know who this new girl was…. it was a real sensation for a while.”

  John Perry Barlow remembers one of his first meetings with Carolyn:

  “We were at a café near Lincoln Center in New York City. Then we left to see the Financial Center in southern Manhattan. There, we passed many hours talking, till two or three a.m. We didn’t talk about people, but of our views of life. Carolyn had the air of a chic hippie. If she was allowed to be totally free, I think she would have worn faded and psychedelic clothes. She was a little odd, believed in astrology, very carefully studied the stars. She was also interested in the tarot. At the end of the evening I said to her, ‘Do me a favor. Fix me up with someone like you, will you?’ ”

  “I remember the day John called me and said, ‘Dude, I’ve met the one,’ ” Stephen Styles recalled. “I said, ‘John, where have I heard that before?’ And he said, ‘No, this time it’s for real, my friend. Wait until you meet her.’

  “About a week later, he invited me to meet Carolyn at Bubby’s, a restaurant in Tribeca just up the street from John’s place. When I walked in, there was this girl sitting at a table talking to some people in a real animated fashion with this super personality just sort of filling the room, saying something about how much she loved the place’s pecan pie. She was lean and angular, tall, with her hair sort of pulled back from her fac
e, light makeup on. As I walked over to her table, here comes John from the men’s room, with a big smile and wearing the black knit cap that I happened to know was the last gift his mother had ever given him. He said to me, ‘Buddy, this is the girl I was telling you about.’ She flashed me pretty much the greatest smile ever and—bingo! We spent the whole afternoon laughing and talking.

  “I remember that we talked about John’s flying. He had started taking lessons after his mom died. He said, ‘Mom wouldn’t have allowed my flying even for a second.’ To which Carolyn said, ‘Smart lady, your mom.’ I asked her, ‘You’re not so thrilled with the fact that John’s taking flying lessons either, are you?’ She replied, ‘Between you and me, I think he’s got a screw loose.’ We laughed. ‘No way will he ever get me up there, I can tell you that much.’ ”

  In the summer of 1994—just months after Jackie died—John decided he was serious enough about Carolyn to bring her to the Kennedy compound to meet the family. It was while at the compound with John’s family that Carolyn got her first taste of the way John was perceived by his family. Everyone seemed to be involved in some sort of political or philanthropic endeavor—everyone, that is, but John. No one pressured him about it—they just didn’t bring it up at all. It somehow seemed wrong or, at the very least, inadvertently hurtful that everyone talked about their many ventures, leaving John out. He was taking flying lessons. That was his project at the time. Fun, but not exactly significant—which, if anything, mirrored the way he was viewed by the family.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” Carolyn asked John, according to what she later recalled to her friend Mary Cullen.

  On its face, Carolyn’s was a simple question, but was it ever loaded! Though embarrassed to admit it, John said he wasn’t sure how to answer the question, that he had been thinking about it for some time and was hoping to soon find something that would distinguish him—but he didn’t know what that was, not yet, anyway. This probably wasn’t easy for him to admit. However, his admission seemed to bring them instantly closer, as Carolyn would later remember it. Prior to this time, John had seemed distant and removed. However, here in Hyannis, at the compound in which he had spent so much time with family and loved ones, he was different. He was reaching out to her, being honest, and she found it compelling.

  In the months to come, whenever John had an idea as to how he might proceed, Carolyn took great interest in it and enthusiastically spoke with him about it. It doubtless made John feel that the relationship had great potential because it mirrored some of the great marriages he had seen in his own family. After all, behind many of the great Kennedy men had often been a strong, powerful woman—such as had been the case with his own parents, Jackie standing behind Jack, loyal to him, no matter what. Even before them, of course, his grandmother had stuck with his grandfather even in the darkest of times.

  “The greatest power couple in our family has to be my aunt Eunice and uncle Sarge,” John told Jacques Lowe, the Kennedy family photographer. The two had met to go over photographs Lowe had taken in the 1960s, which he now wanted to donate to the JFK Library. “That’s what I’m looking for in my own life,” he said, holding a picture of Eunice and Sarge taken by Lowe. “A woman who will support me the way my aunt supports my uncle. That’s golden, what they have,” he said. “If I could find that kind of woman, I’d be a happy man.”

  Rose Kennedy Dies

  On January 22, 1995, Rose Kennedy passed away at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port from complications of pneumonia, just a few months short of her 105th birthday. At her bedside were Ted, Vicki, Pat, Jean, Eunice, Ethel, and many of her grandchildren. As well as her five surviving children, she had thirty grandchildren and forty-one great-grandchildren.

  In his memoir, True Compass, Ted Kennedy wrote that Rose’s death “came as an even more heartbreaking blow than I could have anticipated. It was not as though I hadn’t understood for some time that this was going to happen. Mother had grown enfeebled (in body, but not in spirit) from a series of strokes even before she turned one hundred.” Ted gave a stirring eulogy for his mother during her funeral Mass at St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in Boston, where Rose had been baptized. “Mother knew this day was coming, but she did not dread it,” he said. “She accepted it and even welcomed it, not as a leaving but as a returning. She has gone to God. And at this moment, she is happily presiding at a heavenly table with both of her Joes, with Jack and Kathleen, with Bobby and David.”

  “At Rose Kennedy’s service, there was bedlam outside the church,” recalled Cape Cod Times photographer Steve Heaslip. “There was a huge crowd outside the church, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger came out of the church with Maria Shriver the crowd started chanting, ‘Ah-nold! Ah-nold! Ah-nold!’ He was visibly upset and looked angrily at the crowd. You could tell that he thought that was inappropriate. There were carloads of Kennedys at that funeral. I don’t think I have ever seen that many Kennedys all in the same place, and all with that exact same smile. It was a little overwhelming.”*

  After the service, the family went to Hickory Hill, where Ethel had arranged for a catered meal in Rose’s honor. Everyone was present except Ethel’s son Michael. It was later learned that he had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program.

  “It’s just so hard to believe,” Ethel was overheard saying to her sister-in-law Pat. “First Jackie. Now Grandma.”

  For Ethel, Rose’s death was another big blow, because the two women had been neighbors at Cape Cod for so long. Contrary to what a lot of people may have thought—and what had been reported about them in the press—she was truly attached to her and thought of her as a great friend as well as a mother-in-law. The two had spent countless hours together planting flowers on the expansive property and talking about family matters, trying to make decisions about myriad problems, always coming together as the backbone of the family. Ethel treasured those moments. Even in Rose’s declining years, Ethel took comfort in knowing that she was right next door at the compound, and that she was okay. It had been incredibly difficult for Ethel to watch as Rose’s condition deteriorated over time, and she dreaded the day Rose would be gone for good. Now that day had come.

  “But you still have me, Ethie,” Ted Kennedy told her as he held her tightly in his strong arms.

  “I do, don’t I?” Ethel said, looking up at him with a sad smile.

  “Mother loved you so much,” he told her in front of the others. “And you remember what she would always say, don’t you? She would always say, ‘No matter what happens, God wants us to be happy. After all, birds sing after a storm…”

  Ethel finished Rose’s quote: “… so why shouldn’t we?”

  Pat, too, had a very difficult time with Rose’s passing. She still hadn’t gotten over Jackie’s death, which had hit her hard. In fact, it was safe to say that Pat still hadn’t reconciled Jack’s or Bobby’s deaths either, even though those tragedies had occurred so many years earlier. The same could be said of most of the Kennedys, though, and whenever there was a family funeral—such as Rose’s—it all came back to them, the overwhelming sadness, the emotional devastation, the terrible grief they felt, first, when Jack was murdered, then when Bobby was taken from them. All of it was always present, just under the surface. Somehow, they managed to prosper and even grow as a family despite it, but it was always there.

  Pretty much all of the Kennedys were present at the compound after Rose’s service, including John, of course, who had brought Carolyn. It was the first time she was present for an important family occasion, and as always, she made a favorable impression on everyone. After meeting her for the first time, Jean pulled John aside and, in front of a gaggle of his cousins, told him, “Now, don’t you dare mess this up, John. She seems like a good girl.” She then slapped him lightly—playfully—across the face. “I’m watching you,” she warned him, “but more importantly, so is Grandma.” She pointed to the heavens above. John had to laugh. “Then I know I’d better toe
the line,” he said, smiling at his aunt.

  Paparazzi War Zone

  As often happens when people sense they are perfect for one another, things moved very quickly between John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. By late summer 1995, the two were living together in John’s loft at 20 North Moore Street. They soon became a Manhattan staple in that they were quite social, always attending parties, dinners, galas, and charity events, constantly being photographed coming and going. Yet Carolyn never seemed very happy. Though she loved John deeply and was privately very content with him, the intrusion of paparazzi everywhere she went—even when she was not with John—had quickly become more than she could handle. She’d never wanted to be famous, she just wanted to date John Kennedy Jr., and even though she fully understood that the two notions—fame and John—went hand in hand, that didn’t make it any easier for her whenever she saw those long black lenses poking out from behind a parked car or some bushes.

  Publicist R. Couri Hay, a friend of the Kennedys, recalled, “Over time, a strange phenomenon began to occur where Carolyn’s image was concerned. Simply put, people began to hate her. All you ever saw were pictures of her looking really pissed off and stories about how mad she was, and people began to think, hey, what right does she have to be so unhappy? I soon began to see her not as an asset to John, but as a liability. He had big plans, or so he told me once. He had his eye on the Senate one day, and, who knows? Maybe even the presidency. But she couldn’t even handle Tribeca; how was she going to handle Washington?”

  Stephen Styles recalled, “Friends would come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why is she so pissy? What does she have to be so unhappy about? She’s got JFK Jr. What’s wrong with her?’ And I would defend her, saying, ‘But you don’t know her, she’s nothing at all like those pictures you’ve seen, like those stories you’ve read.’ It didn’t matter. The perception was being engraved in stone that she was ungrateful and difficult, and it quickly got to the point where there was nothing anyone could do about it.”