In truth, some collective jealousy of Carolyn Bessette was inevitable, especially from the women of America. In particular, women of all generations felt a real connection to John Kennedy Jr., whether it was motherly, sisterly, or sexual. If America had a prince he was it, and she was the woman who had landed him, and no one had ever heard of her. Who was she? There was a real cultural fascination about her, and a sense that if she was going to be the woman who landed the prince, the least she could do was share him with people, be open about her life. Be outgoing. Be what people expect from someone in that role. This was expecting an enormous amount from her, because Carolyn Bessette was, at the end of the day, a very private person.
This cultural cattiness about Carolyn created an ongoing dynamic because the tabloid press coverage of her put her in direct opposition to John. No one was going to write anything negative about John. Even the editor of the National Enquirer had told John that the publication’s audience didn’t want negative stories about him. And since all stories about celebrity couples hinge on conflict, because happy couples don’t sell, if they weren’t going to write negatively about John, then who would be their target? It was preordained to be Carolyn. Or as Richard Bradley so aptly put it, “She could have been as beautiful as she was and with the personality of Mother Teresa and it still probably wouldn’t have made any difference.”
That the tabloid media generate millions of dollars in revenue by publishing stories based on nothing but the unfettered imaginations of their writers is something Carolyn Bessette never really considered—that is, until such stories began to be fabricated about her and her life. “She would be standing in a checkout line and there on a rack would be a magazine whose cover would be some ghastly, awful picture of her glaring at someone, and the headline was about how she and John were fighting. She just couldn’t ignore it,” said Mary Cullen. “First of all, it infuriated her. Then it hurt. ‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ she told me one day, ‘because John doesn’t want to hear about it. He keeps saying he has had to live with it all his life, as if that means I should be okay with it, too. But I’m not.’
“It was a huge frustration for her because she saw the obvious link between the fabricated stories and the unflattering pictures, and it became an issue between her and John. It soon mushroomed into what she saw as a communication problem. After all, she worked in PR. She felt that maybe there was something that could be done to mitigate the damage that was being done. ‘Maybe we could figure something out, if he would just talk about it,’ she told me. ‘Maybe we could strategize things better instead of just walking out into the middle of a freaking war zone every single night of the week. There has to be a better way.’ In the end, she just wanted to be heard, but it was a subject John didn’t want to discuss. It turned into, ‘The fact that it bothers me should be enough for you to care, but it’s not. Why is that?’ You know how every couple has that one fight they keep having over and over again without any hope of resolution? This was theirs.”
The irony is that John never had a problem with the tabloids, prior to this time, anyway. In fact, he subscribed to them and, in a strange way, had an appreciation for them. He enjoyed the narrative some of the reporters would spin to tell a good—even if untrue—story, mostly because John also loved to tell a good story. And besides, what was being written about him was far enough from the truth that it didn’t matter to him.
Adding another layer to an already unhappy situation, some of the New York paparazzi began to dislike Caroline because they felt she had poisoned John against them. He had always been very nice, but now, almost overnight, he was combative. Suddenly he was confronting the photographers, screaming at them to “get the hell out of the way,” and becoming confrontational.
At one point, John even called Jacques Lowe, an award-winning photojournalist who once served as the official campaign photographer for JFK, just to discuss with him photographers and how they might be better handled. “It’s completely out of control,” John said, “and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“My best advice is for you to tell Carolyn to just accept it and roll with it,” Lowe told John, according to his memory of the conversation. “Since her public image is obviously being shaped by tabloid photography, the least she can do is smile, for God’s sake. Even if she doesn’t mean it, she has to smile, John. No more frowning or scowling or putting a hood over her head. That’s just the way it has to be. Otherwise, she’s going to be perceived as a new kind of Kennedy woman, all right. The pissed-off kind!”
“Of course I have tried to tell her that,” John said, “but she won’t listen. The other thing is that her mother is encouraging her that she shouldn’t have to put up with it. And I wish she’d stay out of it.”
“Oh, no. Once the mother gets involved, forget it,” Jacques said. He told John that his mandate would have to be to make both Carolyn and her mother understand that “if Carolyn is going belong to you, she’s also going to belong to the world,” Lowe concluded. He reminded John that likely no woman in history abhorred paparazzi as much as John’s own mother had, “but you never saw pictures of her glaring at them. Even when she was angry at them, she somehow looked beautiful. Rage can actually be attractive,” he told John, “that is, if you know how to pull it off.”
“Yes, but I’m afraid there will only ever be one Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” John said.
Jacques Lowe had to agree.
John’s Risky Proposition
John Kennedy Jr. was always interested in the media. In fact, one of the reasons he usually tolerated photographers was because he knew they had a job to do, that they served a purpose, whether it was to provide mindless entertainment to the masses as a diversion from people’s troubles, or to document some important touchstone moment in history. John not only was fascinated by celebrity and the way people handled it, as we have seen from his relationship with Madonna, but also was intrigued by the way the rich, famous, and influential molded and shaped their images for public consumption. John had seen the way the public was now reacting to Carolyn Bessette as a result of the way she was captured by paparazzi, and though it bothered him a great deal and he thought it grossly unfair, it intrigued him just the same and in many ways reinforced for him the wisdom of the way he had always dealt with the media. “He assumed the best about people and never became cynical about their motives,” his close friend Dave Eikenberry said, “and that’s amazing, given the sycophants and leg humpers he had to deal with every day. It took enormous fortitude for him to stay well grounded in the face of his bizarre celebrity, but he did it.”
“As I see it, even the trashiest tabloid writer has a responsibility that he clearly does not take seriously—shaping the way people think of others, and by extension, the way they perceive themselves,” John told this author in 1994. (Interestingly, he introduced himself to me simply as “John Kennedy,” leaving out the “F.” and the “Jr.”) “It’s all tied together. When it’s about politics, the way the media reports and distorts or otherwise makes decisions about the way to ultimately present information to the masses can, obviously, have huge ramifications. This is a subject that has long interested me.”
Before his mother died, John often talked about publishing a political magazine. Jackie was ambivalent. On one hand, she was happy to see that he had passion for something, and publishing was certainly an interesting proposition. Of course, she and her family had always been on the other side of the equation, often trying to control the way they were perceived by the media and, by extension, the public. However, she had started a career as a photojournalist many years earlier, and Jack had also worked as a reporter. So maybe John’s idea wasn’t that much of a stretch. But Jackie wasn’t sure. “John, you’re not going to do the Mad magazine of politics, are you?” she asked, which couldn’t have made John feel very supported. He said no, “But I thought it was good advice to keep in the back of my mind [in terms of] what direction we wanted to go,” he later told Larry K
ing. Then Jackie got sick and John’s idea was derailed for a bit. When he eventually mentioned it to Carolyn Bessette, she thought it was terrific. The more the two of them discussed it, the more persuasive Carolyn was—and the more John began to believe that the venture had potential.
Things moved quickly. Soon, John had partnered with an old friend, Michael Berman—who had a background in public relations and marketing, but none in publishing—in the idea of a political magazine that would emphasize not only politics but also pop culture, along with how society views politics. It would be a political lifestyle magazine—that was the best way to describe it—and they would call it George, as in George Washington. The two then went about the business of raising the money for the venture—in the area, they learned, of about $30 million.
It obviously wasn’t difficult for John Kennedy Jr. to network in the publishing business. Magazine and newspaper publishers eagerly accepted his calls and took meetings with him. Most of the executives who met with John saw something in him that they didn’t know existed because he didn’t give a lot of interviews to the press and, other than the tabloid fictions, not a lot was known about him. They found that he actually had keen insight into the cultural habits of others. He understood, or at least tried to understand, what made people tick. This was partly because he always made calculated choices to remain tethered to “normal” people in his life. He socialized with celebrities at fund-raisers, but that was about it. His friends were not all in show business and they weren’t all in politics. He had friends in all walks of life. Therefore, he understood people, which would serve him well as a publisher. Also, he had known and was still friendly with many politicians, and had a strong foothold in that world just by virtue of his famous lineage. Of course, all of the Kennedys were just as immersed in that world, but none were JFK’s only son. As John Kennedy Jr., he was a guy who had special access. In other words, he could call the president of the United States and it was likely he’d get through—and likely on the first try.
As it happened, it would be Pierre Salinger, who had been the White House press secretary to President Kennedy, who set John on the right path with George. Salinger, who was living in Paris at the time, was visiting Georgetown when John asked to take a meeting with him. “This guy is historical,” he told Carolyn in front of friends over drinks. “He’s an old friend of my dad’s, and he knows media like no one’s business.”
“Yes, John and Carolyn Bessette met with me,” Pierre Salinger recalled many years later. “I had known John all of his life, so I was proud to see how he turned out. He was well-spoken, intelligent, ambitious. I was also impressed with Carolyn. She shared John’s vision for a political magazine. She didn’t say a lot; she felt to me like a quiet power. Of course, my job, as I saw it, was to talk him out of such a risky idea.”
John and Carolyn met Pierre at a restaurant in Georgetown, John wearing a black jacket and red tie, Carolyn a brown Prada suit. “It’s far too risky a proposition,” Pierre Salinger told him, according to his memory of the meeting. He warned the young Kennedy that he would “lose your shirt in this venture,” reminding him that most magazines fail in their early stages of development.
“We’re aware of that,” John said, referring not only to himself but also to Carolyn at his side. “But there’s nothing like it on the market. It would do for politics what Rolling Stone did for rock music,” John said. “Politics is, today, driven much more by personality than ideology. That’s what this magazine is about.”
“But why not just write a column for Vanity Fair, or something like that?” Pierre asked.
John laughed and glanced at Carolyn, who did not betray the way she may have felt about the idea. She just sat quietly, sipping her vodka and grapefruit juice. John said he could sit down and write a column for Vanity Fair, which would take about an hour out of his day. Or he could devote “my life to a project that actually matters to me,” he said, “like this one.”
“Again, it’s too risky, John,” Salinger persisted. “Why not just work for your uncle Teddy in the Senate?”
At that, even Carolyn had to chuckle. “You may as well forget trying to talk him out of this thing, Mr. Salinger,” she finally said. “He’s going to do it. He really believes in it.”
“And what do you think, my dear?” Pierre Salinger asked her.
“I think it’s great,” she said. “Only someone like John could make it work, though,” she added. Then—even though there was probably a lot more she could say—she looked at John to fill in the blanks, as if recognizing that it was his place, not hers, to continue. Before he had a chance to speak, Pierre asked John another question: “Is this your way of entering politics?”
“Not right now,” John said after pondering the question for a moment. “But in the future, who knows?” He noted that he could most definitely see himself running for office one day, but that at this time in his life he liked “the proximity to it that a magazine like this could afford me.”
Pierre Salinger had to smile to himself. He would later admit that the idea of John Kennedy Jr. in politics appealed to him greatly, mostly because he knew how incredibly proud his father would have been to witness such a development in his son’s life. “And you know, your concept is not really such a stretch,” he told John. Salinger then cited JFK’s fabled debate with Nixon as a perfect example of personality over ideology. “Even though your dad had it all over Nixon, it was his image that helped him win the debate as much as it was his politics,” said Salinger, according to his memory of the conversation with John. “So, in a sense, what you’re proposing isn’t new. Yet it feels new just the same, doesn’t it?”
Of course, John’s father, JFK, did grasp the vital importance of image-making in American politics. He was in office at a time when television was becoming the primary medium for news-gathering and he, more than any president before him, knew how to use this new medium to its—and his—best advantage. After JFK, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton successfully used the medium, while others, such as LBJ and Richard Nixon, never really understood it, as future historians would point out.
“Well then, okay, let me see what I can come up with for you,” Pierre Salinger told John Kennedy Jr.
George
True to his word, a couple of days after their meeting with him, Pierre Salinger called John Kennedy Jr. with the idea of having him contact Hachette Filipacchi Media, the world’s largest magazine publisher. Headquartered in France, its interests would later include book publishing. “I knew that the French loved the Kennedys,” Salinger would recall, “mostly because of Jackie’s celebrity there. And I had a strong sense that David Pecker [who at the time was in charge of the magazines’ operations in the United States] might be interested in what John had to offer.”
John met David Pecker over lunch at an Italian restaurant on East 60th Street. “He arrived on his bike with his briefcase slung over his shoulder,” recalled Pecker, who also remembered being “skeptical” once John explained his idea. “I told him that magazines about politics and religion don’t sell,” said Pecker. “Why should I invest Hachette’s money in this? He said he’d put celebrities on the cover—commercialize the covers. He handed me the results of a direct mail campaign which he had paid for himself. It cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s how confident he was, and it was reassuring to me that he was willing to put his own money at risk. When we finalized the deal [in February 1995] we had dinner at Rao’s at 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue in Harlem. After dinner, he just walked over to his bicycle and put his cap on. As he was going down 114th Street in the middle of the night, photographers were all chasing him.”
Once word got out that JFK Jr. was publishing his own magazine, the novel idea caught on like wildfire, and enough advertising space was purchased to fill eight issues before the first one was even published! The magazine’s headquarters would be centralized in an office building at 1633 Broadway, and as far as Kennedy and his partner, Michael Berman
, were concerned, everything was off to a good start. The partners spent the next few months staffing the publication with people such as Matt Berman (no relation to Michael), who became its creative director, and Richard Blow (now Richard Bradley, after he changed his last name to his mother’s maiden name) as senior editor and, eventually, managing editor. The first five issues would publish bimonthly, after which the intention was for the magazine to hit the stands every month.
The plan was for each issue to feature an interview that John would personally conduct with a notable person. For its first issue, John and Gary Ginsberg, senior editor and head of legal affairs for the magazine, flew to Montgomery, Alabama, to interview former Alabama governor George Wallace, the infamous white supremacist and JFK’s fabled nemesis. They spent three days interviewing the politician, who by this time was elderly and nearly deaf. It went fairly well; Ginsberg and Richard Bradley returned to finish the job. Later, Kennedy flew to Los Angeles with Michael Berman to interview the movie producer Oliver Stone, which did not go quite as well. Stone, who had made the controversial film JFK, could not resist peppering John with questions about his father and about his opinion of the Warren Commission’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination. John didn’t mind talking about his father, but the assassination was definitely off-limits. “Why would any person think it’s okay to talk to a stranger about the way his father was murdered?” John would later ask one of his staffers. Perhaps Stone couldn’t be blamed, though. After all, the subject of Kennedy was one of his great passions. He was sitting with the president’s only son—what else could he do but ask questions? Still, John excused himself from the interview, which was ultimately canceled. The story was replaced by one about Warren Beatty.
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