Jackie’s death occasioned other changes in John’s life, too. Ironically, given Jackie never liked Daryl Hannah, her death was a catalyst for John to move on from her. Soon after his mother’s death, he moved out of Hannah’s apartment on the Upper West Side back down into a newly renovated loft apartment in an industrial-looking building on North Moore Street, in Tribeca. But John being John, he was not alone for long. By then, he had met Carolyn Bessette.
* * *
JOHN WENT TO THE VIP SHOWROOM AT Calvin Klein and saw her there. A mutual friend thought they would hit it off. The head of public relations at Calvin Klein, Bessette was a bombshell with an exotic look. He was gobsmacked immediately. “John was attracted to women who were not intimidated by him,” his friend Richard Wiese said. “He liked women with a point of view.” Bessette grew up in a big white clapboard house on Lake Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and her older twin sisters, Lauren and Lisa, moved with their mother after her parents divorced and she had remarried an orthopedic surgeon. Carolyn graduated from St. Mary’s High School, in Greenwich, in 1983, where she was voted the “Ultimate Beautiful Person.” At Boston University, she majored in elementary education and appeared on the cover of a calendar, “The Girls of B.U.” After college, she did publicity for a few nightclubs in Boston before being spotted by Calvin Klein and being lured to New York to work at his headquarters on West 39th Street.
John first told John Perry Barlow about Bessette in early 1994. He was still living with Hannah but he told Barlow that he had met Bessette and that she was “having a heavy effect on him.” He added that he wasn’t going to “pursue her” because he was loyal to Hannah. “But it was hard for him,” Barlow said, “because he couldn’t get his mind off her.” Barlow asked John about her and who she was. “Well, she’s not really anybody,” he said. “She’s some functionary of Calvin Klein’s. She’s an ordinary person.” Barlow met Bessette in the fall of 1994, after John and Hannah had split. “Carolyn was as charismatic as John was,” he said. “Charisma, you know, was once a theological term meaning ‘grace.’ And she had that. I was also impressed with the fact that she was a bit eccentric. She was not conventional in any sense.” She reminded him of Jackie “in her quirkiness” and in “her unbelievable capacity to engage one’s attention.” He thought also, “eccentric, artistic [and] Bohemian.” Carolyn, he said, had Jackie’s ability to “be talking to six people at one time and make everyone feel like the only one in the room.… It was based on genuine interest. Having a beautiful woman want to know all about you is not such a bad thing.” Sasha Chermayeff was also struck by Bessette’s physical beauty, among other things. “Carolyn was hilarious,” she said. “She was sarcastic without being mean. She was funny. She was engaging. You cannot tell in photographs how beautiful she was in real life. I never saw a picture of her that did her justice.”
Some two months after John’s friends had been summoned to Martha’s Vineyard for his supposed wedding to Daryl Hannah, he was spotted kissing Carolyn Bessette at the finish line of the New York City Marathon. They were just there watching the race but the picture of them together was on the cover of the New York Post, much to the irritation of Michael Bergin, a Calvin Klein underwear model and Bessette’s on-and-off lover. “Yes,” she told Bergin when he called her about the picture. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing!” he yelled at her incredulously, knowing that even he could not compete with John.
Ed Hill said he thought the reason behind John’s attraction to Carolyn was similar to what attracted him to Hannah: that she seemed to be able to handle his fame while at the same time using her own wiles to attract her own attention, thereby taking some of it away from him.
In January 1995, People once again put John on its cover, under the headline “JFK Jr. on His Own.” The point seemed to be that he was “alone as never before.” He was working on pulling George together. He had campaigned for his uncle Ted the previous fall. He went skiing in Colorado over New Year’s. He celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday with some friends, family members, his German shepherd, Sam, and his 104-year-old grandmother in Hyannis Port.
Since he did not speak with People, the magazine was left to interview two political operatives about what John’s political future might be. The political consultant Robert Shrum told the magazine, “I don’t think there are a lot of people who’d want to run against him,” while William Schneider, at the American Enterprise Institute, added, recalling John’s appearance at the 1988 Democratic convention, “It was a success the minute he showed up onstage. There was an audible gasp. I’m not sure anyone remembers one word of what he said.”
Regardless of the never-ending speculation about his political aspirations, John was fully devoted to getting George up and running. He had Berman, his operating partner, and Hachette, his financial partner. What George needed more than anything was advertising. And to get that, John was dispatched to Detroit to meet with the money men at the Big Three automobile companies. “We knew that if we could get Detroit, we’d be OK because they’re cautious advertisers in terms of content and newness,” Berman told Esquire. In April 1995, John agreed to give a luncheon speech at the Adcraft Club, a ninety-one-year-old organization that was the largest association of advertisers in the country. His presence nearly caused a riot. The car companies’ executives went wild for John and the prospect of advertising in George. One magazine publisher told the Los Angeles Times: “It was bizarre. I can’t think of anyone else in this country who could have drawn the range of interest that he did. Everyone wanted to see the guy. Everyone. I’ve seen GM and Ford keep the likes of Ted Turner and Si Newhouse waiting. But the people there were waiting on [Kennedy] like he was visiting royalty.” GM committed to becoming George’s largest advertiser. Chrysler followed quickly thereafter. The first two issues of George had 175 ad pages each, at a time when Vanity Fair averaged around 115 ad pages. In terms of ad pages sold, it would be the most successful magazine launch ever.
Editorially, Hachette’s executives wanted John to be “as public as Tina Brown.” He certainly was using his fame to get interviews, including with George Wallace and Colin Powell. John commissioned pieces about Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half sister and one by Roseanne Barr imagining what her life would be like if she were president. (That piece did not work out.) He hired Herb Ritts to photograph the model Cindy Crawford to pose as George Washington for the premiere issue and had Anthony Hopkins lined up for the second cover, dressed up as Richard Nixon, whom he played in the Oliver Stone movie about the thirty-seventh president of the United States. John asked Robert De Niro to contribute, and he did. He asked Ann Coulter to write, and she did. “My family was not a Kennedy-fanatic family, so I never really distinguished one Kennedy from the rest,” she said. “I knew he was at least the good-looking one of this motley crew. He was certainly fair to Republicans and no other magazine was.”
The George pre-publication hype was in overdrive. Hachette’s original commitment to publish two issues of George had already been increased to eight following the unexpected ad-page blowout. It was to go bi-monthly at the start of 1996 and then monthly starting in September 1996, in time for the 1996 presidential election. The dream was for George to sell somewhere between three and four hundred thousand copies a month on the newsstand, in line with what Vanity Fair was selling. A senior editor John hired, Richard Blow, recalled what a complicated position John found himself in at the magazine—on the one hand being pushed to use his Rolodex to get prominent writers to contribute to the magazine but on the other not feeling particularly comfortable doing it. “He’d usually make the call, but not happily,” he wrote. “He seemed to feel he was exploiting himself, asking a personal favor, rather than making a business proposition—and he wasn’t entirely wrong. If the writer said no, John felt he’d cheapened himself for naught.” He’d failed repeatedly to convince Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential historian and wife of one of his father’s closest advisers, to write for Geo
rge. He had dinner with Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, to see, unsuccessfully, if he would be willing to write for the magazine. “He’s not going to write for us,” John told Blow. “He just wanted to have dinner with me.” Nora Ephron turned John down, too. “I must be losing my juice,” he told Blow.
John started suffering from Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that “sapped his energy” and made him “cranky,” according to Blow. “By midafternoon on many days, he would be slumping in his chair, looking mystified by his body’s betrayal. To treat the condition, he drank an iodine concoction washed down with seltzer, grimacing as he did. John admitted that he was waking up at five in the morning, so taut with anxiety he could not fall back asleep.”
Not missing a beat, though, he flew out to Los Angeles and filmed a minute-long segment on Murphy Brown, which was to air after the first issue hit the newsstands on September 26, 1995. In it, John, dressed in a business suit, was playing Murphy Brown’s new assistant—the exact role that Seinfeld’s Kramer had played three years earlier. In fact, Murphy Brown said the same thing to John that she had said to Kramer when they first met: “Hi, I’m Murphy Brown, you must be my new secretary.” When she realized quickly enough that her new secretary was John Kennedy Jr., she said, “Oh, John, hi. I guess that whole lawyer thing didn’t work out. That’s a tough break.” It was a brilliant stroke of publicity, and product placement that got the magazine—for free—fifty thousand new subscribers after the show aired, saving him, Berman, and Hachette around $1 million. (When he appeared on Larry King Live, on CNN, on September 28, George received a hundred thousand new subscriptions, another expense-saving coup.)
Berman intentionally created a bit of media circus for the launch of George at Federal Hall, on Wall Street. He knew John could sit for maybe one interview, as he did with the Washington Post, but he would have little interest or patience in doing one interview after another. Why not get permission to use Federal Hall for the announcement and hold a big press conference there to announce the magazine? As many as three hundred reporters and camerapeople packed into the room. John took the stage, to the strains of “Movin’ on Up,” the theme song to the Jeffersons TV show. Paul Begala, a former Clinton adviser, had helped John with his speech. “I don’t remember seeing this many of you in one room since the results of my last bar exam,” he said at the start, before ending with, “Ladies and gentlemen, meet George.” He then flipped over a mock-up of the first cover, featuring Cindy Crawford posing as George Washington, dressed in a powdered wig and a colonial uniform, with plenty of her taut midriff showing. It was a big hit. Joe Armstrong, the magazine consultant and friend of Jackie’s, was in the front row. He thought John spoke with “authority” and “conviction” about the magazine and what it could become. “I thought of Jackie, who had died the year before,” he said. “John had tried very hard to convince her that this was a smart magazine idea, and though she hadn’t been quite persuaded, I know she would have been very proud that he got this done.”
The actual publication date of the first issue was still two weeks away. But the transformation of George from an intimate, wonky version of the inside-the-Beltway New Republic—minimal advertising, 125,000 circulation—to a major, overhyped national publication about politics as entertainment with John Kennedy as its editor in chief—350 pages of advertising, 500,000 copies printed—was nearly complete.
The first issue of George was a remarkable piece of work. It looked like a mature adult, even though it was a newborn. It was chock-full of ads—for Clinique, for Calvin Klein (of course), for Ralph Lauren, for Giorgio Armani, for Cadillac, for Valentino … you name it. There was even an ad for Tommy Hilfiger featuring preppy-looking guys who could easily have gone to Andover with John and me. John’s buddy John Perry Barlow wrote a piece about Newt Gingrich. Paul Begala wrote a piece about the media and whether it was biased. In his editor’s note, John recounted George’s difficult two-year slog getting off the ground. He praised Hachette Filipacchi for recognizing the “viability” of the idea of a nonpartisan political magazine focused on personalities “after 14 months of dubiously successful fundraising.” The driving force behind George, he wrote, was a belief that “if we can make politics accessible by covering it in an entertaining and compelling way, popular interest and involvement in the process will follow.”
Gary Ginsberg joined George as both its internal attorney and a senior editor. He believes the magazine was ahead of its time, something for which John and Michael Berman deserved much credit. “They saw politics as more than just black and white,” he said. “They thought that politics was inculcated in everything with American life and culture—that there was politics in sports, there’s politics in fashion, there’s politics in entertainment, there’s politics in business, and he wanted to explore those intersections. They wanted politics to become much more accessible to women, to people who were younger, to people who weren’t members of a political party, to independents, to people who had never bought a political magazine. They wanted to broaden it, make it more appealing, make it more accessible, make it more colorful literally and figuratively, because they wanted to excite people about the political process. So they defined it as broadly as they could. They added color to what until then were magazines that were only in black and white—that only came at politics from an ideological perspective.” Ginsberg said their approach offended some members of the “guardian class of political journalists,” such as Maureen Dowd, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Wieseltier, who saw George as “heresy” and who “didn’t want John to succeed.” Jealousy was part of it, he said, but so was their view that George was frivolous. “They couldn’t define it, they didn’t understand it,” he said.
The first reviews of George from the “traditional” journalistic community were decidedly mixed: The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “revolutionary fun. Not to mention zippy.” The Wall Street Journal said its editorial content was “an afterthought.” The Boston Globe called it “disappointingly vapid,” while the Detroit News claimed it was “a political gem.” Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, was merciless. “Of course it’s not going to work,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a magazine without a function, with no point of view. Magazines are interpretive vehicles.” Of John, he said, “He’s clearly no editor.”
* * *
ONCE THEY HAD FINALLY GOTTEN together, John and Carolyn were nearly inseparable. Sometime in the spring of 1995, she moved into John’s loft on North Moore Street. RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s assistant at George, could tell they were getting increasingly serious about their relationship because he always took her call when she phoned the office. His sister was the only other person whose calls he always answered. Once George moved into the forty-first floor of Hachette’s offices, at 1633 Broadway just north of Times Square, Carolyn would come by regularly, sit in John’s office chair, and make phone calls. She also spent time with Matt Berman, the magazine’s art director (no relation to Michael), hashing out ideas for the covers, or photo shoots or stories. She was not a George employee but, given her sense of style, her relationship with John, and that she had decided to leave her post at Calvin Klein, she had a big influence on it—over time perhaps too big an influence.
When some of John’s close friends had taken her measure and decided, for one reason or another, that she was not in John’s league, John wouldn’t hear of it. He was totally smitten. “John was ecstatic in Carolyn’s company,” Richard Blow explained. “When she visited the office, he would gaze upon her as if he couldn’t completely believe what his eyes were taking in. He could not stop touching her, running his fingers through her hair, stroking her arms. Carolyn accepted his attentions but rarely reciprocated. At least in public, John was the more openly affectionate of the two.” If his friends questioned him about Carolyn, John did something a little unexpected: He told Carolyn that a particular friend—naming him—had his doubts about her. Instead of getting overtly angry
at said person, she’d go out of her way to win him over by lavishing attention on him, flirting, touching his arm or shoulder—figuring correctly that a charm offensive was the way to go, at least at first. “He was completely besotted by her when she was at her best,” Brian Steel said. “She had him wrapped around her finger.… Could come up behind you, touch you on the back of your neck. You knew it was her and then she would look you in the eye like you were the only person in the room. She was mesmerizing.”
Over the Fourth of July weekend in 1995, Carolyn and John headed to Martha’s Vineyard. At one point, John asked Carolyn to go fishing. While they were out on the water, John asked her to marry him. “Fishing is so much better with a partner,” he said to her. He added that many things in life are better with a partner. He gave her a platinum ring surrounded by diamonds and sapphires, courtesy of Maurice Tempelsman. Carolyn did not respond to John affirmatively for three weeks. (The press made it out to be because there were problems in their relationship, but Terenzio said that was not true; it was more a matter of making sure she wanted to become the wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. and what that meant about surrendering her privacy.)
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