Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  In any event, the news had to be handled very carefully. It could not be announced before its time, obviously. Still, there was a segment on A Current Affair, a television gossip show, about John and Carolyn together in Martha’s Vineyard. Calvin Klein model Michael Bergin, the other man, happened to see the segment and was furious. “With Carolyn,” he wrote later. “My Carolyn. I was in total shock. Carolyn was wearing a T-shirt and something that looked suspiciously like underwear, and John Jr. seemed to be helping her into her pants.” Bergin confronted Bessette again about John, and again she said John was “just a friend” who was “going through a difficult time.” And she kept on lying to Bergin about the depth of her relationship with John despite the fact that they were all living in New York City—Bessette kept her own apartment, even though she was basically living with John. She would still, on occasion, be with Bergin.

  Somehow, though, John and Carolyn managed to keep the explosive news of their engagement under wraps until the Friday before Labor Day. That’s when the New York Post reported their engagement, according to a “good friend” of the couple’s, and for good measure showed a close-up of Carolyn’s diamond-and-sapphire engagement ring.

  During Thanksgiving 1995, the writer Peter Alson went with a group of twelve people, including John and Carolyn, to a secluded resort in Guanaja, Honduras. They were all together for ten days. One morning, Alson found himself alone at breakfast with John. “So if you weren’t spending Thanksgiving here, where would you be right now?” he asked John. He quickly realized he hadn’t thought through the question carefully enough. “For a moment he stared at me without saying anything,” Alson recalled. “Then he looked down, and I saw tears in his eyes. I hadn’t been thinking. The date was November 22, the anniversary of his father’s assassination, and a year and a half since Jackie had died. He was turning 35 in a couple of days, and it would be one of the first Thanksgivings he would spend without her. The fact that I, an almost-stranger, knew all these things about him, made me understand his need for the self-protective force field he always seemed to have. I felt bad that my thoughtless question had upset him, but moved, too, that he could, even for a moment, be so vulnerable.”

  The following February 25, on an unseasonably warm day, the full range of John’s and Carolyn’s emotions would be on public display, and unfortunately for them both were captured by a video photographer for all to eventually see (when still pictures were sold to the National Enquirer and the video made it on to Hard Copy). What started out as an innocent enough walk to Washington Square Park on a gorgeous day, with his new dog Friday in tow, turned into a shouting and shoving match, ending in tears. At one point, it seemed, John succeeded in ripping the engagement ring he gave Carolyn off her finger.

  The incident was a cause for much concern back in the George office. “We circled the topic like airport guards around an abandoned suitcase,” Richard Blow wrote later. “I knew that John had a temper and that Carolyn was no shrinking violet, but the violence of their rage presented a harsh contrast to the tenderness I’d seen between them.” John said nothing about the fight to his colleagues. “Even though the video suggested that Carolyn was more the aggressor than John, the fight was bad for George.”

  Berman, for one, was furious at John—not only because he lost his temper but also because he had not told Berman about the whole incident before it hit the media. He was worried that advertisers would not like the look of John and Carolyn fighting. “Michael had attempted to stake his claim as John’s closest adviser, and failed,” Blow wrote. “Carolyn lost, too, in a way I don’t think she fully understood. The fight helped create an impression of her as high-maintenance and melodramatic.” A few weeks later, in connection with Howard Stern’s appearance on the April/May 1996 cover of George, John went on his radio show. The whole incident seemed to have blown over, more or less. It was a hilarious segment that touched on many subjects, including how buff John was, how he could get any woman he wanted, when he lost his virginity—it turned out that happened at Andover—and the fact that gay men had come on to him. They also spoke about his fight with Carolyn in Washington Square Park. “There was some silly argument,” John told Stern. “We’ve been going out for a long time. We’re in love.” Stern asked him if he had seen the tape of the incident. “No I haven’t seen the tape,” he said. “Why do I need to see the tape? I was in it.”

  Carolyn and John’s engagement was news to Michael Bergin, whom Carolyn was still seeing on occasion. In March 1996, she called him up out of the blue. “She seemed to have reached a breaking point,” he remembered. “She could only go a few months without seeing me: She needed her fix.” She came by his apartment and gave him a pet bird, which he soon thereafter returned to the pet store. A few weeks later, she came by his apartment again and then insisted they go for a walk. They got as far as the nearby pizza parlor, and ordered two slices. She did not touch her pizza and then abruptly got up and left. A week later, in April, she called Bergin again and said she needed to talk, and invited him to her new one-bedroom Washington Square apartment, even though she was spending most of her days and nights with John on North Moore Street.

  They sat on her bed together for a long minute, holding hands and not saying anything. “The reason I came to see you last week is that I was pregnant,” she told him. “I needed someone to talk to.”

  “You’re having a baby?” he asked, no doubt recalling that when she had previously become pregnant by him, she decided to have an abortion.

  “No,” she told him. “I lost the baby. I had a miscarriage.”

  Bergin spent the night with her. “I knew it was wrong and she knew it was wrong but we both found ways to justify our behavior,” he remembered. He still thought he might have a chance of winning her back. “The way I saw it,” he continued, “she probably didn’t even tell John Jr. about the pregnancy. She had come to me. What did that say about their relationship?” The next morning at seven o’clock, they woke to the sound of one of their mutual friends banging “crazily” on Carolyn’s apartment door. “Get the fuck out of here,” he told Bergin. “He’s on his way over.” John had been trying to reach her but she had taken her phone off the hook and so when she continued not to answer, he decided to go to her apartment and see if she was there, having called their mutual friend first to see if he knew where she was. Carolyn was “freaking,” he recalled, and he got “the hell out of there,” carrying his shoes, since he didn’t have enough time to put them on. The next time he saw Carolyn, she was a married woman.

  In early July 1996, Billy Way, John’s friend from Andover and Brown, was killed by a taxicab as he crossed Madison Avenue after leaving Nello, an Upper East Side restaurant and bar where he felt at home. Way, a professional tennis player, had drug and alcohol addiction problems. It turned out that Way had no close relatives around New York and was nearly destitute—New York magazine later reported that he had stopped paying rent on the apartment he lived in nearby and the electricity had been turned off—so John was the one who had to go to the morgue and identify his body. John was visibly shaken by the experience, Chermayeff remembered. “It was one of those accidents where he said, like, literally half of Billy’s head was like Billy and the other half was just, like, split kind of right down the middle,” she said. “The other half was like mush, like hamburger. He said it was so intense. I saw him afterward and he was just, like, sitting in this chair and he just looked like he was old.” Way was thirty-five. John and Carolyn went to the memorial service together. John was devastated. A few years later, John was having breakfast with a friend down in Tribeca and brought up the memory of Billy Way. “I still get choked up when I think of how he died,” John said. “He was a party guy, too, just like Carolyn. And look at what happened to him. Dead at 35. What a waste! I often wish I could pick up the phone and just call him.”

  * * *

  AFTER LABOR DAY 1996, John’s fellow George colleagues noticed he was having trouble focusing. He was in a good mo
od but he was skipping editorial meetings, signing off quickly on story ideas, and leaving the office early. “He was practically whistling through the corridors,” Blow recalled. “It could mean only one thing: after about a year and a half of dating, John and Carolyn were getting married. Everyone at George, I think, guessed John’s secret. But no one said a word to him, and even among ourselves we barely alluded to the possibility.”

  In the end, John used every piece of wisdom he had gained through a lifetime of deft media manipulation—both avoidance and charm—to keep his wedding plans secret. He and Carolyn decided to get married at the tiny, whitewashed First African Baptist Church on the northern end of Cumberland Island, Georgia. (He had visited the same church years earlier on a trip with Christina Haag.) The wedding ceremony occurred at 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 21, 1996. John’s sister was the matron of honor, and her two daughters, Rose, eight years old, and Tatiana, six years old, were flower girls; her son, Jack, three years old, was the ring bearer. Anthony Radziwill, his cousin, was John’s best man. Ted Kennedy toasted them. The couple danced to Prince’s “Forever in My Life.” The biggest coup of the event, though, was that it had been pulled off without the press knowing. “It was the paparazzi fake-out of the decade,” one magazine concluded.

  Those few friends fortunate enough to be invited to the secret wedding said it was special. “The wedding was really, really nice,” remembered Sasha Chermayeff. “It was beautiful. It was a beautiful little church.” Added Amanpour, “His family was there, and nobody knew till the end. And how fabulous is that? What a great sense of freedom, so uncomplicated, so un-grand, so simple—so simple. They released one picture, and that was that.”

  There was some (misguided) thinking that with John married, and settled down, perhaps the media focus on him and Carolyn would abate. After all, as a newlywed, he was now unavailable, so to speak. But in fact, the media attention on the couple seemed only to intensify, and in a way that began to cause problems both for them and for those around them. Fresh from his two-week honeymoon in Turkey, on Sunday morning, October 6, dressed elegantly in a navy-blue suit and red tie, John came downstairs from his North Moore Street loft to the stoop at the front of the building. There was no doorman, and barely a lobby. When he got there, he was met as usual by a swarm of photographers who always seemed to be charting his every move and those of his new bride. His thought was to charm the photographers by asking for their indulgence when it came to Carolyn. It was a risky ask—after all, the appetite for pictures of them was nearly insatiable. National Enquirer had reportedly paid $250,000 for the photos of John and Carolyn fighting in Washington Square Park, and regular photos of John or Carolyn walking around or of John tossing his personal trash into a city garbage can or of him in-line skating without a shirt on went for hundreds of dollars. He knew that what he was asking the press to do was far outside the norm. But, he must have figured, it was worth a shot, especially since he had the ability to be extremely charming and persuasive when he wanted to be.

  He stood on the metal stoop and in his best aw shucks voice asked for forbearance. “This is a big change for anyone,” he said to the assembled gaggle. “For a private citizen, even more so. I just ask [for] any privacy or room you could give her as she makes that adjustment. It would be greatly appreciated.” Then he turned around, went back inside, and a few minutes later emerged with Carolyn holding his hand tightly. “She looked terrified,” Town & Country reported. As they started to drive off in his Saab, the photographers circled the car, boom microphones looming ominously.

  John’s plea failed. In December, John nearly “came to blows” with one photographer who trailed after him on the streets of Tribeca. In Hyannis Port, one summer, he took a bucket of water and dumped it on a paparazzo’s head. Before Christmas, another time, he confronted the two photographers who had taken the pictures of his fight with Carolyn in Washington Square Park. First he talked to them, then he jumped on the hood of their car—staked out near his apartment—and reached through the roll-down window to try to grab the car keys. That’s when one of the photographers rolled the window up, squeezing John’s arm in the process. Carolyn, meanwhile, tried to pull his arm away. In the end, the incident won John and Carolyn a cover story in the National Enquirer under the headline, “JFK Goes Berserk.” There were the rumors that accompanied the photos. There was one about how Carolyn ran off to Europe to be with her sister after a particularly nasty fight. There were rumors about her infertility, and about how they were consulting with medical specialists to help them conceive. There was a rumor about Carolyn consulting with her lawyer to figure out how to increase the $1.36 million she would be paid if their marriage lasted fewer than three years. She supposedly disliked John’s Brown friends; he supposedly disliked her expensive shopping sprees. “The punishing attention began to wear Bessette down,” Town & Country reported. “Carolyn got dumped into the deep end of the celebrity thing pretty unceremoniously,” said John Perry Barlow. According to Chris Cuomo, “She could have never anticipated the intensity that would then be transferred onto her, because now it’s not just ‘Well, you’re hanging out with this guy that we all care about,’ it’s ‘Wow, you’re the one? You’re the one.’ So it became this combination of everything you would have to deal with if you were dating a rock star, when that rock star also happens to be royalty.”

  Complicating matters—whether John knew or not—was the fact that Carolyn had not gotten over Michael Bergin. By April 1997, he had moved to Los Angeles to join the cast of Baywatch, the long-running television series about Los Angeles lifeguards. Shortly after his move, Carolyn had called him and asked him when she could see him again. According to Bergin, they began an affair in July 1997 while John was kayaking in Iceland. He claimed the affair continued off and on through the fall of 1997 and spring of 1998, in Los Angeles, in a motel in rural Connecticut, and during a funeral for a mutual friend’s mother in Seattle. According to Bergin, Carolyn seemed desperate and begged Bergin to “save” her from her marriage to John. When they were in Seattle together, “She began to bawl uncontrollably, huge, gasping sobs, so powerful she could hardly catch her breath,” he wrote. “I was getting scared. I was watching her come apart at the seams and I didn’t know what to do.” He believed that she was asking him “to give her strength” to leave John. In the end, he could not do what she wanted him to do. He loved her, yes, but he did not want to be the one responsible for breaking up her marriage. That would be a scandal for the ages, and he did not want any part of it. It was too late for them. He told her no, and eventually left the motel in a cab and returned to his Los Angeles apartment, ultimately refusing her pleas. He never saw her again.

  There are those who dispute Bergin’s account of the affair he had with Carolyn after her marriage to John. In American Legacy, C. David Heymann quoted any number of Carolyn’s friends who said it wasn’t true that Carolyn and Bergin had rekindled their affair and that John was the love of Carolyn’s life. He also poked holes in Bergin’s time line. It’s hard to figure out the truth. Heymann’s book about John is itself riddled with mistakes. But John’s closest friends knew it was true, whether John could bring himself to believe it or not.

  One trip John did take solo during the summer of 1997 was to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to attend the annual Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in. He told people he met there that he had been interested in flying since he was a little boy. After his visit to Oshkosh, he wrote a letter to the association’s president: “Best of luck with your work at the EAA. The next time I see you at the air show, I intend to fly there … myself.” In fact, on July 6, 1996, John had purchased a Buckeye Powered Parachute, from Buckeye Industries in Argos, Indiana. It was a one-seat flying machine that resembled an Everglades boat with a large parachute attached to it. The powered parachute was able to take off and land in an open field. On October 13, John took his first trip in his parachute in Saratoga Falls, New York, about twenty miles north of Albany. He flew around for thir
ty minutes. He asked the flight instructor on the ground below if he could stay up longer. “The sunset is so beautiful up here,” he said. When he finally landed, he was of course smitten. “That was incredible,” he said. “I can’t believe it. I have never done anything that compares to this.”

  While at the Oshkosh air show, John made arrangements to buy a new, two-seat Buckeye Dream Machine, a larger version of the parachute that would enable him and Carolyn to fly together. He had arranged to pick up the new Dream Machine from Buckeye, in Argos, Indiana, on November 22, 1997—on the thirty-fourth anniversary of his father’s death, in keeping with his practice of having a diversion on that day.

  * * *

  JOHN’S CLOSEST FRIENDS seemed to know that something was not right with John’s marriage. Ed Hill said Carolyn was complicated; she fit perfectly what John thought he wanted in a wife but she was also often more than he could handle. “John inhabited the world of [Calvin’s wife] Kelly Klein’s beach house in Southampton,” he said. “That wasn’t the only world he inhabited, but it was a big part of his world, and it was a part that he couldn’t avoid because he was the Prince of America. So he needed someone by his side who was, in his words, ‘a player,’ who could navigate that world with him. She was beautiful. She was truly beautiful. She had all the looks and all the moves and all the wiles. She was also completely full of shit and was a nightmare. The things that he liked about her were real. Whether or not that’s what he needed, that’s anyone’s question. But in terms of what he thought he needed and what he thought he wanted, he found it all in her. She could move fluidly among the movers and shakers. You could not intimidate her. She could pull rank. She could turn a cold shoulder. She had all the skills. At the end of the day she was selfish and manipulative and damaged in her own way.”