America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  For the past few years, I had been appearing as a talking head on several History Channel shows but now felt ready for a bigger role. I decided that I wanted to switch chairs and act as a host. Earlier that day, I went to the head of programming at the network with my request. She sat me down and said, “Steve, there are two kinds of people on the History Channel: historians and talent. You are clearly not talent.” Those words were still rattling around in my head when I met John that Monday night at Cafe Luxembourg. When I told him my story, John, who excelled at giving advice, suggested that I ask for smaller opportunities—maybe as guest host—to first make them more comfortable with me in that role. With his advice in mind, I raised the topic again on Tuesday and Wednesday.

  The next day, my producer asked me to attend a meeting in his office. When I arrived, a sense of excitement filled the air and people whom I had never seen before were milling around. My producer rarely cracked a smile, but this afternoon he was beaming. “You won’t believe what happened,” he said. “This morning John F. Kennedy Jr. called the office and offered to sit down for a thirty-minute interview on the eightieth anniversary of his father’s birth. But he would do it under one condition: that you host the show.” John never hinted that he planned to make that offer, and I never would have asked. But he understood that he could dole out a little of himself and in the process give me a significant career boost. I would fly back from Oxford for the interview, and we agreed that John would use the interview to discuss the Profile in Courage Award that honored individuals who championed brave but unrecognized causes.

  We filmed on a Friday in a studio around the corner from the History Channel offices. On most days, only the crew would be present. But on this day I noticed about a dozen well-dressed female executives standing in the dark behind the cameramen. John had not told RoseMarie that I would be conducting the interview, so she called a few minutes before John arrived to make sure the host stayed on topic. “Rose,” I responded, “I’m the one doing the interview.” She was almost as thrilled as me, not because she understood why it was such a big opportunity for me but because she knew that John was in safe hands. “Have fun,” she said.

  But fun is not a word that I would have used to describe the experience. I felt unbelievably nervous, almost as nervous as when I gave my first lecture about John’s dad back at Brown. My worry was not over John, who made fun of me right up until the moment I introduced him. It was the teleprompter—the machine that sits a few feet away and scrolls your lines—that scared the hell out of me. Although I read books all the time, teleprompters always confounded me. My eyes read faster than my lips could speak, so I would try to catch up by pronouncing three words as one long syllable. My producer instructed me to slow down and lower my voice.

  Most of the interview focused on how John and Caroline honored their father’s legacy. John talked about the Institute of Politics at Harvard and, of course, the Profile in Courage Award. The recipient that year was Charles Price, an Alabama judge who wrote an opinion forcing another judge, Roy Moore, to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom, declaring it a clear violation of the First Amendment prohibition against state-sponsored religion. What struck me was how often John returned to the theme of inspiring people to get involved in public life and humanizing those who held office—in many ways, the animating theme of George. When asked why his father had recently been ranked as the best president in American history—ahead of Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt—John offered a dispassionate, analytical answer. He stated that his father had “inspired hope” and “created a sense of possibility”—a potential that had been tragically cut short. His death, he continued, “allowed people to project what they hoped for America and their own lives onto his memory.” When asked about the specific impact of his father’s legacy on him, John said that his father “would want both of his children to live their own lives and not try to mimic, for the sake of public expectation, his life.”

  At that moment, it occurred to me that John perceived George as an extension of his family’s efforts to keep his father’s legacy alive. Whether talking about the magazine or the Profile in Courage Award, John reiterated a core message that politics represented a noble endeavor. George, he stated, offered a “personal entry” into the public realm. “People in public life are never projected as the human, multidimensional, complex, self-sacrificing people they often are.”

  The interview proceeded without a hitch. Afterward, I decided to have fun with the young women who had gathered for the interview. John and I had large coffee mugs with the History Channel logo emblazoned on them. I knew that someone would steal John’s cup, so as I got up to escort him from the studio, I switched mugs. When I returned, as expected, the mug in front of John’s seat was missing. Someone out there still thinks she has John Kennedy’s DNA on that coffee mug, but, unfortunately, it is only mine.

  When the show aired about a month later, on Monday, June 2, 1997, I was on my summer break from Oxford and living in New York. I did not watch it because I disliked hearing my own voice. But the next morning, a few minutes after nine, my phone rang. On the other end was an agent from the William Morris Agency who had seen the show and wanted to sign me as a client. I was beyond thrilled. I called the head of programming at the History Channel, naïvely expecting her to share my excitement, but she remained silent. “Meet me for lunch today,” she directed. “Do not sign with him until we have lunch.” At our meeting, she offered to create a show for me. “I don’t know what it will be, but you will soon have your own show.” That show, HistoryCenter, aired for the next nine years, followed by other series. I spent two decades at the network, and it was all because of a generous act by my famous friend.

  * * *

  —

  Carolyn demonstrated her best qualities when helping Carole cope with her dying husband, but she continued to be moody and unpredictable most of the time. According to John’s close friend Rob Littell, she alternated between being lively and wisecracking and then being “like a caged animal backed against the wall.” The more she insisted on privacy, the more aggressive the paparazzi became. “Billy, you don’t understand,” she told John’s friend since childhood Billy Noonan. “When I walk up a street, they walk in front of me backward, knocking over old ladies and mothers with children. They don’t care.”

  It soon became apparent that marriage to John was more of a double-edged sword than Carolyn had anticipated. She relished the glamor and fame that came with being the wife of an American prince, but she claimed not to have anticipated the intensive media scrutiny. While John tried to be supportive, he also grew frustrated with Carolyn’s inability to make the transition. He felt responsible for her happiness, and he knew that his wife’s coping mechanisms, and her attempts to balance the good and the bad, had been overwhelmed.

  The August 1997 death of Princess Diana—often described as the most famous woman in the world—only exacerbated Carolyn’s fear of the paparazzi. Diana’s life ended in a grisly car crash when she was only thirty-six years old. Paparazzi on speedy motorcycles had been pursuing her Mercedes after she left dinner at the Hotel Ritz in Paris with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed.

  John, who had once met Diana at the Carlyle hotel, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to convince her to appear on the cover of George, described her as “sparkly.” She had questioned him about details of his upbringing because she wanted to raise her sons, Princes William and Harry, in the same way that Mrs. Onassis had raised John and Caroline. She asked if John would meet with her boys. John was always amused by speculation that they were in constant communication, since he was considered American royalty and Diana was British royalty. “I always think that people imagine that we have a bat phone on my desk and Diana’s desk and [Monaco’s] Princess Stephanie’s, and we can pick it up and the other will answer,” he joked.

  Diana’s tragic death sent Carolyn into a tailspin. She obsessively watched every minute
of television coverage, wondering if she would meet a similar fate. She identified with the young princess who was tormented by the media that literally chased her to her death. Whenever the subject of Diana came up, Carolyn would shake her head and mutter, “That poor woman.” John noticed the change in her behavior. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do about Carolyn,” he told Billy Noonan. “She’s really spooked now.”

  Kathy McKeon, who had served as Jackie’s assistant as well as John’s and Caroline’s governess when they were younger, had dinner with John and Carolyn in Hyannis Port on the day Diana died. When the topic of the princess’s death came up, Carolyn, who had said little during the meal, suddenly opened up. Kathy observed that John was “clearly worried about his high-strung bride. ‘Kat,’ he said, ‘tell Carolyn how Mom used to handle them.’” She told Carolyn that when Mrs. Onassis was at the Cape, “she’d leave the gate smiling, give them one good picture, and they let her go.”

  Carolyn shouted, “No! I hate those bastards! I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” Kat responded, “That’s exactly what they want you to do. They’ll get great pictures.” Carolyn described how she had been chased by a “wolf pack of photographers” who were “grunting and groaning and pushing each other” to get closer to her. “They were almost on top of me,” she said in an agitated voice. “It was just awful. I can’t take it!”

  John intervened to calm her down. “You gotta just take it easy,” he insisted. “Relax.”

  Diana’s death resonated with John, too, because it exposed the tension between his professional responsibilities and his personal desires. Though it seemed like an obvious story for George to cover, John hesitated. “It was clear he was having an emotional reaction to the story,” recalled Biz Mitchell. “He was annoyed that we were discussing it at all.”

  “I don’t see any reason why we have to do it,” he declared.

  “We can’t ignore it entirely,” Biz pleaded. “We have to do something.”

  When they held their regular editorial meeting to discuss the topic, John kept the whole staff waiting. After he arrived and the subject came up, John announced that he could not talk about it. Instead of engaging the subject, John decided to clean his office. Ultimately, he agreed reluctantly to publish a photo essay.

  John spoke often with his old friend Sasha Chermayeff about Carolyn and his frustrations with their marriage. For the most part, John liked to play sports and engage in physical activities with his male friends. But he’d confide in his female friends, and none more so than Sasha. By the late 1990s, she had married and was raising two children. John called her the morning after she gave birth to her first son.

  “Sasha, did you have your baby?” he asked. John was ecstatic when Sasha said yes and told him her son’s name: Phineas Alexander Howie.

  “That’s the greatest name I ever heard in my life!” he shouted over the phone. Sasha could hear his excitement in his voice. “Oh my God,” he repeated, “Phineas Alexander Howie.”

  Sasha wanted John to be the godfather, but she did not want to impose on him. What she did not know was that John was eager. “I am going to be godfather,” he told her one night over dinner. “I am going to be godfather of that baby. I am putting money away for him every year because when he grows up, I want him to buy a Ferrari.”

  A few years later, when Sasha was pregnant again, John insisted on also being this baby’s godfather. Sasha joked, “No, no, for this one, I am going to get Michael Jordan.” John, who thought she was serious, was clearly offended. John knew so many famous people that he assumed she knew the basketball star well enough to ask him to be the godfather. Sasha was thrilled to have John as a godfather again.

  It was not surprising that John would turn to Sasha to help smooth over his relationship with Carolyn. After Diana’s death, Carolyn became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive. “She just didn’t want to leave the apartment,” Sasha reflected. “She didn’t want to go and be followed. She didn’t want to go shopping. She stopped going to see her psychiatrist because one paparazzi walked backward in front of her, videoing her face after she came out of her therapy appointment.” Sasha had watched the paparazzi interact with John since they’d been friends in high school. But their conduct toward Carolyn was different: seeing her vulnerability, they reacted like sharks sensing blood in the water, and fueled by their desire to earn a big paycheck, they swarmed around her, trying to incite a reaction.

  “She wasn’t delusional,” Sasha emphasized. “They treated her horribly.” One day Carolyn saw Sasha talking to one of the paparazzi outside their building. As soon as Sasha walked in the door, Carolyn pounced. “You can’t talk to those people! They are not our friends!” she shouted. “They are not good people. You can’t trust them.” Sasha explained that she had known some of them since she and John were fifteen years old. “These guys are here all the time; you don’t have to worry about them,” she said soothingly. “They are not going to hurt you. It’s sleazy, but they just want the money.”

  Carolyn shot back, “No! I don’t want you talking to them. You can’t talk to them. You can’t be friends with them. These guys are the enemy. They are trying to ruin us. They are fucking with me.”

  * * *

  —

  Carolyn could not reconcile her inner desires with the pressures of public life. She did not want to interact with the photographers who hounded her, but she studied nearly every picture of herself she could find and became increasingly self-conscious about her appearance. Her hair kept getting lighter and her body thinner. Even after her nemesis Michael Berman had been banished from John’s magazine, she went from being a free spirit who enthusiastically visited the George offices to a dark and fuming paranoiac.

  Many close friends suspected that she had begun self-medicating, growing especially fond of cocaine. One friend described being on Martha’s Vineyard when Carolyn and John started having a loud, angry fight. Carolyn stormed out and did not return until the following morning, “all coked out.” While John used cocaine occasionally, his drug of choice had always been marijuana, which he began smoking as a teen. He rarely drank alcohol, and when he did, it was usually beer or an occasional glass of wine. Carolyn used drugs to lift her spirits, while John used pot to calm his racing mind. One of his favorite possessions was a bong made of white clay in the mold of Pegasus, the winged divine stallion of Greek mythology. Pegasus was quite popular among John’s friends.

  Rumors of problems in their marriage, both real and imagined, became a regular feature in the tabloids. Especially after their highly explosive fight in Washington Square Park, there was enough truth to make such accounts appear authentic. Typically, however, they veered off into voyeuristic fantasyland. When reporters saw John walking around with his arm in a sling, the rumor mill shifted into high gear. Had he been in a fight with his wife? Did Carolyn hit him with a wine bottle? The truth was that they had simply been having a quiet dinner at home before he left for a weeklong trip to India. John was washing dishes when he sliced a deep gash between his thumb and forefinger. He wrapped the wound himself and left for India the next day without seeking treatment. While in India, the injury began to hurt. When he returned home, he went to the hospital for minor surgery to repair nerve damage. But when the media asked why John had not explained himself earlier, a George spokeswoman said it was because “if he responded to every inquiry—about the state of his marriage, about his dog, about why he’s wearing a hat—he would never have time for anything else.”

  Carolyn felt trapped and blamed John for her predicament. Not only was he the reason paparazzi were hunting her down, but also he was mostly absent, trying to keep his struggling magazine afloat. “She was doing anything she could to get his attention, most of it negative,” reflected RoseMarie. John would call during the day to check on her, and she would refuse to answer. On those rare occasions when she did go out with friends, she would not tell him, and he would
return to an empty apartment.

  Caring for his wife and worrying about her emotional well-being occupied much of John’s time. In September 1997 Rob Littell and his wife took John and Carolyn out for their one-year anniversary, arranging for a limousine to pick them up outside of John’s apartment. When they exited the apartment together, John bounded into the car, but Carolyn walked away and sat on the stoop, saying she could not go. John sat down next to her, lovingly placed his arm around her shoulders, and whispered into her ear. After a few minutes, Carolyn rose to her feet and entered the car.

  While John performed many acts of kindness toward his troubled wife, he could also be insensitive. He assumed that Carolyn would use her newfound celebrity to become involved in civic campaigns or join charity boards. For some reason, he chose to throw her into the deep end of the pool and see if she could learn to swim. “I didn’t get the fucking employee handbook,” she complained on many occasions. She had a point. John’s expectations for Carolyn came from his own experiences and the way he’d been raised—the family never provided him with a public relations advisor or media training. He learned how to succeed in public life the hard way, and he assumed that Carolyn would and could do the same. He could be thoughtless in other ways as well. He would occasionally tell Carolyn he would be home at a certain time for dinner. She would prepare something special for him, but, at the last minute, John would decide to go to the gym, then stroll home two hours late—without notifying her—and wonder why she was upset.