More than one hundred people came to the wake, and hundreds more gathered outside on the sidewalk. Guests, most of whom appeared to be in a state of shock, sipped Perrier from wineglasses and absentmindedly nibbled on watercress sandwiches with the crust cut off. John took on the role of official greeter, breaking away periodically to speak for extended periods with his cousin Anthony Radziwill and old friends like Billy Noonan. At one point, John rushed to the aid of an elderly woman—one of Jackie’s society friends—who had passed out. “It was incredibly stressful,” Tuckerman said. “Everyone was in a daze.”
At one point, John took Daryl out to the fourteenth-floor terrace to wave to the throng below—at which point the crowd began singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Joining his friend outside, Noonan told him that Jackie was “more than a First Lady” to the people gathered below. “She was an icon. She was their queen.” John smiled and nodded.
On a clear, sunny Monday morning, Jackie returned to St. Ignatius Loyola, the church where she had been baptized and confirmed. To the tune of the hymn “We Gather Together,” the heavy casket, covered with a spray of lady’s mantle, was carried up the steps of the church by eight pallbearers: seven of Jackie’s nephews and John Walsh, the Secret Service agent who had become a father figure to John as well as Caroline.
Lady Bird Johnson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were among the hundreds of politicians, artists, writers, business leaders, social lions, fashion icons, and entertainment figures gathered inside the church. The ceremony was planned around readings from the Scriptures and poems that John hoped would “capture my mother’s essence.” He explained that three elements in particular had come up again and again: “her love of words, the bonds of home and family, and her spirit of adventure.”
The Reverend Walter F. Modrys conducted the Mass, and Jackie’s old friend and onetime escort Mike Nichols read a passage from the Bible. Opera diva Jessye Norman sang “Ave Maria,” while Caroline read from a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry that was presented to Jackie when she graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. The slim volume was her prize for winning Miss Porter’s literary award.
There was never any doubt that Ted Kennedy would once again be called upon to deliver the eulogy. “No one else looked like her, spoke like her, wrote like her, or was so original in the way she did things,” he said. Harking back to Dallas, he pointed out that “she held us together as a family and a country. In large part because of her, we were able to grieve and then go on. She lifted us up, and in the doubt and darkness, she gave her fellow citizens back their pride as Americans.”
Jackie’s love for John and Caroline was, he continued, “deep and unqualified. She reveled in their accomplishments, she hurt with their sorrows, and she felt sheer joy and delight in spending time with them. At the mere mention of their names, Jackie’s eyes would shine and her smile would grow bigger.”
From the church, the cortege made its way through Manhattan traffic and on to LaGuardia Airport, where John led the rest of the funeral party onto a chartered plane. President Clinton was on the tarmac at National Airport (later renamed Reagan Airport) to meet the 737 jetliner bearing Jackie’s body when it arrived in Washington at 1:30 p.m. From there, the motorcade of minibuses, limousines, and police motorcycles escorted the hearse through the black iron gates of Arlington.
The casket, now covered with ferns and a cross of white lilies of the valley—Jackie’s favorite flower—was placed next to Jack’s grave. On one side lay John’s stillborn sister Arabella. On the other, his infant brother Patrick, whose death only months before Dallas had brought Jackie and Jack closer than they had ever been.
It had been thirty-one years since John and Caroline had watched their mother light the eternal flame here. Now it blazed in the brilliant sunlight as President Clinton spoke. “In the end, she cared most about being a good mother to her children,” he said, “and the lives of Caroline and John leave no doubt that she was that, and more. May the flame she lit so long ago burn ever brighter here and always brighter in our hearts.”
The children each gave brief readings—first Caroline, then John. Then, as sixty-four bells rang out from Washington’s National Cathedral—one for each year of Jackie’s life—they knelt down and kissed their mother’s coffin. Caroline, her head bowed, stepped back. But John walked the few steps over to the spot where his father lay and, leaning forward, reached out to touch his gravestone.
There was no hiding the depth of Caroline’s grief; her face had been tearstained and etched with sorrow for days. But John had revealed nothing of his feelings, never allowing the well-worn Kennedy mask of stoicism to slip. At this moment, it all finally came crashing down on him. It had always been the three of them against the world, and now Mummy was gone. Forever.
With the right hand that had saluted his father more than three decades before, John reached up and brushed a single tear from his cheek.
A person never really becomes a grown-up until he loses both his parents.
—JOHN
Carolyn is a lot like the woman who would have been her mother-in-law.
—JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Carolyn has her own sense of mystery, doesn’t she?
—LETICIA BALDRIGE
The press has made my life hell. Nobody knows what it’s like.
—CAROLYN BESSETTE-KENNEDY
The next five years should have been the great years for them.
—PAUL WILMOT
11.
“The Luckiest Man Alive”
* * *
It had been less than two weeks since Jackie was buried at Arlington, and the flag over the Kennedy compound fluttered at half-mast. Yet the mood was festive as Daryl, John, and the Kennedy cousins grunted their way through the family’s brutal Memorial Day touch football game.
For the happy couple, now widely believed to be on the verge of announcing their wedding plans, it was just another opportunity for more public displays of affection. At one point during the game, John tackled Daryl and then threw her over his knee and spanked her. “You’ll regret this!” she screamed, clearly enjoying every minute of it. “I’ll get even!” And with that she jumped up, plowed into him, and then screamed with delight as they rolled around on the lawn.
John, facing a number of other pressing issues, was perfectly happy maintaining the status quo in his relationship with Daryl. Front and center now was the administration of his mother’s $150 million estate, the bulk of which was to be divided between her children. Maurice had just begun briefing John and Caroline on the task that lay ahead: finding a way to pay the steep inheritance taxes, which could easily top $30 million.
John and his business partner, Michael Berman, were also fully committed to getting George off the ground, and since John had no intention of investing a penny of his own money in the magazine—Maurice and Jackie made him promise that he wouldn’t—that meant finding a backer with deep pockets.
No longer willing to wait, Daryl, according to several of her friends, got down on one knee and proposed to John herself—apparently the second time she’d tried this ploy. She was also waxing romantic about her days with Jackson Browne. In fact, during Jackie’s wake, jaws dropped as Daryl insisted on telling everyone about her first meeting with Browne—how he picked her out of a concert audience and pulled her up onstage. All of this was in earshot of John, who was still reeling from the loss of his mother only hours earlier.
“Don’t push me,” John replied to these increasingly desperate pleas. Nor was he particularly moved by her none-too-subtle hints that she might return to Browne. “I don’t respond,” John said, “to ultimatums.”
By July, it was over. After six years, Hannah made the extraordinary decision to return to Browne. John, meanwhile, returned to an old love of his own—Jules Baker, the head-turning model who looked so much like Jackie.
Two months later, Baker was John’s date at the wedding of his favorite cousin and closest friend,
Tony Radziwill—now an ABC News producer—and Tony’s colleague Carole DiFalco. The wedding took place in a white clapboard church in East Hampton, New York, and once again John was best man—a favor Tony would later return. The event was an especially joyous one for John, since only a few years earlier Tony had fought and won a tough battle against testicular cancer. Sadly, the cancer would return with a vengeance within days of Tony and Carole exchanging their wedding vows.
For the moment, John’s main concern was once again how to juggle the women in his life. He was still seeing Carolyn Bessette—a close friend of Baker and the bride—although at this point Jules seemed to have the inside track. “Jules looked so much like Jackie it was eerie,” one of John’s friends remarked. Did being with her provide a way for John to, in a sense, hang on to his mother? “He just wasn’t ready to let go, not completely. I’m sure he wasn’t consciously aware of it, but there was something of Jackie in all the women he was serious about.”
Tony Radziwill’s wedding also gave John the opportunity to send a message to his old flame Daryl. Since Aunt Lee’s husband Herb Ross, the groom’s stepfather, was a friend of Hannah’s, she had also been invited. At the reception, John made a beeline for Daryl, greeted her warmly, and gave her a peck on the cheek. Then he walked back to Baker, wrapped her in his arms, and gave her a passionate, lingering kiss.
“I was always there for him,” Jules said, “and he was always there for me.” But that was the problem. The woman who most intrigued John was the one who, at least for now, played hard to get. While he was squiring Baker to high-profile events all over New York, John was also stealing quiet moments with Carolyn. “She was a very strong one-on-one person,” said John’s friend Richard Wiese. “John always found her provocative.”
On one of those occasions when Carolyn chose to make herself available, John took her on a tour of the waters off Hyannis aboard his powerboat PT-109. Facing into the wind like the ship’s figurehead that hung from his wall at Brown, John’s thong-clad passenger wriggled into a skirt—with a little help from the skipper—and then asked him to carry her ashore so she wouldn’t get wet. He happily obliged.
“She knows how to handle men like practically nobody I’ve ever met,” John Perry Barlow said at the time. “She knows where all the levers are, and she is very deft in her operation of them.”
In that sense, she was indeed very much like John’s mother. “Jackie was a skillful listener,” JFK’s pal Chuck Spalding observed. “She had this way of focusing on you with those enormous brown eyes and hanging on your every word so the rest of the world just sort of fell away. Men, needless to say, tended to find this irresistible.”
Like Jackie, Carolyn had a “genuine appreciation of men,” Barlow said, adding that she was “extremely female, and I think it only appropriate there would be a lot of voltage across that gap. She is hardwired to relate to people who are male.”
It was impossible to escape the fact that, on the surface, Carolyn bore a strong resemblance to the blond, blue-eyed, Scandinavian-looking Daryl Hannah. Yet there were also striking similarities between Carolyn and Jackie, whom she had never met. Both were slender, tall, and elegant, with broad shoulders, long necks, full lips, patrician profiles—and size-eleven feet that made them both self-conscious. (When he first met Carolyn, John jokingly made note of the fact that her toes were “freakishly long” but gave her style points for using alternating black and white polish on her toenails.)
Jackie and Carolyn also shared an aristocratic bearing that at times bordered on the aloof, a unique sense of style, and a carefully nurtured aura of mystery. In contrast to John, who smoked a single cigarette a day as a point of personal discipline, Carolyn, like Jackie, was a chain smoker. Carolyn made no effort to conceal her near-obsessive need for order and control—another Jackie trait—which served as counterpoint to John’s easygoing manner and congenital sloppiness.
Born in the New York City suburb of White Plains, Carolyn was six and her older twin sisters, Lauren and Lisa, eight years old when their parents—public school administrator Ann Marie and kitchen designer William Bessette—split. The following year, Ann Marie married wealthy surgeon Dr. Richard Freeman and moved from the working-class town of Greenburgh, New York, to affluent Greenwich, Connecticut. Carolyn’s own father would be largely absent from her life—and that absence, Rob Littell theorized, gave her a certain “wounded” quality. “Her vulnerability, while hidden beneath a tough, funny exterior, made her deeply empathetic to others.”
Perhaps, but at St. Mary’s Catholic High School, Carolyn broke her share of hearts on the way to being voted “Ultimate Beautiful Person” by her classmates. “She’s passionately sexy,” said Eugene Carlin, a jock she dated off and on throughout high school. “Beautiful. Sophisticated. Tough. Driven. She can drive you nuts.”
Apparently she did just that as an undergraduate at Boston University, where she dated hockey star John Cullen, who went on to play for the Tampa Bay Lightning. Behind Cullen’s back, she was reportedly having a torrid affair with his friend and teammate Chris Matchett. Once she’d dumped them both—and posed for a sexy “Girls of BU” calendar—she moved on to Alessandro Benetton, heir to the Benetton fashion empire.
Carolyn graduated from Boston University in 1988 with an education degree but had no interest in pursuing a career in that particular field. Instead, she set her sights on more glamorous pursuits—first as a publicist for nightclubs in the Boston area, then as a model. In 1990, she struck a number of seductive poses in leather, lace, and denim for a series of jeans ads that never ran.
Around the same time, Carolyn’s parents cut her off after she maxed out her credit cards, and she went to work as a salesperson in Calvin Klein’s Boston store. Tapped by senior management to handle celebrity clients, Bessette moved to New York and promptly befriended the designer, his wife, Kelly, and their daughter Marcie. Marie Claire fashion director Sciascia Gambaccini credited Carolyn’s wholesome, fresh-scrubbed look with inspiring several of his campaigns. “She’s a healthy, beautiful American,” she said, “and that’s what Calvin likes most.” Carolyn “was his muse, definitely.”
Not all of Carolyn’s habits were healthy. A denizen of New York’s nightlife, she often partied until dawn at such fashionable nightspots as the Merc Bar, MK, Au Bar, and Buddha Bar. As a publicist in the fashion industry, she was also invited to snort the occasional line of cocaine.
Carolyn’s job at Calvin Klein also meant that she remained in close contact with Michael Bergin; she was instrumental in getting his modeling career off the ground, and the torch Bergin once carried for her still smoldered. Understandably perturbed by John’s dalliances with other women as well as his irritating habit of showing up for their dates late or not at all, Carolyn was not above using her hunky friend to make him jealous.
Unlike so many of the other women he encountered, Carolyn clearly was no pushover. She had been hired by Calvin Klein to handle celebrity clients because she didn’t appear to be intimidated by anyone—and John was no exception. Carole Radziwill remembered a favorite phrase of Carolyn’s when she thought something was absurd—“I don’t think we’ll be doing that”—and how, like John, Bessette stabbed at the air with her hands to make a point.
“Most women sort of became tongue-tied around John,” his college buddy Richard Wiese said. “But that wasn’t Carolyn’s problem. She was very strong-minded and knew what she wanted and had absolutely no difficulty speaking her mind.”
As besotted and bewildered as he was by Carolyn, John had other pressing matters to attend to—not the least of which was the disposition of Mummy’s estate. Jackie had named Maurice and her lawyer, Alexander Folger, as executors, but ultimately it was up to John and Caroline to see that her final wishes were carried out.
It was no surprise that the bulk of their mother’s fortune was divided equally between Caroline and John. In a final snub, she made no provision for her envious sister, Lee, “because I have already done so during m
y lifetime.” However, she left $500,000 in trust to each of Lee’s children, Tony and Tina. Jackie also bequeathed $250,000 to Nancy Tuckerman and $50,000 to her longtime maid Provi Paredes, while $100,000 went to another niece, Janet Auchincloss Rutherfurd’s daughter Alexandra.
Even in death, Jackie did what she could to ensure that her children were safe. She had asked that her chief bodyguard, former Secret Service agent John Viggiano, prepare a list of security risks to John and Caroline. His chilling report, attached as an addendum to Jackie’s will, named several stalkers, including a Brooklyn man who was convinced that he, not Ed Schlossberg, should be married to Caroline, a convicted wife-beater who was convinced he had been married to Jackie and was the real father of her children, and—most terrifying of all—the double murderer who appeared at the front door of 1040 to declare his love for Jackie and the children. “The mental instability of many of the individuals involved,” Viggiano concluded, “and the harassing nature of their communications, represent a significant threat to the personal security of Mrs. Onassis’s descendants.”
Neither John nor Caroline thought there was much they could do about the threats, other than to try to keep their precise addresses out of the newspapers. “If some nut out there wants to do something,” John said, echoing his father’s prophetic words, “there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not going to live my life worrying about things I can’t control.”
If anything, John was moved by the outpouring of affection from his fellow New Yorkers in the wake of his mother’s death. The city moved swiftly to rename the former High School of Performing Arts on Forty-sixth Street—the inspiration for the 1980 movie Fame and the television series that followed—as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School. Even more gratifying to John was the city’s decision to name the Central Park Reservoir after her. “She was as much a part of this park,” said one park worker who had watched her take her runs along the 1.57-mile jogging path, “as this body of water.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 31