Many of the interviews John did for his magazine would turn out to be more revealing of him than they were of the subject. From the kinds of questions John asked, one could sense that he was thinking about going into public service and was realizing that once in that arena, he wouldn’t be able to leave it easily, if at all. It was as if he wanted as much data as he could amass before taking the leap. He was on a quest and was smart enough to use the venue he had created to gather for himself as much information as possible, not just about politics but also about a whole spectrum of experiences from a wide range of subjects, such as Muhammad Ali, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Louis Farrakhan, Don Imus, Bill Gates, and Northern Irish politician Gerry Adams.
In September 1995, John Kennedy Jr. officially announced the publication of George at a much-touted press conference in the rotunda of Manhattan’s Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street, which stands on the site of Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States. There were more than 150 reporters and photographers present, including this author. John joked that he hadn’t seen that many newsmen in one place since the results of his first bar exam created a media firestorm. He was funny, interesting, candid, and, more than anything, struck people as a humble guy just wanting to make a valid contribution, much like so many other members of his family. “My uncle Teddy said that if he was still speaking to me by Thanksgiving, I’m not doing my job,” he said with a grin. He then displayed the cover of the first issue of George, featuring Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington (it would be the October-November issue of 1995). Of course, her clothing was scant, the point being, as John explained, that “politics doesn’t have to be dull. It can be interesting, even tantalizing.”
For the rest of the year, John would work hard to promote his magazine, doing television and radio interviews with the likes of Howard Stern, Larry King, Barbara Walters, and Oprah Winfrey. He even had a cameo on the sitcom Murphy Brown, starring Candice Bergen. It was the first time most Americans got to know John as an adult—witty, candid, funny, but also, in his own way, quite guarded. Like his mother, he presented himself in such a way that an interrogator sensed it would be inappropriate to ask him personal questions. It felt somehow wrong to bombard him with questions about Jackie, for instance.
One of the biggest splashes the magazine made was when John put Drew Barrymore on the cover dressed as Marilyn Monroe for the September 1996 issue. The caption read, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” A great many people were confused by that particular cover, but if you knew John, it made a lot of sense. Of this cover, John told Oprah Winfrey, on the first show of her eleventh season, “My family is used to all manner of controversy. In the grand scheme of things, this probably didn’t register too high on the Richter scale.”
“John was very aware of the cultural semiotics of the Kennedy iconography,” said Richard Bradley. “He was actually trying to do a couple things with that cover. One was to push back the boundaries of the box in which he found himself. The Kennedy iconography had become like a straitjacket for John, and playing with it that way was his Houdini-like way of moving his muscles and bones to get out of the straitjacket. He was saying, ‘Back off. Give me some room. I’m a living breathing person, I’m not a statue.’ At the same time, he was also saying that it was dangerous to set such iconography in stone. He was saying, ‘My father was human and, yes, he had a full life and it’s not all untouchable. He is not a deity.’
“That said, John was also very protective of his parents’ memories,” continued Bradley. “For instance, he was unhappy about the Seymour Hersh book The Dark Side of Camelot for the simple reason that he thought it was reductive of his father’s place in history. He felt that his father was a great man and that this kind of book was destructive of his memory. John was very conscious of the power exerted by the memory of his father. He could very easily step outside his own personal memories or the personal impact his father had on him and see what his father meant to the masses, how his father had inspired people. So to have writings that sort of splattered mud on that shining inspiration seemed to him to be shameful.
“Beyond that, he believed very strongly that public service was worthwhile, that we should encourage people to go into it and that if we violate the personal lives of politicians, we not only discourage people from going into the field but we distract the public’s attention away from serious issues.”
Though off to a good start, within a year the magazine would begin to founder. “Yes, the magazine had its problems,” said Richard Bradley, “and we did our best to address them, but it wasn’t easy. Was it a political magazine or was it about celebrities? The audience didn’t understand it. John wasn’t willing to compromise or pander, either. Maybe if he had been, it would have been more successful, I don’t know.
“John went to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. Imagine the history of that! It was amazing to even think about, let alone for it to happen. But it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. What should have mattered to people didn’t matter as much as one might have thought.*
“That said, John was true to his convictions; he wanted the magazine to be taken seriously, so he rejected interviews with pop culture people that might have given the magazine a broader appeal. Therefore, we ended up with Billy Graham, Dan Quayle, Gary Hart, and Cokie Roberts… and maybe a younger demographic didn’t really get that or want that from us.”
“Sometimes, it felt like a college newspaper,” said a former staffer. “John was always a presence, but he had a casual way of commanding and the staff liked him a lot, even if sometimes they were confused by him. For instance, we were once on deadline, feverishly trying to get the magazine out, and he walked in and said, ‘Let’s go to the park and play touch football.’ People were appalled, but they appreciated a gesture he made in the fall of 1996, when the staff was again putting an issue to bed. John decided they needed to unwind: He called the Yankees front office and procured forty-one skybox passes to a World Series game. No one complained that time.”
John Proposes to Carolyn
At John Kennedy Jr.’s side throughout the development of George had been his greatest encourager, Carolyn Bessette. In fact, three weeks before the press conference to unveil the first issue, John had asked Carolyn to marry him, giving her a ring of diamonds and sapphires, a duplicate of a ring Jackie once wore and loved. Much to John’s surprise and dismay, though, Carolyn didn’t exactly jump at the chance to be his wife. In fact, she said she wanted to think it over.
“She called me and said, ‘John popped the question last night,’ ” recalled her friend Stewart Price. “I said, ‘Wow, congratulations, sweetheart! When’s the wedding?’ And she said, ‘Well, I didn’t say yes. I told him I had to think about it.’ ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked her. She paused for a long moment. ‘Of course I love him,’ she said. ‘But I really have to think about it. Do I want to live my life under a microscope? Running from photographers every day? For the rest of my life?’ ”
Another problem Carolyn identified as she got to know John was that she saw so many people around him who, either consciously or not, preferred to identify themselves as people who knew him rather than as individuals with their own independent lives. “He saw that all around him and was very conscious of it,” observed Richard Bradley. “I think he was torn between the fact that sometimes it was useful to have people like that around and the fact that, on a deeper level, he knew he was better served by having people who could tell him when they thought he was wrong or making a mistake, people who could retain some distance from him.”
“Carolyn didn’t want to get sucked into John’s world and lose her own identity,” said Stewart Price. “Or, as she told me, ‘I don’t want to be a Kennedy. I am who I am and I’m okay with that. I don’t want to just be JFK Jr.’s wife, and let that be what defines me for the rest of my life. That’s not what I want.’ Knowing her, I understood that. ‘What are you going to
do?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.”
Indeed, it would be months before Carolyn would officially accept John’s proposal.
Relationship Woes
Though obviously in love, John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were also two very passionate and expressive people who sometimes allowed their heated emotions to get the best of them. When they argued, it was as if they completely lost their minds, at least according to those who knew them best. “They definitely knew which buttons to push in each other,” said one close friend. “They knew how to inflict the most damage.”
There had always been the problem of stalking paparazzi, and discussion of that particular subject seemed always to end in a fight. However, in the last six months or so, a new and arguably more serious difficulty had begun to emerge: Carolyn’s insecurity, which, as it often did, manifested itself in her extreme jealousy of other women. She was beautiful, charming, smart—the total package, if ever there was one. Yet the manic way people usually reacted to being in John’s presence—especially the way some women behaved—caused Carolyn to second-guess his loyalty and fidelity to her. As far as John was concerned, he never gave her reason to be suspicious because he had never cheated on her. He simply wouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t in his makeup. Or was it?
In fact, John had taken Carolyn away for a weekend while he was still technically in a relationship with Darryl Hannah—and Carolyn would never let John forget it. “John was sorry he had ever told her about Darryl,” said Stephen Styles. “Carolyn had that on him and she was relentless with it. ‘If you cheated on Darryl with me, how do I know you’re not cheating on me with someone else?’ Of course, he and Darryl had been on a so-called break at the time, and it had been Darryl’s decision to call for the hiatus, but that didn’t matter. It became a part of the running narrative of their relationship that John had ‘cheated’ on Darryl with Carolyn, and now Carolyn couldn’t trust him. John could simply glance at a woman in an admiring way and he would later be accused of having been interested in her. From waitresses to celebrities, it didn’t matter—if she was an attractive female and Carolyn sensed that a moment had occurred between them, it all but guaranteed a good fight.”
As an example, John and Carolyn were having breakfast with two mutual friends at Socrates restaurant in Tribeca on a Sunday morning. Throughout the meal, an attractive woman across the room kept trying to get John’s attention. She seemed to be winking at him, flirting with him. He couldn’t help but notice, as did, of course, Carolyn. Finally the woman came over to John’s table and asked if she could have her picture taken with him. He declined. However, she was persistent. She went on and on until finally John relented. She handed someone a camera and the picture was taken. “You know, this isn’t the first time we met,” she then said to him. He looked confused. “Do I know you?” he asked. “You don’t remember?” she responded, somewhat mysteriously. “A couple of years ago? On the Cape?” John looked at her closely, scrutinizing her face as if trying to place her. “Nope, I don’t remember,” he said finally. “Sorry.” After an uncomfortable moment, the woman said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. Thanks, John. Bye.” And with that, she was on her way.
“What was that about?” Carolyn instantly wanted to know.
“Beats me,” John said. After sizing him up, Carolyn then asked why John appeared to be so nervous. “Is it because you thought she was hot?” she asked, throwing down the gauntlet. Now his temper was rising. He repeated that the lady in question was just a fan. Carolyn still wasn’t satisfied, though, and continued to push. “Jesus Christ, Carolyn,” John said, now raising his voice. “You’re so much smarter than this. Come on!”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded to know.
Before he knew it, he was having a full-on argument with his fiancée in front of his friends about something that, in his view at least, couldn’t have been more ridiculous. Finally, Carolyn excused herself and left the table in tears. John was visibly shaken. “I don’t know what to do now,” he said to his friends. “Should I go after her, or what?” he asked. His friends said yes, he must. He then got up, threw some money on the table, and said, “What a great way to start the day, huh?” before running after her.
By the winter months of 1996, John and Carolyn were, according to what he was telling his friends, “averaging about one good knock-down, drag-out a week,” and usually over the same two themes: her unhappiness with paparazzi and her insecurity about other women. Because the two were so constantly monitored by the very photographers who had become an issue in their relationship, it seemed only a matter of time before one of their dustups would be caught by a video camera.
It happened one Sunday morning in February 1996. After having breakfast, John and Carolyn were seen arguing in Central Park, with her laying into him, screaming at him and gesturing wildly. He retaliated by shouting back at her, his face twisted with rage, his leashed Canaan dog, Friday, looking up at him. At one point, she hauled off and hit John hard on the shoulder with a closed fist. John seemed to be unglued as he grabbed Carolyn by the shoulders and shook her. As she pulled away, he snatched her hand and yanked the engagement ring from her finger. The struggle continued as he pushed her and she pushed back, all the while hollering within inches of each other’s face. At one point, the two appeared exhausted and dazed, with John sitting down on the curb and crying in front of stunned passersby. Carolyn bent over him. “Give it to me,” she said to him. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the ring, and handed it to her. With ring in hand, Carolyn knelt down next to John and touched her head to his. Then she began to cry as well. However, he pushed her away. The fight began again, with Carolyn trying to wrestle the leashed dog from John. “You got your ring,” John told her. “You’re not getting my dog!” After a tug-of-war, John finally said, “Fine!” and gave Carolyn the leash. Finally, the two of them began walking down the street together, talking to each other quietly and appearing to be making amends.
“She accused me of having an affair with [fashion model] Claudia Schiffer,” John later explained to another one of his cousins when talking about the fracas. “And I lost it. I don’t even know Claudia Schiffer,” he added. “The jealousy gets to you. I lost it. She kept pushing and pushing and pushing until, finally, I just lost it.”
John and Carolyn Marry
John Kennedy Jr.—arguably one of the most famous men on the planet in 1996—managed to do the seemingly impossible when he married Carolyn Bessette. He did it in secret, far from the prying eyes of stalking paparazzi and the rest of the news media. On September 21, 1996, the glamorous couple exchanged vows on remote and inaccessible Cumberland Island, the largest and southernmost of Georgia’s barrier islands. Only eighteen miles long and three miles wide, the island has no grocery stores, no gas stations, and very few commercial establishments. In fact, only about a hundred people live there, and most of them work for the National Park Service.
At the time, the handsome Kennedy scion was thirty-five, his new wife thirty. The ceremony, which was romantically illuminated by the glow of candles and kerosene lamps, took place in a white clapboard chapel, the First African Baptist Church, a quaint one-room church on the north end of Cumberland Island, which had been built by former slaves back in 1893 and then rebuilt in the 1930s. No longer an active church, it serves as a local historical monument. Constructed with whitewashed logs, it has only eleven handmade pews that seat no more than forty people, providing the setting for certainly one of the most intimate of Kennedy weddings.
John looked, as expected, quite dashing on his wedding day in a midnight blue wool suit and white vest, one of his father’s shirts, JFK’s watch, and, along with his groomsmen, a blue cornflower as a boutonniere. It had been JFK’s favorite flower. Carolyn was elegant in a pearl-colored silk crepe bias-cut gown with a veil of silk tulle, along with long gloves. Her bouquet was fashioned from lilies of the valley, Jackie’s favorite flower. Holding her hair in place was a comb that ha
d belonged to Jackie, a gift from Caroline. Father Charles J. O’Byrne, a Jesuit priest who had known John ten years earlier when John was a student at New York University, performed the ceremony by reading from the Bible with a small flashlight.
Most certainly, when that single dreamy color photograph of John and Carolyn made the magazines and newspapers, he kissing the hand of his beaming bride, most Americans were taken completely by surprise. If anything, it proved that even the most high profile of celebrities can have private moments if there are people around them who adhere to one simple practical principle: Don’t talk about it.
It’s true that everyone involved in the planning of the wedding—from the caterer and the florist to the designers and family members—wanted the best for John and Carolyn. But to say they kept a big secret for him would be inaccurate. Actually, they didn’t know he was even getting married. The weekend before the service, John called the people on the guest list and told them he was having a party on Cumberland Island and that they should make plane reservations right away and be sure to attend. He was adamant that it was a party they would not want to miss. Everyone took the bait. Of course, to everyone’s credit, no one blabbed about the “party” either.
But of necessity, the occasion had to be kept small and intimate. Thus many of John and Carolyn’s personal friends could not attend; there simply wasn’t enough room to accommodate them. Those family members present who managed to keep the couple’s secret were: Anthony Radziwill, who was ill at the time with cancer and who served as John’s best man; Caroline Kennedy, who was matron of honor, and whose daughters, Rose and Tatiana, were flower girls, and whose son, three-year-old Jack, was the ring bearer; Caroline’s husband, Ed Schlossberg; Ted and Vicki Kennedy; Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill; Ethel’s son Bobby Kennedy Jr.; Jean’s son William Kennedy Smith; Maurice Tempelsman; and members of Carolyn’s family, including her mother, Ann Freeman, and one of her sisters, Lisa Bessette.
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