Hill said he could “see it in her” that she might be having an affair with Bergin. “I could see how she took advantage of John,” he continued. “It was that whole thing that she was a girl who played by ‘The Rules’”—a reference to the 1995 bestselling book about dating. “The legend was that she was sort of the ultimate product of ‘The Rules.’ She executed all ‘The Rules’ in the best possible manner and nailed herself John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. I think that there is probably substance to that.” Hill was making these observations as someone who got along fine with Carolyn but whose ultimate loyalties were unquestionably with John. “If you listen to the way I’m talking about her now, you can see that if push had come to shove in a given situation, I would have thrown her under the bus in a heartbeat,” he continued. “Because you’re so fucked up and you do and don’t love the guy. You see him more as a conquest than a person. But even in your heart of hearts, if you love him and it’s what you wanted, and you’ve managed to get beyond the game that led you to him in the first place, you’re still so fucked up you can’t stop. You’re like an addict.”
Sasha Chermayeff said that after the wedding “everything changed” between John and Carolyn. “She got nervous as hell,” she said. Carolyn was “nervous” before the wedding, to be sure, but afterward, she said, “it sort of went down and down and by the last year they were not able to communicate, like not at all.” She said Carolyn was “obsessed” with Bergin “being her salvation” and hoped that she could “go back and kind of pretend” with him that her life wasn’t what it was with John. “She was just having some crazy sexual thing with the other guy,” she said. “I never understood it.” At first, like Hill, Chermayeff thought that Carolyn could handle life with John. “She’s smart enough, she’s strong enough, she’s kind of like almost ruthless,” she said. “She can do it.” But the reality of the intense spotlight was more than she could handle, even though she thought she could. “It just broke her down to the point of real fear and paranoia, like she wouldn’t go out of the apartment,” she continued. “She got agoraphobia.”
She also stopped having sex with John. “I never quite understood what happened, why that was the way it was, and I felt really sad about it because I wanted so much to see him really, really fulfilled and he wasn’t,” Chermayeff continued. “She wanted to be with John, but she wanted to have sex with the other guy because that is where she felt more at home. John, she was just going to deny. In fact, she just wasn’t going to fuck him. Sorry to be crude.” John couldn’t live like that. “And a lot of people can’t,” she said. “Her excuse—that she was really shut down sexually—wasn’t really true. But she was shut down from him. It is mind blowing, but it happened. People are so strange, and love and chemistry, and who people want to be with, and intimacy. God knows there’s no making any sense of any of it.”
Chermayeff said she spoke with John about the fact that his wife wouldn’t sleep with him anymore. He was upset about it. He was in therapy. He may have, eventually, had casual sexual interludes with Julie Baker, a former girlfriend, but he was, Chermayeff said, “very serious, and very seriously committed to the fact that he had fallen madly in love with Carolyn. They had this really passionate beginning, which Herb Ritts photographed incredibly … I mean when they were madly, madly, madly sexually in love. He took these incredibly super sexy pictures of John and Carolyn where they were like on fire. She even said to me, ‘We were like on fire during this session,’ and you can tell.” (The photographs have never been made public.) But she was fickle, Chermayeff continued. Carolyn was married to John but had fallen back in love with Bergin. “She wanted it all. It was fucking her up and then she couldn’t sleep with John. They were really hot and heavy, I remember it, and then there’s a lot of stress. They had fun. They got married. They had a great wedding. It was a great party. We all loved it, it was like a love fest, and then shit started stressing her out. There was more stuff going on with her than I clearly knew about. There were more serious issues that I wasn’t really privy to.” Carolyn was in pain. “It came from real dysfunction and was dysfunction,” Sasha said. “She was good at seeming really together but she actually wasn’t. Maybe she was a coke addict and sort of a sex addict, who knows?”
She said John remained generally hopeful he and Carolyn could work through their issues. But then he realized, according to Chermayeff, that Carolyn’s “issues were much more serious than he had expected or thought them to be, and that the sexual shutdown was like—I don’t think anybody had ever done that to him before—and this was during that period where she didn’t want to go out and was really paranoid.” John asked Chermayeff to spend some time with Carolyn. “She was talking about ‘How do I keep passion in my relationship?’ Questions of course where in hindsight it was like ‘Oh yes, you are talking about yourself’ and ‘Why aren’t I picking up on all the cues, that you’re telling me that you don’t have passion for John anymore, and you’re desperately messed up about it and you’re really stressed out about the paparazzi and you rush off to LA whenever you can to go with your old boyfriend.’”
* * *
JOHN WAS ALSO HAVING HIS headaches at George. The euphoria of the first two issues faded rapidly. Gary Ginsberg said that pretty much by the third issue of the magazine—after the 350-page ad buy of the first two issues had ended—he feared George could soon be in financial trouble. “The big advertisers couldn’t quite categorize it,” he said. “They didn’t know: Is it a fashion magazine? Is it a political magazine? Is it a general interest magazine? So it required buyers to think more broadly and to think more creatively about how they would use it in their media buys. At a certain point they just kind of gave up.”
Around April 1997, John had a falling-out with Michael Berman, his longtime business partner. There would have been no George without the combination of the skills that both John and Michael brought to it, but it’s probably fair to say that each of them was having trouble sharing that credit. As one person who knew them both said, “A political magazine with Michael Berman had no value. But apparently a political magazine with only John Kennedy didn’t have a lot of value, either.”
And then there was the influence of Carolyn on John’s decision-making at George. The editors would come up with story ideas and Carolyn would change them. A decision would be made about whom John would interview for the magazine or what meeting he should attend and then two days later John would announce that he had changed his mind. She would go into the George offices and opine on the colors that should be used in the magazine—she was the master purveyor of style after all—despite the color scheme having already been determined. John was unreliable and would triple-book lunches or meetings. He would surround himself with people who were in his thrall and were afraid to tell him when things weren’t going right. Carolyn would call up Michael Berman and complain about John. She complained about Michael Berman to John. John and Michael were fighting every day about something or other. There was the time that John inadvertently tore the cuff of Michael’s shirt in the midst of a heated argument about the direction of the magazine. After that, John locked himself in his office and then Michael tried to pick the lock with a pair of scissors. (He later apologized to Berman and bought him a new shirt.) “It was a shit show,” said one former George employee. “The last year of that business while I was there was a complete shit show.”
Carolyn seemed to be encouraging the chaos. She also believed John could run George without Berman. “He just seemed to think he could do it by himself,” the George employee continued. In this telling, it all seemed rather sad: “I think John was always alone. He seemed like he had a big, full life but he was just kind of always alone, and maybe he just thought he could do it by himself. In this case I think it was his wife who said, ‘You can do this better on your own.’ … I think there are two Johns and I think one was before her and one was after her. I honestly believe his life turned into a free fall. Personally and professionally. Who else did
he have? All he had was his sister and his wife.”
In any event, as the Daily News reported, by June 1997 the divorce between John and Berman had been finalized. “Ending months of tense negotiations,” the paper reported, Berman ended up as the head of a new division at Hachette that would produce films and TV shows. “I’m looking forward to another new challenge,” he said. He also denied the rumors that John’s marriage to Carolyn had in any way hastened his split with John. “That’s just silliness,” Berman told the paper. “It was always professional. It wasn’t a dispute so much as a maturing of differences. For me, George was an entrepreneurial idea and a challenge, but it wasn’t anything I expected to stay with throughout my career.” Terms of Berman’s settlement with John were not disclosed—he used what he received in the settlement as the grubstake for the private-equity business he now runs—but high-powered attorneys were employed to reach it. The two men never spoke again. John didn’t replace Berman. He was now unequivocally free to do whatever he wanted to do with George, with little meaningful interference.
It was July 16 when Richard Blow first saw the photo of John. It was to accompany John’s editor’s letter for the September issue, which was just about to be sent to the printer. It was the first issue that John produced after he had split with Berman and was an idea Berman had long opposed. The color picture, taken after office hours by Mario Sorrenti, featured John sitting in a dark room with no shirt on and what looked like nothing else on, either. (His private parts were a hazy blur.) His muscled arms were wrapped around his knees. He was supposedly gazing at an apple dangling from an imaginary ceiling, although the apple had been added later. “But John only looked naked,” Blow remembered. “He had left his boxers on.” He had also been very careful to insist that Sorrenti use a Polaroid camera to take the picture, and in the process made sure there was no film negative floating around that could make its way into the gossip rags. “It occurred to me that John had lost his mind,” Blow continued, “and that was before I read the editor’s letter that accompanied the picture.”
John’s editor’s note—written at the last minute without consulting anyone—would garner more attention, and controversy, for George than anything he had done before it. The piece was ostensibly about the twenty “most fascinating” women in politics that George had profiled for the issue. But the actual writing was more than a little opaque about exactly what he was trying to say and to whom. Surrounded by a respectable number of full-page ads for the likes of Saks, Armani, Burberry, Polo, and Clinique, John wrote without any context, “I’ve learned a lot about temptation recently.” Whatever he was referring to, though, he did not elaborate. Instead he wrote about how interesting it was to consider those people who give in to temptation, instead of wrestling with it. He then referred to some article he had read—without citing it specifically—in which the author reflected upon the virtue of living a “respectable life.” The unknown writer, according to John, argued that leading the straight, narrow, and predictable life in many ways is a departure from true human nature—“one that’s ruled by passion and instinct.” He then lamented: “Conform utterly and endure a potentially dispiriting, suffocating life.” He wrote that he had witnessed this “cycle up close” in the past year. And then swatted at a hornet’s nest. “Two members of my family chased an idealized alternative to their life,” he wrote, without mentioning any names but clearly referring to his first cousins Michael and Joseph Kennedy, two of Robert Kennedy’s sons. “One left behind an embittered wife, and another, in what looked to be a hedge against mortality, fell in love with youth and surrendered his judgment in the process. Both became poster boys for bad behavior. Perhaps they deserved it. Perhaps they should have known better. To whom much is given, much is expected, right?” Joe had divorced his wife after twelve years of marriage; Michael allegedly had a five-year affair with his children’s teenage babysitter. Joe was contemplating running for governor of Massachusetts with Michael as his campaign manager. (Michael died a little more than a year later in a ski accident in Aspen.) It was not precisely clear what John was trying to say in his editor’s note about his cousins. But the combination of it and the half-naked picture caused a media sensation.
At around the same time he and Carolyn had another public spat—this time on a twelve-passenger Continental Express flight from Newark to Martha’s Vineyard. According to Boston magazine, John and Carolyn were bickering pretty much the whole time. But their argument reached its nadir when John said, according to someone seated two rows away, “Maybe we should get divorced. We fucking talk about it enough!” To which Carolyn replied, “Oh, no. We waited for your mother to die to get married. We’re waiting for my mother to die to get a divorce.” Their dispute intensified after the flight landed and they headed together to Red Gate Farm. According to the Star, Carolyn soon thereafter left the island by private charter and “John spent the entire next day frantically bicycling around the island. He just wouldn’t stop.”
In September 1997, they celebrated their one-year anniversary at a spa resort in Big Sur, California. They “emerged looking refreshed and in love,” one writer for Cosmopolitan observed. And a few weeks later they were photographed together lovey-dovey in Tribeca. On October 9, Carolyn and Caroline accompanied John into Lenox Hill Hospital, where he underwent surgery on his hand as a result of an injury from playing touch football. Everyone looked happy. “Bessette-Kennedy seems to be finding her footing as both Kennedy spouse and media darling, even smiling for the camera,” Cosmo reported.
There were rumors that Pecker and Hachette were going to pull the plug on the magazine. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pecker denied the rumors and said that George was actually doing better than he and Hachette had expected. He added that John had a multiyear contract with the magazine, wasn’t going anywhere, and was a hard worker. “I’ve never seen a community so negative about a person and wanting him to fail,” Pecker said. “People are very surprised that he’s successful. He works 12 hours a day, he travels all over the place, he does the interviews.”
Despite Pecker’s public assurances about George’s future, behind the scenes he was turning up the pressure on John to improve the magazine’s financial performance. In November 1997, John organized a retreat at the Beaverkill Valley Inn, in the Catskills, for editorial employees. The idea was not only to get the staff revved up again about the magazine and its mission but also to acknowledge the pressure coming from Pecker. There were hikes, friendly games of soccer, and family-style meals interspersed with some serious tension inside the inn’s conference rooms. At one point, John lost his temper when, after he explained how George intended to sell more copies of the magazine on the newsstand than did Men’s Journal or Esquire, Terenzio pointed out that those magazines had a staff twice as large as George’s. “It’s never going to happen unless Hachette steps up and gives us what we need to be competitive,” she said. But John didn’t appreciate her insight and told her so, in front of everyone. “That’s enough,” he told her.
“But—” she started to say.
John cut her off. “I said that’s enough,” he said. “We don’t need to hear that anymore.”
Terenzio had been publicly humiliated. “I turned beet red,” she recalled in her book, “humiliated in front of the editors, who quickly averted their gazes.” Afterward, everyone was still in shock, as was Terenzio. “They were visibly uncomfortable after witnessing John lash out at me,” she continued. “It had shocked them as much as it had embarrassed me. They weren’t used to it. But I was.” It was one thing for John’s assistant to see a side of him in daily interactions where he was less than charming and politic; it was quite another for the whole staff to witness such a display.
He later more or less apologized, and Terenzio understood his position. “Look, I’m sorry about today’s meeting,” he told her. “But when you say stuff like that, people assume it’s coming from me. I can’t go around being negative all the time about Hachette. It
’s bad for morale and bad for business.”
Terenzio recalled how Maggie Haberman, the daughter of Nancy Haberman, the magazine’s press spokesperson, was working as an intern at George one summer and spent an afternoon answering Terenzio’s phone. After the phone rang at one point, Haberman yelled to John that someone was on the line for him. “What are you saying?” he said nastily. “I can’t even hear you.” Terenzio, returning to her desk, told John that he was yelling at an intern. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry, Maggie.” Maggie later told her mother, “I can’t believe how he talks to [Terenzio] sometimes.” (Haberman would go on to become a White House correspondent for the New York Times.)
On November 22, 1997, John and Carolyn went for three days to Argos, Indiana, of all places, to the headquarters of Buckeye Industries, the manufacturer of his Buckeye flying parachute. He asked the Buckeye executives not to alert the press. A Buckeye executive was dispatched to Chicago and flew Carolyn and John back to the Argos area on a private jet. John had two purposes for the trip: to get his basic flight instructor rating for the Buckeye and to trade in his single-seat Falcon 582 for the new Buckeye Dream Machine that he had previously ordered. Carolyn took her first flight in the solo Buckeye when they were in Argos and she seemed to love the experience as much as John did on his first flight. She turned out to be almost as big a daredevil as he was. “Now you know why we are here,” he told her after she had landed, “to get a two-seater so we can fly together.” They ordered pizzas and went out to breakfast with the Buckeye executives, who completely fell for John and Carolyn. They especially found Carolyn to be warm and funny—and very pleased to be out of the Manhattan spotlight.
After Christmas that year and following the George second-anniversary celebration, John headed to the FlightSafety Academy, in Vero Beach, Florida, to resume his study for his pilot’s license. “All John’s life, he wanted to be free,” remembered Laurence Leamer, a family biographer. “He wanted to fly above celebrity. He wanted to fly above this attention and be his own person, and the ultimate way to do that was to fly, and from the time he was a boy he wanted to do that.” By then, John had been working on his pilot’s license off and on for some fifteen years. After getting a small dose of flying while on John Perry Barlow’s ranch, John had started his training in 1982; six years later he had logged forty-seven hours in a plane, with six different instructors. In only one of the forty-seven hours was he alone as the pilot; the rest of the time, he flew alongside an instructor. For the next nine years, John suspended his training, and when he resumed, in Vero Beach, he went at it with passion. “I worry about John flying,” Maurice Tempelsman told a friend. “He’s so distractible.” Between December 1997 and April 1998, he flew another fifty-three hours, forty-three of which were with an instructor. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the instructor at FlightSafety who prepared John for his “private checkride” said he had “very good” skills for someone with his level of experience. He earned his private pilot certificate in April 1998. (A few years later, FlightSafety would also train the terrorists who committed the September 11 attacks.) When he graduated he gave the FlightSafety instructors a picture of himself, inscribed to “The bravest people in aviation because people will only care where I got my training if I crash. Best, John Kennedy.”
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