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televisionThere are only two known recordings of fashion icon Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s voice. One is eight seconds long. (“It was a very emotional and wonderful night,” she told red carpet reporters at a 1998 ball.) The other is just two seconds. It’s deep and elegant. Almost musical. It’s the voice at galas and charity dinners, talking about summer plans and trips to the Hamptons. It sounds like money. On Instagram accounts dedicated to her memory, Bessette-Kennedy’s fans—usually young people born long after—have been waking up to her voice. She and her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash 1999 — pored over the clips. They pored over her photos, too — the clean lines of her wardrobe, her ice-blonde hair, the distinct presence of a beautiful, doomed woman. She was a mystery that needed to be solved. Answers rarely came.
In the 25 years since Bessette Kennedy died, that hasn’t been much of an issue. She was one of the most mysterious figures of late 20th-century American celebrity, credited with popularizing a kind of quiet luxury long before it existed. Becoming a popular wordThink minimalist separates, black sandals, oversized white shirts. Very chic. Very tailored. Very Calvin Kleinwhere she worked as a publicist before her marriage. She was one of the beacons of the “Flashback Friday” genre on social media – images pulled from the archives representing a distant and more innocent past. If not more innocent, at least more interesting. That she died so young and so tragically, at just 33, only added to her mythic allure.
Two new books claim to fill that gap. Kennedy Jr.Written by his former executive assistant RoseMarie Terenzio and journalist Liz McNeil, it is an oral history of the handsome crown prince of America’s most famous family, whose celebrity and tycoon ambitions seemed set to make him as famous as his parents, President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Onassis. Don’t Ask: The Kennedys and the Women They RuinedWritten by journalist Maureen Callahan, this book is as lurid as its title: A Brief History of Sexual Nightmares In the Kennedy White House and beyond. Both works have been called definitive retellings, and both spend a great deal of time on Bessette Kennedy, her charm, and her many fans. However, Kennedy Jr. Always too clean, Don’t ask It’s obscene. Bessette Kennedy is further obscure because of it. She’s either a cold martyr or a drug-addicted social climber. You don’t let anyone know.
What Kennedy Jr. At least it does manage to make the fantasy of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy come true; a distant notion of who she was and the world she inhabited. Interestingly, this has little to do with who she married. In modern Bessette Kennedy fandom, JFK Jr. is just an accessory – a pretty goofball attached to a nineties trendsetter. Usually Kennedy Jr. It is best read in this context.
The best parts of Terenzio and McNeil’s book are recollections of how Bessette-Kennedy, before she became famous, moved around Manhattan, working as a publicity director for Calvin Klein by day and partying at night. “She was a club girl and dated a lot of people,” recalled Brian Steel, a friend of JFK Jr. Terenzio, who was close to the couple, remembers Bessette-Kennedy living in a West Village brownstone before moving in with JFK Jr. Kate Moss was her upstairs neighbor. The book recalls Bessette-Kennedy smoking Parliament Lights in a Tribeca sushi restaurant, snorting cocaine and shopping at Neiman Marcus.
“She is indeed mysterious… Who is this savage?” recalled Robbie Little, John Kennedy’s friend. Another friend, Jack Merrill, added: “She could get dirty. She and John both understood that sometimes to have a good time, you had to get dirty. ” Many contributors used similar abstract words to describe her—“energetic,” “dynamite”;That Kennedy was that kind of girl.” Even how she and Kennedy met is a little unclear. He told a friend that they first met “at Calvin Klein” in 1992. The timeline of their relationship is confusing; Kennedy appears to have dated Caroline and actor Daryl Hannah for a while before the two made their relationship official in 1994.
As the story goes on, Bessette-Kennedy becomes increasingly fuzzy as a character. In February 1996, the couple was involved in a physical altercation while walking their dog in Central Park that became a national scandal, but the book downplays the incident. “The conflict was about John being taken advantage of by his friends,” Terenzio says. “John didn’t think it was a big deal. Caroline was angry because they were being followed by photographers and now a videographer. I think in some ways she felt it was her fault, but she was also angry at John because she felt like she was trying to protect him.”
Their wedding that September only accelerated the media attention that was wearing her down. Meanwhile, the high-profile launch and subsequent sales woes of Kennedy’s lifestyle magazine, JFK: From Zero, distracted her. George“Caroline’s life disappeared,” recalled her friend Sasha Chermayeff. “She was a wonderful girl … but her identity was completely changed. She went from being the coolest girl in the scene but not famous to being very famous but mocked and insulted by the tabloid media.”
As time went on, things only got worse, Chermayeff said, with Bessette-Kennedy growing increasingly afraid of the press and her marriage strained. Others claimed she barely left the house. “There was something about Caroline, she knew the answers,” Chermayeff said. “This is how you were in New York. This is what you would say to a man when he behaved badly. This is what you would tell your boss. But she couldn’t bring herself to deal with her fears with all her wisdom.” By the time of their deaths, she and Kennedy were contemplating divorce.
There is a feeling Kennedy Jr. Perhaps due to sensitivity, no one wanted to be too harsh on either side. Don’t ask dropped that approach, but with a bit of drama. There, JFK was described as a narcissistic “guy”—a man who was “coddled and spoiled,” “angry and impatient,” and “a bit naughty.” Callahan said the only reason Caroline put up with his arrogance, filthy apartment, and bad habits was because she herself was a ruthless gold digger. That was Callahan’s best assessment of her. She claimed Caroline psychologically tortured her ex and relentlessly pursued JFK Jr. until he was hers. Then she began her transformation into a “sassy Upper East Side ice queen.”
“Her face had grown severe and angular,” Callahan writes. “Her once-messy hair had been straightened with a heat iron, her scalp had burned and throbbed from the bleach, the burns cooling to form hard, raised scabs beneath her platinum mane.” She sounded like Frankenstein’s monster.
The Kennedys and Caroline’s sister Laura died in a plane crash that officials blamed on Kennedy’s poor piloting—he had been trained only to fly in clear weather and died from spatial disorientation on the short flight to Martha’s Vineyard. But Callahan believes the crash reflected Kennedy’s hubris and self-destructive tendencies. “Is there a part of him, subconscious or otherwise, that didn’t care if he died and took his wife and sister-in-law with him?” she asks calmly. “His magazine was going bankrupt. His marriage was failing. His sister barely spoke to him. His life was falling apart in every way.”
Neither book is the complete story. Bessette Kennedy and JFK Jr. were temperamental but, most of all, private. Their secrets went with them. But the book’s effect doesn’t damage the myth of Caroline herself. The image she once was—the slip dresses and turtlenecks, the understated glamour—remains. Beautiful, photogenic, but always elusive. Forget the Kennedys: Caroline Bessette’s mystique is her greatest legacy.
“When I think about my wife, I always think about her head and what’s inside it,” Ben Affleck muses in his 2014 thriller Gone Girlwhich cites Bessette Kennedy as one of the main inspirations for its mysterious semi-villain Amy Dunne. “I thought about that, too: her mind, her brain, all these coils, and her mind moving through them like a fast, crazy centipede… What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you?”
JFK Jr. and Don’t Ask: The Kennedys and the Women They Ruined are now in theaters
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