Once upon a time, p.31
Once Upon a Time, page 31
This snippet was catnip for all the tabloids, who went on a snarking spree. “Do you think the hunk showed Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss his Declaration of Independence?” asked one paper.
In November, Manhattan File published the first of what was to be a series titled “Diary of a Bitch,” a new column by Candace Bushnell of Sex and the City fame. The portrait was ruthless. The subtitle was “Spoiled in the City. She married the world’s most eligible bachelor, and inherited way more than she bargained for: an unreformed husband, a paparazzi conspiracy, and a nasty habit for popping pills. Is something rotten in SoHo? Introducing the diaries of CKB.”
“CKB” was portrayed with less nuance than a Disney villain: pouting for attention, pretending to be pregnant. Written in the first person, CKB says, “And then I did what I trained myself to do when I was kid. I started the cry.”
Carolyn felt pummeled. So, she stepped out of the ring, just as her sister Lauren was stepping in.
“Carolyn asked me to show Lauren around town,” Jack Merrill remembered. “Lauren was smart. She was bright and funny like Carolyn, but more subdued.
“But the reason I was showing her around instead of Carolyn,” Merrill continued, “was because Carolyn was not leaving the house.”
“This was not the Carolyn I knew, and I have no doubt that eventually, she would pull out of this and bounce back,” said MJ Bettenhausen. “All of it, the white-blonde hair, the eyebrows, the rail-thin figure; eventually, she would have centered. She was always fit and had a beautiful figure, but she became so thin and pale. Carolyn was an Italian girl who used to laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe. I think she felt she had to fit in, to be what she thought people expected a Kennedy to be. So… blonder, thinner. It was exhausting. But I know she would have bounced back.”
Carolyn took solace in her animals. “Yet even that was disrupted, albeit temporarily. John didn’t want it known that he hunted deer with his cousins—Carolyn hated it,” Bettenhausen remembered. “John tried to bring Friday, who was not a hunting dog, a few times. Friday was an already high-strung breed, and the sounds of the gunshots terrified him. Poor Friday suffered from some high anxiety after a few trips. Carolyn was furious. It took a while to get him settled back down enough to walk outside for longer than a bathroom break.
“Once, he even got skunked, and John had to give him a tomato juice bath to get the scent off. Friday was pink for a week,” Bettenhausen said. “Some friends from the dog run asked her, ‘Why did you dye Friday pink?’ Carolyn deadpanned right back, ‘Ask John; it was his idea.’ ”
Although she was pulling back from the public eye, her sense of humor remained intact.
Bettenhausen recalled when “Carolyn once accidentally introduced herself as Caroline Kennedy. She immediately realized her slip and doubled over laughing at the mistake. The thought of the two of them being interchangeable was preposterous.”
Carolyn would spend hours on the phone, calling to check in with those she cared about. “I knew when Carolyn called I would need to put time aside from my day,” said Hamilton South.
She was “an incredible conversationalist and her humor was generous of spirit,” South reminisced. “Carolyn was the first person to be up and reading the entire paper. We would go over everything. News, politics, arts, she had something bright and witty to say about it all. But she wasn’t really leaving the house, at least not when in the city. The intrusion of the press and the subsequent feeling of being trapped was still there; always there.”
“Even though she was having a difficult time, she was still a caretaker,” recalled Ariel Paredes, who was then at Boston College. “She would buy clothes and beauty products for me and send packages wrapped in so much George packaging that my eyes would bleed. I would call to thank her and laugh about all the George paraphernalia. ‘You’re the only one I can use this crazy packaging for,’ Carolyn laughed. ‘Your friends in Boston won’t care or even know what George is.’ ”
Staying at Lauren’s may have been Carolyn’s nonverbal communication to John that she was not pleased with the excessive demands the outside world made on their lives. RoseMarie Terenzio wrote that John had, at times, a blind spot about other people’s time. “Carolyn would decline invitations from friends because John said he was coming home for dinner. So she would wait and wait and wait, while he worked late and went to the gym (without letting her know), and then waltz into to the apartment way past dinner time…. Another classic scenario was when he would spring important information on her at the last minute, such as ‘Oh, by the way, the Whitney benefit is in two days’ or ‘I’m bringing a friend home for dinner… right now.’ She wanted to know why the hell he didn’t tell her sooner. It wasn’t mean-spiritedness on his part. He was simply as disorganized and clueless as a kid. Still, it didn’t make scrambling to accommodate him any less frustrating.”
So Carolyn retaliated. “[She] used to hang out at her sister Lauren’s house in Tribeca and bitch about the invasion of her privacy,” said longtime Bessette family friend William Peter Owen. “She’d stay late. John would return to 20 North Moore Street, and she wouldn’t be there for him. This happened on several occasions.” She would often stay at Lauren’s until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, she would stay the night. The message seemed to be: I still have my own life. Take me for granted, and I won’t be there.
To further aggravate matters, Carolyn declined to accompany John on outings and trips that fall, exhausted by the strain of worrying about her husband’s career, the declining health of beloved Anthony, and having to nonetheless appear happy in pictures or be faced with another tabloid story. On a trip to Rome to sell ads for George, John strolled through Piazza Navona on his own. Carolyn had skipped Italy.
When it came time for his annual trek out of town to avoid the anniversary of his father’s assassination in November, she passed on camping in Maine. On Thanksgiving, John and Carolyn went to Hyannis Port for the holiday, and, while Carolyn went to the Thursday dinner, she skipped Ted’s Friday-night cocktail party as well as his Saturday brunch of leftovers. John was alone for the family football huddles, beach walks, and sailing, looking, according to the Detroit Free Press, “lost and dour.”
Picking and choosing carefully, Carolyn attended just a few events in December—she went with John to the Robin Hood foundation breakfast on the 2nd, with Lauren in tow. Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols were there, and there is a video clip of Carolyn’s delight at speaking with Sawyer, whom she adored. Carolyn would remain circumspect in her appearances and usually dressed that way as well, with black, midi-length dresses by Yamamoto.
A sea change came on December 11 when she attended Revlon’s Fire and Ice Ball at Universal Studios in Los Angeles in a bright-white Versace evening dress. Was this a willing return to public life? It would depend. It isn’t easy to pull out of a cycle of fear, especially when accompanied by real threats. As recently as 1995 the FBI had received kidnapping threats against John by Colombian drug cartels, so Carolyn’s concerns for their physical safety were not unfounded. But that evening in December, attending the Fire and Ice Ball with Maria Shriver and her brother Bobby, Carolyn seemed carefree, although bashful. She joked with the reporters outside, saying, “I’ve been waiting a long time for a date with my cousin Bobby.” When asked what her favorite part of the evening was, she said, “I had no favorite part. The whole evening was spectacular.”
In their troublemaking manner, what the papers took away from the event was that Carolyn “really hit it off” with John Enos, an ex-boyfriend of Madonna’s, and that she was “unaccompanied by her husband.”
Carolyn and John spent Christmas Eve at the Freemans’ in Greenwich, bringing Marta Sgubin and, of course, Friday with them, then had a very quiet Christmas dinner with Anthony and Carole Radziwill. “There is nervous energy around all of us,” Radziwill wrote in What Remains. “We plan a trip to Cuba and Greece. We are trying to ramp a lifetime into a few short years.”
After Christmas, Carolyn and John headed to visit cousins Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sun Valley, where they had a large home and often hosted parties. Liz Smith, informed that the couple was there, duly reported that “John Kennedy Jr. was out on the slopes skiing or snowboarding every day, and lunching with his guy pals. Carolyn Bessette appeared on the mountain once before she decided to head down an easier run with Ralph Lauren exec Hamilton South.” The press would not give them peace in Istanbul nor Idaho, it seems.
No matter. Carolyn was not a strong skier, but she and Hamilton found a way to have an excellent time together. “She looked great in all black—ski pants, coat, and a black headband. She lectured me on skiwear as she felt I needed to up my sports attire.” South laughed. “Neither of us were advanced skiers. We only did one run, and then it was down to the lodge for après ski for us, or back to the place we had rented near Maria and Arnold’s.”
Finishing out 1998 with laughter and friends and family seemed like a hopeful end to a really tough year. Lauren was now just blocks away, and they were closer than ever. With newfound strength from the proximity of her sister, Carolyn readied for the days to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO GREY GARDENS IN MANHATTAN
January 1999–March 1999
The New Year began in the company of friends. In early January, Carolyn and John went to Rob and Frannie Littell’s East Village apartment to catch some of the NFL playoffs on TV. “While John and I screamed at the TV,” Littell wrote, “Carolyn played with Coco and Tate and eventually fell asleep on the couch. She awoke as the final whistle blew. John started needling her before she could rub her eyes. ‘Yo, Carolyn, honey, you were snoring. What kind of person falls asleep at a football party?’ ” He then jokingly apologized to Frannie for his wife’s less than scintillating presence, attempting to get a rise out of Carolyn.
Always up for teasing banter, Carolyn thanked Rob and Frannie for “making her feel so comfortable that she could just fall asleep and apologized for her husband’s inability to recognize true hospitality when he saw it. We all laughed,” wrote Littell, “and the two lovers soon went arm in arm into the night.” If only Carolyn and John could have stayed in that cozy living room.
In the first days of 1999, John went to a meeting with Barry Diller’s USA Network in Los Angeles, arranged by Hachette. It became clear that David Pecker had indicated that John would play a large role, likely pushing for him to host.
“Fuck this!” John yelled, and left the room.
Steve Gillon wrote that John then phoned Pecker, and the two engaged in what staffers called “a fiery phone call.” At that point, John’s relationship with Pecker had devolved into war.
John tasked executive editor Biz Mitchell with hiring a forensic accountant, because, according to Gillon, “John was suspicious that Pecker was running John out to every dinner in town to attract advertisers, and then funneled the money into other titles at Hachette.” John wanted Biz to find out where the money was really going, because it wasn’t going to George editorial budgets nor toward the magazine’s profits. The move ramped up the vitriol with Pecker, and he let John know that, barring making a profit, Hachette would not renew their contract, which was expiring at the end of 1999.
“Pecker was comparing current sales, which was not unusual for a magazine that had just gone monthly three years earlier,” said Gillon. “The enormous success of the first couple of issues were unusual, and the comparison shouldn’t have held.”
But the antagonizers had gotten to John. It had been Michael Berman, and now it was David Pecker.
And then there was Anthony. Until this moment, John would not accept that he could not save Anthony, but this facade was becoming harder and harder to uphold. It was painful to watch someone under this much pressure, and perhaps Carolyn’s instinct to nurture brought her slowly but surely out of her isolation.
Carolyn had remained a lifeline for Carole and Anthony, accompanying them to nearly every hospital stay. John acknowledged as much, telling Billy Noonan, “I just worry about Carole… Carolyn has been really great to her. She does these little sweet things, like buy her friendship rings… I keep losing everyone. I really need to start thinking about having a family. [Losing Anthony] is going to suck.”
As the problems at George escalated in 1999, Carolyn started coming to the office once more. She would also accompany John in the search for new investors. On January 27, they were spotted coming out of the David Hare play The Blue Room at the Cort Theatre, which starred Nicole Kidman. Carolyn, while still in her signature black, had let her hair loose from the severe chignon and ponytail she had lately favored, her hair blowing wildly in the wind, much like she had worn it before the days when her every move was caught on camera.
Later in the month, Carolyn invited herself to Carole Radziwill’s parents’ house in Suffern, New York, to watch the Super Bowl. “ ‘I can’t believe you never invited me there,’ she says, indignant. ‘I want to see where you grew up. I’m coming,’ ” Carole wrote in What Remains. “After dinner, Carolyn looked through all of the wedding albums. ‘You look like Cary Grant!’ she says to my brother. She has all of them tell their stories. Jeff, my brother-in-law, just got his pilot’s license, and they talk about John’s plane. ‘I don’t know if I want him to fly when we have kids,’ she says.”
On Presidents’ Day weekend, Carolyn was supposed to go skiing with John in Utah but canceled. It’s unknown if this change in plans was the result of a fight, but, more likely, once Carolyn heard where they were staying—a place in Alta called the Peruvian Lodge, where the rooms were like dorms with shared bathrooms at the end of the hall—she took a pass. John called Chris Oberbeck last minute to see if he would join. Chris knew that John was having a rough time, and after checking with his own wife, he bent over backward to make the trip happen.
“About two years into their marriage, Carolyn seemed to be regaining her balance,” wrote Littell. “Which isn’t to say all was rosy—in fact, the two of them spent a fair amount of time locking horns.”
“They had an intense passion,” said Chris Oberbeck. “That passion was manifested in loving each other and really having a great time together, and it was also manifested in unbelievable fights.”
What Carolyn wanted from the marriage naturally put pressure on John, because she was asking for a full partnership in a way he had not been asked before. “Carolyn was not afraid to say no to John, or to get him angry,” Carole Radziwill said. “And he needed that.”
“Most women sort of became tongue-tied around John. But not Carolyn,” said Richard Wiese. “She was very strong-minded, knew what she wanted, and had absolutely no difficulty speaking her mind.”
But still, many tabloids could only focus on her employment—or lack thereof. “What does she do with her days?” was the query that the Washington Post felt entitled to ask the previous September.
It was a question that kept coming up. For the public, but no doubt for Carolyn herself as well. Carolyn was a woman whose energy and time had always been taken up with work. She wanted and needed to work. But the perennial question, since she had linked her life to John’s, was: What would that look like?
“She still hopes to return to a career. But what? There were a lot of stipulations. She couldn’t go near fashion because of John’s magazine, and she also had to be available to him and his unpredictable life,” wrote RoseMarie Terenzio. She traveled with him incessantly, recently especially so, looking for new backers. There were those who shouted she should be taking up charity work, to which she did give her time and support, albeit quietly. But officially putting her name to any of the many nonprofits that approached her had to wait. Given that their public life was primed to become even more public if John held office, Carolyn wanted to be cautious, not least because every move she made was being picked apart.
“Not to mention,” Terenzio continued, “that Carolyn’s high-profile presence would have disrupted most offices.” It would have, and sometimes did. Carolyn had become very close to Hamilton South, and if they didn’t spend an hour on the phone, she would sometimes pop over to his workplace. “But then everything just stopped. Everyone wanted to glimpse her, and it was mayhem,” he said. “Eventually, I moved closer to Tribeca, and we all had our evenings together so that we could spend time without my work life coming to a halt!
“Carolyn and John had home routines,” said South. “When Effie didn’t cook—and usually he did—Carolyn had one recipe, roast chicken with lemon and garlic. If it wasn’t one of those two then they ordered in, sometimes even from Kentucky Fried Chicken. I would come over, and Carolyn was always at the Dunbar desk in the side room as you walk in, that she had made her base. At home, Carolyn dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, and I would walk in to see her at the desk poring over the papers. The moment I entered, with her hands fluttering about her for emphasis, ‘You will not believe what is going on!’ And it was always about the world, never about her.
“When she wasn’t at that beautiful desk, she was on the couch, making phone calls to friends. Again, it was about them. Their lives, the world, a new film, or ballet on at Lincoln Center.”
Carole Radziwill said that, in the spring of 1999, she had spoken with Carolyn a good deal about getting into documentary filmmaking. “I was doing docs at ABC News, and she was always interested in illuminating other people’s stories.” She added, “I think, because of her upbringing, being raised by a single mom, she identified with the underdog, and now she was in a position to provide insight into the struggles and victories of ordinary people. That really appealed to her.”
Another complication to launching a career was the onus to have children—not just any children, but the JFK IIIs. “John was eager to start a family,” wrote Rob Littell. Carolyn was not. “She would, with a bit of bluster, say that she could never subject a baby to the weird, public spectacle of their life… I think she was frightened that she wouldn’t be a good mother, that she wasn’t strong enough to care for another human being.”
