Screaming into each other’s faces from inches apart, John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were not exactly looking their uber-glamorous best.
It was February 1996, just seven months before America’s society wedding of the decade was due to take place on an idyllic island in Georgia, and the future bride and groom were tearing strips off each other in New York City’s Battery Park.
And all of it was captured by photographer Angie Coqueran, snapping away unseen.
The couple ended up physically fighting. At one point, Jr grabbed Carolyn’s hand and pulled off her engagement ring so hard he broke it.
‘The whole thing was very public, and it made me really uncomfortable and nervous,’ Coqueran told the Daily Mail last year. ‘Eventually they stopped arguing and there was a lot of sitting in silence on the park bench.’
When they finally left the park, Coqueran says she heard John Jr tell his fiancée: ‘I don’t even know her… I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Those who know anything about the notoriously wandering eye of Kennedy men will probably think they know exactly what Carolyn was talking about.
The official ‘Kennedy-approved’ narrative is that the beautiful, talented young couple had a glittering but doomed romance that ended tragically in July 1999 when John Jr crashed the light aircraft he was flying into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, killing Carolyn, her sister Lauren and himself.
It was February 1996, just seven months before America’s society wedding of the decade was due to take place on an idyllic island in Georgia, and the future bride and groom were tearing strips off each other in New York City ‘s Battery Park
Screaming into each other’s faces from inches apart, John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were not exactly looking their uber-glamorous best
Carolyn with RFK Jr. at an event in New York City, October 1998
The tragedy – when both John Jr and Carolyn were in their thirties – inevitably preserved their memory when they were still young, cool and hot (he the founder of hip magazine George and she a senior publicist at Calvin Klein and revered clothes horse).
Their doomed romance naturally provided a perfect new chapter in the so-called curse of the Kennedy family. ‘Tragedy revisits the Kennedys,’ intoned the New York Times in an editorial that mourned ‘a family of unfinished journeys, of magnetic personalities cut down far too early.’
Now, controversial television writer and director Ryan Murphy, master of the glossy drama series, is focusing on the couple in the latest iteration of his ‘American Story’ franchise.
After ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘American Crime Story,’ the whirlwind courtship and marriage of John Jr and Carolyn will provide the first installment of ‘American Love Story,’ a collection of romances which captured the world’s attention.
Sarah Pidgeon will play Carolyn, ex-model Paul Kelly will be John Jr and Naomi Watts, his mother Jacqueline.
Murphy has been repeatedly accused in the past of playing fast and loose with history in his dramas. And it’s worth asking which Bessette-Kennedy relationship he’ll give us now, because rival biographies have offered vastly conflicting versions of their troubled relationship.
Do you go, for instance, for the philandering and unhinged coke-head Carolyn — who turned up two hours late for her own wedding — of Edward Klein’s scandal-packed 2003 book ‘The Kennedy Curse’?
Klein described their relationship as ‘a doomed fairy tale, a nightmare of escalating domestic violence, suspicions of infidelity, and drugs — a union that seemed destined to end in one kind of disaster or another.’
Or was Carolyn the cruelly hounded but always kind and compassionate perfect princess that Elizabeth Beller presented in 2024 in her fawning, #MeToo era biography ‘Once Upon A Time: The Captivating Life Of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.’
Or is the truth somewhere in between these two extremes?
Biographer Edward Klein described their relationship as ‘a doomed fairy tale, a nightmare of escalating domestic violence, suspicions of infidelity and drugs’
He was 31 and she was 26. They came from drastically different backgrounds
Last year, in her book ‘Ask Not: The Kennedys And The Women They Destroyed,’ the Daily Mail’s Maureen Callahan made clear that Carolyn was hardly perfect, reporting that she took cocaine heavily to control her weight and antidepressants to cope with the pressure of fame and marriage.
However, said Callahan, John Jr was hardly blameless – ‘playing fast and loose with Carolyn’s heart for years’ and then, after they married, expecting her to fall into the housewife role of cooking and cleaning their New York loft apartment.
Callahan quoted a friend of Carolyn’s saying: ‘Anybody from her past, he wanted gone. They were grooming [her] to be John Kennedy’s wife, and John Kennedy was being groomed to go into politics.
‘I think the problem is that Carolyn created this Stepford political wife to please John. That’s when she started to die.’
Some have said that the only two people who really understood their relationship went down in that little Piper Saratoga plane, but the speculation seems set to continue.
It’s not even entirely settled how the couple first met, which was soon after Carolyn moved to New York from Boston in 1992.
One theory is that they ran into each other while jogging in Central Park, another has it that Kelly Klein, Calvin’s second wife, introduced them at a party, while a third – now seen as the most likely – claims that it happened when John Jr visited Calvin Klein’s New York showroom where Carolyn dealt with VIP clients.
He was 31 and she was 26. They came from drastically different backgrounds. The daughter of an architectural engineer and a public school teacher who divorced when Carolyn was eight, she grew up in the New York suburbs and later Greenwich, Connecticut. She went to Boston University and, after a brief attempt to break into modeling and working as a nightclub promoter, she got a sales job at Calvin Klein in Boston.
Her keen fashion sense and considerable people skills rapidly earned her promotion to the Manhattan flagship store.
Meanwhile, John Jr was America’s most eligible bachelor, the dreamboat Kennedy scion nicknamed ‘John-John’ who’d won the heart of the nation when, on his third birthday, he’d stepped forward at his father’s state funeral and saluted the flag-draped casket.
He’d had an Ivy League education at Brown University before, exploiting the sort of gold-plated connections that came with being a Kennedy, he’d dabbled in acting, law and journalism. When he met Carolyn he was three years away from co-founding the glossy magazine George, a politics-as-lifestyle and fashion monthly.
John Jr – whose previous girlfriends included Brooke Shields, Cindy Crawford and actress Sarah Jessica Parker – had left a trail of broken hearts and would have intimidated most women. However, Carolyn had never been cowed by celebrity (which was why she ended up working with them at Calvin Klein) and reportedly never chased him.
Some said she hardly needed to, given she was not only strikingly beautiful but also sparklingly intelligent. ‘It’s got to be one of the things that attracted [John Jr] to her – she had such repartee and such wit,’ said publicist Paul Wilmot who worked with her at Calvin Klein. ‘She had just enough sense of sarcasm.’
In terms of personality and interests, they were not obviously compatible – she was a big party girl while his idea of a perfect weekend was a grueling hike in the mountains.
Some have said that the only two people who really understood their relationship went down in that little Piper Saratoga plane, but the speculation seems set to continue
In terms of personality, they were not obviously compatible – she was a big party girl while his idea of a perfect weekend was a grueling hike in the mountains
Another reason why they didn’t immediately fall for each other was that they were both with other people when they met – John Jr was dating Hollywood actress Daryl Hannah while Carolyn was seeing Calvin Klein underwear model and future Baywatch star Michael Bergin. (The latter later claimed in a book published after her death that Carolyn’s sexual obsession with him continued after her marriage to John Jr.)
By 1994, however, John Jr and Carolyn were definitely dating and, predictably, the paparazzi couldn’t get enough of them. The media’s continual presence in their lives meant, inevitably, that their public spats – which weren’t infrequent – were chronicled as fully as their glitzy party appearances.
He was used to – and some say, relished – relentless media attention but she’d never sought fame and found it difficult to handle, (Sarah Jessica Parker once observed that going out with John Jr taught her what it was really like to be famous) and complained to friends she couldn’t do anything to advance her career without being accused of exploiting the Kennedy name.
In 1996, John Jr and Carolyn married in front of just 40 people in a tiny wooden church on an island off Georgia – albeit an event that involved a major security operation to ensure their privacy.
As they moved into John Jr’s loft apartment in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, (besieged 24/7 by photographers and TV crews) the media chatter rapidly became fevered speculation over when she might have a baby, which Carolyn would fend off with jokes.
According to Klein, however, Carolyn’s refusal to give John Jr the children he craved – and indeed, her refusal to even have sex with him – was just one of the growing rifts between the couple.
Although Klein credited Carolyn with a ‘shrewd, sharp, hard intelligence,’ he said that she crumpled under the intense public attention, which not only increased her anxiety but also made her controlling.
‘It was clear to friends that Carolyn was cracking under the pressure,’ he wrote. ‘She displayed the classical signs of clinical depression. A few months after the wedding, she began spending more and more time locked in her apartment, convulsed by crying gags…’
Carolyn’s downward spiral, Klein writes, had started before they married. He recounted how, on her wedding day, she’d become ‘hysterical’ when she had trouble getting into her Narciso Rodriguez dress and ‘in a state of high anxiety’ was two hours late for the ceremony.
After they wed, her behavior became ever more alarming, said Klein. He reported how she stopped going out and became a ‘heavy user of street drugs,’ sitting in restaurants unaware she had ‘white rings around her nostrils.’ He said John Jr returned home one night to find her ‘sprawled on the floor in front of a sofa, disheveled and hollow-eyed, snorting cocaine with a gaggle of gay fashionistas –clothing designers, stylists, male models, and one or two publicists.’
Klein – whose claims, it must be said, came secondhand from what John Jr had told friends – says their marital squabbles became increasingly violent as both had ‘fiery tempers,’ culminating in John Jr once being rushed to an emergency room for surgery to repair a severed nerve in his right wrist.
The cocaine made her intensely paranoid, especially when she heard rumors her husband had rekindled his romance with Daryl Hannah, the biographer claimed. Meanwhile, John Jr was obsessed with the fear that she was back with ex-boyfriend Michael Bergin. Klein said Carolyn continued to sleep with Bergin even after she moved in with John Jr although the sexual affair ended after her wedding.
Klein quoted Bergin’s former manager as telling him he’d once found Carolyn hiding under the model’s staircase and, on another occasion, breaking a window to get into his apartment after climbing up his fire escape.
John Jr eventually moved out of their loft and into a hotel. However, some claim he had been trying to work out his differences with Carolyn and try to save their marriage when they took their fateful plane trip.
The cocaine made her intensely paranoid, especially when she heard rumors her husband had rekindled his romance with Daryl Hannah, Klein claimed
The media’s continual presence in their lives meant, inevitably, that their public spats – which weren’t infrequent – were chronicled as fully as their glitzy party appearances
In the spirit of other recent books that have tried to rescue the reputation of famous women who’ve been monstered by a male-dominated world, Elizabeth Beller did her best to resurrect Bessette’s reputation in a 2024 biography, which the Washington Post dismissed as ‘dewy-eyed.’
Despite Beller’s rejection of Klein’s shocking reporting, her book barely addressed the drug allegations, quoting a friend who claimed Carolyn ‘barely drank wine,’ and simply dismissed her alleged affairs as mere friendships.
Beller, who admitted she was ‘not interested in salacious content,’ instead found only good things to say.
‘[The press] portrayed her as manipulative, crazy, cold [and] icy, and it couldn’t be further from the truth,’ she told Women’s Wear Daily. ‘She was warm, funny, effervescent and an extremely good friend, and someone who practiced random acts of kindness on a regular basis, not only to just her friends.’
Insisting her story was really ‘one of relentless stalking and public scrutiny,’ Beller concentrated on heart-warming stories such as how Carolyn compassionately urged John Jr to call Princes William and Harry after their mother’s 1997 death.
As for their well-documented fights, Beller insists that, underneath all the froth, the couple were meant for each other. ‘They would love hard and they would fight hard,’ she quotes a friend as saying. ‘But they were very much a couple.’
But even Beller had to admit that Carolyn was prescribed antidepressants, and that by early 1999, the marriage was in turmoil and the couple were in counseling.
She also recounted a momentous break-up dinner at which John Jr gave Carolyn a letter from a close friend who ‘claimed Carolyn was a user, a partier, that she was out for fame and fortune,’ and that Carolyn ‘dated guys around town.’ Beller added: ‘John casually tossed the piece of paper at her, stood and walked out the door.’
Whatever else Ryan Murphy has to say about this most turbulent relationship, it’s hard to imagine he will pass up the dramatic potential of that scene.
