‘I want to have kids, but whenever I raise the subject with Carolyn, she turns away and refuses to have sex with me.’
The speaker was John F Kennedy Jr, and he was sitting on the edge of a king-size bed, a phone cradled in the crook of his shoulder, pouring his heart out to a friend.
It was late on the afternoon of July 14, 1999 – two days before John’s fatal plane crash – and the last rays of sunlight were flooding his room at the Stanhope, a fashionable New York hotel located across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
‘It’s not just about sex,’ John told his friend. ‘It’s impossible to talk to Carolyn about anything. We’ve become like total strangers…’
For a moment, the words choked in John’s throat, and his friend could sense his struggle to regain his composure. Then all of John’s pent-up bitterness and frustration exploded over the phone line.
‘I’ve had it with her!’ he said. ‘It’s got to stop. Otherwise, we’re headed for divorce.’
A thousand days had passed since John exchanged wedding vows with Carolyn Bessette on a wild, unspoiled island off the coast of Georgia, and during that time the truth about their troubled marriage had been kept a well-guarded secret.
Now John and Carolyn were living apart – he at the Stanhope, she in their downtown loft in Tribeca – and John was on the verge of calling it quits.
Biographer Edward Klein describes their relationship as ‘a doomed fairy tale, a nightmare of escalating domestic violence, suspicions of infidelity and drugs’
From the start, Carolyn was in a quandary over who would make her wedding dress.
Should she ask Calvin Klein, who until recently had employed her as a mid-level publicist? Should she choose her old roommate, the talented black fashion designer Gordon Henderson? Or should she turn to Narciso Rodriguez, a former Calvin Klein staffer?
Carolyn knew that her choice of designer was certain to garner worldwide publicity.
It was not until 15 days before the wedding that Carolyn finally made a decision. She picked the relatively unknown Narciso Rodriguez to design both her rehearsal dinner dress and wedding gown.
Gordon Henderson, who was Carolyn’s closest friend, was devastated. He had dreamed of designing Carolyn’s dress – and becoming a bigger fashion star.
As a consolation, Carolyn asked Henderson to make John’s suit.
Preparations were conducted with all the secrecy of a military operation. Only a few close friends and family members were invited.
And on the day, everything seemed to go smoothly until Carolyn attempted to put on her wedding dress and found that she could not manage to get the $40,000 pearl-colored silk construction over her head. It was cut on the bias without a zipper and, like many such dresses, it was difficult to put on. Try as hard as she might, she could not squeeze herself into it.
Under mounting pressure, Carolyn grew hysterical and began yelling at everyone around her. Henderson gently led her into a bathroom, put a scarf over her head, and managed to get her into the dress. Then, still in a state of high anxiety, she sat while her makeup and hair were redone.
Carolyn’s stiletto heels drilled holes in the sandy beach on the way to Cumberland Island’s tiny wood-frame First African Baptist Church. A stunning six-foot-tall, size-six, corn-silk blonde bride, she was two hours late for her own wedding.
The marriage made front-page news everywhere. The man who could have had any woman in the world had chosen as his bride one who was not rich or famous or ennobled by family background or distinguished by any professional accomplishment.
What Carolyn had were certain charismatic qualities – exceptional beauty, a unique sense of style, and a shrewd, sharp, hard intelligence.
The media played the marriage as a Cinderella story, casting Carolyn as the commoner who had found true love with Prince Charming.
But it turned out to be a doomed fairy tale, a nightmare of escalating domestic violence, sexual infidelity and drugs.
When John and Carolyn returned from their honeymoon in the fall of 1996, they found a swarm of journalists camped outside their front door in the heart of Manhattan’s chic Tribeca district.
Over the course of the next few weeks, reporters foraged through the garbage and pursued them wherever they went.
Normally, only supernovas of the magnitude of Madonna had to suffer through this kind of public ordeal. But Carolyn was suddenly thrust into their celestial company.
Photos of her appeared everywhere. She drove the fashion world mad with excitement. Women’s Wear Daily crowned her a modern style icon, heir to Jackie O, her deceased mother-in-law.
Anna Wintour at Vogue was eager to get Carolyn to pose for a cover.
And Ralph Lauren tried to hire her as his personal muse. ‘Every time you design something, or create something,’ Ralph instructed one of his top aides, ‘think of Carolyn Bessette.’
John was accustomed to this kind of treatment. The narcissist in him thrived on it. To get attention, he often indulged in exhibitionist stunts, such as appearing shirtless in Central Park or having his picture taken while sailing with a thong-clad Carolyn.
Like most megastars, he dreaded the emptiness that came with being ignored.
John F. Kennedy, Jr. and wife Carolyn at the annual White House Correspondents dinner in May 1999 – two months before they died
But Carolyn was a different story. As the months wore on, she could not handle the relentless scrutiny. When a photographer approached her on the street, she cast her eyes to the ground and hunched her shoulders.
‘She makes herself look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ complained Calvin Klein.
To avoid the paparazzi, Carolyn sought refuge in the West Village apartment of Gordon Henderson.
‘She didn’t feel at home in the [Tribeca] apartment,’ said a friend. ‘She hated it… And John had decorated it – badly. It was very cold, like a young man’s first loft.’
It was clear to friends that Carolyn was cracking under the pressure. She displayed the classic signs of clinical depression. A few months after the marriage, she began spending more and more time locked inside her apartment, convulsed by crying jags.
As a child of divorce who had long been estranged from her father, Carolyn was sensitive to any sign of male desertion. In her view, John had forsaken her to work on George, his political lifestyle magazine.
One time she faxed him at his office: ‘Please come home now, I need you.’
She resented that John had reverted to his old bachelor ways – pumping iron at the gym late into the night, going off on kayak trips with the boys, and (Carolyn suspected) playing around behind her back with the girls.
One time, when John returned in the evening to their loft, he found Carolyn 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.
Without asking John’s permission, Carolyn gave keys to their loft to some of her friends so they could come and go as they pleased.
‘You’re a cokehead!’ John screamed at her, according to one of the people present that night.
Her friends in the fashion industry were aware that Carolyn was a heavy user of street drugs.
Cocaine made her intensely paranoid, especially when she heard rumors her husband had rekindled his romance with Daryl Hannah
Carolyn with John Jr at an event in New York City, October 1998
‘She and I went to dinner one night when John was sick at home with the flu,’ recalled a close acquaintance who worked at George magazine.
‘She made at least a half dozen trips to the bathroom, and came back to the table with white rings around her nostrils. We went from bar to bar, and she wanted to come over to my apartment, but I said no because I knew it would be an all-nighter. I finally dropped her off at 3am.
‘The next morning, John came into the office and asked, «Why did you keep my wife out so late?» And I said, «A better question, John, is why your wife didn’t want to go home».’
‘Carolyn was like a wild horse,’ this person continued. ‘She had a trash mouth and loved being irreverent. She used to call John a f*g all the time. Once, there was a party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private club in Florida, and Carolyn announced to a roomful of people, «I had to take a Puerto Rican bath on the way down in the airplane».’
Their fights frequently turned violent, and John told friends that he felt trapped in an abusive relationship. One time he had to be rushed to the emergency room for an operation to repair a severed nerve in his right wrist. He dismissed the injury as the result of a stupid household accident. But his friends were certain that Carolyn was the culprit.
When she heard rumors that John was seeing his old flame Daryl Hannah behind her back, Carolyn flew into a rage.
People who knew Carolyn doubted she would ever let John go. Her insecurity fueled a need to control and manipulate; her addiction to cocaine made her paranoid.
She was jealous of John’s sister, Caroline Kennedy, and his business partner at George, Michael Berman – in fact, of anyone who challenged her for undisputed control over John.
‘Carolyn,’ said one of her confidantes, ‘poisoned John’s relationship with Michael. I heard her tell John: «I don’t believe Michael’s your real friend. The only reason he’s close to you is because you’re John F Kennedy Jr».’
But it was Carolyn’s constant meddling in the editorial operations of George that finally wrecked John’s relationship with Michael. Partly as a result, the magazine, which had been Berman’s idea in the first place, was teetering on the brink of disaster.
Carolyn and JFK Jr, whose arm is injured, walking in Tribeca, October 1997
Carolyn parties with friends at New York City’s Indochine restaurant in November 1994
Carolyn had also engineered a bitter falling-out with Caroline Kennedy after hearing that John’s sister had made snide remarks about the Cumberland Island wedding.
A stickler for punctuality, Caroline had criticized the bride for being late to her own wedding.
Now Carolyn and Caroline were barely on speaking terms, and John was caught in the middle.
When he married, John dreamed of having a son. He even picked out a name: Flynn. But Carolyn was never willing to start a family.
‘I hate living in a fishbowl,’ she confided to a friend. ‘John may be comfortable living like this, but I’m not. How could I bring a child into this kind of world?’
What attracted John to this ill-fated relationship? Several explanations were making the rounds in the months before his violent death.
Many of his friends told me that they suspected he had married Carolyn because he was looking for someone to take the place of his dead mother.
John was still as needy as the little boy who had saluted his father’s coffin after the presidential assassination. And John himself admitted to his friend on the phone: ‘I’m attracted to strong-willed women like my mother.’
But Carolyn was not just a strong-willed woman. She could be demanding, domineering and, according to even her best friends, downright bitchy.
Some people felt that John overlooked her faults because he was blinded by her glamorous Jackie O style.
Like the ethereal Jackie, Carolyn affected an air of mystery and unavailability, which drove the media crazy and sustained the public frenzy that John found exciting. And like Jackie, Carolyn was very controlling, which made John feel protected and cared for.
From the moment John laid eyes on her, he became obsessed. ‘He could not keep his hands off her,’ one of his friends told me. ‘He constantly stroked her hair, which she had dyed white blonde.’
Carolyn accepted John’s worshipful attention as though it was her due. And that aloof attitude set her apart from other women John had dated in the past – Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sharon Stone, Daryl Hannah and many lesser-known names.
Many of those women had thrown themselves at John, which made him suspicious of their motives. Carolyn appeared to be unimpressed by his fame.
‘The narcissist in him thrived on it. To get attention, he often indulged in exhibitionist stunts, such as appearing shirtless in Central Park or having his picture taken while sailing with a thong-clad Carolyn,’ Klein writes
Carolyn with Calvin Klein, left, at a New York City party in October, 1992
John did not divulge personal matters to the people he worked with at George magazine. He reserved his confidences for one or two close friends. And to them, he disclosed his worst fear: that his wife, Carolyn, was cheating on him.
Though he did not know it at the time, John’s suspicions were not far-fetched. Carolyn had rekindled a relationship with her old boyfriend Michael Bergin, a former underwear model she had met – and fallen in love with – when they were both working for Calvin Klein.
‘Michael lived in a second-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, and I was in his apartment one day, and we were in the middle of something when he was buzzed on the intercom from the apartment building front door,’ one of Bergin’s friends told me.
‘Michael asked me to leave immediately, and when I went out, I found Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy hiding under the staircase.
‘I said, «Hi, Carolyn, what are you doing?»‘ the friend continued. ‘And she said, ‘Oh, hi, I’m just going upstairs to Michael’s.
‘When I got home, Michael called me and said in a kind of panic, «You saw Carolyn! Why did you talk to her?» He really loved Carolyn, and wanted to protect her.’
For a time, Carolyn managed to keep her relationship with Bergin a secret from her husband. But then, during one of their screaming matches, she blurted out the truth.
As John later told a friend, he was thunderstruck. In his narcissistic self-absorption, he found it inconceivable that a woman would choose another man over him.
It took time for him to recover from this devastating blow, but eventually he convinced himself that his wife’s behavior was more a reflection on her than on him.
He persuaded Carolyn to see a psychiatrist. He made sure that she took her daily dose of antidepressant medication. To amuse her, he flew her to exotic hideaways for romantic vacations. And in March 1999 he began to join her in marriage counseling.
Nothing worked.
Four months later, on July 12, 1999, Carolyn stormed out of the marriage counselor’s office when the therapist raised the subject of her drug habit. Then, in a supreme act of rejection, Carolyn began to sleep in a spare room that John had used to store his exercise equipment.
Two days later, on July 14, humiliated and at his wit’s end, John moved out of the Tribeca loft and checked in to a $2,000-a-night suite at the Stanhope.
The day after, Thursday, July 15, John visited his orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital to have a soft cast removed from his left ankle. Six weeks before, he had suffered a fracture in a hang gliding accident and had been using crutches to get around.
Underwear model Michael Bergin later starred in Bay Watch (pictured in 2000 on the show)
JFK Jr. on crutches outside a George magazine party, June 1999
The ankle was still too tender to bear the full weight of his muscular six-foot-one, 190-pound frame. And his surgeon strongly advised him not to fly solo for at least another ten days.
The surgeon was not the only one who counseled caution.
A few weeks before, just after John crashed his hang glider, his friend John Perry Barlow expressed concern that John had become overconfident about his flying. Barlow urged John to view his broken ankle as a warning sign.
John’s Piper Saratoga II HP, for which he had paid $300,000, was a high-performance plane that seriously taxed his experience, which totaled only 37 hours in the air with a certified flight instructor. No one – not even Carolyn – knew that John’s meager hours ‘in command’ did not meet insurance company requirements.
As a result, John was flying without insurance on his life and those of his passengers.
On his last night alive, John planned to have cocktails at the Stanhope, then go to Yankee Stadium to watch Roger Clemens pitch against the Atlanta Braves. John and his friend Gary Ginsberg, a former editor at George who was now working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, were to be the guests of the Yankees’ principal owner, George Steinbrenner, in his field-side box.
As always, the image-conscious John dressed with care. Then, with the help of his crutches, he made his way to the hotel elevator and descended to the lobby. When the doors opened, John swung himself onto the black-and-white marble floor and negotiated the several yards to the bar.
The noisy room fell silent the moment he entered. Heads swiveled as he made his way to a corner table, where two young women were waiting. One of them was his wife. The other was Carolyn’s sister Lauren Bessette, an attractive, dark-haired investment banker with Morgan Stanley.
Lauren told a friend that it had been her idea for the three of them to meet for drinks. She was gravely alarmed over Carolyn and John’s decision to live apart, and she said that she thought it would be a good idea for them to discuss their problems in front of her. Maybe she could help break their emotional logjam.
Carolyn with her sister Lauren in New York City, 1998
JFK Jr in the cockpit of his small aircraft with Carolyn
July 17, 1999: A coast guard helicopter lifts a rescue swimmer from the water during the search for debris of JFK Jr’s plane
But the relationship between John and Carolyn had become so tense and ugly that neither of them was in the mood to talk. They sat in stony silence. As Lauren told the story, she asked John and Carolyn to join her in holding hands.
At first they refused. But when Lauren insisted, they reluctantly clasped her hands.
Lauren was aware that Carolyn had vowed never to fly with John in his plane. But as she squeezed her sister’s hand, Lauren urged her to make an exception and accompany her husband in his Piper Saratoga the next day to Hyannis Port, where family members and friends were assembling for the wedding of his cousin Rory Kennedy.
For added encouragement, Lauren offered to fly along with the couple as far as Martha’s Vineyard, where she planned to spend the weekend with friends. The three of them would make the flight together from Fairfield, New Jersey.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it’ll be fun.’
First John, then Carolyn agreed to Lauren’s proposal.
‘Great,’ Lauren said. ‘Then I’ll see you guys tomorrow at the airport.’
From The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America’s First Family for 150 Years by Edward Klein. Copyright © 2003 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
