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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
INTRODUCTION
- AN ILL-FATED HOUSE
PART ONE
- SCOURGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
PART TWO
- AFFLICTION
CHAPTER THREE
PART THREE
- TRIBULATION
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
PART FOUR
- VISITATION
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
EPILOGUE
- THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF KENNEDY
ALSO BY EDWARD KLEIN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES
NOTES
INDEX
Notes
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
AN ILLFATED HOUSE
It was an illfated house … . A curse seemed to hang over
the family, making men sin in spite of themselves and
bringing suffering and death down upon the innocent as
well as the guilty.
—EDITH HAMILTON, Mythology
“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, who recalled the conversation
for me several days later, while it was still fresh in his memory. “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.
For the life of him, John could not understand why his marriage had soured,
especially since it had begun with so much sweetness and hope. An inveterate
prankster, John eagerly endorsed Carolyn’s wish to keep their wedding plans
secret. “This is one thing I’m in control of, not John,” Carolyn told a close
friend. “No one’s going to know where or when we’re getting married.”
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 who now worked for the Paris couturier Nino
Cerruti? Carolyn knew that her choice would have major repercussions, for her
wedding dress and its designer were certain to garner worldwide publicity.
It was not until fifteen 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 dress, as well as Caroline Kennedy
Schlossberg’s matron-of-honor dress.
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 and
orchestrate the details of the wedding. Preparations were conducted with all the
secrecy of a military operation. Only a few close friends and family members
were invited. 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 crepe floor-length gown 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 blond bride, she was two hours late for her own
wedding.
The one-room church was illuminated by candlelight, and it was so dim inside
that the young Jesuit priest, the Reverend Charles J. O’Byrne of Manhattan’s
Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s funeral
Mass was held in 1994, had to read the service by flashlight. John’s cousin and
closest friend, Anthony Radziwill, served as best man (as John had served as
best man at Tony’s wedding), and at the end of the ceremony John turned to
Tony and told him that he had never been happier in his life.
The marriage made front-page news everywhere, and a new Kennedy myth
was born. 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—a union that seemed destined to end in one kind of disaster
or another.
When John and Carolyn returned from their honeymoon in the fall of 1996, they
found a swarm of journalists camped outside their front door at 20 North Moore
Street in the heart of Manhattan’s chic TriBeCa district. The rowdy media mob
terrified Carolyn, and in a gallant effort to protect his wife, John pleaded with
the reporters and cameramen to back off and give her a chance to adjust to her
new role as a celebrity.
His pleas fell on deaf ears. Over the course of the next few weeks, the siege of
North Moore Street got only worse. Reporters foraged through the newlyweds’
garbage, searching for clues to their sex life. Paparazzi pursued John and
Carolyn wherever they went, pounding on the sides of their automobile to make
them turn toward the cameras, then blinding them with flashbulbs.
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. The editor of Women’s Wear Daily, Patrick
McCarthy, crowned Carolyn a modern style icon, heir to Jackie O, her deceased
mother-in-law. Anna Wintour at Vogue and Liz Tilberis at Harper’s Bazaar
were eager to get Carolyn to pose for their covers. And Ralph Lauren tried to
hire Carolyn 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 Bessette. As someone who had grown up in the klieg lights
of public scrutiny, John equated celebrity with power. And like most megastars,
he dreaded the emptiness that came with being ignored.
But Carolyn was a different story. As the months wore on, she could not
handle the relentless personal scrutiny and exploitation that went with public
glorification. 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. And indeed, in many
photos, she looked like a hunted creature.
To avoid the paparazzi, Carolyn sought refuge in the West Village apartment
of Gordon Henderson. “She didn’t feel at home in the North Moore Street
apartment,” said a friend. “She hated it. She didn’t like where it was located.
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 and, as gossip columnist Liz Smith observed,
“bemoaning her fate as the wife of the most famous man in the world.”
“John’s life was huge—with dozens of friendships and involvements—but
Carolyn couldn’t handle that,” one of her closest friends told me. “She didn’t
want to go out. She would ditch John’s friends, not show up for dinner, refuse go
to people’s houses or events. She burned a lot of bridges.”
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.” In addition, 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—cloth-ing 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
who was present that night.
Her friends in the fashion industry were aware that Carolyn was a heavy user
of street drugs.
“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 three A.M. 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 fag 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 tried to dismiss
the injury as the result of a stupid household accident. But his friends knew
better: they were certain that Carolyn was the culprit.
Both Carolyn and John had fiery tempers, but it was always she who seemed
to get the better of their arguments. 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 Schlossberg, and
his business partner at George, Michael Berman—in fact, of anyone who
challenged her for undisputed control over John.
“Carolyn didn’t like Michael Berman,” said one of her friends. “She thought
Michael wasn’t on the up-and-up, and that he had a vested interest in her
husband. She 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 Berman and was one of
the factors that led to Berman’s departure. Partly as a result, the magazine, which
had been Berman’s idea in the first place, was teetering on the brink of disaster.
“The divorce between Michael Berman and JFK Jr. was fateful for George,”
said Jean-Louis Ginibre, the former editorial director of the U.S. division of
Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, the Paris-based publisher that bankrolled and
distributed George. “When Berman left, something was lost in the mix.”
Carolyn had also engineered a bitter falling-out with Caroline Kennedy
Schlossberg 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 and for insisting on wearing four-
inch heels as she trudged down the sandy beach to the church. Now Carolyn and
Caroline were barely on speaking terms, and John was caught in the middle
