John F. Kennedy Jr: Great Expectations; In Honor of America’s Prince Charming

In September 1999, Vanity Fair featured Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy on the cover of the magazine. Carolyn and her husband, John F. Kennedy, Jr. had died only 2 months prior in a plane crash that shocked the world. Writer David Michaelis wrote a poignant piece about John John, America’s Prince Charming, titled Great Expectations. Longtime friends, Michaelis reminisced about all the things we loved about JFK Jr.: charm, humor, dynamic personality, stunning good looks.

John F. Kennedy Jr. had been in the spotlight almost since birth. He was born just 17 days after his father won the White House and was still an infant when his father and namesake became president. The nation was captivated by the Kennedys and their small children. But the glare intensified following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. The image of a 3-year-old JFK Jr. saluting his father’s casket on his young birthday was ingrained in the nation’s cultural collective memory. From that point forward, the boy nicknamed John John would always generate a large amount of publicity.

John lived a very public life in New York City. I remember from a very young age my mother always talking about him: how handsome he was and how normal he seemed. She would always chuckle at the photos of him riding his bike to work as he was dressed in a nicely tailored suit with his pant legs stuffed into his socks so they wouldn’t get caught or dirty. When I moved to NYC as an adult there were always JFK Jr. sightings: on the subway, at the NYC marathon, walking in Tribeca, in the elevator at Calvin Klein (when he started dating Carolyn).

I heard a great story right after his passing. The night before he died he attended a Yankees home game. As all New Yorkers, John took the subway up to the game. Anyway who has ever taken the subway to a Yanks game knows its standing room only and the car is packed to the brim with Yankees fans pushing in until the car hits capacity and you can no longer move (or breathe). John had recently suffered a leg injury and got on the subway in a cast. He stuffed himself into the car and stood just like all the other Yankees fans on their way to the game. A few minutes later, someone noticed his cast and crutches and offered him their seat. He refused at first, finally accepting the gracious offer. He proceeded to announce, “Who ever said that New Yorkers aren’t the nicest people in the world,” to the amusement of the entire train car who howled and clapped. Nobody bothered him because he was JFK Jr., because on that crowded subway, on that hot steamy night, he was a New Yorker just like the rest of us.

Great Expectations

Somehow, even as John Kennedy accepted that he belonged to America, he also managed to belong to himself. The author, a longtime family friend, learned firsthand just how hard that must have been—and how amazing the grace with which Kennedy took his place in history.

A long, long time ago, when he was John—just John—I knew him a little. I was a friend of his sister Caroline’s from school. Her brother was a skinny 13-year-old with a big flop of hair. He was thoughtful, undemanding. He remembered your name. He had a watchful eye, a quietness that did not seem to mark him as a Kennedy male, and a mischievous streak that did. As a younger brother he could be protective and loving but also loose, goofy—goofy in a way that kept him from having to control the world too much.

As he grew older, authority came to him, and he wore it naturally. If, as a boy, he had been embarrassed by his skinniness, he seemed surprised as a man to have become beautiful—no other word for it. He moved with Olympian grace, back rippling, stomach quilted with muscle. If he was vain about his body, he seemed unconcerned with his handsomeness, and careless with his hair and clothes.

He could poke fun at his own myth brilliantly, and knew how to be honest with a wry smile and wrenching laughter. To a remarkable degree he remained unself-conscious. His sense of obligation to his family showed itself in one physical quality that I remember: He had trouble sitting still. He could not seem to help himself; he was always moving restlessly in and out of rooms.

When he entered or left a room he did something overpowering to that room and the people in it, something that no one else, except perhaps his parents, his sister, or Princess Diana, could do. Fame is a gross distortion of a human being, but he made it look as if you or I could do it. I once spent a quarter of an hour being John F. Kennedy Jr., which gave me an idea of who he was and what it might have cost him had he not managed to find a coherent sense of self.

The setting was a room in a senior-citizen center somewhere in Rhode Island late in the spring of 1980, when his uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Working on the campaign, I happened to enter that room of seniors with one of the senator’s nieces, Kerry Kennedy. The crowd was expecting her. They knew that Kerry went to Brown University in nearby Providence. And because it was also known that John F. Kennedy Jr. was enrolled at Brown, and because I was close enough in age and height to John, and because Kennedys are known to travel in multiples, the seniors simply assumed that I was the only surviving son of the late President Kennedy. It took nothing more than showing my face in that room: I was the boy who had saluted his father’s flag-draped coffin. I was “John-John,” or, as they pronounced it, in a kind of love chant, “Jawn-Jawn.”

Over and over: Jawn-Jawn, Jawn-Jawn. It felt like undertow. The wildly grasping hands, the gaping mouths, the talonlike fingernails—all suddenly in my face, on my body, deeply in my flesh. I no longer belonged to myself, I was theirs. I remember telling row after row of wheelchair-bound seniors that I wasn’t John. No one listened. Everyone was bewitched. John-John, I was, Jawn-Jawn I would be.

For me it was only for a matter of minutes. He had a lifetime of it. By some act of will, or strand of DNA, he would not be conquered by the assault—not by the cameras, not by the beating of muffled drums or flags at half-mast or the film clips that again and again swept his smiling, unhurt parents from Love Field to their doom, and him to his salute outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral. He had been history and he would be history. Though he was part of everyone’s past, he somehow understood that he must always remain in the present. If he had a chance to live outside the myth, it was by mastering the here and now.

I saw him leaving a room a couple of years ago, at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C., which he was attending as the founding editor in chief of George magazine. At the end of the evening, in one of the wide, carpeted hallways of the Hilton, my wife, Clara, and I were pulled into an expanding swirl of people, eddying urgently around a fixed center. My first thought was that here was the scene of a medical emergency. Someone must be on the floor, having a heart attack, because of the way people near the center of the pack were shouting in alarmed, incoherent bursts. Others respectfully kept their distance from the center yet also refused in the crisis to budge from their places. More and more people packed in behind us, until we were all pressed together and holding our breath in suspense, witnesses to the emergency of John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s leaving the Hilton.

He seemed interested in fulfillment. In recent years, he had settled down, made commitments. But still you never knew with him how hard it was to live with his feelings—or, for that matter, with expectations, memorabilia, houses, dubious privacy, plentiful money, grief more dreadful than it seems possible to endure.

In the dining room of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, a little after 10:15 p.m. on May 19, 1994, John told family and friends that she was dead. Minutes later, a desperate keening could be heard from a back hallway. It sounded as if it might have been one of the old Greek maids from the days of Onassis. It turned out to be a woman no one knew, silver-haired, odd-looking, who suddenly appeared in the front hallway and embraced John. He at first took her to be one of his Bouvier cousins. But when he gallantly apologized for not knowing her, the woman told him first one, then another obviously fake name, and he realized that she had come in off the street, from the crowds that had been logjammed behind blue sawhorses for days on the sidewalk below.

That scene in the hallway could have played out in so many ways, ugly or angry, weird or graceful. Good manners can help at a time like that; so can kindness, patience, and experience with the chaos that was always at the edge of his family’s life. By the time his mother died, he had learned simplicity too, which was her greatness. But to know how to handle an intruder at your mother’s deathbed, you need above all to be true to yourself. He gently told the woman, “Madam, you don’t belong here.”

Identity is the question we all have to solve, and that’s why John Kennedy’s triumph, his ability to be himself, despite odds no one would bet on, was a miracle to witness.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: The Private Princess; In Honor of My Style Icon

In September 1999, Vanity Fair featured Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy on the cover of the magazine. Carolyn and her husband, John F. Kennedy, Jr. had died only 2 months prior in a plane crash that shocked the world. Writer Evgenia Peretz captured the heart and soul, as well as style, in the article The Private Princess, which featured stunning black and white photographs taken by Bruce Weber.

On the 10^th anniversary of her death, I am saddened by the loss of my style icon and wanted to print the article that was so touching after her passing. Bessette-Kennedy had everything that a girl could want: grace, poise, and a million watt smile that I loved seeing in the pages of society and fashion magazines. Even ten years after their deaths, her style epitomizes a timeless aesthetic.

She was only a few years older than me, both of us having long blond hair, living in NYC, obsessed with clothes. I saw so much of her in me and I’ve heard the same thing said by other friends who lived in NYC at the time. She was the girl we all envied – she did marry our dream boy JFK Jr. And let’s not forget the fashion. She always looked perfect, whether she was attending a black-tie event or walking her dog on a Tribeca street.

Her look was effortless and she made it look so easy. She carried the Hermes Birkin long before Victoria Beckham amassed a $3 million collection. She knew Narciso Rodriguez was talented by allowing the then unknown fashion to design her elegant wedding dress. She had truly timeless style: often dressed in black, as most New Yorkers do, she embraced fashion labels such as Yohji Yamamoto, Prada, Manolo Blahnik, Miu Miu and, of course, Calvin Klein. She was rarely seen without her strong, red lipstick and otherwise bare face, long blond hair either pulled back or worn pin straight. She had a distinct look: sophisticated, elegant, timeless, classic.

Carolyn Bessette was born in White Plains, New York on January 7, 1966. Voted “Ultimate Beautiful Person” of her high school class of 1983, Bessette grew up in a wealthy corner of Connecticut just outside of New York City with twin sisters, Lisa and Lauren, just one year older.

Bessette graduated from Boston University, where she was the cover girl for the “Girls of BU” 1988 calendar, and went on to work in PR at Calvin Klein. She first met and spoke with Kennedy when both were running in Central Park and impressed him with her beauty, intelligence, and sincerity. Their fairy-tale marriage on September 21, 1996 took place in a 100-year-old, flower strewn chapel on Cumberland Island, a secluded island off the Georgian coast.

After her marriage to “John-John” as her husband is often affectionately called, Bessette was the focus of much media attention. Declared a trendsetter by the national press, she was often compared to her late mother-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, because of her fierce protection of her own (and Kennedy’s) privacy, as well as her work for charitable causes.

Bessette and Kennedy, along with her sister Lauren, were killed when their small private plane, piloted by Kennedy, crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999. When rescuers found the wreckage a few days after the crash, the bodies of sisters Carolyn and Lauren were still holding hands.

The Private Princess

With her dazzling blond head set firmly on her elegant shoulders, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy confronted a ravenous spotlight—and the inevitable comparisons to Jackie—from the moment she stepped out of that tiny Cumberland Island chapel at John Kennedy’s side. But to those around her, and to photographer Bruce Weber, she showed a face of laughter, a wealth of tenderness, and a profound commitment to her husband, friends, and family during her brief but spirited life.

Just as John F. Kennedy Jr. was inextricably bound to his father’s legacy, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, from the moment she wed John on Cumberland Island in 1996, was destined to be enshrined by the media as the next Jackie Onassis. And, really, who could blame them? There were, for one thing, the on-paper similarities: like Jackie, Carolyn was Catholic and her parents divorced. And then there was that look: that smart, minimalist sexiness that instantly made her a gold standard of modern beauty. With a public aloofness that was invariably termed “mystique,” Carolyn, as the new Mrs. Kennedy, had the fashion world clamoring for interviews and covers, scrutinizing her hemlines, and coining such phrases as “throwaway chic” and “effortful effortless.”

Perhaps the reason that Carolyn never quite achieved Jackie’s fashion-icon status was that she never really wanted to. For Carolyn, who was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, by her schoolteacher mother and orthopedist stepfather, life was simply too much fun for that. And it always had been. After being called “the ultimate beautiful person” in her high-school yearbook, the ambitious young woman got down to business: as an education student at Boston University, Carolyn displayed a keen status radar early on, dating Italian clothing heir Alessandro Benetton and future N.H.L. star John Cullen. Her entrée into the fashion universe was equally smooth. After college, she worked briefly as a salesgirl in Boston’s Calvin Klein boutique. In 1989 it was on to New York, after she had been hired by Paul Wilmot to join Calvin Klein’s P.R. department. By day, she helped dress the likes of Blaine Trump, Nan Kempner, and Diane Sawyer. By night, she hit the downtown club scene. New York was her element, and Carolyn let her natural moxie shine.

As for how girl met boy, the fairy-tale version has them jogging into each other in Central Park. More likely, they met through their mutual friend Kelly Klein—and there was little fairy-tale about it. A proponent of postfeminist courtship, Carolyn was a Rules girl who would never have been caught reading the actual book. When John held back, Carolyn would remind him about underwear model (and future Baywatch star) Michael Bergin, who was still on her back burner. Carolyn could also give John hell. The indelible images of Carolyn and John, however, are of them holding hands, her sitting in his lap, and the two kissing, laughing, or just gazing at each other. For all of her sass, Carolyn was, at her core, deeply devoted to those she loved. A wonderful listener, she would happily indulge her friends, even in their most endless stories. She phoned John at George several times a day, and acted as the unofficial hostess at the magazine’s functions.

In October 1996, when John and Carolyn returned from their honeymoon to find a herd of reporters camped out in front of their Tribeca loft, John pleaded with the paparazzi to leave Carolyn alone. He understood that the “mystique” thing was nonsense—that Bessette was not an icon, but a wife, a worker, a daughter, and a friend, with an insatiable appetite for life.

Remembering John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: Ten Years Later

Today, July 16, marks the 10-year anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, in a tragic plane crash. The couple died in a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999 along with Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette.

High up in the sky, JFK Jr. discovered a peace that often escaped him on the ground due to his famous family.  “The sunset is so beautiful,” he radioed his flight instructor on his first solo flight in 1996. “Can I go around one more time?” Permission was granted. And for the next three years, Kennedy escaped the burden of being the son of a beloved slain President, the burden of being a sex symbol hounded by paparazzi, by soaring above it all. But tragedy is the Kennedy family curse. In retrospect, it no longer shocks or surprises that the thing that gave Kennedy so much joy would be his downfall.

When Kennedy’s single-engine Piper Saratoga vanished on a summer night 10 years ago, it was shocking. We sat glued to our TVs for hours as searchers combed the waters off Martha’s Vineyard for the plane. When the bodies of Kennedy, his young wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren, were finally found, grief struck the nation as the man we had considered the Prince of Camelot was now gone.

“From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family,” his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy said in his eulogy. JFK Jr. was a long-time NYC resident and had a love affair with the city, which we happily reciprocated. At the time of his death, John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy were living in an apartment in TriBeCa, at 20-26 North Moore Street, Apartment 9E. I often walked past the apartment hoping to catch a glimpse of my favorite couple: he so handsome, America’s prince; she so effortlessly glamorous and chic, I wanted to be just like her. The apartment became a shrine for devastated New Yorkers. Shortly after the couple died, actor Ed Burns moved into the apartment.

John F. Kennedy, Jr. was just 38 when he died, but for the generation that mourned his father he would always be the 3-year-old boy in shorts saluting the casket bearing the body of his dad, President John F. Kennedy. Known as John-John, a nickname Kennedy detested, the brave boy captured a nation’s sorrow. John wanted to make his own mark in the world saying: “It was important for me to go outside the arena for a number of reasons,” he said after launching his magazine, George. “I think everyone needs to feel that they’ve created something that was their own, on their own terms.”

After JFK’s assassination, his mother, Jackie Kennedy, decided Washington was no place to raise her son and daughter, Caroline. She decamped for New York and home became a 15-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. Kennedy grew up a city kid: riding the subway, biking in Central Park, he even got mugged for his bike at 13. “I always grew up just living a fairly normal life,” he said. “I thank my mother for doing that.”

In addition to good looks, Kennedy inherited from his father a love of sports and he was often photographed shirtless in Central Park to the delight of female fans. People magazine named him the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1988, an honor which he humbly accepted. Being the sexiest man alive had it perks and John was linked to Daryl Hannah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sharon Stone, Madonna, and even Princess Diana.

Kennedy graduated from New York University Law School in 1989, and under the media glare failed the bar exam twice, earning him the headline: “The Hunk Flunks.” Kennedy persevered and eventually passed and as a young prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, he won all six of his cases – and the respect of his peers.

The standing ovation Kennedy received at the 1988 Democratic National Convention fueled speculation he might follow his father’s footsteps into politics. But he had other ideas. After his mother died in 1994, Kennedy said goodbye to law and launched George, a hip-yet-relevant magazine that covered politics with an irreverent style. “Not Just Politics as Usual” was its motto. Cindy Crawford, dressed as George Washington with a powdered wig and bare midriff, graced the debut cover.

Jackie Kennedy never liked Daryl Hannah and most of the women he dated, but two years after his mom died, Kennedy married a woman a lot like her.

In a successful coup outsmarting the paparazzi, Kennedy was able to have an extremely private wedding ceremony with his new bride, Carolyn Bessette, at the First African Baptist Church on the remote Cumberland Island in Georgia. John and Carolyn were married on September 21, 1996. The simple one-room church built in 1937 is maintained by the National Park Service as a historical building. The island is only accessible via ferry or private boat.

A former publicist for Calvin Klein, Carolyn Bessette was a stunning blond who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., and who was as chic as they came. Being such a private person, she struggled under the strain of the public attention that her husband appeared to endure with ease, but Carolyn, 33, had no fear of flying – with her husband.

On the foggy night of July 16, 1999, she and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34, boarded Kennedy’s plane at the Essex County Airport in Caldwell, N.J. They were en route to the wedding of Kennedy’s cousin, Rory, in Hyannis, Mass., but were to drop off Lauren Bessette on Martha’s Vineyard along the way. “Five three November to two two, thanks,” the young pilot told the tower. Those were Kennedy’s last recorded words. At 8:38 p.m., he took off from the tarmac and flew into history.

The National Transportation Safety Board later ruled the crash had most likely been caused by “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.” Weather conditions in the area at the time were clear below 12,000 feet with visibility at ten miles. Kennedy had only been flying for 15 months.