By the summer of 1995, John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette had been together for about a year. They were now living in John’s loft at 20 North Moore Street in Tribeca. John was generally happy with the way things were going with the woman he’d called “the one,” even if the romance continued to generate headlines. For him, being a Kennedy had always meant forgoing privacy and dealing with daily intrusions—fans approaching for autographs, paparazzi taking pictures when least expected, all the sort of thing celebrities are used to, but, in John’s case, magnified tenfold because of his storied lineage. The building in which they lived didn’t even have a doorman; it was easy access for anyone.
That John was so good-looking didn’t help, either. “Damn. If only I was slightly less photogenic,” he used to joke when complaining about the photographers who would trail him for miles. He had good humor about it. Therefore, it was difficult for him to be sympathetic to Carolyn’s angst about what he viewed as the relatively harmless act of people approaching for autographs and photographers taking pictures of her.
Carolyn felt as if she were being hunted and, in a sense, she was right. As the woman who had captured the heart of a man viewed as America’s most eligible bachelor, she quickly became the source of great interest. Photos of her were sold to tabloids for thousands of dollars and, as she soon learned, even more if she was caught looking miserable. A sour face suggested she was unhappy, and what better story is there than the one about the woman who has it all but doesn’t appreciate it? What right does she have to be so unhappy? After all, she’s with John Kennedy Jr. “She would call me from an alley, her voice shaking,” recalled Ariel Paredes, Gustavo’s daughter. “She would say, ‘These animals have been following me all day. I’m at the end of my rope.’ I would tell her, ‘Don’t take it so seriously. They only want your picture. Just pose and forget it.’ It’s easy to give advice when you’re not the one being followed by a pack of wild dogs.”
In response to her complaints, John was impatient with Carolyn and simply wanted her to adjust. “Welcome to the circus,” he would tell her, minimizing her feelings. “Just ignore the clowns, is all.” The closest he ever came to being proactive about ditching the press was to call the Kennedys’ wedding hairstylist, Lenny Holtzman, and ask for a disguise. “He would call me from the Barnstable Municipal Airport when he got to the Cape from Manhattan and say, ‘Lenny, I need my bike and my disguise.’ So I’d have to go and meet him with his bike, his wig, and a dress. He’d go into the ladies’ room and change and get on his bike and ride right past the paparazzi. They wouldn’t recognize him; he was not an attractive woman. I used to laugh so hard, I would pee in my pants.”
“Don’t talk those guys, whatever you do,” RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s assistant, would advise Carolyn of the paparazzi. “If they hear your voice, it’s personal. Just be enigmatic and don’t give them anything.” Carolyn protested that advice, fearing it would just make her appear bitchy. “It doesn’t matter,” RoseMarie said. “You’ll never win. Don’t react because they want a rise out of you. That makes for an even better shot.” When she could tell that she wasn’t really being helpful, she suggested that Carolyn talk to John about it. “He’s good at this sort of thing,” she said. Carolyn said she had tried to talk to him, but, she added sadly, “He doesn’t care about it at all.”
“But John, that’s not how you were raised,” John Perry Barlow reminded him during the summer of 1995, while taking him to task about his reaction to Carolyn’s discontentment. Barlow was right; John had been brought up to respect women, not disregard their feelings. He had once admitted to Barlow that he never wanted to become “that creepy Kennedy who doesn’t care what his girl thinks about anything. I hate those guys.” Barlow now warned him that he risked becoming “that creepy Kennedy” unless he paid attention to Carolyn’s concerns. It wasn’t easy. While John was certainly brought up a certain way by Jackie, he was also a Kennedy male raised in a Kennedy culture, where the men were generally selfish and entitled. It took some real introspection on his part to fully comprehend and then empathize with the depth of Carolyn’s despair. He was eventually willing to put in the work, though, and dedicate himself to finding ways to help her cope.
In the end, John found there wasn’t much he could do about “the circus” other than to make it clear that the clown act was no longer acceptable. Whereas the paparazzi army could once assume that John was fine with them and their intrusive ways, by the summer of 1995, those days were over. Now John wanted to at least try to protect his significant other. Therefore, when photographers approached, he would shout at them to back off, which was maybe an overreaction, but at least it was supportive of Carolyn. He’d also chastise people who jumped out at them from the shadows. Still, it took a lot out of him, just as it did Carolyn.
At the end of a particularly bad week of being hounded by the press, Carolyn and John were at their home with Anthony Radziwill when a friend came by unexpectedly. He walked into the apartment just in time to see Carolyn doing a line of coke from the coffee table. Both she and John were feeling no pain, he recalled; Anthony didn’t seem to be indulging. “‘It’s been a bad week,’ John told me as he sat down and did a line,” recalled the intimate. “I said, ‘John, what the hell is this? This is new. Is this your thing, or is it Carolyn’s?’ He laughed and said not to worry about it. ‘Look, I’m a Kennedy. Do you think this is the first time I’ve ever done drugs? Please.’ Then he lay down in Carolyn’s lap. As she stroked his hair and kissed his forehead, they actually looked peaceful together, I had to admit.
“An hour later John said he had the munchies. ‘You sure you want to go out there and have to deal with who knows what?’ I asked him. He smiled at me and said, ‘Sure. Bring ’em on.’ He then took Carolyn by the hand, and off we went with Anthony to get some pizza.
“As we walked down the street a couple guys approached. I thought, Oh boy, here we go again. But John said to them, ‘You want a picture? Sure. Go for it.’ He and Carolyn then smiled and smiled and smiled and posed and posed and posed to the point where Anthony and I were like, okay, Jesus. Enough, you guys. Then they waved goodbye to the paps and we all went on our way. John turned to me and said, ‘This is not the real world we’re in right now. It’s only going to last about another hour.’”
Cocaine actually was new for John, but not because he lived a drug-free lifestyle. In fact, he and his friend John Perry Barlow had been doing acid and Ecstasy together for almost twenty years. Though his mother would, no doubt, have been quite upset about it, the first time they dropped acid was when John was just seventeen, right after Jackie sent him to work on Barlow’s ranch in Wyoming for the summer. “John and I enjoyed LSD and MDMA for many years,” Barlow recalled. “He was cautious, though, because of what he had seen in his family. But yeah, I mean, this was something we did from time to time to blow off steam and maybe look at life in a different way. It wasn’t something he wanted a lot of people to know about, though, especially, his cousins. He didn’t want them to think he approved of their own drug use, which he viewed as excessive, so he kept his own under the radar. Coke really wasn’t his thing, though,” Barlow continued. “John told me he viewed coke as merely a mechanism for getting stoned, whereas he thought of acid and Ecstasy as a way to experience life differently, especially when things started to get out of control because of his relationship to Carolyn. At that point, anything he could do to create the space to put things in perspective was what he would want to do.”