CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE 
September 1998–December 1998
Unfortunately, John didn’t understand why the paparazzi made Carolyn so upset or why I was neurotic,” RoseMarie Terenzio wrote in Fairy Tale Interrupted. “ ‘It’s no big deal,’ he said to Carolyn over the phone in response to her complaint about a particularly vicious incident. ‘Just don’t pay attention to it. I don’t.’ I cringed. ‘There are worse things that could happen than a few photographers following you around…’ he said.”
Terenzio clarified, “I knew that John’s dismissive attitude was due to his frustration. He had no control over the situation and was angry that he couldn’t protect his wife from it. He should have told her as much—I know she really wanted to hear it—but instead he was flippant.”
Even though Terenzio was John’s assistant, she was a confidante and supporter to Carolyn and John both. “And I had to appease both sides,” Terenzio wrote. “I couldn’t tell John off or dismiss Carolyn’s complaints. Instead, I acted as a mediator…. To John, I would say, ‘Give her a break’; to Carolyn, ‘He doesn’t get it.’ ”
Eventually the paparazzi even found Carolyn and MJ Bettenhausen’s dog run. “She came less and less because she felt that people standing on the other side of the fence would be a bother to other dog owners,” Bettenhausen said.
“She got depressed,” Carole Radziwill said.
John’s experience of the press simply wasn’t the same. Photo editors did not clamor for a shot of him looking sad or upset in the way they did Carolyn, knowing catching her at loose ends was of greater interest, and, by extension, of greater value. According to friends, she was indeed surprised and pained at how caustic they were with her, and again when getting married did not change the dynamic in a positive way. She was still vilified in tabloids, and she could feel that public opinion still clung to the images of her sparring with John in Washington Square Park. Yet it was important to Carolyn to be a good wife, and she worked at it. She showed up: at Municipal Art Society galas, Profile in Courage Awards, George events, and romping on the lawn in Hyannis Port in front of family photographers. She felt like she was there for John in every way: as a wife, as a colleague, as a member of the Kennedy dynasty. To endure the crises surrounding each of these imperatives, she wanted her husband’s time and attention. And most likely reassurance.
Thus, Carolyn craved more time when it was just she and John, wanting to know “he would always be there” so that she could feel safe enough to give him the children they both wanted. As Pam Thur observed, “She was asking him to slow down to be with her.”
But John was not built to slow down. John felt the crises and, by rote, thought the best way to survive was to keep moving—make the magazine a success, position himself for office both in the public sphere and in the Kennedy hierarchy. They had opposite reactions to the same set of issues. What Carolyn hoped for in John was care and attention reciprocal to what she had been giving him. Instead, John’s tunneling forward very well could have felt like the abandonment she had always feared. As a response to that fear, she not only withdrew from the world, she withdrew from John.
John would have felt it had Carolyn been pulling away. In Four Friends, William D. Cohan wrote that “John seemed quite stymied by Carolyn and how poorly they were getting along.” Carolyn was not a quiet, undemonstrative person. If she loved someone, if she was happy with them, she would show it. She asked questions, tended to someone’s concerns, and never left one in doubt of her feelings. The absence of that would have left a huge void.
It was not only the press trying to drive them apart with false stories and conjured dramas. There were a few people in their circle—really friends of John’s—who were perhaps hoping for the downfall of Carolyn and John’s marriage. Maybe some wanted their buddy back in the proverbial playground, and maybe some hoped to be the second Mrs. Kennedy. It exacerbated a rough patch in their marriage, and both spoke to friends of the predicament.
Carolyn had long witnessed women throw themselves at John, even as he held her hand. He had many female friends, which was usually fine. Until it wasn’t. John had lunch with Julie Baker once a month, and Carolyn did not object. Yet, she drew the line after Julie Baker climbed into his lap during a party at the loft. Understandably, Baker was then banned. But John still kept his monthly lunch with her.
John, by now, was unlikely to be bothered by rumors about Michael Bergin. Yet in her distress and hiding in Tribeca, she had befriended John Birch, who owned Wyeth Antiques, then located a walk around the corner at 151 Franklin Street. Birch specialized in the mid-century modern furniture that Carolyn loved, such as her Dunbar desk and dining table, the few pieces of her choosing that would fit in a loft full of Kennedy history. Visiting Wyeth was a way to get out of the house without exposing herself to a phalanx of photographers. “Carolyn had always had male friends,” said MJ Bettenhausen, “and that’s what John Birch was to her. A friend and confidant during a difficult time.”
John Kennedy had kept a journal most of his life. As with many of his belongings—no matter how valuable or personal—he was careless about keeping track of it. As Cohan recounted, John once left his journal on an outdoor table at a Greenwich Village café. A friend took a peek when he went to the bathroom. This same friend again “happened upon one of John’s journals on the coffee table” at North Moore Street. On this occasion, the friend read an entry in which: “John had written that he suspected Carolyn of having an affair with a friend who was a married antique dealer: ‘I can’t believe she’s doing this to me.’
“When John discovered that his friend had read [the] journal entry, he didn’t seem upset. ‘My life is a mess and it’s all because of Carolyn,’ he apparently had told the friend. ‘The only question is how do I get myself out of it.’ ”
The friend who read John’s journals told Cohan that Carolyn was “snorting more and more cocaine” and revealed information that John had shared about a lack of physical intimacy in his marriage. This friend remains unnamed, as do his or her motives in making these statements.
While a few accounts include Sasha Chermayeff as confirming some of these rumors that swirled around Carolyn, she takes issue with the misrepresentation of her words. “I never saw her do drugs, and I never concluded, at the time, it as a given she was having an affair with the antiques dealer or Bergin,” she stated firmly. (She wrote an email on the Andover alumni page contesting her quotes in Cohan’s book, also stating that it was “sad and painful to see Carolyn once again characterized as a shallow, selfish bitch, by someone who never knew her.”)
The strain of a rumor mill in overdrive was taking a toll. Chermayeff recalled, “One evening when John convinced me to get Carolyn out of the loft for a glass of wine, she asked me how long-term couples keep passion in their relationship, which I found odd as they hadn’t been married for yet three years.”
Chermayeff wasn’t the only friend to notice the visible toll on Carolyn. “The last time I saw her we had lunch at Bubby’s with Effie in the early fall of 1998,” MJ Bettenhausen said. “Carolyn was subdued, but there were traces of the old, joyful Carolyn. At the end, she gave me her new cell phone number, saying, ‘Call this new number, honey.’ It seems they had to change their numbers often. I spent the next six or seven months in California, as my husband’s mother needed help, so I didn’t get to see her. But I feel she would’ve pulled through this difficult time.”
John’s college friend Chris Oberbeck saw the issue as having several complicating factors. “One, it was the beginning of the degradation of the media where they increasingly lowered their standards, sort of the beginning of the ‘post-truth.’ Therefore, they were willing to print anything about her as long as it sold, and Carolyn sold,” he said. “The further she retreated, the more ferocious they became. And then Carolyn, stuck at home, was like a tiger in its cage; pacing back and forth and understandably angry.”
Oberbeck illustrated a secondary factor with a memory from rooming with John at Brown. “At a certain point, I became fed up with the dynamic in the house. I felt everyone always deferred to John,” Oberbeck said. “I wanted to be friends with him, but only if we were going to remain on equal footing. ‘I used to think we were pretty good friends, but now I’m not so sure,’ I told John. I gave him a list of reasons why I was questioning the friendship. He was so used to getting his way that he began to walk with a swagger. I don’t think he was even aware of it. My comments took him by surprise. His entire face dropped as if to say, ‘Oh, that’s not true.’ But he listened, and he took my feelings to heart. Then he changed—he worked on it. He could be selfish, but he was never malicious. It was natural selfishness, because he was who he was.”
Yet the positive changes John needed to make in his friendship with Oberbeck were of a more concrete nature. It was easier to step up on one’s share of chores and not eat the last of the cereal than it was to convince the media to leave his wife alone and convince his wife the media didn’t figure in their lives.
“Additionally, now that John was running George and eyeing political seats, the media actually did matter,” Oberbeck said. “John and Carolyn were woefully under-managed for their outsize life. They needed aides-de-camp. They needed security. And they should have probably moved away from that building where there was only one entrance that stepped out onto the stage that North Moore had become.” The remark wasn’t purely figurative—the front door to their building literally opened onto a low platform that was a step above the sidewalk. A stage.
FOR LABOR DAY WEEKEND, once again there was a big Kennedy family gathering. Rather than flying with John, Carolyn drove to Hyannis Port. When flying above the Vineyard, John would “buzz” Jackie’s house, a neighbor told Andersen. John would swoop down close enough so everyone below could clearly see N529JK, a reference to his father’s birthday, on the fuselage. Then, at the last minute he would pull up after having made sure to show whoever was in the plane with him an aerial view of Red Gate Farm. However, none of his family would go up in the air with him—not Ted, not the Shrivers, not even the RFKs. At the close of Labor Day weekend, the Philadelphia Daily News reported that John had “made a perfect approach and touchdown” at the airfield in Hyannis Port but noted that Carolyn “met her hubbo” there, and that “the two were expected to return home to Manhattan—again, traveling separately.”
Caroline was concerned that her brother was flying again and urged him to be cautious, saying, “After all, you’re no longer alone—you have a wife to worry about.” Caroline didn’t take lightly the value Carolyn brought to her brother’s life. “Whenever she’s around, he’s got that goofy, fool-in-love expression on his face,” Caroline once told a friend soon after he’d earned his pilot’s license in April.
On September 18, Carolyn and John stole a few moments alone on a trip to the Caribbean. As they were flying commercial, they were “under surveillance.” A Rush and Molloy gossip column reported that “John Kennedy Jr. and wife Carolyn Bessette looked quite affectionate on Friday aboard an American Airlines flight bound for the island of Dominica. In between smooches, John had his nose in an aviation textbook.” It was a quick weekend trip, however, and then it was back to business.
Carolyn continued to be discerning about the events she attended with John. The Municipal Art Society gala made the cut, as it was closely associated with John’s mother and the award was in Jackie’s name. It was a family affair, so Carolyn had safety in numbers. She was seated next to Lee Radziwill, with co-chair Caroline, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver in attendance. Carolyn also had John. The Times Herald described how he “drooled over his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s stunning black strapless gown, worn with long black gloves and the spikiest heels. He had a surprising revelation about the designer: ‘It’s by me! You gotta to see the back. The back is the best part.’ Actually, Carolyn said, it was by Yohji Yamamoto, a favorite designer of hers. The back featured a sort of derriere wrap around.”
Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio made the announcement that the event had raised more than $1 million for the art society. Also there were UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, musician Bobby Short, writer Dominick Dunne, and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
Later that month, Carolyn made another public appearance, albeit in a less glamorous setting. She appeared at a Tribeca Community Board 1 meeting, where she spoke out against a proposed installation of a cooling tower for the nearby Holland Tunnel, which would have made a deafening noise. To have their one safe space in New York City become a cacophony of hissing engines would’ve been a stressor they didn’t want to add to the already long list. (They eventually lost the battle, but they would not be around to know—the cooling towers were erected in 2000, with the New York Times claiming that Tribeca, “the old butter-and-eggs district of Lower Manhattan, isn’t sizzling any longer. It’s deafening.”)
Carolyn stepped out once more that fall, at the Foreign Policy Association Dinner at the New York Hilton, where First Lady Hillary Clinton made a thirty-seven-minute speech about the United States’ responsibility to the United Nations.
It seemed that Carolyn was very intentional about which events would bring her out of the apartment—in particular, those that might be important to John’s future in politics. It was clear where he was heading. George was an Act I.
He spoke with several trusted friends about running for the seat of New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who John had heard was not planning to run when his term ended in 2000. He told Gary Ginsberg that he was seriously considering running. John was also approached by Democratic leaders to gauge his interest. He told Judith Hope, Democratic chairwoman of New York State, that he was in.
“His next goal was to be New York senator, or possibly governor. And then he would’ve run for President,” wrote Littell. “He’d already been offered the opportunity to run for Senator Lautenberg’s seat in New Jersey, presumably using his mom’s Peapack address as his home base. He rejected the idea and began to put a team together to develop a roadmap for his political future. John was intensely dedicated to destiny, and he had his nose quietly to the grindstone.”
John threw himself even further into his work that fall. While Carolyn intellectually knew that he had to do everything he could to save George, emotionally, she would have liked more of his time. He was turning thirty-eight that year, and one can’t help but wonder if he compared himself to his father at that age: JFK received a Purple Heart at twenty-six after his PT boat was torpedoed and he led his crew to safety, where most were rescued; by twenty-nine, he was elected to the House of Representatives; by thirty-five, he was in the Senate; and he married Jackie at thirty-six. He wrote Profiles in Courage at thirty-nine, at once contributing to the mythology of those he celebrated and putting himself in their company, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, the same year Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born. He became president at the age of forty-three.
John’s accelerated trajectory toward his future was both profound and a little frightening for those close to him. Gillon noted that even Caroline’s husband, Ed Schlossberg, fumbled around the intensity of his brother-in-law’s path. That fall, John got a call from HBO asking if he would narrate a documentary about his father’s assassination, executive-produced by Edwin Schlossberg. John was livid. Not only had John never commemorated his father’s assassination, he actively avoided all mention of it. That Ed would begin such a project and then not call his brother-in-law himself but have HBO call to see if John wanted to participate was way out of bounds. It was the second time Ed had started a film project on JFK without telling John.
“Who the fuck is he to tell me how to honor my dad’s death?” John yelled.
Another friend said, “I’ve never seen him so mad, and I’d never heard him expel a string of expletives like that in all the years I’d known him.”
At the end of October, Carolyn and John were planning on attending a Halloween party given by Women Model Management of New York. Easily enough, they would wear their George and Martha Washington costumes, still on hand from the previous Halloween. But Carolyn and Lauren got a call that their grandmother Jennie, Ann’s mother, had fallen ill while on vacation in Florida. So, John attended solo while Carolyn and Lauren flew to be with Jennie.
The press saw an opening and pounced, with the New York Post announcing: “JFK Jr.’s marriage is falling apart because John is spending time with other women. On Halloween, he left Carolyn at home while he dressed up as George Washington and went to a party attended by Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and other leading supermodels. Indications are that his marriage is in trouble.”
This snippet was catnip for all the tabloids, who went on a snarking spree. “Do you think the hunk showed Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss his Declaration of Independence?” asked one paper.
In November, Manhattan File published the first of what was to be a series titled “Diary of a Bitch,” a new column by Candace Bushnell of Sex and the City fame. The portrait was ruthless. The subtitle was “Spoiled in the City. She married the world’s most eligible bachelor, and inherited way more than she bargained for: an unreformed husband, a paparazzi conspiracy, and a nasty habit for popping pills. Is something rotten in SoHo? Introducing the diaries of CKB.”
“CKB” was portrayed with less nuance than a Disney villain: pouting for attention, pretending to be pregnant. Written in the first person, CKB says, “And then I did what I trained myself to do when I was kid. I started the cry.”
Carolyn felt pummeled. So, she stepped out of the ring, just as her sister Lauren was stepping in.
“Carolyn asked me to show Lauren around town,” Jack Merrill remembered. “Lauren was smart. She was bright and funny like Carolyn, but more subdued.
“But the reason I was showing her around instead of Carolyn,” Merrill continued, “was because Carolyn was not leaving the house.”
“This was not the Carolyn I knew, and I have no doubt that eventually, she would pull out of this and bounce back,” said MJ Bettenhausen. “All of it, the white-blonde hair, the eyebrows, the rail-thin figure; eventually, she would have centered. She was always fit and had a beautiful figure, but she became so thin and pale. Carolyn was an Italian girl who used to laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe. I think she felt she had to fit in, to be what she thought people expected a Kennedy to be. So… blonder, thinner. It was exhausting. But I know she would have bounced back.”
Carolyn took solace in her animals. “Yet even that was disrupted, albeit temporarily. John didn’t want it known that he hunted deer with his cousins—Carolyn hated it,” Bettenhausen remembered. “John tried to bring Friday, who was not a hunting dog, a few times. Friday was an already high-strung breed, and the sounds of the gunshots terrified him. Poor Friday suffered from some high anxiety after a few trips. Carolyn was furious. It took a while to get him settled back down enough to walk outside for longer than a bathroom break.
“Once, he even got skunked, and John had to give him a tomato juice bath to get the scent off. Friday was pink for a week,” Bettenhausen said. “Some friends from the dog run asked her, ‘Why did you dye Friday pink?’ Carolyn deadpanned right back, ‘Ask John; it was his idea.’ ”
Although she was pulling back from the public eye, her sense of humor remained intact.
Bettenhausen recalled when “Carolyn once accidentally introduced herself as Caroline Kennedy. She immediately realized her slip and doubled over laughing at the mistake. The thought of the two of them being interchangeable was preposterous.”
Carolyn would spend hours on the phone, calling to check in with those she cared about. “I knew when Carolyn called I would need to put time aside from my day,” said Hamilton South.
She was “an incredible conversationalist and her humor was generous of spirit,” South reminisced. “Carolyn was the first person to be up and reading the entire paper. We would go over everything. News, politics, arts, she had something bright and witty to say about it all. But she wasn’t really leaving the house, at least not when in the city. The intrusion of the press and the subsequent feeling of being trapped was still there; always there.”
“Even though she was having a difficult time, she was still a caretaker,” recalled Ariel Paredes, who was then at Boston College. “She would buy clothes and beauty products for me and send packages wrapped in so much George packaging that my eyes would bleed. I would call to thank her and laugh about all the George paraphernalia. ‘You’re the only one I can use this crazy packaging for,’ Carolyn laughed. ‘Your friends in Boston won’t care or even know what George is.’ ”
Staying at Lauren’s may have been Carolyn’s nonverbal communication to John that she was not pleased with the excessive demands the outside world made on their lives. RoseMarie Terenzio wrote that John had, at times, a blind spot about other people’s time. “Carolyn would decline invitations from friends because John said he was coming home for dinner. So she would wait and wait and wait, while he worked late and went to the gym (without letting her know), and then waltz into to the apartment way past dinner time…. Another classic scenario was when he would spring important information on her at the last minute, such as ‘Oh, by the way, the Whitney benefit is in two days’ or ‘I’m bringing a friend home for dinner… right now.’ She wanted to know why the hell he didn’t tell her sooner. It wasn’t mean-spiritedness on his part. He was simply as disorganized and clueless as a kid. Still, it didn’t make scrambling to accommodate him any less frustrating.”
So Carolyn retaliated. “[She] used to hang out at her sister Lauren’s house in Tribeca and bitch about the invasion of her privacy,” said longtime Bessette family friend William Peter Owen. “She’d stay late. John would return to 20 North Moore Street, and she wouldn’t be there for him. This happened on several occasions.” She would often stay at Lauren’s until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, she would stay the night. The message seemed to be: I still have my own life. Take me for granted, and I won’t be there.
To further aggravate matters, Carolyn declined to accompany John on outings and trips that fall, exhausted by the strain of worrying about her husband’s career, the declining health of beloved Anthony, and having to nonetheless appear happy in pictures or be faced with another tabloid story. On a trip to Rome to sell ads for George, John strolled through Piazza Navona on his own. Carolyn had skipped Italy.
When it came time for his annual trek out of town to avoid the anniversary of his father’s assassination in November, she passed on camping in Maine. On Thanksgiving, John and Carolyn went to Hyannis Port for the holiday, and, while Carolyn went to the Thursday dinner, she skipped Ted’s Friday-night cocktail party as well as his Saturday brunch of leftovers. John was alone for the family football huddles, beach walks, and sailing, looking, according to the Detroit Free Press, “lost and dour.”
Picking and choosing carefully, Carolyn attended just a few events in December—she went with John to the Robin Hood foundation breakfast on the 2nd, with Lauren in tow. Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols were there, and there is a video clip of Carolyn’s delight at speaking with Sawyer, whom she adored. Carolyn would remain circumspect in her appearances and usually dressed that way as well, with black, midi-length dresses by Yamamoto.
A sea change came on December 11 when she attended Revlon’s Fire and Ice Ball at Universal Studios in Los Angeles in a bright-white Versace evening dress. Was this a willing return to public life? It would depend. It isn’t easy to pull out of a cycle of fear, especially when accompanied by real threats. As recently as 1995 the FBI had received kidnapping threats against John by Colombian drug cartels, so Carolyn’s concerns for their physical safety were not unfounded. But that evening in December, attending the Fire and Ice Ball with Maria Shriver and her brother Bobby, Carolyn seemed carefree, although bashful. She joked with the reporters outside, saying, “I’ve been waiting a long time for a date with my cousin Bobby.” When asked what her favorite part of the evening was, she said, “I had no favorite part. The whole evening was spectacular.”
In their troublemaking manner, what the papers took away from the event was that Carolyn “really hit it off” with John Enos, an ex-boyfriend of Madonna’s, and that she was “unaccompanied by her husband.”
Carolyn and John spent Christmas Eve at the Freemans’ in Greenwich, bringing Marta Sgubin and, of course, Friday with them, then had a very quiet Christmas dinner with Anthony and Carole Radziwill. “There is nervous energy around all of us,” Radziwill wrote in What Remains. “We plan a trip to Cuba and Greece. We are trying to ramp a lifetime into a few short years.”
After Christmas, Carolyn and John headed to visit cousins Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sun Valley, where they had a large home and often hosted parties. Liz Smith, informed that the couple was there, duly reported that “John Kennedy Jr. was out on the slopes skiing or snowboarding every day, and lunching with his guy pals. Carolyn Bessette appeared on the mountain once before she decided to head down an easier run with Ralph Lauren exec Hamilton South.” The press would not give them peace in Istanbul nor Idaho, it seems.
No matter. Carolyn was not a strong skier, but she and Hamilton found a way to have an excellent time together. “She looked great in all black—ski pants, coat, and a black headband. She lectured me on skiwear as she felt I needed to up my sports attire.” South laughed. “Neither of us were advanced skiers. We only did one run, and then it was down to the lodge for après ski for us, or back to the place we had rented near Maria and Arnold’s.”
Finishing out 1998 with laughter and friends and family seemed like a hopeful end to a really tough year. Lauren was now just blocks away, and they were closer than ever. With newfound strength from the proximity of her sister, Carolyn readied for the days to come.