CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO GREY GARDENS IN MANHATTAN January 1999–March 1999

The New Year began in the company of friends. In early January, Carolyn and John went to Rob and Frannie Littell’s East Village apartment to catch some of the NFL playoffs on TV. “While John and I screamed at the TV,” Littell wrote, “Carolyn played with Coco and Tate and eventually fell asleep on the couch. She awoke as the final whistle blew. John started needling her before she could rub her eyes. ‘Yo, Carolyn, honey, you were snoring. What kind of person falls asleep at a football party?’ ” He then jokingly apologized to Frannie for his wife’s less than scintillating presence, attempting to get a rise out of Carolyn.

Always up for teasing banter, Carolyn thanked Rob and Frannie for “making her feel so comfortable that she could just fall asleep and apologized for her husband’s inability to recognize true hospitality when he saw it. We all laughed,” wrote Littell, “and the two lovers soon went arm in arm into the night.” If only Carolyn and John could have stayed in that cozy living room.

In the first days of 1999, John went to a meeting with Barry Diller’s USA Network in Los Angeles, arranged by Hachette. It became clear that David Pecker had indicated that John would play a large role, likely pushing for him to host.

“Fuck this!” John yelled, and left the room.

Steve Gillon wrote that John then phoned Pecker, and the two engaged in what staffers called “a fiery phone call.” At that point, John’s relationship with Pecker had devolved into war.

John tasked executive editor Biz Mitchell with hiring a forensic accountant, because, according to Gillon, “John was suspicious that Pecker was running John out to every dinner in town to attract advertisers, and then funneled the money into other titles at Hachette.” John wanted Biz to find out where the money was really going, because it wasn’t going to George editorial budgets nor toward the magazine’s profits. The move ramped up the vitriol with Pecker, and he let John know that, barring making a profit, Hachette would not renew their contract, which was expiring at the end of 1999.

“Pecker was comparing current sales, which was not unusual for a magazine that had just gone monthly three years earlier,” said Gillon. “The enormous success of the first couple of issues were unusual, and the comparison shouldn’t have held.”

But the antagonizers had gotten to John. It had been Michael Berman, and now it was David Pecker.

And then there was Anthony. Until this moment, John would not accept that he could not save Anthony, but this facade was becoming harder and harder to uphold. It was painful to watch someone under this much pressure, and perhaps Carolyn’s instinct to nurture brought her slowly but surely out of her isolation.

Carolyn had remained a lifeline for Carole and Anthony, accompanying them to nearly every hospital stay. John acknowledged as much, telling Billy Noonan, “I just worry about Carole… Carolyn has been really great to her. She does these little sweet things, like buy her friendship rings… I keep losing everyone. I really need to start thinking about having a family. [Losing Anthony] is going to suck.”

As the problems at George escalated in 1999, Carolyn started coming to the office once more. She would also accompany John in the search for new investors. On January 27, they were spotted coming out of the David Hare play The Blue Room at the Cort Theatre, which starred Nicole Kidman. Carolyn, while still in her signature black, had let her hair loose from the severe chignon and ponytail she had lately favored, her hair blowing wildly in the wind, much like she had worn it before the days when her every move was caught on camera.

Later in the month, Carolyn invited herself to Carole Radziwill’s parents’ house in Suffern, New York, to watch the Super Bowl. “ ‘I can’t believe you never invited me there,’ she says, indignant. ‘I want to see where you grew up. I’m coming,’ ” Carole wrote in What Remains. “After dinner, Carolyn looked through all of the wedding albums. ‘You look like Cary Grant!’ she says to my brother. She has all of them tell their stories. Jeff, my brother-in-law, just got his pilot’s license, and they talk about John’s plane. ‘I don’t know if I want him to fly when we have kids,’ she says.”

On Presidents’ Day weekend, Carolyn was supposed to go skiing with John in Utah but canceled. It’s unknown if this change in plans was the result of a fight, but, more likely, once Carolyn heard where they were staying—a place in Alta called the Peruvian Lodge, where the rooms were like dorms with shared bathrooms at the end of the hall—she took a pass. John called Chris Oberbeck last minute to see if he would join. Chris knew that John was having a rough time, and after checking with his own wife, he bent over backward to make the trip happen.

“About two years into their marriage, Carolyn seemed to be regaining her balance,” wrote Littell. “Which isn’t to say all was rosy—in fact, the two of them spent a fair amount of time locking horns.”

“They had an intense passion,” said Chris Oberbeck. “That passion was manifested in loving each other and really having a great time together, and it was also manifested in unbelievable fights.”

What Carolyn wanted from the marriage naturally put pressure on John, because she was asking for a full partnership in a way he had not been asked before. “Carolyn was not afraid to say no to John, or to get him angry,” Carole Radziwill said. “And he needed that.”

“Most women sort of became tongue-tied around John. But not Carolyn,” said Richard Wiese. “She was very strong-minded, knew what she wanted, and had absolutely no difficulty speaking her mind.”

But still, many tabloids could only focus on her employment—or lack thereof. “What does she do with her days?” was the query that the Washington Post felt entitled to ask the previous September.

It was a question that kept coming up. For the public, but no doubt for Carolyn herself as well. Carolyn was a woman whose energy and time had always been taken up with work. She wanted and needed to work. But the perennial question, since she had linked her life to John’s, was: What would that look like?

“She still hopes to return to a career. But what? There were a lot of stipulations. She couldn’t go near fashion because of John’s magazine, and she also had to be available to him and his unpredictable life,” wrote RoseMarie Terenzio. She traveled with him incessantly, recently especially so, looking for new backers. There were those who shouted she should be taking up charity work, to which she did give her time and support, albeit quietly. But officially putting her name to any of the many nonprofits that approached her had to wait. Given that their public life was primed to become even more public if John held office, Carolyn wanted to be cautious, not least because every move she made was being picked apart.

“Not to mention,” Terenzio continued, “that Carolyn’s high-profile presence would have disrupted most offices.” It would have, and sometimes did. Carolyn had become very close to Hamilton South, and if they didn’t spend an hour on the phone, she would sometimes pop over to his workplace. “But then everything just stopped. Everyone wanted to glimpse her, and it was mayhem,” he said. “Eventually, I moved closer to Tribeca, and we all had our evenings together so that we could spend time without my work life coming to a halt!

“Carolyn and John had home routines,” said South. “When Effie didn’t cook—and usually he did—Carolyn had one recipe, roast chicken with lemon and garlic. If it wasn’t one of those two then they ordered in, sometimes even from Kentucky Fried Chicken. I would come over, and Carolyn was always at the Dunbar desk in the side room as you walk in, that she had made her base. At home, Carolyn dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, and I would walk in to see her at the desk poring over the papers. The moment I entered, with her hands fluttering about her for emphasis, ‘You will not believe what is going on!’ And it was always about the world, never about her.

“When she wasn’t at that beautiful desk, she was on the couch, making phone calls to friends. Again, it was about them. Their lives, the world, a new film, or ballet on at Lincoln Center.”

Carole Radziwill said that, in the spring of 1999, she had spoken with Carolyn a good deal about getting into documentary filmmaking. “I was doing docs at ABC News, and she was always interested in illuminating other people’s stories.” She added, “I think, because of her upbringing, being raised by a single mom, she identified with the underdog, and now she was in a position to provide insight into the struggles and victories of ordinary people. That really appealed to her.”

Another complication to launching a career was the onus to have children—not just any children, but the JFK IIIs. “John was eager to start a family,” wrote Rob Littell. Carolyn was not. “She would, with a bit of bluster, say that she could never subject a baby to the weird, public spectacle of their life… I think she was frightened that she wouldn’t be a good mother, that she wasn’t strong enough to care for another human being.”

Everyone, if they are honest with themselves, is daunted by the idea of being a first-time parent. If you add all the poison from the paparazzi, it’s even more frightening. This brings to mind Carole Radziwill’s earlier comment that Carolyn’s fashion friends couldn’t comprehend “that this unusual blitz was an entirely different beast.” When Jackie Kennedy said that Ron Galella’s stalking made life “intolerable,” she was talking about the work of one man. Carolyn was dealing with Galella’s progeny: a voracious mob.

Also, “she had seen firsthand how one family can sort of become central, and slowly the other side loses touch and barely has contact at all,” said a close friend. “This was hitting home for Carolyn, now that she was beginning to understand that not seeing her father wasn’t what he preferred. It was just how time and life played out. Carolyn realized it was one family being closer and busier than another. And if any family in the world was close and busy, it was the Kennedys. She worried she could lose her children she had with John in the same way her father had lost her. It was an unbearable thought.”

Littell, writing about Carolyn in the spring of 1999, noted that she hadn’t given up: “Carolyn seemed more lively, more engaged. I think she was literally fighting her way out of her depression. She often went to La Palestra, the gym owned by John’s friend Pat Manocchia, spent time with her friends, and started to carve out her own space in the marriage. And, yes, as widely reported, John stayed at the Stanhope several nights over their years of marriage…. I’ve spent a night or two out of the house in anger, too. The thing that’s most poignant to me is John’s choice of the Stanhope, located quite near the apartment he grew up in. It’s as if he tried to go ‘home’ in his darker moments.”

John admired his aunt Eunice and uncle Sarge’s marriage, in which the wife had her own professional goals. Eunice had to push past her own father’s belief that women should not work, and began on day one of her brother’s presidency to push him to put physical and intellectual disabilities on the agenda. Eunice was tireless, driven, and devoted, eventually founding the Special Olympics. Part of what drew John to Carolyn was exactly that kind of potential in her, and part of what made her happy as an individual was putting that energy and drive to use. Yet for the last year she had been sapped of power, paralyzed by the sting of the press and the need to lie low while George struggled.

Carolyn, by refusing the Peruvian Lodge and Maine camping trips, was recovering herself. I am in this, too, she seemed to be saying. You have to begin to consider me in these things. I am not simply a Kennedy accessory.

Carving out her space inside the marriage needn’t have meant an affair. Here we enter a bit of a meta moment, because much of what has thus far shaped our knowledge of Carolyn has been history written by men. Some of this can be put down to sensationalizing. But is it fair to ask if some other hostility was playing out in these men? Some knew her, but many who did not were possessive of John both in life and death, and several wrote as if it were common knowledge that she was having an affair. Among them was Edward Klein, who wrote in his 2003 book, The Kennedy Curse, that Carolyn was having an affair with Michael Bergin. Klein had written numerous books about the Kennedys, all with the breathless voice of an insider, though John told RoseMarie that he was “a guy who had lunch with my mother once at someone else’s house and dined out on that the rest of his life.”

MJ Bettenhausen put it quite succinctly: “She didn’t have an affair with Bergin, nor the antiques dealer. She would not have jeopardized her marriage to John. Crying on a shoulder, perhaps, but she would not have strayed.”

Clifford Streit, Bergin’s former manager and the inspiration for Sex and the City’s beloved Stanford Blatch, said that “the part about his having an affair with her after she married John Jr. was total horsecrap. Michael and I often discussed Carolyn after she married John, and it’s simply not true that he slept with her after she got married. They may have spoken on the phone a few times, but that was it.”

Carolyn and John began couples therapy in March. “By 1999, the Kennedys have reached a pivotal moment in their relationship,” wrote Christopher Andersen. “John was telling friends that for months, Carolyn, unhappy, despite a steady diet of prescription antidepressants, had simply refused to sleep with him. Frustrated and confused, the couple began seeing a marriage counselor in March.” This accords with Sasha Chermayeff’s observation that “prescriptions are doled out like candy, and they don’t tell you about the side effects, which for antidepressants can be a severely decreased libido.”

At the same time, John had been successful in his efforts to encourage Carolyn to begin a rapprochement with her father. John held the belief, gained from firsthand experience, that even problematic family members were better tolerated than cast away. John helped Carolyn, and Carolyn helped John. That had not changed. In those last months, she traveled with him, looking for new backers to hopefully save the magazine. But she was also instrumental in getting him to consider the next steps in his career, which likely included political service.

Things could be terrible one moment, and bliss the next.

“They were talking about kids, and they were talking about him becoming a senator,” Littell said in the JFK Jr. documentary Final 24. “She’d smoothed out.”

On March 9, the Whitney Museum hosted its Brite Nite fundraiser, where, according to the Rush and Molloy, “some of the museum swells [were] reportedly a little nervous about the evening’s sexy entertainer, Foxy Brown. So they are relieved Miss Brown wore a tasteful blue dress when she spouted rhymes for the likes of Leonard Lauder, Ron Perelman and Claudia Cohen, Martha Stewart, Russell, Kimora Lee Simmons, and Tommy Hilfiger. Kennedy and a happier-looking Carolyn Bessette stayed to dance into the wee hours as the party filled with fragrant smoke.” Perhaps Carolyn was amused enough by the “swells” looking worried to make it a long night. Vogue observed that the downtown crowd, “including its most famous couple,” came uptown.

Was Carolyn’s happiness due to John’s newfound understanding of the need to create a lifestyle conducive to building a nuclear family or to Lauren’s presence in New York City?

Carolyn and Lauren were pleasantly surprised that the more time they spent with their birth father, the more comfortable they became with him. Like all relationships, this, too, was not a simple matter of “one day the girls and their father were estranged” and the next “as if he hadn’t missed a day of their lives.” It was a process, and it was healing. Healing, too, for John to watch, as he actually did have the trauma of his father here one day and gone the next.

Now he was facing a profound loss again with his best friend and cousin, Anthony, who had spent New Year’s having emergency surgery at NIH. He began chemotherapy at Columbia-Presbyterian. The proximity to his loved ones was a good thing, but it felt like moving backward: Surgery had not worked, so now they were trying chemo.

When things felt very dire, Carolyn and Carole played a game they called Townhouse. It was a grown-up version of a child’s game of make-believe. “The townhouse as we know it is straight from Edith Wharton—a tottering mansion in Gramercy Park sitting remote and dreamy on an empty lot, towering over the neighborhood,” Carole wrote in What Remains. “There are four floors and sixteen-foot ceilings and a wrought-iron gate. Heavy velvet drapes cross the windows, and we sometimes peek out from them.” Radziwill called it “Grey Gardens in Manhattan,” a tip to the estate on Long Island where Jackie’s cousins Big Edie and Little Edie Beale infamously sequestered themselves after Phelan Beale, Little Edie’s father, left them destitute. The mother and daughter lived for decades hidden in the East Hampton mansion, which fell into complete disarray. Jackie stepped in to help, giving them $25,000 to bring the house back up to code after the Suffolk County Department of Health Services gave them countless violations.

“ ‘I’ll be Big Edie,’ Carolyn says. ‘No, Little Edie, with a sun hat and halter, reading the National Enquirer. Oh my God, that will be us, the Beales! People will say, “Whatever happened to Carole and Carolyn? They had so much promise.” And we will be locked up behind our gate ordering takeout and dressed in vintage Dior gowns,’ ” Carole wrote. The irony was that, while the Beales were reclusive shut-ins, living out of sight and out of mind of the world until the Maysles brothers showed up with their cameras, Carolyn was a recluse because of the cameras that were certainly not invited into her life.