More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 14 - July 28, 2025
the PR girls at Calvin Klein were not only muses for Calvin and Zack, but walking advertisements for the brand, the original influencers.
like her mother taught her to be when she was sure of her position, she was unrelenting.
“We all have certain roles in our families that we are assigned from childhood,” Carole Radziwill would later observe about this conflict. “And most families, despite how one grows and changes over time, are comfortable keeping everyone in their roles. When you go back to visit, you find yourself in those same roles, even if you’ve perhaps outgrown them. I think John, now an adult starting his own magazine, had changed. And Carolyn helped him realize that he had grown into someone wiser, more professional, and more nuanced as a person than what everyone in his family was used to.”
We joked that while John and Anthony water-skied off Onassis’s yacht Christina O, as it traversed the waters around his island, Skorpios, Carolyn and I were wearing our blue smocks at the jewelry counter.”
“What people don’t realize is how central work was to Carolyn,” her roommate Colleen Curtis explained. “She always worked. Always, always, always. Look at her sister, her mother. They were powerhouses.”
“Once Carolyn came into the spotlight, she never made a mistake. Her own sense of style was innate. As Anna Wintour said, ‘You either have it or you don’t.’ ”
More than anything, though, Carolyn had an uncanny ability to read people. This could manifest itself as compassion or as wary surveillance, but she was never not paying attention.”
“What used to be a push-pull environment for news changed with the intensity behind the new twenty-four seven channels and the internet, and the need to churn out more content,” she explained. “It had always been commonplace to be cruel to women in the media, but this exponentially increased in the nineties.
she felt like she had to pay attention to her looks in a way she wasn’t that interested in doing on a daily basis…
It’s important to have people around who love and understand you, so you don’t feel you’re the only ones invested in your future.’
“It was very crowded but Mary Richardson, Bobby’s wife, always gave wonderful dinners,” said Carole. “She was so lovely and made everyone feel at home. It was one of Mary’s superpowers.”
the mandate in DC was the “ ‘trailing after’ phenomenon—the good wife that doesn’t want to upstage her husband,”
After he got his license in April 1998, John joked often and openly about how family and friends simply refused to fly with him.
“She was pretty angry,” Sasha observed. “About a lot of things, and it was understandable. But at a certain point, you have to slow down and ask yourself, ‘Do I want to be in constant outrage?’ Because you can’t grow in that state.
Get over it. Move on. Smile for them. Frown to them. Give them the finger. Be the world’s biggest bitch, Leona Helmsley with blond hair and a ponytail. Or be Lady Di. Who cares? Fill up your soul. This is not a dress rehearsal. Wake up. Wake up, and you better do it soon.”
“We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years,”
She was wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world.
She was stoutly determined not to be hollow.

