Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

by Elizabeth Beller

She loved to laugh. Many of her friends feel sad that she is being remembered primarily as a style icon. Carolyn should also be remembered for her warmth, for her kindness and generosity, for her wit, for her compassion and, most of all, for her great sense of fun. —Colleen Curtis, Daily News, July 25, 1999

I remembered a story written by Henry James. It was the story of a young girl… who was as brave as she was beautiful, who was pure of heart and as unafraid to love. His description of Isabel mirrored that of Carolyn and I wondered out loud how it was possible for him to have known her when he wrote that story over a century ago. But, I suppose, it was because he was writing about his dream of a pure and brave American girl, one who comes along maybe once every hundred years, if we are lucky. —Carole Radziwill in her eulogy for Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy at Grace Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, July 24, 1999

Perhaps what was most remarkable about Carolyn was that she was a super empath, which on the flip side makes one supersensitive.

The schadenfreude over Carolyn’s bottle of antidepressants found washed up on the shore of Martha’s Vineyard just days after the crash now seems shameful and ghoulish.

This was one of the lessons she taught her daughters: Never forget about those who are left aside.

“What struck me most about Carolyn,” remembered Jane Youdelman, “was that she was always full of hope. It’s an undervalued characteristic. But she moved through the world brimming with a countenance that exuded ‘What fun thing will I get to do or see today?’ It made everything around her that much more enchanting. And it wasn’t just because she was a child. It was a trait she held on to for a very long time.”

Carolyn sometimes juggled a couple of men at once, always leaving them before she could be left. A mantra she repeated with friends captures the nature of these relationships: Date them, train them, dump them.

“She was always at ease,” he continued. “She possessed a good mind for business, though business per se didn’t turn her on. She was secure and strong, exceedingly sure of herself. She didn’t take shit from anyone. In other words, it wasn’t possible to intimidate her. She always stood up for herself. If she felt she was being spoken to in a disrespectful manner, she’d say, ‘Excuse me, please don’t talk to me like that.’ ”

Abdul Kareem Egyptian Musk Oil, which she would buy from street vendors and share with the other girls.

In The Men We Became, Rob Littell put their issues down to the idea that good relationships have a gardener and a flower: One likes to nurture, and the other likes to be tended to. “The problem was that Daryl and John were both clearly, and admittedly, flowers,” he wrote.

Carolyn told very few people of John’s proposal. She invited Carole Radziwill to North Moore Street and showed her the ring but asked her not to share the news. Carolyn was becoming more aware of the swirl of ambition and judgment that surrounded John and knew it would be a heavy burden. Rob Littell later wrote, “[Carolyn] resisted his proposal for an entire year.”

Kennedy memorabilia turned upon the podium. Many saw the estimates and thought they might have a chance at winning the bid. They were soon disabused of this notion. Items that would not have sold in a rummage sale skyrocketed to thousands of dollars—such as a tape measure for over $5,000. The president’s MacGregor woods golf clubs sold for $772,500, more than eight hundred times the $700–900 estimate. Arnold Schwarzenegger, then-husband of John’s cousin Maria Shriver, was the buyer.

The necklace sold for $211,500—more than ten times what it would have cost had it been real, and setting a record for faux pearls. Caroline’s childhood rocking horse sold for $75,000, and John’s high chair for $85,000. Even an ashtray went for $37,000, though it did bear Jackie’s initials. Most of the items were not exceptional works of art or craftsmanship, nor were they even from the White House era. They were all Jackie. Not one item went unsold; the proceeds from the sale totaled $34,457,470.

Carolyn had sprezzatura, defined as “certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it,” in 1528 by Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. One might guess she didn’t mind being a footnote in the la Repubblica article—a slight mention being a relief after the onslaught of attention she had been given by the papers in her home country.

Where many people showed sympathy, Carolyn had empathy. There is a big difference between feeling sorry and having compassion which allows for the other person’s feelings.”

“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.

One night, when Anthony’s health took a frightening turn, Carole and Carolyn were still there when John turned up at the hospital late, still in his tux after an event. John sat down next to Anthony and held his hand, and began humming “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” “Anthony’s eyes are still closed, but they seem more relaxed when he smiles,” wrote Carole. “They sing together softly, this children’s song… The doctors think Anthony will die tonight, and John takes him to the safest place he knows.”

Jackie Kennedy once said, “Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage, and death.” The plane took off at 8:38 p.m. Sunset on July 16, 1999, was 8:26 p.m. Dusk was at 8:58. Carolyn, John, and Lauren had twenty minutes of crepuscular blue and then darkness.

Loved ones were waiting for them. They waited on the other side—of that blue, of the sky, and of the water. At 10:00 p.m. on Friday, July 16, a couple and their young daughter were waiting at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport for Lauren’s plane to arrive, after which they would all head back to their house. Dan Samson was waiting to meet John and Carolyn at the Hyannis Port airport.

All he knew was that he was supposed to pick the couple up and bring them to the Kennedy compound, where the celebrations for Rory Kennedy’s wedding to writer Mark Bailey were already underway. Outside the main house was an enormous white tent for Saturday’s ceremony. Inside, there was laughter, toasts, and gifts, including a large quilt with something representing a member of the Kennedy family stitched onto each square.

Some knew that Carolyn and John were dropping Lauren off first and that they’d gotten a late start. Maybe they had grabbed dinner before heading over. No one there was worried yet. However, the couple waiting for Lauren began to worry, and asked a Martha’s Vineyard Airport operations employee if he knew where the plane was, who in turn inquired at the control tower about whether there had been a flight plan filed for the Piper Saratoga. There was none.

Dan Samson called Carole Radziwill, who was at Red Gate Farm with Anthony for the summer, where Carolyn and John would help take care of him—them both, really—over Anthony’s last weeks. It was now midnight, and Anthony wordlessly handed Carole the phone; she initially thought it was John. Samson apologized for calling so late and said he was supposed to pick up Carolyn and John from the airport, but they hadn’t arrived. He asked if they were there. “Carole thought they were running late,” Samson said, “but I knew they had taken off.

Next, she called Caldwell Airport. Yes, they took off around 8:30; John’s car was still there. Then she tried Bridgeport, where there was no record because there was no flight plan.

Carole wrote that Anthony woke up amid the flurry of activity, and when he saw all of Carole’s notes and phone numbers, he put his face in his hands and cried. Eventually, Ted Kennedy called. He remained calm and reassuring. But everyone at the party, at what was supposed to be a celebration, began the slide into despair that Carole had been fighting since her phone rang. Carole’s insistent call to the Woods Hole Coast Guard set the full force of emergency services into action.

Unable to locate the plane, the FAA called the Coast Guard back, as well as the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Coast Guard cutters began an official search for the plane. Soon John Podesta, then White House chief of staff, called President Clinton at Camp David, who in turn authorized whatever measures necessary to find the plane, and asked to receive updates throughout the search.

Carole then called the Freeman home in Connecticut. Dr. Freeman answered, and Carole quickly explained that Carolyn and John hadn’t arrived and there was a search underway. Carole later wrote that she told him, “I’m sure it’s fine, but I didn’t want you to hear it on the news.” Ann Freeman immediately called her back. She listened to Carole explain the airports and calls and missed connections. “Well, everything’s okay, right? Was anyone else on the plane with them?” Carole was silent. Long enough for Ann to scream.

Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey delayed their nuptials, and instead of a wedding under the tent, the Kennedys’ mass on Saturday morning was a prayer and vigil. The Washington Post reported, “[Rory] is on the beach with her fiancé, Mark Bailey, walking along the beach outside the Kennedy compound. Bailey’s right arm is wrapped around her shoulders, her left hand clutching his fingers to her chest.”

Caroline and her family prepared to fly back east, but they would seclude themselves at their home in Bridgehampton. Ann and Richard Freeman secluded themselves at their home in Greenwich, which was surrounded by police barriers.

“Streams of Strangers Keep Vigils, Waiting, but Expecting the Worst,” read the headlines. “Visitors poured up the hill to the Kennedy graves here at Arlington National Cemetery,” wrote the New York Times, “the sweltering summer heat compounding the day’s dirgeful tinge as they left flowers and notes for the missing Kennedy.” One note read: “The world stands motionless and hearts are heavy with sadness.”

But on July 18, by two p.m., all remaining hope began to fade as small pieces of foam insulation were found washed up over a mile along Philbin Beach. One of the captains on the search told the New York Times “the insulation was ‘consistent’ with insulation that would surround an airplane cockpit.” Massachusetts State Police captain Robert Bird, who had announced the finding, conceded to a reporter: “It likely would take an impact of great force to produce such debris.”

By Monday, the headlines announced that Carolyn, John, and Lauren were presumed dead. The New York Times ran its obituary, “John F. Kennedy Jr., Heir To a Formidable Dynasty.” The public mourning was extreme. The flowers on North Moore Street were now accompanied by citizens sobbing and lighting candles. They left notes, American flags, and even sketches of the couple at a makeshift shrine on the steps of the Tribeca apartment. Once the area cleared, after midnight, a lone man stood playing a dirge on the bagpipes in the middle of the street.

The families wanted to ensure that the place of burial did not become a tourist destination, so after much discussion, they collectively decided on a burial at sea for all three. On July 22, of the Bessette-Freeman family, only Ann, Richard, Lisa, and William attended the scattering of the ashes held aboard the Navy guided-missile destroyer the USS Briscoe.

Family members committed their ashes to the sea from a steep ladder at the ship’s rear, aided by crewmembers for safety. A brass quartet played “Eternal Father” while the flowers meant for Rory Kennedy’s wedding were scattered after the ashes.

The memorial service for John and Carolyn was held on Friday, July 23, at St. Thomas More Church on East 89th Street, just off Madison Avenue.

It was a sweltering 90 degrees as around 315 friends and relatives fought past barricades erected as far away as 72nd Street. Mourners had to brandish their invites to be allowed through and then walk seventeen blocks in the suffocating heat, past hundreds of onlookers lining the blocks. By contrast, the small church where Jackie’s service had been held, was dark and cool. Despite the number of Carolyn’s friends devastated by their loss, only a small number were invited, and there still wasn’t enough room for them all.

Also in attendance were dignitaries such as John Kenneth Galbraith, John F. Kerry, and the Clintons. Reverend Charles O’Byrne, who had married them less than three years earlier on Cumberland Island, conducted the mass.

Tim Shriver said, “For all those we love, united now with John and Carolyn and Lauren, for Jack and Jackie, for Carl Messina, that the many mansions of the Lord might be filled with their joy, their laughter, and their spirits, united now in heaven, we pray.”

Ann Freeman, in a feat of Herculean emotional strength, read from Henry Scott Holland’s “Facts of Faith”: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I’ve only slipped away into the next room… Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere, very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt. Nothing is lost. One brief moment, and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again.”

“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,” Ted added.

“He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will live forever in our memory and in our beguiled and broken hearts.”

Hamilton praised her caring ways and the simple aspects of her style and approach to life; he spoke lovingly of “her graceful bearing, her special allure” as “a physical expression of an inner fact,” bringing many of those present to tears.

Days earlier, when reporters were in wait outside the Freeman home, both Ann and William, in a note read to reporters by family friend Grant Stinchfield, described their daughters as “the embodiment of love, accomplishment, and passion for life.” The statement noted that “John and Carolyn were true soul mates, and we hope to honor them in death in the simple manner in which they chose to live their lives. We take solace in the thought that together they will comfort Lauren for eternity.”

Many who remembered the Bessette sisters came to pay their respects and knelt to pray outside the church, despite the heat. “Amazing Grace” was played, as it had been when Carolyn walked down the aisle in the one-room First African Baptist Church nearly three years earlier.

When I was asked to read for Carolyn at this service I worried that nothing I would find could adequately describe what she meant to those of us who knew her. She was wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world. Always burning a little more brightly than any of us around her. She believed in me at times when I didn’t believe in myself.

I remembered a story written by Henry James. It was the story of a young girl named Isabel. A girl who was as brave as she was beautiful, who was pure of heart and as unafraid to love. His description of Isabel mirrored that of Carolyn and I wondered out loud how it was possible for him to have known her when he wrote that story over a century ago. But, I suppose, it was because he was writing about his dream of a pure and brave American girl, one who comes along maybe once every hundred years, if we are lucky.

Henry James writes of her in The Portrait of a Lady: “It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries she passed for a young women of extraordinary profundity.

She had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action. She had an infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong. The chance of inflicting a sensible injury upon another person always struck her as the worst thing that could happen to her. She was stoutly determined not to be hollow. Her way of taking compliments was to get rid of them as rapidly as possible. She was thought insensible to them whereas, in fact, she was simply unwilling to show how infinitely they pleased her.

A character like that is the finest thing in nature. It’s finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titain, or a Gothic cathedral.” That is the Carolyn I loved. I will miss her for eternity. The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” was played to emulate the brightness and vivacity of both Carolyn and Lauren: “She comes in colors everywhere.”

It was a shock to accept that Carolyn, Lauren, and John, three young people of promise, were lost without warning. Their life force was so strong that it was difficult to grasp that it no longer inhabited their physical forms. Suddenly, the media was kinder to Carolyn, lamenting the “loss of a princess” and recalling her “cool, regal demeanor” and “demure sparkle.” But it would not last. And once again, the press relayed the story as the loss of Camelot, and much about how losing John and Carolyn was the loss of American royalty. As is often the case, they portrayed the humans involved as almost secondary to the dynasty.

We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago.” Mantel was writing about Princess Diana, but similar circumstances apply when we look at Carolyn’s plight. Would just about anyone who married JFK Jr. have elicited this much enduring fascination during their life and in the decades since they died? I think the answer is no.