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

by Elizabeth Beller

THE BACKLASH AGAINST FEMINISM in the 1990s is the historical and cultural context in which I now perceive Carolyn’s story. Women who spoke up about workplace inequality or domestic abuse were dismissed as histrionic troublemakers. The new twenty-four-hour tabloid media—which skewered Anita Hill, reduced Marcia Clark to a “lawyerette,” and blamed Monica Lewinsky for her affair with President Clinton—leveled unprecedented vitriol at Carolyn.

To be an Italian American during the early 1900s was to be subject to appalling bigotry. A wave of nativist hostility engulfed the country during the Great Depression. Pseudoscientific racist theories claimed that “Mediterranean” types were criminal, even subhuman.

While the internment of Japanese Americans is well known, the US government also relocated ten thousand Italian Americans away from coastal zones to military camps throughout the United States and restricted the movements of six hundred thousand more.

Through the 1960s, Catholics were not admitted into many country clubs,

“The consistent presence of a nurturing father figure is tied to confidence, resilience, and emotional health, and can be a protective factor when the world feels overwhelming,” notes Kimberly Wolf, a specialist in young women’s mental health and the author of Talk with Her: A Dad’s Essential Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident, and Capable Daughters

Carolyn and John sat in a banquette, where, before they ordered a thing, John presented Carolyn with a letter. The author who sent it to him, a friend of his, came from the milieu of boarding schools, Ivy League universities, and “old money” families of New York, though he didn’t divulge these facts until much later. The letter claimed Carolyn was a user, a partier, that she was out for fame and fortune. And in a grand flourish of the “slut versus the stud” double standard,

the epistolatory spy added that Carolyn “dated guys around town.” John casually tossed the piece of paper at her, stood, and walked out the door. Carolyn stared in shock at John as he departed and then at the correspondence that sat before her on the white linen tablecloth. She read the letter, folded it, and put it in her purse. Then she got up and left. She would carry it with her, in many ways, for a very long time.

The Washington Square Park fight left Carolyn making her public debut in the role of a hysterical, unhinged woman. John was snarked at, too, but for him, this moment was but a blip on the long exposition

that was his life as the son of a beloved president. David Spade sat under John’s photo on Saturday Night Live’s “Spade in America,” and lightly called him out: “Excuse me, I have to go rough up my girlfriend and pretend I run a magazine. Be right back.” Was it merely in jest, or was it indicative of John’s reputation for being less than civil with his girlfriends—to which there were seldom any consequences? After all, he had been seen screaming at Daryl Hannah in the street as well, and it hadn’t changed the public notion that he was Prince Charming.

We all knew John had a temper, but the public didn’t.

According to Claire Sisco King, associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University, “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. For Carolyn, there was also the unspoken rule where John and his family had been through so much tragedy, that treating them (too) poorly was unacceptable. So you need heroes and villains, and unfortunately that meant scapegoating Carolyn.”

Professor King noted that “this was no longer responsible journalism reporting the news and responding to public interest. They had to fill that time, and if they had to, they would make things up.”

But what had worked for John before was no longer sufficient. The economy of celebrity stalking had changed. Now that there was endless airtime and web pages to fill, the notion that the media would show a target any semblance of respect was outdated, especially when a female was involved. Had John been traveling solo or with one of his Brown compatriots, a few shots would have sufficed. But because Carolyn was a new, unvetted female in the Kennedy family with the double appeal of disliking having her photo taken but looking mesmerizing in them, the chase was on.

“It was like he got it into his head that Carolyn was this Yoko Ono character who was taking John away from him, which was absurd because he was not Paul McCartney. He wasn’t even Ringo.”

Billy wrote that he had taken issue with John flying solo to Hyannis Port without him, accusing John of making him “so pissed off that I yelled at [my wife].”

One of the best inclusions was the Secret Service code names for the Kennedy family: JFK was Lancer, Jackie was Lace, Caroline was Lyric, and John, fittingly, was Lark,

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.”

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.”

Noonan later said of Carolyn’s distance, “Either John told her to keep quiet, or she was seeing a psychiatrist, or she was medicated. Or a combination of all three.” This litany fails to consider the possibility that she simply did not like or trust him.

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.”

In a sense, Carolyn’s experience was a larger-than-life version of many of the impossible standards that women face. You must be chaste, but you cannot be frigid or prudish. You must be beautiful, but you cannot care about being such. You must never be angry, even if people (or in Carolyn’s case, the tabloids) spread lies about you.