Inside the Turbulent Final Days of JFK Jr.'s Marriage to Carolyn Bessette

"They would love hard, and they would fight hard, but they were very much in love."

By Caroline Hallemann

Jun 28, 2017

Nearly 21 years after Carolyn Bessette married John F. Kennedy Jr. in an intimate, secret ceremony on an island just off the coast of Georgia, friends and family of the couple are still reflecting on their dramatic relationship, and mourning their untimely death.

"They would love hard, and they would fight hard," Ariel Paredes, friend of John and Carolyn's and granddaughter of Jackie Kennedy's aide Providencia Paredes, revealed to People magazine this week. "But they were very much in love."

After the couple died in a plane crash in the summer of 1999, rumors swirled that their marriage had been in trouble and that Kennedy had moved out of their shared apartment. Twenty-one years later, friends paint a picture of a couple working through their problems but still deeply committed to one another.

One issue was undoubtedly the media attention that was a constant part of their lives. For her part, Bessette was never comfortable with the scrutiny that accompanied her marriage to President Kennedy's son. "If someone was going to steal our prince, the press and the public wanted her to be some kind of unblemished princess," John Perry Barlow, a friend of Kennedy's, told People. "She was her own self. The woman everyone has read about it not at all as she was in real life."

In her book Jackie's girl, Jackie Kennedy's personal assistant Kathy McKeon recalled a conversation in which Bessette revealed her fear of the paparazzi. "She couldn’t take it. She wasn’t brought up with it. John was, Carolyn wasn’t," McKeon wrote. "She said, 'I’m terrified of them.'"

But the press wasn't the only stress on their marriage in its final weeks. Right before the tragic plane crash that would claim them both as victims (along with Bessette's sister Lauren), Kennedy was facing financial troubles at his magazine George while coming to grips with the fact that his best friend and cousin Anthony Radziwill was dying from cancer.

"To say their marriage was on the rocks is just inaccurate," says Carole Radziwill, Anthony's wife and Bessette's close friend, who wrote about John and Anthony's relationship in her book What Remains.

"Anthony’s impending death was a strain on their marriage, no doubt. But it was a difficult time for all of us. If it weren’t, we would be inhuman."

Sadly, we'll never know if that period of marital troubles was merely a blip on their otherwise strong relationship or something more serious, as the couple died tragically on July 16, 1999.

"Had he not crashed the plane, it would have been a meaningless few weeks of tension," a source close to John told People.

"But it took on a life of its own because it was the last chapter of their life. One week they could have been at war, and the the next week they could be right back in love—we’ll never know."

Secrets and Lies

All the world knows the end of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s story. The hidden chapter was the gradual unraveling of their marriage as it slid from wedding-day hysterics into a spiral of depression, drugs, and violence. In an excerpt from his new book, Edward Klein explores the conflicts—over starting a family, George magazine, and life in the spotlight—that drove Kennedy and Bessette apart, despite interventions by a couples therapist and, fatally, Carolyn’s sister Lauren.

by

Edward Klein

April 18, 2014 4:40 pm

I want to have kids, but whenever I raise the subject with Carolyn, she turns away and refuses to have sex with me.”

The speaker was John F. Kennedy Jr., and he was sitting on the edge of a king-size bed, a phone cradled in the crook of his shoulder, pouring his heart out to a friend. It was early in the evening of July 14, 1999—two days before John’s fatal plane crash—and the last rays of sunlight were flooding his room at the Stan-hope, a fashionable New York hotel located across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It’s not just about sex,” John told his friend, who recalled the conversation for me several days later, while it was still fresh in his memory. “It’s impossible to talk to Carolyn about anything. We’ve become like total strangers.”

For a moment the words caught in John’s throat, and his friend could sense his struggle to regain his composure. Then all of John’s pent-up bitterness and frustration exploded over the phone line.

“I’ve had it with her!” he said. “It’s got to stop. Otherwise we’re headed for divorce.”

A thousand days had passed since John exchanged wedding vows with Carolyn Bessette on a wild, unspoiled island off the coast of Georgia, and during that time the truth about their troubled marriage had been a well-guarded secret. Now John and Carolyn were living apart—he at the Stanhope, she in their loft in Tribeca—and John was on the verge of calling it quits.

For the life of him, John could not understand why his marriage had soured, especially since it had begun with so much sweetness and hope. An inveterate prankster, John eagerly endorsed Carolyn’s wish to keep their wedding plans secret. “This is one thing I’m in control of, not John,” Carolyn told a close friend. “No one’s going to know where or when we’re getting married.”

From the start Carolyn was in a quandary over who would make her wedding dress. Should she ask Calvin Klein, who until recently had employed her as a mid-level publicist? Should she choose her old roommate, the talented black fashion designer Gordon Henderson? Or should she turn to Narciso Rodriguez, a former Calvin Klein staffer who now worked for the Paris couturier Nino Cerruti? Carolyn knew that her choice would have major repercussions, for the designer was certain to get worldwide publicity.

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Carolyn ultimately decided on the relatively unknown Rodriguez to design both her rehearsal-dinner dress and her wedding dress, as well as the matron-of-honor dress for Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, John’s sister. Rodriguez worked for months on different designs, but it was not until 15 days before the wedding that Carolyn made her final pick.

Gordon Henderson, who was Carolyn’s closest friend, was devastated. He had dreamed of designing her dress and becoming a bigger fashion star. As a consolation, Carolyn asked him to make John’s suit and orchestrate the details of the wedding. Preparations were conducted with all the secrecy of a military operation. Only a few close friends and family members were invited. Everything seemed to go smoothly until, on the day of the wedding, Carolyn attempted to put on her dress and found that she could not manage to get the $40,000 pearl-colored silk-crêpe floor-length gown over her head. It was cut on the bias without a zipper, and like many such dresses it was difficult to put on. Try as hard as she might, she could not squeeze herself into it.

Under mounting pressure, Carolyn grew hysterical and began yelling at everyone around her. Henderson gently led her into a bathroom, put a scarf over her head, and managed to get her into the dress. Then, still in a state of high anxiety, she sat while her makeup and hair were re-done.

Carolyn’s stiletto heels drilled holes in the sandy beach on the way to Cumberland Island’s tiny wood-frame First African Baptist Church. A stunning six-foot-tall, size-6, corn-silk-blonde bride, she was two hours late for her own wedding.

“I hate living in a fishbowl,” Carolyn said. “How could I bring a child into this kind of world?”

The one-room church was illuminated by candlelight, and it was so dim inside that the young Jesuit priest, the Reverend Charles J. O’Byrne of Manhattan’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s funeral Mass had been held in 1994, had to read the service by flashlight. John’s cousin and closest friend, Anthony Radziwill, served as best man (as John had done at his wedding), and at the end of the ceremony John turned and told him that he had never been happier in his life.

The marriage made front-page news everywhere, and a new Kennedy myth was born. The man who could have had any woman in the world had chosen as his bride one who was not rich or famous or ennobled by family background or distinguished by any professional accomplishment. What Carolyn had were certain charismatic qualities—exceptional beauty, a unique sense of style, and a shrewd, sharp, hard intelligence.

The media played the marriage as a Cinderella story, casting Carolyn as the commoner who had found true love with Prince Charming. But it turned out to be a doomed fairy tale, a nightmare of escalating domestic violence, suspicions of infidelity, and drugs—a union that seemed destined to end in one kind of disaster or another.

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When the couple returned from their honeymoon, in the fall of 1996, they found a swarm of journalists camped outside their front door at 20 North Moore Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s Tribeca district. The rowdy media mob terrified Carolyn, and in a gallant effort to protect his wife John pleaded with the reporters and cameramen to back off and give her a chance to adjust to her new role as a celebrity.

His pleas fell on deaf ears. Normally, only supernovas of the magnitude of Madonna had to suffer through this kind of public ordeal. But Carolyn was suddenly thrust into their celestial company. Photos of her appeared everywhere. She drove the fashion world mad with excitement. The editor of Women’s Wear Daily, Patrick McCarthy, crowned Carolyn a modern style icon, heir to Jackie O, her deceased mother-in-law. Anna Wintour at Vogue and the late Liz Tilberis at Harper’s Bazaar were eager to get Carolyn to pose for their covers. And Ralph Lauren tried to hire Carolyn as his personal muse. “Every time you design something, or create something,” Lauren instructed one of his top aides, “think of Carolyn Bessette.”

John was accustomed to this kind of treatment. The narcissist in him thrived on it. To get attention, he often indulged in exhibitionistic stunts, such as appearing shirtless in Central Park or having his picture taken while sailing with a thong-clad Carolyn. As someone who had grown up in the klieg lights of public attention, John equated celebrity with power. And, like most mega-stars, he dreaded the emptiness that came with being ignored.

Carolyn stormed out of the marriage counselor’s office when the therapist raised the subject of her drug use.

But Carolyn was a different story. As the months wore on, she could not handle the relentless personal scrutiny and exploitation that went with public glorification. When a photographer approached her on the street, she would cast her eyes to the ground and pull in her shoulders. “She makes herself look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” complained Calvin Klein. And, indeed, in many photos she looked like a hunted creature.

To avoid the paparazzi, Carolyn sought refuge in the West Village apartment of Gordon Henderson. “She didn’t feel at home in the North Moore Street apartment,” said a friend. “She hated it. She didn’t like where it was located. And John had decorated it—badly. It was very cold, like a young man’s first loft.”

It was clear to friends that Carolyn was cracking under the pressure. She displayed the classic signs of clinical depression. A few months after the wedding, she began spending more and more time locked in her apartment, convulsed by crying jags and, as gossip columnist Liz Smith observed, “bemoaning her fate as the wife of America’s most famous man.”

“John’s life was huge—with dozens of friendships and involvements—but Carolyn couldn’t handle that,” one of her closest friends told me. “She didn’t want to go out. She would ditch John’s friends, not show up for dinner, refuse to go to people’s houses or events. She burned a lot of bridges.”

As a child of divorce who had long been estranged from her father, Carolyn was sensitive to any sign of male desertion. In her view, John had forsaken her to work on George, his political lifestyle magazine. One time she faxed him at his office: “Please come home now, I need you.” In addition, she resented that John had reverted to his old bachelor ways—pumping iron at the gym late into the night, going off on kayak trips with the boys, and (Carolyn suspected) playing around behind her back with the girls.

Once, when John returned in the evening to their loft, he found Carolyn sprawled on the floor in front of a sofa, disheveled and hollow-eyed, snorting cocaine with a gaggle of gay fashionistas—clothing designers, stylists, male models, and one or two publicists. Without asking John’s permission, Carolyn gave keys to their loft to some of her friends so that they could come and go as they pleased.

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“You’re a cokehead!,” John screamed at her, according to one of the people who were present that night.

Her friends in the fashion industry were aware that Carolyn was a heavy user of street drugs.

“She and I went to dinner one night when John was sick at home with the flu,” recalled a close acquaintance who worked at George. “She made at least a half-dozen trips to the bathroom and came back to the table with white rings around her nostrils. We went from bar to bar, and she wanted to come over to my apartment, but I said no, because I knew it would be an all-nighter. I finally dropped her off at three A.M.

“The next morning, John came into the office and asked, ‘Why did you keep my wife out so late?’ And I said, ‘A better question, John, is why your wife didn’t want to go home.’

“Carolyn was like a wild horse,” this person continued. “She had a trash mouth and loved being irreverent. She used to call John a fag all the time. Once, there was a party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private club in Florida, and Carolyn announced to a roomful of people, ‘I had to take a Puerto Rican bath [a derogatory term meaning a splash of water and a spray of cologne] on the way down in the airplane.’”

Their fights frequently turned violent, and John told friends that he felt trapped in an abusive relationship. One time he had to be rushed to an emergency room for an operation to repair a severed nerve in his right wrist. He tried to dismiss the injury as the result of a stupid household accident, but his friends knew better: they were certain that Carolyn was the culprit.

To a friend John disclosed his worst fear: that his wife was cheating on him.

Both Carolyn and John had fiery tempers, but she always seemed to get the better of him in their arguments. When she heard rumors that he was seeing his old flame Daryl Hannah, she flew into a rage.

People who knew Carolyn doubted she would ever let John go. Her insecurity fueled a need to control and manipulate; her frequent use of cocaine made her paranoid. She was jealous of John’s sister, Caroline, and his business partner at George, Michael Berman.

“Carolyn didn’t like Michael Berman,” said one of her friends. “She thought Michael wasn’t on the up-and-up, and that he had a vested interest in her husband. She poisoned John’s relationship with Michael. I heard her tell John, ‘I don’t believe Michael’s your real friend. The only reason he’s close to you is because you’re John F. Kennedy Jr.’” It was Carolyn’s constant meddling in the editorial operations of George that finally wrecked John’s relationship with Berman and was one of the factors that led to Berman’s exodus. Partly as a result of that, the magazine, which had been Berman’s idea in the first place, was teetering on the brink of disaster.

“The divorce between Michael Berman and J.F.K. Jr. was fateful for George,” said Jean-Louis Ginibre, the former editorial director of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, the Paris-based publisher that bankrolled and distributed George. “When Berman left, something was lost in the mix.”

John told friends that Carolyn also had a bitter falling-out with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg after hearing that John’s sister had made snide remarks about the Cumberland Island wedding. A stickler for punctuality, Caroline had criticized the bride for being late to her own wedding and for insisting on wearing high heels as she trudged down the beach to the church. Now Carolyn and Caroline were barely on speaking terms, and John was caught in the middle, between his wife and his adored sister.

John dreamed of having a son. He had even picked out a name: Flynn. But Carolyn was never willing to start a family. “I hate living in a fishbowl,” she confided to a friend. “John may be comfortable living like this, but I’m not. How could I bring a child into this kind of world?”

John once told a friend, “I’m attracted to strong-willed women like my mother.” Carolyn was not just a strong-willed woman. She could be demanding, domineering, and, according to even her best friends, downright bitchy. Some people felt that John overlooked her faults because he was blinded by her glamorous Jackie O style. In her own edgy, modern way, Carolyn was as chic as Jackie; she dressed with the simple elegance that John adored. Like the ethereal Jackie, Carolyn affected an air of mystery and unavailability, which drove the media crazy and sustained the public frenzy that John found exciting and fun. And, like Jackie, Carolyn was very controlling, which made him feel protected and cared for.

From the moment John laid eyes on Carolyn, he was besotted with her. “He lived and breathed Carolyn,” one of his friends told me, echoing the sentiments of many. “He could not keep his hands off her. He constantly stroked her hair.”

Carolyn accepted John’s worshipful attention as though it was her due—as though he was lucky to have her, rather than the other way around. Carolyn’s aloof attitude set her apart from other women John had dated—Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Daryl Hannah, and a number of lesser-known names. Many of those women had thrown themselves at John, which made him suspicious of their motives. Carolyn, on the other hand, appeared to be unimpressed by his fame, and in the end it was probably her posture of cool indifference, as much as her beauty, that captivated him.

Carolyn possessed another quality that attracted John, who hated to be thought of as square. “She is the hippest person I ever met,” Jean-Louis Ginibre once said. “She is totally au courant. Very bright. There is nothing she doesn’t know. She can focus on one person for 10 to 20 minutes and be totally involved with this person. She is very intense, very touchy-feely, and can mesmerize a person.”

To members of the editorial staff of George magazine, their famous boss often appeared listless and withdrawn. This may have been the effects of Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that drained John of energy and made him grouchy. Or it could have been the “family problem” he occasionally referred to when talking with his colleagues.

Something was disturbing him.

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But John did not divulge personal matters to the people he worked with. He reserved his confidences for close friends. To one, he disclosed his worst fear: that his wife was cheating on him with her old boy-friend, Michael Bergin, a top male model who had gained fame for his amazing pecs and abs in Calvin Klein underwear ads and billboards.

Carolyn had fallen in love with Bergin and fostered his rise as a Calvin Klein model. And even after she met John Kennedy and moved in with him, she continued her sexual affair with Bergin.

“Michael lived in a second-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, and I was in his apartment one day, and we were in the middle of something when he was buzzed on the intercom from the apartment building’s front door,” said Clifford Streit, Bergin’s former manager, who is now a producer and screenwriter. “Michael asked me to leave immediately, and when I went out, I found Carolyn hiding under the staircase.

“I said, ‘Hi, Carolyn, what are you doing?’” Streit continued. “And she said, ‘Oh, hi, I’m just going upstairs to Michael’s.’

When I got home, Michael called me and said in a kind of panic, ‘You saw Carolyn! Why did you talk to her?’ He really loved Carolyn and wanted to protect her.

“Michael didn’t feel comfortable continuing a relationship after she began living with John. But Carolyn was obsessed with Michael. And one day she went up the fire escape to his apartment and broke the window to get in.

“After she married John, Michael decided to stop seeing her. There is something strangely decent about Michael, and he was respectful of marriage vows.”

Not long after the fire-escape episode, Bergin left New York to become an actor in Hollywood. He joined the cast of the television series Baywatch and appeared in a two-hour telefilm for Fox, Baywatch Hawaiian Wedding.

When I caught up with Bergin, I asked him about the time Carolyn Bessette broke into his apartment. At first he professed to have no recollection of such an incident. But as we talked, memories of his days with Carolyn began flowing back.

“Carolyn climbing fire escapes doesn’t surprise me,” Bergin told me. “If Carolyn wanted to get into someone’s apartment, she would. If she had to be a spider woman to get into someone’s apartment, she would. If she had to throw things, she would.

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“There was one time when Carolyn saw me at a bar lighting a cigarette for an ex-girlfriend,” he continued. “Carolyn came over, pushed the girl out of the way, got in my face, and screamed and yelled at me, and even drew a little blood from my face.

“I went home, and two minutes later Carolyn was at my door. I had to let her in or she would have knocked the whole building down. I had these tall, heavy religious candles, and she threw one through the window, smashing the windowpane, and another at the mirror above the fireplace mantel, which shattered. Then she knocked my television set and VCR onto the floor and jumped on my VCR and squashed it.

“I ran out of the apartment. I’m very athletic and fast, but she caught up with me, and started yelling at me, and taunting me, calling me a baby. And my adrenaline was flowing, and I turned around and pushed her away from me, and she went flying in the air and landed on the stoop of a building. That put an end to that, and we went back to my apartment.

“Carolyn and I had a very intense love for each other. We were inseparable for a couple of years. And I know deep in my heart that she still loved me even after she married John Kennedy. Some things just don’t end.”

After their marriage, Carolyn managed to keep her feelings about Bergin a secret from her husband. But then, during one of their screaming matches, she told John that she was still sleeping with Bergin. That was a lie, but John believed her.

“She threw Michael Bergin in John’s face,” said Clifford Streit. “I think she used Michael Bergin in any way she could to get whatever she wanted out of John. The only one in the world who thought Carolyn would choose Michael over John was John.”

It took time for John to recover from Carolyn’s “revelation,” but eventually he convinced himself that his wife’s behavior was more a reflection on her than on him. He persuaded Carolyn to see a psychiatrist. He made sure that she took her antidepressant medication. To amuse her, he flew her to exotic hideaways for romantic vacations. And in March 1999 he joined her in marriage counseling.

Nothing worked.

Four months later, around July 12, 1999, Carolyn stormed out of the marriage counsel-or’s office when the therapist raised the subject of her drug use. Then, in a supreme act of rejection, Carolyn began to sleep in a spare room that John had used to store his exercise equipment.

Humiliated and at his wit’s end, John moved out of the North Moore Street loft and checked into the Stanhope Hotel. His room overlooked the museum and Central Park, where he had played with his sister as a little boy.

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Page proofs and cover mock-ups for the upcoming issue of George were strewn over the carpet in John’s hotel suite. As the editor in chief, John assigned all the stories and chose the photographs, and he was particularly proud of an article on Congresswoman Mary Bono, the widow of Sonny Bono, which was illustrated by a photo of the U.S. representative scantily clad.

There was a lot about his role at George that John did not like. He was not particularly fond of the circulation battles for prime display space on magazine racks, or the trench warfare for advertising dollars. But he delighted in the side of the job that called upon him to make a good impression—the one-on-one interviews with notorious characters such as Fidel Castro and Larry Flynt, and the television appearances to promote new issues.

It turned out that John was attracted not only to adrenaline-pumping physical activities, such as rollerblading, hang gliding, kayaking, rappelling, skiing, and flying, but also to the thrust and parry in the public arena that came with being the editor of a national magazine.

Before the launch of George, John had consulted with his mother, who expressed her deep reservations about his magazine venture. Jackie shared these concerns with some of her friends in the media, including me. “John has never shown the slightest interest in the magazine business before,” she told me. “And he has no experience in journalism. Why would he want to start the kind of magazine that snoops and pries into people’s private lives? He knows I don’t approve.”

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The clash between Jackie and John over George was, in many ways, emblematic of their relationship. For, as much as Jackie loved John, he caused her a great deal of anguish and grief.

After the assassination of his father, John’s impulsive behavior developed into a serious problem. He was restless, had a low threshold for boredom, and could not sit still for any length of time. He was disruptive in school and did poorly academically. Jackie frequently had to chastise him.

A friend of Jackie’s recalls that when John finally got to be too much for her to handle she took him to see Dr. Ted Becker, a well-known psychiatrist for children and adolescents in New York City. Through a referral by a friend—the wife of the chairman of a Fortune 500 company—Jackie also found a woman specialist in Moline, Illinois, and brought her to New York on the chairman’s company jet.

The specialist diagnosed John as suffering from A.D.D., attention-deficit disorder, and dyslexia, which impaired his ability to read. For the A.D.D., she prescribed Ritalin, a medication that raises the body’s dopamine levels, which stimulates other neurotransmitters in the brain and helps it work better.

John, according to a close family friend, remained on Ritalin for much of his life, but the results were mixed. He flunked 11th grade at Phillips Academy, a prestigious prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, and had to repeat the grade. After he graduated from Brown University, Jackie refused to let him apply to the Yale School of Drama, although acting was clearly his strongest suit.

The friction caused by John’s desire to pursue a career in show business resulted in frequent shouting matches between mother and son. On one occasion, John stormed out of a room, slamming the door in his mother’s face.

It was at Jackie’s urging that John went to law school. After graduating from New York University, he joined the office of the Manhattan district attorney, which was run by Bobby Kennedy’s old friend Robert Morgenthau.

After John moved into the Stanhope, he spent a great deal of time on the phone, seeking solace. During a long, rambling conversation with one of his closest friends, John said, “It’s all falling apart. Everything is falling apart!”

Things were falling apart because John’s mother was no longer around to hold them together. During her life, Jackie had been John’s anchor in stormy seas. She encouraged him to be bold and courageous—but only up to a point. She drew the line at high-risk Kennedy behavior, which she deemed self-destructive.

For example, when John was a student at Brown and wanted to take flying lessons, Jackie extracted a promise from him that he would never pilot his own plane. “Please don’t do it,” Jackie told John, according to a friend. “Don’t we have enough deaths in the family from plane accidents?”

In the spring of 1994, when Jackie realized she was dying, she asked her longtime companion, the diamond dealer Maurice Tempelsman, to look after her children, especially John. Two friends of Jackie’s recalled that John had never felt particularly close to Tempelsman, who occupied a separate bedroom in Jackie’s apartment. After John’s mother died—and before his loft in Tribeca was ready for occupancy—he let Tempelsman know that he would like to have his mother’s apartment to himself. He suggested that the older man find his own place to live, which Tempelsman did by moving to a hotel.

John also ignored Tempelsman’s advice about flying and took lessons at the FlightSafety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida. “I worry about John flying,” Tempelsman told a friend. “He’s so distractible.”

When John graduated, he presented a photo of himself to his flight instructors with the following inscription:

To Flight Safety Academy, The bravest people in aviation because people will only care where I got my training if I crash. Best, John Kennedy.

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Jackie had also cautioned John about the dangers of starting a new magazine. But a year after her death he went ahead with plans for George anyway. At the time of George’s launch, in September 1995, readers and advertisers flocked to the magazine because they wanted to be part of John’s world. As a result, George had one of the most successful magazine launches in history, which made John feel like his own man for the first time.

However, Jackie’s concerns about George were eventually proved valid. The magazine began to hemorrhage money and was expected to lose nearly $10 million in 1999. To John’s frustration, George never earned the respect of the journalistic community, which considered it an amateur venture.

For John, the failure of George was unthinkable. Beyond the private humiliation, the collapse of the magazine could derail his ambitious political plans. And so John had been seeking alternative sources of financing for the ailing magazine. A few days before his death, he and a certified flight instructor had flown John’s private plane, a single-engine Piper Saratoga II HP, to Toronto to meet prospective backers. John had also turned for help to his friend Steve Florio, the president and C.E.O. of Condé Nast, which currently publishes 17 magazines, including Vogue and Vanity Fair.

“I had contracted an infection in my mitral valve in a doctor’s office, and had to have open-heart surgery,” Florio recalled in an interview with me. “Shortly before John’s fatal crash, he called me and said, ‘My cousin Arnold’s here.’ He put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the phone. Schwarzenegger said he had the same damn thing as I did.

“When I got out of the hospital, John invited me to lunch,” Florio continued. “‘Why don’t we go to San Domenico, and you can have a piece of grilled fish, and we can talk,’ John said. What I thought was going to be just a friendly chat turned out to be a more substantive talk. Hachette had lost interest in George, and John wanted to know if we at Condé Nast would be interested in picking it up. And I said, ‘Yes, we can talk about it. George is a good magazine. Let’s keep chatting over the next couple of months.’ But John died before we could make a decision on George.”

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On Thursday, July 15, John visited his orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital to have a cast removed from his left ankle. Six weeks earlier, he had broken the ankle in a paragliding accident, and he had been using crutches to get around.

The ankle was still too tender to bear the full weight of his muscular, six-foot-one, 190-pound frame, and he had received medical advice not to fly for at least another 10 days.

Someone closer to him also counseled caution. A few weeks before, just after John had crashed his paraglider, his friend John Perry Barlow expressed concern that John had become overconfident about his flying. Bar-low urged John to view his broken ankle as a warning sign.

John’s Piper Saratoga, for which he had paid an estimated $300,000, was a high-performance plane that seriously taxed his experience. He was some 10 hours short of getting instrument-rating certification. As a result, John’s meager “hours in command” did not meet insurance-company requirements for coverage in excess of $1 million.

“The coverage was ordered through the Joseph Kennedy office [which handles much of the Kennedy-family business],” said an insurance expert. “His mother’s insurance broker didn’t write it, because at the time he was taking flying lessons his mother was still alive, and she did not want him to fly. John was afraid Jackie’s broker might say something to her. The Kennedy office paid for both his flying lessons and the insurance, avoiding letting his mother know.”

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Two days before he died, John had lunch in the café of the Stanhope. With the help of his crutches, he made his way to the hotel elevator and descended to the lobby. When the doors opened, John swung himself onto the black-and-white marble floor and negotiated the several yards to the café. The noisy room fell silent the moment he entered. Heads swiveled as he made his way to a corner table, where two young women were waiting. One of them was his wife, Carolyn. The other was Carolyn’s sister Lauren Bessette, an attractive, dark-haired executive director with Morgan Stanley.

Lauren told a friend that it had been her idea for the three of them to meet for drinks. She was gravely alarmed over Carolyn and John’s decision to live apart, and she said that she thought it would be a good idea for them to discuss their problems in front of her. Maybe she could help break their emotional logjam. But the relationship between John and Carolyn had become so tense and ugly that neither of them was in the mood to talk. They sat in stony silence. As Lauren told the story, she asked John and Carolyn to hold hands with her. At first they refused. But when Lauren insisted, they reluctantly clasped her hands.

Lauren was aware that Carolyn was most reluctant to fly with John in his plane. But as she squeezed her sister’s hand, she urged her to make an exception and accompany her husband in his Piper Saratoga the next day to Hyannis Port, where family members and friends were assembling for the wedding of his cousin Rory Kennedy.

Lauren knew that John had promised to attend Rory’s wedding. He clearly intended to do so, even if he was in a state of anguish and confusion over his troubled marriage, his failing magazine, and the recent news that his cousin and best friend, Anthony Radziwill, was near death with cancer.

To encourage Carolyn, Lauren offered to fly along with the couple as far as Martha’s Vineyard, where she planned to spend the weekend with friends. The three of them would make the flight together.

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“Come on,” she said, “it’ll be fun.”

First John, then Carolyn, agreed to Lauren’s proposal.

“Great,” Lauren said. “Then I’ll see you guys at the airport.”

The whole world knows what happened next.

On Friday, July 16, John and Lauren Bessette traveled together in his white Hyundai convertible from Midtown Manhattan to the Essex County Airport in Fairfield, New Jersey. They got stuck in traffic and arrived a little after eight P.M., as the light in the sky was fading. But there was no sign of Carolyn, who was coming in a separate car.

What had delayed Carolyn?

The answer to that question comes from someone who has never spoken publicly before. Colin Lively, a haircolorist and stylist, was getting a pedicure at a New York salon that afternoon.

“It was late at the end of the day on Friday, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was right next to me, sitting in the same line of people getting pedicures,” Lively recalled. “She had a little piece of sheer fabric—about three inches square, almost white with a hint of lavender—and she wanted her toenail polish to match the swatch.

“The pedicurist would apply the polish, and Carolyn would go to the window and put her foot up and put the fabric next to it,” Lively continued. “Meanwhile, her cell phone kept ringing, and she kept answering it.

“‘What?’ she said impatiently into the phone. ‘I told you—I’m getting a pedicure.’

“She made the pedicurist re-do her toenails, and the phone rang again, and she said, ‘The more times you call me, the longer it’s going to take!’

“She had the pedicurist do it three times. She wasn’t overtly bitchy, but she was so self-involved. If this was a key to her personality, then I would say she was obsessive about a lot of things.”

Finally, Lively said, her phone rang again. It was her driver, who had been waiting for her.

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“‘If you can’t park, circle the block,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes.’”

Only when the nails were done to her satisfaction did Carolyn Bessette Kennedy finally leave the salon.

Excerpted from The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America’s First Family for 150 Years, by Edward Klein, published by St. Martin’s Press L.L.C.