REMEMBERING JFK JNR
Although he was born just two weeks after his father John F Kennedy was elected 35th president of the United States and only lived in the White House for three years, John F Kennedy Jnr’s charmed and intensely scrutinised life was fodder for a modern fairytale. When the single-engine plane Kennedy Jnr was piloting crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on July 16, 1999 – killing him and his two passengers, wife Carolyn BessetteKennedy and her sister, Lauren – the world mourned for the loss of potential the so-called “Prince of Camelot” represented.
“He said he was two people,” Steven M Gillon, author of The Reluctant Prince biography, recalls his friend telling him once. “He said he played the role of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jnr, the son of the president. But at his core, he was just John.”
Kennedy Jnr was 38 when he died, and November 25 this year would have seen him celebrate his 60th birthday. “John’s father is frozen in time,” Gillon told WHO’s sister publication People. “And now John is too.”
PRINCE OF CAMELOT
Kennedy Jnr – mistakenly given the childhood nickname “John John” after a reporter misheard JFK call for his son twice – was the first infant to live in the White House. He seemed to have access to all areas, hiding under the desk in the Oval Office and often interrupting meetings to play and talk with his president dad.
Three days after his father was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, the image of Kennedy Jnr raising his tiny hand in final salute as he watched his father’s funeral procession became etched in world history. It was his third birthday. From that moment, says Gillon, “All the hopes and expectations transferred to him and he carried that burden his entire life.” Widowed Jacqueline Kennedy moved her family to a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where Kennedy Jnr grew up with sister Caroline. “He had to deal with some incredible pressure,” Jim Bailinson, a friend and schoolmate, recalled to The Washington Post. “In [primary] school, kids would follow him into the bathroom, just to gawk at him.”
He went on to attend Brown University and then law school at New York University, and went to work at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, following the advice of his mother to forge his
“All the hopes and expectations transferred to him” —GILLON
own path. “She’d always encouraged both Caroline and I to make our own way,” Kennedy Jnr said in a 1995 interview with Barbara Walters. “To not subordinate our own lives to the expectations of what we should do with our lives.”
FAMOUS LOVES
As one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, Kennedy Jnr was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1988. “People can say a lot worse things about you, right? That you were attractive, and you look good in a bathing suit,” he laughed off the title in an interview.
His list of famous girlfriends included dates with supermodel Cindy Crawford, an on-off romance with actress Daryl Hannah, and a six-month fling with soon-to-be Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker. “We would go places where there wasn’t a soul around, and the next day I’d see pictures of us there in the tabloids,” Parker later told The New York Post. “I never had any idea what real fame was until I met John.” He also dated Madonna, who allegedly was disapproved of by Jackie. “She thought she was ill-bred and raunchy,” an insider tells Us Weekly.
In 1992, he met PR executive Carolyn Bessette in a Calvin Klein store and two years later, as he prepared to launch his politics-meet-fashion magazine George, they started dating. “She wasn’t afraid to get John angry … and John needed that,” the couple’s close friend Carole Radziwill has said. “He loved her. And she loved him. And they drove each other crazy.”
They married in a private ceremony on Georgia’s Cumberland Island on September 21, 1996. The bride wore Narciso Rodriguez, and they were wed by candlelight in the island’s tiny First African Baptist Church. Managing to pull off the secret storybook wedding “required the skill of a James Bond and the whole CIA. Jackie must be smiling in heaven”, the former first lady’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, said at the time.
TRAGIC END
Many have written about how in the final months of their lives Kennedy Jnr and his wife’s marriage was under increasing pressure. “John and Carolyn loved each other, but their struggles were much more real than people realise,” says The Kennedy Heirs author J Randy Taraborrelli. “They were working on their relationship at the time they died. They thought they had all the time in the world to figure this out.”
Likewise, Kennedy Jnr was on his way to finally finding his place in the public sphere, with many friends saying that before his death, he had begun exploring the idea of entering politics. “At first, he ran from his father’s legacy,” says author and friend Gillon. “At the end of his life, he wanted to embrace his father’s legacy.”
For five days after Kennedy Jnr’s plane
“She wasn’t afraid to get John angry … and John needed that” — RADZIWELL
went missing en-route to cousin Rory Kennedy’s wedding, the world prayed for a miracle, until July 21, when US Navy divers retrieved three bodies from the broken plane on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
“It was earth-shattering,” RoseMarie Terenzio, Kennedy Jnr’s personal assistant, told People. “It was unbelievable. It was as if the earth had cracked in half. And I could not understand how this could happen. To him of all people.”
“What I liked about John and Carolyn is that they were like everybody else in general,” friend Billy Noonan shared on JFK Jr and Carolyn’s Wedding: The Lost Tapes.
“No-one ever expected that three years [after the wedding] we’d be in another church for another reason.”