Mom Knows Best

“John had measured most of the women in his life by Jackie’s opinion of them,” writes author Taraborrelli.

THE JACKIE EFFECT

It’s no surprise he used a book to seduce. After all, John’s beloved mother, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, was a book editor and he and his sister Caroline inherited her love of reading. Before her 1994 death, Jackie was an outsize part of her son’s life, and anyone who dated him had to pass her inspection. “It had always been tough for his girlfriends to meet Jackie for the f irst time,” J. Randy Taraborrelli writes in The Kennedy Heirs. For Splash star Daryl Hannah, with whom John had a on-off again relationship for six years in the early 1990s, his mother was a stumbling block. “Jackie didn’t like Daryl because Daryl was an actress and people in Jackie’s high-society world didn’t want to associate themselves with those types of people,” reveals the insider, adding that Jackie was the reason he ended up breaking up with a lot of women. “He would often dump a girl because his mom didn’t approve of her.” Jackie could also play matchmaker, as she reportedly did when a young

Brooke Shields visited the Brown campus and John was on hand to give her a tour. The two hit it off and wound up dating. Brooke later downplayed the romance as “Brief, short-lived. It was a good diary entry, that’s all.”

But out of favor with Jackie, Daryl was humiliated by John’s failure to propose. “I get asked about it all the time,” she once said of persistent marriage rumors. “This morning I call up my plumber, and even he asks me. Oh, brother, I’m just trying to get my pipes fixed. Why can’t people talk about something else?”

Even as they split, Jackie was — posthumously, at least — involved. An insider tells Star John found Daryl to be too self-absorbed. “They fought about that a lot,” says the insider. Indeed, in the book, America’s Reluctant Prince, historian and friend Steven M. Gillon writes that when Jackie died, the actress was more concerned with her dog’s health than John’s grief. “Daryl’s on the phone talking about her dog and John is there in the kitchen with [his friend] Sasha Chermayeff, and he says, ‘Can you believe this? I just lost my mom and all she wants to talk about is her sick dog.’”

PERFECT GENTLEMAN

In the end, John’s past loves have nothing but good things to say about him. As model Julie Baker, whose two-year relationship with John began in 1989, says, despite his fame and fortune, John was as down-to-earth as it gets. “I just loved that he was kind of silly, quirky, forgetful, fun and adventurous,” she said. “A normal, humble, great guy.” ★