PARADISE LOST
Byline: Written in New York by Mark Ganem / with contributions from Kevin West / Eric Wilson / Alev Aktar / Dan Peres / Robert Murphy, Paris
NEW YORK — Fashion appears to have lost its newest and brightest fashion icon — the only real successor to her mother-in-law, Jacqueline Onassis.
At press time Sunday, authorities still held out a rapidly dimming hope that Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr., and sister Lauren Bessette may have somehow survived the crash of their small private plane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard last Friday evening. Developments have been slow to come, but increasingly pessimistic.
The news media’s focus has largely been on John’s fate — the latest in a long history of Kennedy family tragedies. But in the eyes of the fashion world, it is Carolyn who was the undisputed star, a fact John himself admitted with easy humor. “Let me use the same phrase that my father did when he went to Paris with my mother 35 years ago,” he told guests at an Italian industry fashion dinner in 1997. “My name is John Kennedy, and I am the man who is accompanying Carolyn Bessette to Milan. I am honored to tell you she is my wife.”
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has been the kind of designer’s dream that comes along once in a lifetime: a striking woman of easy, unstudied style who, along with her husband, commanded a room the minute she walked in. A true clothes horse, she was sighted regularly at Prada and Barneys and gained recognition as diverse as a VH-1 Fashion Awards nomination and an appearance on the ever-stodgy Best Dressed list. And could she ever wear clothes, from jeans and a T-shirt to the form-fitting winter-white Versace sheath she wore at last winter’s Fire & Ice Ball in Los Angeles. “She chooses simple, severe looks that not everyone would wear,” said Gucci’s Tom Ford, reached over the weekend at his apartment in Paris. “She knows how to set off her beauty with clothes. That’s a rare gift.”
Ford, like all the designers contacted by WWD Sunday, was insistent on not talking about Bessette Kennedy in the past tense.
“She has the look of the Nineties,” said Karl Lagerfeld from the Chanel atelier. “She is not a label girl. Everything that she wore looked fabulous on her.” Added Oscar de la Renta, who designed the dress Ethel Kennedy was to wear for her daughter Rory’s wedding: “She is the incarnation of modern style.”
But mostly, Bessette Kennedy, with her piercing blue eyes and silken blond mane, possessed an arresting beauty that many characterized as uniquely American — and uniquely contemporary. “She was so beautiful and so natural,” said photographer Bruce Weber. “She looked almost like a cowgirl that you would see at the rodeo. The look of a cowgirl who accidentally got thrown in a dress. She had that charm and that grace. Like a horse jumping up in the air.”
Donna Karan perhaps best summed up the Bessette Kennedy mystique, calling her “simply exquisite.”
Bessette Kennedy, in fact, could catapult designer names into the headlines just by wearing one of their creations. The first to benefit from this remarkable ability — and from Carolyn’s fierce loyalty to her friends — was her former employer, Calvin Klein, for whom Bessette Kennedy served as director of public relations for Collection. Then came Narciso Rodriguez, a friend since those days, whom she thrust into the international media limelight by wearing his now famous — and much imitated — wedding dress. (She made sure the groom was suited up by another friend, Gordon Henderson, whose business had fallen on hard times.) Lately, she favored Yohji Yamamoto for public appearances. Rodriguez — who according to friends was too distraught from the news of the accident to comment — told WWD not long after the Bessette-Kennedy wedding, “Carolyn is my muse. She’s got great personal style and is such a good friend that while we were designing the dress, there was no bullshit. I knew what she wanted, and she knows what I do. It was easy.”
Her fashion moments aside, Bessette Kennedy was unmistakably a tireless worker, serving as unofficial ambassador for her husband’s brainchild, George magazine. She regularly hit the event circuit — largely, it was clear, because some of the companies involved are current or potential advertisers. Only a few months ago, she showed up at a relatively minor fashion do in New York. Asked what she was doing there, she winked and said, “I’m Georgie’s girl.” Kennedy’s magazine has been under intense pressure of late, however, with ad pages down dramatically and reports that he was quietly seeking a new backer. His current partner, Hachette, reportedly has a contractual obligation through December, and new Hachette chief executive officer Jack Kliger had been reviewing the status of the magazine in recent weeks. It’s been an expensive proposition, with Hachette so far having invested an estimated $15 million to $20 million in the publication.
Carolyn has also shown support for her in-laws’ causes, like the David Parsons Dance Company, supported by Lee Radziwill and the Municipal Art Society, one of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ favorite projects. And she arrived at the Fire & Ice Ball, benefiting the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program, with brother-sister team Bobby and Maria Shriver, joking, “I’ve been waiting for a long time for a date with my cousin Bobby.” Evelyn Lauder of the Estee Lauder Cos. remarked that Carolyn had been growing more in her public role lately, including appearances at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation luncheon last October and the Whitney gala, where John was chairman. “Carolyn started out after she married being a little uncertain of herself,” Lauder noted. “Within a year, she sort of blossomed, and the real personality became more evident. She was finally much more confident and very much herself and proud of it.”
Bessette Kennedy’s reputation was also one of being extremely loyal to friends. But if she thought that intimacy was being abused, she could quickly show her fury. When she felt that Brad Johns, her colorist, was leaking details of her private life to the press, she stopped seeing him — and later had her lawyers issue a cease-and-desist order demanding he not use her name in advertisements.
Carolyn Bessette first appeared on fashion’s radar screen when she worked at a Boston-area Calvin Klein boutique after graduating from Boston University. It wasn’t long before sharp-eyed executives transferred her to the New York headquarters to be closer to the action. There, her influence was disproportionate to her experience. She was not only moving quickly in the office — she had Calvin’s ear and his wife Kelly’s friendship — but out on the town as well. “She has real street smarts,” one observer remarked. “She knew what was going to be a trend long before anyone else.” Charming, intelligent and funny, Bessette could also be mercurial and tough. Most importantly, she seemed indifferent to celebrity — making her ideal for her first assignment: assisting VIPs in the showroom. “It’s got to be one of the things that attracted [Kennedy] to her — she had such repartee and such wit,” said New York publicist Paul Wilmot, who also worked at Calvin Klein back then. “She had just enough sense of sarcasm. All these things that seemed so serious in the fashion world — she would cut right through them. From day one.”
Calvin Klein, reached late Sunday afternoon, continued to express hope about Bessette Kennedy, even as the news trickling out of Martha’s Vineyard remained relentlessly pessimistic. “My hopes and prayers are that they still will all be found alive, and my thoughts are with Carolyn’s family and the whole Kennedy family,” he said.
In a 1992 feature on up-and-coming New Yorkers, WWD’s sister publication W described Bessette, then 25, with her “mannequin proportions and sultry blue-eyed beauty,” as “merely a physically blessed real person. Sort of.” Just recently promoted to the Collection position at the time, she revealed how she decided against pursuing a career in teaching despite majoring in elementary education in college: “At the time, I felt a little underdeveloped myself to be completely responsible for 25 other people’s children,” she explained. “And to a large extent, I felt it wouldn’t be provocative enough for me.”
It clearly wasn’t. Bessette Kennedy still maintained a detailed and concise knowledge of the worlds of business and society. Once, in conversation alongside her husband, the name of Galen Weston — whom John did not know — popped up. With the speed and accuracy of a top presidential aide, she filled him in on the Canadian billionaire’s holdings, his wife’s elected office and gave a thumbnail sketch of the couple’s social world.
John and Carolyn met not long after her arrival in New York, though accounts differ as to the circumstances. One has them meeting by chance during a Central Park jog. In others, Kelly Klein plays matchmaker, introducing them either at a party or during a showroom visit at Calvin Klein by the young Kennedy scion.
The match wasn’t immediate, however. Kennedy was dating Daryl Hannah, and Carolyn was seeing Calvin Klein model Michael Bergin. Besides, Bessette was a veteran party girl, while Kennedy, known to ride to black-tie events on his bicycle, was more of an athletic outdoorsman.
She found the difference amusing. Once, after he had taken the staff of George on a rugged retreat in the Catskills, she joined in with a cluster of editors commiserating over the outdoor rigors of the weekend. “You could be hanging from a cliff by your fingernails and John would say, ‘Come on! Let’s go! What are you waiting for?’ ” she chimed in. Later, she confessed to WWD, “I told one of the editors, ‘Now you know what I go through every weekend.”‘
Still, by 1994, the couple was an item.
And while wildcat videos of arguments between John and Carolyn replay continually on taboid television shows, the pair often seemed the very image of a loving couple when together. He could appear protective of her in public settings, and when they were seated at separate tables at a large benefit dinner, he would frequently check that all was well.
They could even be a little sappy.
“How’re you doing, honey-bunny?” John asked her at a star-studded party at New York’s Asia de Cuba restaurant to celebrate the second anniversary of George magazine. Dressed in a long, black Yohji dress and ebony polished calf Manolos, Bessette Kennedy stood with her husband at the party’s entrance for nearly two hours meeting and greeting guests ranging from Lee Radziwill to Anne Heche to Ian Schrager. She had a word for everyone — even Seventies rocker Ted Nugen,t who walked in wearing a Ducks Unlimited cap.
“Don’t be too hard on those ducks,” she teased.
At another event, she repeatedly addressed her husband as “Mouse.”
“It was clear they loved one another very much,” said Krizia designer Mariuccia Mandelli, who hosted Carolyn during the designer’s retrospective in New York last June.
While their public appearances together were rare — any party they went to automatically assumed the proportions of a major event, whether in New York, Washington, London or Italy — they were not entirely reclusive. They occasionally could be spotted among the chic crowd at such eateries at TriBeCa’s trendy Independent, Greenwich Village’s Il Cantinori — dining this spring, for instance, at the outdoor table with Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger — or at the cozy NoLIta bistro La Cigale.
And when out of the public eye, they definitely knew how to do casual. The week after Easter this spring, the couple stayed near Vero Beach, Fla., at a house borrowed from financier Pete Peterson while John took additional flying lessons at nearby Flight Safety, where he had earned his pilot’s license and was training for an instrument-rating license. During the long weekend, the couple would head out to the local cafe in shorts and sports sandals for an al fresco breakfast. Her famous blond hair was hidden beneath a bandanna, but otherwise they blended in — as much as America’s most famous couple could be inconspicuous. Bodyguards and large retinues were not their style.
Over breakfast, their banter was quick, light and ceaseless, whether arguing over the legal definition of breaking and entering — inspired by a story on the front page of the paper — or snatching each other’s food. When he tried to shoo her hand away from his breakfast, pointing out she had her own, she shot back, “It tastes better off your plate.” And they made almost too beautiful a couple. “The two complement each other beautifully,” said Emanuel Ungaro. “It’s fantastic to see them together.”
“They have everything to look forward to,” said Donna Karan. “They are really beautiful people inside and outside. I think they were teachers of how to live with grace and style and with being celebrities.”
That, particularly, did not come easily for Carolyn. Although she handled her role as Kennedy wife extremely well, Bessette Kennedy was clearly ambivalent about the hysteria that greeted her engagement and then marriage to America’s favorite bachelor (whose fortune has been estimated at $32 million).
Bessette’s wedding to Kennedy in 1996 was perhaps her first major brush with the care she’d have to use to protect her private life. A 50-member security team, hired at a cost of $250,000, began coordinating with state troopers, the police and the National Park Service five days in advance to provide safety and secrecy. Beaches and marinas within a 15-mile radius of Cumberland Island, Ga., were watched and all boats (or hikers) bound for the island were turned away.
Even as the couple honeymooned in Turkey and Greece, the rumor mill kicked into high gear. The big question on the minds of the publishing world was who would get her for their cover.
The answer: no one. Nor would she choose to add her name to a vanity list of contributing editors or even grant interviews.
It was a strategy of deflecting public attention that the former p.r. executive continued to pursue, though the result, as her mother-in-law well knew, created only more intense interest.
Next, of course, came talk that she was pregnant, a rumor she handled with typical skill and aplomb. At the 1997 premiere of “Air Force One” in Washington, Tommy Hilfiger and John were passing around snacks. She declined an offer of Goobers, she told Hilfiger, because if she indulged, the press would think she’s pregnant. “Are you pregnant?” asked Hilfiger. “Absolutely not,” she responded. Around the same time, Bessette Kennedy slipped away from the crowd at another party to a secluded table and ordered a drink from the waiter. When she took a cigarette from a guest at the party, she glanced up with a wry smile and said, “I guess you know this means I’m not pregnant.”
But a sense of humor will get you only so far, and one can’t help but notice that the fun-loving Bessette Kennedy became increasingly vigilant about protecting her privacy. “Carolyn was not used to this,” Wilmot said of the intense public scrutiny. “It was one thing she didn’t bargain for. She never gave an interview because she wasn’t going to become a public figure. She felt that she didn’t owe anyone an interview. She was right.” Observers, though, gave her credit for handling the limelight with apparent ease. “She was also very aware of her role as John’s wife, and she played it out very well,” said Krizia’s Mandelli. “She was very discreet, and very simple, in the best sense of that word.” Added Donatella Versace, “She handled the situation of marrying into that family so gracefully, under that kind of spotlight. I knew her before she was married, and she didn’t give up anything from her old life for her new life. She is so glamorous — not by her clothes or her style, that’s not important. I mean real glamour. She has a wonderful way of looking at you, with those beautiful eyes. It makes you feel warm.”
“In photos, she can appear rather cool and aloof,” said Gucci’s Ford, who last saw the couple when he sat with them at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last spring in Washington. “But in person, she is the opposite — so warm. She has a magnetic sex appeal. She is polished and charming — a real beauty, in every sense.”
“She seems so shy because she was not used to being in front of the camera,” said Bruce Weber. “She really isn’t so comfortable in front of the camera. She was more like one of us [photographers] — she is more used to being on the other side of the camera.”
Perhaps Bessette Kennedy’s reluctance toward celebrity had to do with her sense of proportion as well as shyness. She once noted that her favorite piece in George was a profile of the late Mother Teresa. “Through her great need to be vigilant for the disenfranchised,” she said, “Mother Teresa was an extraordinary departure from the values of media culture. And any figure who challenges that is a powerful political figure.”
Her care in avoiding the incessant media attention has made some characterize Bessette Kennedy as a reluctant hermit, holed up in the couple’s TriBeCa loft, and she herself had pointed out that the invasion was close to total — and sometimes genuinely threatening. “I thought it was kind of a joke at first,” she told an editor at WWD a few months ago. “I’d pick up the phone at work and there would be this guy calling from the National Enquirer, asking the most absurd questions: ‘Why did you beat up John in the park yesterday?’ But then it just got bizarre. I realized that a lot of the photographers really didn’t like me. They wanted me to do something wrong — so they could photograph it. And when I fell in the street one day outside the apartment, these four or five guys just went crazy. Nobody helped me up. They just kept snapping.”
Still, she managed to find humor in the situation as well. “I walked into my grandmother’s house one day and she was on the phone talking to someone called Bambi,” she recalled to the same editor. “My grandmother is pretty old and I know most of the people she knows, and I couldn’t figure out who this Bambi was. ‘Oh Bambi, I don’t think that’s true,’ she was saying, and ‘Oh Bambi, that’s so funny.’ And ‘Sure, anytime you want, Bambi.’ Finally she got off the phone and I said ‘Who’s Bambi?’ And she said ‘Oh, Bambi’s my friend from “Hard Copy.” ‘ And, of course, she had no idea what ‘Hard Copy’ was.”
This was the same grandmother who was a trifle disappointed at Carolyn and John’s living arrangements.
“A few weeks after we moved into the loft, she came to visit,” Carolyn remembered. “She was unimpressed. I don’t know what she expected, but she certainly expected something different from a loft in TriBeCa. ‘So you married this famous man and you’re in every newspaper and this is where you live?”‘ she quoted her grandmother as saying.
In fact, Carolyn prided herself on not being an uptown girl. When she first came to New York, she moved to the East Village, long before it was the yuppie haven it has now become. “I used to step over drunks and crack dealers to get to my apartment,” she remembered. “Everybody at Calvin thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t imagine coming to New York and living anywhere else. Even with all the weirdness, I felt comfortable and I had fun.”
Having fun was important to Carolyn. She loved restaurants, nightclubs, late-night parties. Only last month, after a Ralph Lauren-hosted dinner in London, Carolyn was urging her tablemates to go out. “You can be boring at home,” she implored. “Let’s hit the road.”