The enduring romance and glamour of Camelot cannot be overstated. The Kennedys were the closest this country gets to a royal family, and Jackie’s beloved son — handsome, playful, adored — was America’s crown prince and most eligible bachelor. When John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette a few months after the auction, the fashion publicist was transformed into an international celebrity overnight.
They were a beautiful couple. She was a tall, elegant blonde with a cool reserve that complemented his effortless charm. Many people believed that one day John Jr. would become president, and she would be first lady. That dream ended tragically when John, Carolyn and her sister died in a plane crash in the summer of 1999.
Now, 25 years later, Beller has written a biography, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.” The writer, who never met Carolyn, very much wants her subject to be remembered as extraordinary in her own right, not as an ordinary young woman pulled into the Kennedy orbit. To underscore her point, the book opens with an author’s note: Beller says she wants to defend the “slanderous” rumors that Carolyn was shallow, difficult and manipulative, characterizations she attributes to a “dysfunctional culture,” the anti-feminist patriarchy and the media. Her decision to write this book “was not so much a choice as a compulsion.”
It’s fair to wonder if compulsion is the best starting point. A great biography is intimate but honest, compassionate but unflinching. Sigmund Freud believed that biographers were susceptible to transference — romanticizing and sanitizing the narrative in response to unconscious fantasies. At the very least, Beller stumbled into the classic rookie mistake: She fell in love with her subject and so could never see her objectively.
The result is an effusive, almost worshipful portrait of a modern-day princess, stripped of agency or nuance. In Beller’s telling, Carolyn is stunning, caring, brilliant, hilarious and passionate but surrounded and hounded by people who are jealous or simply cruel. Beller interviewed dozens of people — although not the Bessette or Kennedy inner circle, despite her efforts — and the memories are overwhelmingly positive. It’s not surprising that friends want to protect Carolyn’s legacy and diminish her flaws, but the book is a paean to a doomed goddess instead of a reflective examination of a woman thrust into a life she was unprepared for and ill-equipped to survive.
Carolyn’s star rose quickly. After graduating from Boston University in 1988 — a semester late because she was busy promoting local nightclubs — she landed a job as a saleswoman for Calvin Klein’s boutique in Boston. Soon she moved to Klein’s headquarters in New York. She was originally assigned to VIP clients and then became a public relations executive and a darling in Manhattan’s fashion and club scene.
In passage after passage, Carolyn is described as a muse, a mentor, dazzling yet unpretentious. Beller praises her subject as a “super empath” — someone exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of others. Never mind the friends who saw her throwing herself at her friends’ boyfriends. “It was a move at odds with her usually nurturing persona,” writes Beller, “but not necessarily with the fragility beneath the gentleness.”
Call it insecurity, call it vanity, call it a cry for help. Or don’t. Carolyn bragged that no man had ever dumped her. Beller argues that “it stands to reason” that Carolyn would have trouble trusting men because her parents had divorced when she was 8, and she was estranged from her father. (An armchair psychologist might call that unfair to her doting stepfather and to every daughter of divorce who doesn’t try to use friends’ boyfriends to soothe her ego.)
The problem, of course, is that this version of Carolyn has no flaws — or that any faults are uncharacteristic, or justified because of the actions of other people. This strips Carolyn of the capacity for self-awareness, maturity and growth, making everything that happened next a tragedy outside her control.
Myth has it that Carolyn and John met while jogging in Central Park. Beller writes that the two were introduced when he came into Calvin Klein’s headquarters in 1992, and they began a brief, turbulent romance. John broke up with her after receiving a letter from a friend claiming that she was a “user, partier, that she was out for fame and fortune.” Carolyn was down but not out: “She also knew, deep down, that this would not be the end,” a friend told Beller. “John was a prize and Carolyn had her eye on the ball.” Another said Carolyn wanted an “important life,” and she thought she could have that with John.
They renewed the romance in earnest two years later — shortly after Jackie died — and picked up where they left off: two people addicted to each other and the drama they constantly brought to the relationship. When he was an hour late for a dinner date, she threw a glass of wine in his face and stormed out. By early 1996, engaged and living together, the two were filmed having a huge fight in Washington Square Park. The tabloids had a field day; it was a massive embarrassment for John, who had just launched George magazine, and a realization for Carolyn that the spotlight was never turning off.
Whatever doubts they had were pushed aside: Their wedding in September — pulled off in secret — was a sensational fairy tale, complete with one of the most romantic photos in history. The groom was 35, the bride 30.
But two people can be deeply in love and wrong for each other. John, born into a rarefied world of suffocating fame and fortune, was earnest, loving, spoiled, careless, struggling with ADHD and dyslexia, and sensitive to any intellectual slight. He was accustomed to a world eager to give him whatever he wanted. Beller may describe Carolyn as generous, funny and thoughtful, but her heroine also comes across as spoiled, headstrong and insecure. Her insistence on living her life as she wished — including a husband who was an equal partner — was at odds with the man and history she married.
One of the many unexplored questions in this book is the naiveté on both John’s and Carolyn’s part about what was likely to happen when they married. They believed that the media interest would die after the wedding; it intensified. “John and Carolyn were woefully under-managed for their outsize life,” a friend of John’s told Beller. “They needed aides-de-camp. They needed security. And they should probably have moved away from that building.” But the couple continued to live in John’s downtown loft — with no doorman and one exit — where photographers could catch them coming and going.
Everything the newlyweds did in public was scrutinized: They were the undisputed stars at any gala they attended. Carolyn was hailed one of the most fashionable women in the world. But a ski trip to Bozeman, Mont., also made headlines when she wore boots with four-inch heels and the locals laughed at her. Beller attributes it to “jealousy or just plain cattiness — it was the age-old tradition of women turning on women.” So, not just the patriarchy.
Carolyn quit her job to be available for her husband, then found herself bored and resentful of all the people and things that demanded his time. She blamed the paparazzi for her unhappiness — and Beller concurs. John grew up with photographers and had a cordial relationship; Carolyn was never reconciled to the constant presence of cameras or the request for one smile. “No!” she told a Kennedy family friend. “I hate those bastards. I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” It became a vicious cycle — she was angry, the photos were angry, and Carolyn once even spat at a photographer. Perhaps had she lived longer she would have learned — like Princess Diana — to leverage her fame for good.
Maybe Carolyn was clinically depressed, but Beller doesn’t explore the question of mental health and the pressures of being a celebrity. She does say, near the end of the book, that Carolyn was prescribed antidepressants, and that by the spring of 1999 the marriage was in shambles and the couple were in counseling. “She was pretty angry,” said a longtime friend of the couple’s. “But, at a certain point, you have to slow down and ask yourself, ‘Do I want to be in constant outrage?’ Because you can’t grow in that state.”
John confided in friends that his wife refused to have sex with him and that he believed she was doing drugs. The persistent rumors that Carolyn had a problem with cocaine are left largely unexamined. Beller repeatedly says Carolyn never touched the stuff; she quotes one friend who says she “barely drank wine.” In the same vein, Carolyn’s alleged affairs are dismissed as mere friendships. John, on the other hand, may have been unfaithful, but his “infidelity came from pain.”
In July 1999, John persuaded Carolyn to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. Her sister Lauren, who had brokered a reconciliation of sorts, flew along in John’s small plane with a planned drop-off on Martha’s Vineyard. The plane went down shortly after dark off the Massachusetts coast; there were no survivors.
In her epilogue, Beller asks whether any woman who married JFK Jr. would have elicited this obsession and tells herself no — Carolyn was “fascinating, intriguing, exasperating … a revelation.” For the rest of us, she is a cautionary tale, and this book a lesson in the perils of celebrity worship.
The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
