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By Dorinda Elliott
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It had to be destiny. John Kennedy had been linked to some of the most talked-about women in the world. He had jogged in Central Park with Madonna. He had gone deep-powder skiing in Telluride, Colo., with Daryl Hannah. But when The Sexiest Man Alive stepped into a New York charity event and first glimpsed Carolyn Bessette across the room, his glitzy world stopped spinning. In this willowy, quiet beauty with a cool, seductive style, Kennedy had finally met his match. "They had instant eye lock," says Paul Wilmot, a publicist and Bessette's former boss. "The minute they saw each other they were mad for one another. He called her the next day."
Carolyn Bessette stepped willingly into Camelot. They were devoted to each other, and in John Kennedy she found a partner who could escort her through the maze of New York's rarefied political circles while also appreciating the comforts of their younger, hipper neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. But she never developed his easy way of running the gauntlet of gawkers and paparazzi that hounded them everywhere. And in the end her own family found itself drawn into the kind of tragedy that has struck the Kennedys again and again. The little plane that took John and Carolyn toward Martha's Vineyard last week also carried Carolyn's older sister Lauren, 35, a New York investment banker and the twin of a third Bessette daughter, Lisa Ann, a doctoral student of European history studying in Munich. While the Kennedys prayed for the safety of another clan member, the Bessettes faced double the loss.
Carolyn had already traveled a long way from her childhood home in the WASPy New York suburb of Greenwich, Conn. Raised by her mother and stepfather (her parents divorced when she was a schoolgirl), she found ways to stand apart.
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At St. Mary's High School, classmates named her the Ultimate Beautiful Person. Later, majoring in education at Boston University, she kept a low profile: hardly a picture of her appeared in her yearbook. After graduation, she took a job as a shop clerk in Calvin Klein's Boston boutique, a position that allowed her to indulge her passion for stylish clothes.
It was the Calvin Klein fashion empire that enabled her to enter New York's social circles. Calvin himself OK'd her promotion to New York, where she became a publicist for the company and personal shopper for the rich and famous. His wife, Kelly, introduced her to John Kennedy at the swanky charity dinner. A few months before they married, she quit working.
Bessette's resemblance to Kennedy's late mother, Jackie Onassis--not in looks, but in style--must have dazzled her new husband. Like Jackie, Bessette had that stunning ability to look elegant in a pair of jeans and sandals. She had a regal public poise. Kennedy also must have appreciated Carolyn's independence. When she got married, Bessette snubbed Calvin Klein and chose an unknown designer, Narciso Rodriguez, to create her wedding gown. "It was more fun for her," says Wilmot. When the Kennedys visited John's sister, Caroline, in the Hamptons on Long Island, Bessette would sit on a towel on the beach, "trying to avoid getting too much sun," according to one of Caroline's friends, while the rest of the family played Frisbee and frolicked in the waves.
By the time she became Mrs. John Kennedy, Carolyn had crafted a carefully studied grace. And, given the pressures of being a Kennedy, she needed it: friends said she refrained from yelling at swarming photographers, not so much because it was unseemly, but because she was terrified of being caught in an unflattering pose. John was essentially comfortable with his place in the American iconography--and Carolyn was not. Many even speculated that the couple's marriage had suffered as a result. Their mutual passion was obvious. She was spotted from time to time sitting on his lap under the gaze of the paparazzi. Yet she was also seen screaming at him in Central Park, leaving him crying on the curbside. "Carolyn was very provocative," says a long-time friend of John's. "She challenged him and made him think."
Tabloid reports of the couple's most intimate details must have compounded her insecurities. "Nothing prepared her for the impact of all the attention," says Richard Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador-designate. "It was very troubling to her that she couldn't get out of the house. She was besieged." Yet, as ambivalent as Bessette seemed, the lure of the Kennedy clan remained strong. She may even have helped introduce her sister Lauren into the fold. Lauren was rumored to be dating another Kennedy scion--Bobby Shriver, John's cousin. And as has happened all too often to the extended Kennedy family, just when the future seems most full of promise, fate snatches it away.
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