A few months ago, I wrote what I considered to be a throwaway story about some new photos we had of Amal Alamuddin. I was just chatting, working through a comparison as I wrote, that George Clooney was trying to make Amal into this Carolyn Bessette-like figure, the princess-type who stole his heart after years of bachelorhood. Well, everybody yelled at me. So I won’t bring up that comparison again (although I still think the comparison is solid). Anyway, everybody still has some kind of Kennedy nostalgia. Last month was the 15 year anniversary of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s untimely plane crash deaths. I still remember where I was. Do you? People Mag has put John and Carolyn’s “untold story” on their cover this week, which is pretty smart. Everybody is still interested in them.
He was the world’s most eligible bachelor, the only son of our 35th President, with a world of possibility ahead. She was the impossibly chic Calvin Klein fashion publicist, so beautiful that her close friend Daniel Pfeffer says, “no photograph ever did her justice.” In Carolyn Bessette, those closest to John F. Kennedy Jr. say he finally met his match.
Still, she turned him down the first time he asked her out after meeting her at the Calvin Klein showroom in 1994. The first few times, in fact.
“She didn’t think he was serious,” says their close friend Gustavo Paredes, son of Jackie’s personal assistant, Provi Paredes. “He couldn’t believe she turned him down. It had never happened before.”
Flummoxed, he was. Discouraged, he was not. Kennedy, who had just launched George, his political and pop culture magazine, “kept figuring out a way to keep coming back going back to the showroom for more business meetings and more fittings,” says Paredes.
Their fairytale romance and surprise wedding on September 21, 1996, on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, was chronicled all over the world. Yet the fairytale came to an tragic end on July 16, 1999, when the plane piloted by Kennedy, 38, carrying his wife, 33, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34, crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, killing all aboard. Fifteen years later, their closest confidantes remember John, not as Camelot’s heir, but as a friend and colleague who liked to drink Rolling Rock and had begun to talk about starting a family.
Carolyn they remember as a girl who loved to tease John about his penchant for blondes and his lack of fashion sense.
“She thought he was a fashion mistake,” says Gustavo Paredes.
“They were fiery,” says Ariel Paredes, Gustavo’s daughter and a close friend of Carolyn’s. “They would love hard and they would fight hard but they were very much a couple.”
Some of their closest confidantes share these and other stories in this week’s PEOPLE because they want John and Carolyn to be remembered as the warm and wonderful friends they loved.
“John was more famous than any celebrity but in a weird way, he was the simplest person,” says Matt Berman, former creative director of George and author of a new book: JFK Jr,. George, & Me, excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE. “The world saw them as this prince and princess, but they were the most real and engaging people I’ve ever known.”
Yeah, I think in the 15 years that’s passed, a lot of people have successfully whitewashed their marriage. I think he was in love, for sure, but she really bristled under the media’s gaze and she wasn’t very happy being this “America’s princess” figure. I always sort of believed that Carolyn had other stuff going on, and her ex-boyfriend always claimed that they were still occasional lovers even after she got with John.
Oh, and she refused his advances at first? Just like Amal Alamuddin and George Clooney!!
Photos courtesy of People, Getty.
