The House of Kennedy(85)
Barlow, best known as a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, finds Carolyn charismatic, quirky, and a little reminiscent of Jackie herself, but after a Labor Day weekend introduction to the Kennedy clan at the Hyannis Port compound, where Carolyn fails miserably at Kennedy political and athletic gamesmanship, Ethel is less impressed. “I’m afraid Carolyn isn’t everything she portrays herself as being,” she tells her son Joe. Citing the knowledge that comes with raising four Kennedy daughters, Ethel adds, “If there’s one thing I know, it’s girls. Trust me, that one is all smoke and mirrors.”
“Oh, he definitely chased her,” says Brian Steel, who works alongside John as a Manhattan assistant district attorney, in an interview for the ABC documentary The Last Days of JFK Jr. “Early on he would be frustrated. He would say, ‘I called her and she hasn’t called me back.’”
Carole Radziwill recalls John, her husband’s cousin, being “really besotted” with Carolyn. “He was so enthralled with her, and she with him, but she was kind of fierce. She was very confident. He liked that. She was very much her own person. She was this great combination of kind of seriousness and wild child,” she says.
Carolyn’s elusive behavior is reminiscent of Jackie’s resistance to Charles and Martha Bartlett’s “shameless” matchmaking between her and Jack. And like then, it works—by the spring of 1995, Carolyn and John Jr. are living together, and over the Fourth of July 1995, during a fishing trip on Martha’s Vineyard, John proposes. Carolyn “held the proposal off for about three weeks”—just as Jackie had done when she traveled to London to cover Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation—“which I think just made him all the more intent on marrying her,” a friend of the couple tells People.
The engagement story, broken by the New York Post just before Labor Day, nearly overshadows John’s other surprise announcement, scheduled for September 7, 1995: that he’s launching a new magazine. “For almost two and a half years,” he tells USA Today, “it was like I didn’t have a job. I was sort of [developing this magazine] in secret and everyone was like, ‘What’s John been doing with his time?’”
The answer is George, a celebrity-tinged political magazine backed by publisher Hachette Filipacchi which debuts with a double issue in October/November 1995. The inaugural issue features a cover portrait by celebrity photographer Herb Ritts of supermodel (and former JFK Jr. flame) Cindy Crawford, dressed as a midriff-baring George Washington.
“He called my hotel,” Cindy Crawford recalls of John’s request she be his first cover model. “He reached out directly. And who’s going to say no?”
The first two issues sell out and break magazine-industry financial records, and the unusual office atmosphere quickly becomes the stuff of publishing legend. Two associate editors recall going “rollerblading with John in Central Park at midnight. And it was just the fucking coolest.”
But not even the novelty of JFK Jr. as publisher can easily overcome the substantial challenges of publishing expensive-to-produce glossy magazines profitably. Even in the early glow of success, investors are on watch.
John and Carolyn live together in John’s TriBeCa loft at 20 North Moore Street, and at times publicly reveal that each of them possesses a tempestuous temper. On February 25, 1996, during a heated argument in Central Park, Carolyn removes her engagement ring and throws it at John. The entire exchange is photographed, and worth a quarter of a million dollars to the National Enquirer.
“That video was terrible for her, because it framed her as this sort of mean harpy,” says George Rush, one half (with his wife, Joanna) of the New York Daily News gossip column Rush & Malloy. “She never recovered from that branding, really.”
Six months later, however, on September 21, 1996, when the George magazine staff believes John and Carolyn are traveling in Ireland, the couple is actually exchanging wedding vows. The ultraprivate ceremony takes place on remote Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, once a retreat for Carnegies and Rockefellers, in a hand-built, wood-frame First African Baptist Church. The church, lit only by natural light and candlelight, has personal and historic significance. On November 22, 1963, islanders gathered there to mourn John’s father, President John F. Kennedy.
But today, thirty-three years later, it’s a celebration—and hardly anyone knows it’s happening. “If Mr. Kennedy wanted privacy, this was a good place to find it,” says a Cumberland Island official from the National Park Service. “We were so excited to have fooled everybody,” says one of only a few dozen guests, who include Oprah Winfrey, multiple Kennedys, and John’s cousin and best man, Anthony Radziwill. His sister, Caroline, is the matron of honor, and her three children are the flower girls and ring bearer.
Staffers at the local Greyfield Inn sign confidentiality agreements about the wedding and reception details, and a fifty-person security team is brought in to cover the island—“In other words,” one outlet later notes, “there was more security than wedding guests.”
Carolyn wears a bespoke Narciso Rodriguez white silk crepe bias-cut gown that to this day inspires the flattery of imitation. “There is something mysterious and female in the world, and she has a good connection to it,” says John’s friend John Perry Barlow of the bride. “It’s deep and primordial and lovely.”