The House of Kennedy(86)

But the feeling of privacy is fleeting. The couple is recognized three days into their Turkish honeymoon. Two weeks later, at home in New York, John begs the relentless paparazzi for “any privacy or room you could give” his new bride. The New York Daily News translates John’s polite plea into tabloid language: “JUST LEAVE HER ALONE.”

For John, the paparazzi are a part of life. The demands of fame he feuded over with Madonna back in the late 1980s have only intensified. “We’re used to a certain degree of being watched,” he tells Oprah in a September 1996 interview not long before the wedding. He’s only half joking when he says that if he weren’t a Kennedy, “you wouldn’t have invited me on your show.” As RoseMarie Terenzio observes, “John was never not famous. He was born famous. So for John, it was a part of his life.”

For Carolyn, however, it’s a much bigger adjustment. “There were times when I went to their apartment on Moore Street, and you would see the paparazzi just waiting outside, behind cars, in cars, just on the sidewalk for her to leave her apartment,” Carole Radziwill recalls. “A lot of times we wouldn’t leave. We would order food from Bubby’s on the corner. Who wanted to leave and have to go walk through that? That was, like, every day of her life for the first year or more.”





Chapter 57



On Friday, July 16, 1999, a Justice Department special arbitration panel meets in Washington, DC. In a split yet binding decision, the members order the US government to pay the Zapruder family sixteen million dollars for rights to the twenty-six-second film made by Abraham Zapruder, the one-of-a-kind documentation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The dollar amount tops any price previously paid for an American artifact. But before news of the record-breaking award ever hits the wire, it’s held for an even bigger story—a triple fatality.

The name dominating the headlines is once again Kennedy.

*



In December 1997, a student calling himself “John Cole” registers for pilot training at the Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida. On April 22, 1998, he earns his private pilot certificate, licensing him to fly under visual flight rules (VFR) and returns for further study of instrument flight rules (IFR).

“To Flight Safety Academy, The Bravest people in aviation,” the student—a no-longer-incognito John F. Kennedy Jr.—inscribes a personal photo to his flight instructors, “because people will only care where I got my training if I crash.”

On one of John’s trips to Vero Beach, he visits the local Piper Aircraft factory and makes a three-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase—a 1995 Piper Saratoga II. The single-engine aircraft, though used, is an upgrade from his starter plane, a Cessna Skylane.

John is finally realizing his childhood dream of flying. He likes to study at the CJ Cannon’s restaurant at the local airport, where he can watch the planes take off and land. On several occasions, waitress Lois Cappelen and her famous customer talk about Jackie (“She was very strict with me,” John shares with her. “Caroline could get away with anything, but I always had to be good”), the Kennedys, and finally, flying. “He said he had wanted to fly all his life,” Cappelen recalls. “But he told me his wife didn’t want him to do it.” (Or his mother, who’d taken Lem Billings to task for allowing Caroline to try it. Unbeknownst to Jackie, John had actually begun flight training fifteen years earlier, while he was a student at Brown in 1982, but never completed it.)

However, John tells USA Today, “The only person I’ve been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife. The second it was legal she came up with me.” At the Martha’s Vineyard airport restaurant, Carolyn tells another waitress, Joann Ford, a markedly different story. “I don’t trust him,” Ford recalls Carolyn saying of her husband’s flying.

Still, on May 1, 1999, Carolyn does agree to a flight with John, from New York to Washington, for the White House Correspondents Dinner. The DC appearance is part of John’s exploratory process; he’s considering running for the seat a four-term Democratic senator from New York has decided to vacate in the year 2000. He also needs to invigorate support for George, the ad sales of which are declining just as Jack Kliger is taking over as new CEO of Hachette. Some staff changes in January 1999 have also raised eyebrows with business insiders, though John is still touted as having “brilliant editor instincts.” And everyone understands the cachet he brings. “Would this magazine exist without John?” the Observer notes. “Would anyone delude themselves that it would?”

The couple makes an indelible impression on White House reporter Helen Thomas. “They never looked more content and in love than they did that evening,” she recalls. “My God, this is Jack and Jackie all over again, isn’t it? They were so compelling, you actually couldn’t take your eyes off them. The way photographers swarmed them. It really reminded me of the old days, the so-called Camelot days.”

The feeling of romantic nostalgia is persuasive, but it might be a performance. According to friends of the couple who speak off the record to the press, John, thirty-eight, and Carolyn, thirty-three, are in marital counseling, working through issues salaciously reported as including infidelities on both sides, John’s insensitivity toward his wife, and Carolyn’s increasingly erratic behavior, often attributed to prescription and recreational drug use—though Carole Radziwill counters those claims, saying, “That’s not the truth of what was going on.” What they were all actually dealing with, she says, is her husband Anthony’s impending death from cancer. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It was a very difficult, stressful summer for all of us,” she says. “My husband was dying, and it was difficult for John to really accept that.”