u/Historictea

Photo taken by Sasha Chermayeff.

Anecdote shared by R. Couri Hay, publicist and gossip columnist:

“I had the good fortune to see John naked all the time because he was a major exhibitionist.... I want to just preface it by saying I loved him. I respected him. And then I was a major gossip columnist-at one point I had 28 million readers a week at the National Enquirer. It was a professional acquaintanceship. I knew Jackie, I knew Lee Radziwill. So he couldn't avoid me. But John never failed, ever, to smile and say, "Hello, Couri," and it drove everybody crazy when he would do that, because it was like the Camelot seal of approval.

The truth was, he had a love-hate relationship with celebrity, and I think it was more love than hate. He knew he was beautiful. He spent hours and hours at the gym. I never saw him take a shower with the curtain closed. I would see him at the New York Sports Club and then when he was in Aspen at the Aspen Sports Club.

He knew exactly who I was. I'm in the shower across, and John's taking a shower and lathering all up and totally naked and totally comfortable. He could have been a nudist. But the stories-like at a party in Hyannis Port is one of my famous stories I got from a source. Before a big party there, he went skinny-dipping in front of all the gay waitstaff. John was very proud of his body, and I can close my eyes and see every inch of him. The guy was stacked, he had all the right muscles. And there was no shyness about him. He knew I was there. He saw me. He smiled at me.

So in the Aspen Club, he would work out, strip down, no towel, go to the shower. I will tell you that the showers in those days were small. It wasn't pleasant to close yourself in this little shower with a cheap plastic curtain, so it may have been partly convenience. But it was a deliberate move not to close the curtain and one I much appreciated. He was very flirtatious, definitely metrosexual, in touch with all sides of himself. He knew that he was adored and fantasized over.

He used to love to embarrass me. We're in Aspen, at Bonnie's restaurant. He's with all the Kennedys. I go downstairs to go to the bathroom. John Kennedy Jr. walks up to the urinal next to me, whips out his appar-atus, and proceeds to do what men do. I looked at him, he looked at me. I mean, I was so startled. And John looked at me, seeing my embarrassment and everything, and what did he do? He laughed. I think I peed on myself, it was so startling. So he laughed at me, went back upstairs, and then he said, "Let's take a run." And so we went up in the gondola. John had no idea that I could ski. So he picked the most dangerous, the most insane thing. And you know what? I was right behind him. I think he gave me a measure of respect that day. We just had that one run. He went off, I went off, and that was it.”

The photos were taken at Madison Square Garden on June 12, 1994.

Their relationship dynamis according to John’s friends:

Robert Littell: “Daryl had a theory, one that she told us one weekend at the Vineyard, that in every successful relationship there is a flower and a gardener: one person who needs to be tended and one who loves to nurture and support. Or maybe it was a joke, because we all laughed as we dissected our relationships into flowers and gardeners. The problem was that Daryl and John were both clearly and admittedly flowers. The joke eventually hardened into reality. They broke up in a huff following a fight at the airport in 1994.

John moved out of her apartment and into the New York Athletic Club for a while until he found a place on Hudson Street. Somehow, they just never spoke again. I was upset at John for their awkward parting. I thought he owed her a call. But really, I never figured them as marriage material anyway. We went to the Vineyard for a couple years, and I can only tell about those experiences. Over dinners John and Daryl had a good time, but there was never really a spark. You never saw them look each other in the eye, you know, lovingly. Ultimately, they didn't see eye to eye on much.”

Brian Steel: “Daryl was a sweetheart. John loved her, but I think she was needy, and he wasn't great with that.”

John Perry Barlow: “Daryl had the intense, unpredictable manner that John found fascinating. She was a woman of bewildering juxtapositions, one minute needy and insecure, the next demanding or twisting an emotional knife into John's heart. On one occasion, he had planned to go off on a major trip with Daryl; when she called the day before and said she couldn't make it, he was on the verge of tears. On other occasions, he could be cavalier in a way that was brutally hurtful to a sensitive woman. Whatever their problems, she would show up a few weeks later in New York, or he would dramatically fly out to Los Angeles, and everything would be fine. The reason it wasn't working was not that she was a movie star and he was the son of a president, but that they had a bad dynamic in the relationship from the beginning. I said from early on that they weren't good for each other. They could never inhabit the same emotional space. They could never find a relationship of parity. They were always thinking that the other one was the pursuer.

I loved them both, but by the end, their relationship had become very aggressive. In fact, I advised them both to end it. Because they were both so passionate, I just felt they were going to make each other suffer. It wasn't anybody's fault. They were both wonderful people in their own way. But the chemistry had broken down. That's not to say that there wasn't some lingering bitterness. John might have been willing to continue the friendship without the romance. Daryl didn't want it. She was angry. She felt she'd been inappropriately hoodwinked-she’d been manipulated. Right or wrong, that's how she saw it. John knew that I continued to see a fair amount of Daryl, so from time to time, he'd ask me wistful questions about how Daryl was doing. He'd always be very solicitous. He'd ask me to convey his fond regards.”

Sasha Chermayeff: “I think there was something really difficult about Daryl and John's dynamic even when it was going right. She told him that she had never been so abused by anyone. It was so hard for me to believe that John was being verbally or emotionally abusive—I just didn't believe it.”

Charlie King: “It was the thirtieth anniversary of his father's assassination, and we were eating lunch and just talking, and he was not really engaged. He was saying, "I'm having a fight with my girlfriend," which was Daryl Hannah. He goes, "Because she's not getting along with my mother, and so I'm living in the basement of one of my friend's places now. And I can't watch television because everything that's on TV has to do with the anniversary of my father's death." And he goes, "So it's like I'm in the middle of hell right now." I began to sort of give him advice about his relationship with Daryl Hannah, which I just thought was ironic because here's supposedly the Sexiest Man Alive, and I'm giving him advice about his romantic life.”

From Christina Haag’s book Come to the Edge:

During the summer of 1999, the country was gripped by a massive heat wave. It had been years since I'd seen him—not from ill will, but our lives had gone in different directions. Still, when I learned he had gotten married, I was devastated. It was early on a Sunday morning almost three years before, and I was wandering through Penn Station waiting to board a train when I saw the headline. We had broken up at the end of 1990, but for a year or so after that, we would meet and there was the sense of possibility in the air. By the time I stood at the kiosk at Penn Station, I no longer felt this. Yet he remained in my heart, and seeing the photograph was like a small death, a vivid punctuation of an end that had already taken place.

For the last two years, I'd been living and working in Los Angeles. I’d also fallen in love with someone, an actor, and was visiting him that July at a theater in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I hadn't thought about John in a long time, but two days before his death, I did. The actor's family would be arriving the next day, and I would meet them for the first time. But in a sunlit aisle in a supermarket in Lee, I stopped the cart, looked up, and for a moment almost violent in its clarity, it was as though he were with me.

On Saturday, July 17, a friend called early and woke me. She'd heard about the missing plane on the radio, and didn't want me to find out that way. As she reported what she knew, I crumpled to the kitchen floor, my back pressed on cabinet knobs. I held the phone against my chest, and when I stopped crying, she spoke. "But it is John. He's come out of things like this before."

I remember little of that day, only the heat. The actor's family shielded me from news reports, steered me from televisions, and tried to keep me busy, their helplessness etched on their kind, embarrassed faces. I keep searching for a word I once knew, or perhaps imagined. It's to hold two opposing beliefs at once, fully and without judgment; to know that both are true. Like ambivalence, but without its reticence.

That day, when I received my friend's call, I knew in my heart that he was gone. There would be no rescue. And I also knew that this was not possible. In my mind, I kept seeing the purple shadows of the small, uninhabited islands off Martha's Vineyard, ones I had been to with him years before. Surely, they would be found there. Surely, they would be rescued. And like everyone else, I waited.

The next morning when the light was still gray, I got up and drove for hours alone on the back roads of Otis, New Marlborough, and Tyringham. I drove fast, careless with myself. As in a dream, lush white fog covered the hills and wrapped itself around the young birch trees. I blinked to see the road. Things forgotten, tucked away and put to bed, tumbled by across the glass as if they were present. A glance, a touch. The way he said my name and woke me in the morning. Spaghetti he made with soy sauce and butter. Leaping on the benches outside the Museum of Natural History. Candles flickering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he insisted I see for the first time at night, his hand guiding mine over names of cold stone. Another night—skating over black ice. My back against his chest, his arms holding me up; cold on our faces and the sound of the blades. Black trees, black below, black sky. The brush of blue satin against his tuxedoed leg. And the adventures-dangers that fate had tipped in our favor. Once safe, they became the stories we told. But now, pulled over by the side of a country road, I remembered the terror I had felt.

January 23, 1996

I also got a taste of the paparazzi's rabidity when John invited me to a Knicks game the January before they were married.

"What are you doing for your birthday on Tuesday night?" John asked me.

"Nothing. I'm celebrating on Friday and Saturday night."

"Do you want to go to the Knicks-Bulls game with me?"

"Oh, you don't have to take me, John. You can just give me the tickets and I can take a friend."

"You're such a bitch, Rosie. I want to go, too."

"No, no! I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I just meant that if you would rather not go, you don't have to just because it's my birthday."

"I want to take you."

"Great! Thank you."

It was an unseasonably warm night, so John decided that he wanted to walk the fifteen blocks from the office to Madison Square Garden. He extended his arm for me to hold on to and said, "You're my date tonight, Rosie." It was fun to be out with him socially for a change. I didn't have letters to write or appointments to schedule, just the easy enjoyment of chatting about friends, the office, and life as we walked arm in arm, anonymous amid the crowds of midtown workers making their way to Penn Station.

We were halfway there when out of the blue, John said, "Rosie, why don't we grab a cab?"

I looked at him like he was crazy. "Why? I thought we were walking. We're only seven blocks away."
"Just get a cab."

I dropped his arm and stepped into the street to hail a taxi when the paparazzi descended like pigeons flying in to attack a half-eaten pretzel on the ground. I'd been totally oblivious to the signs, but with a practiced eye, John immediately saw them coming.

As soon as I raised my arm to flag down a cab, at least ten of them appeared out of nowhere, screaming his name when they realized he was about to get away. Flash, flash, flash! Their cameras made my head spin. I almost fell on my ass in the traffic whizzing down Seventh Avenue. John allowed them to take a few pictures, and then maneuvered like a missile into the cab (head down, eyes up), as I tumbled in behind him.

Inside the cab, we waited at a red light, while the paparazzi snapped shot after shot, their flashes illuminating the car's interior. John looked out the window, oddly embarrassed that I had witnessed firsthand the craziness that accompanied him wherever he went. The cabdriver broke the awkward silence by telling John how best to avoid the paparazzi on his bike.

"Listen, man, if you want to lose the photographers, you have to ride against traffic."

"Thanks for the tip, John said, then turned to me, smiling, and said, "Somebody's life is going to be a freak show tomorrow.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"You'll see."

Two days later, the Daily News ran a picture of my big date with John. Not to be outdone on the JFK Jr. beat, the other tabloids quickly followed with their own items and photos of the night. The New York Post published a story identifying me by name. The Globe ran with the cover headline "JFK Jr.'s Hot Date with his Secretary," and inside the paper: "By George, JFK Jr. Puts in Overtime." Meanwhile, I couldn't have been happier, because the article called me a "twenty-five-year-old beauty."

August 7, 1997.

John was no longer a teenager, but he found freedom in a boy's play. He may have been in his twenties, but he was not about to put away his Frisbees, footballs, skates, bikes, and kayaks. He still wasn't much of an athlete, but he couldn't get his fill of sports at Brown so he joined a racquetball club outside Providence, where he went with a new friend, Gary Ginsberg, to have a go at it. Gary was in the class behind John, but the two young men shared an abiding interest in politics and sports. Gary had grown up in Buffalo, New York, playing competitive tennis and was naturally more gifted at racket sports.

It was racquetball they played, not squash, which John considered almost a sissy sport. John usually failed to beat up on Gary on the court, but he tried to win a few clear victories when they debated politics. Their shared interests and competitiveness in sports and politics would develop into a close lifelong friendship. Reagan had just been reelected, and like most Brown students, Gary was a proud liberal who thought that the president was a plague on the nation, a reactionary spouting right-wing bromides. Gary was into his Reagan rant as the two drove to the club.

"You know, everyone misses the point about Ronald Reagan," John interjected. "He is an extremely effective president because he stands for very clear principles, he's consistent in his messages, you know where he stands. He's a strong leader. He's ..."

"Oh, come on," Gary said.

"No, no, no, you're missing the point," John insisted.
"You're missing the point on him."

Gary let it drop, thinking John was simply trying to be provocative. Only years later did Gary look back on conversations like that one and reflect that he had missed something about his friend. John could be assertive when the subject was sports, but he was often tentative in the way he talked about politics. It was easy to conclude that John didn't care much about politics. He had a wariness about anything that touched too intimately on his father's past or his future as his father's son and inheritor. He kept his own counsel, and few realized just how interested in politics he was or how astute his judgments were.

JFK Jr.’s fortune was estimated to be between $30 million and $100 million. The filings show that Kennedy gave money from the trust to 14 family members and friends, as well as to his father’s presidential library and Reaching Up, a charity he founded in 1985 to help people with developmental disabilities.

The will was signed on Dec. 19, 1997, more than a year after his marriage to Carolyn Bessette. Had Carolyn Bessette Kennedy survived, she would have received her husband's personal property and their apartment on North Moore Street in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan. “I give all my tangible personal property, wherever located, … to my wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, if she is living on the thirtieth day after my death.” In the event his wife didn’t outlive him, his will provided that his belongings would go to their children – if they had any.

The 16 beneficiaries include:

1. John “Jack” B. Kennedy Schlossberg (nephew)
2. Rose Schlossberg (niece)
3. Tatiana Schlossberg (niece)
4. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (sister)
5. Timothy Shriver (cousin)
6. Phineas Howie (godchild)
7. Olivia Howie (godchild)
8. Alexandra “Sasha” Chermayeff Howie (friend)
9. Reaching Up (non profit organization)
10. John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library Foundation
11. Marta Sgubin (former governess)
12. Efigenio Pinheiro (Jackie Kennedy Onassis' personal assistant)
13. Rosemarie Terenzio (assistant)
14. Robert Littell (friend)
15. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (cousin)
16. Peter Olson (personal lawyer)

Source: New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/25/nyregion/family-employees-and-charities-named-in-kennedy-will.html )

John tended to have long-term relationships and walked away from women who imagined that their physical attractiveness alone made them fascinating. His girlfriend for his last two years at Brown was Sally Munro. She came from a tweedy old New England family whose forebears would have had nothing to do with the likes of a Kennedy. She stood along the sidelines when he played football and waited for him when he showed up late for dates, as he often did. When you went out with John, you ended up not just his lover but his de-facto manager, trying to keep him in check, straightened up, on time, and on his game. - Robert Littell.

Cover story by Elizabeth Sporkin and Victoria Balfour for the May 21, 1990 issue of People magazine.

John F. Kennedy Jr and girlfriend Carolyn Bessette photographed in NYC on February 26, 1995.

From a NY Observer article by William Norwich, published on July 26, 1999:

Various international fashion companies wanted to hire her. "We talked on several occasions about her coming to work for Chanel," said Arie Kopelman, Chanel's president. "But she was worried about conflict of interest with John's magazine and the other fashion advertisers he dealt with."

Describing her tireless loyalty to helping Mr. Kennedy's magazine succeed with its advertisers, she told friends, "I'm Georgie's girl." No doubt Mrs. Kennedy suffered because of her fashion connection. Her ready style incited the paparazzi. "John told me over and over it would be bad, but I didn't believe him until we were actually married," she told a mutual friend. She feared the paparazzi. They were waiting for her to do something wrong. Her suspicions were confirmed when she slipped and fell outside the couple's TriBeCa residence "I couldn't get up," Mrs. Kennedy told another friend. "They just kept snapping."

(Photo: Carolyn wearing a floral-print shirt dress from Chanel's Resort 1996 collection).

Words by William Norwich, (July 26, 1999).

I didn’t know Mrs. Kennedy well. I was cordially acquainted with Mr. Kennedy beginning years ago with some overlap of friends from New England school circles. At the height of his iconization in the late 1980’s as, in People magazine terms, one of the “world’s most beautiful people,” I happened into the small men’s bathroom at Radu, the Manhattan gym, just as Mr. Kennedy was getting out of the shower.

“Not for your column,” he smiled and grabbed a towel.

It wasn’t. In 1993, however, I interviewed him for Vogue . It was his first interview with a glossy magazine. At the suggestion of his mother, or so I understood, he contacted me through a mutual friend who suggested the piece. At the time of the interview, Mr. Kennedy had recently completed a three-year commitment as an assistant district attorney. He was taking some time for himself; he was considering various career pursuits, including starting a magazine. He sat for the Vogue interview because he wanted to promote the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award established in 1989 by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The award honored his father and recognized exemplary acts of political courage by elected officials.

Mr. Kennedy spoke with enthusiasm and humor. Talking about his family, he was cautious. It was an intimate subject that meant the world to him. His mother, and beloved sister Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, were his family, not his American royalty. “We’re a family like any other. We look out for one another. The fact that there have been difficulties and hardships makes us closer,” he explained.

Concerned that an Irving Penn Vogue portrait might make him look too much like a movie star, or a Bruce Weber photograph might make him look too glamorous (he had already earned the nickname “the hunk”), he agreed to let Annie Leibovitz photograph him at her downtown studio. He admired her work, especially her photographs of political people. A hair stylist, makeup person and fashion stylist were employed to ready him for the camera. They weren’t necessary. Mr. Kennedy rode his bike to the shoot. He wore a plain suit, shirt and tie. The hairdresser brushed his hair once. That was it. No makeup. No change of clothes. No cell phone. No assistant. No entourage.

A great gentleman, he put everyone at ease. I’ll miss all the things these fine young people were.

On Tuesday, February 27, 1996, they attended the Municipal Art Society of New York Benefit held at the 69th Regiment Armory. Caroline and Edwin Schlossberg were also in attendance and presented the Jacqueline Onassis Medal to I. M. Pei. One of the photos was captioned: “John, very protective and attentive to his girlfriend at the benefit gala, was seen holding hands and whispering in her ear."

This event took place just TWO days after their big infamous fight in the park on Sunday, February 25, 1996. The fight was first reported in the New York Daily News on Friday, March 1, 1996—two days after the Municipal Art Society benefit. At the time, they were unaware that the incident had been filmed and would soon be seen by the public.

The rumor that John broke her engagement ring is false, as Carolyn can be seen wearing it in the first photograph.