May 19 marked the 30th death anniversary of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis — editor, style icon and former first lady of the United States (1961-63). Those of us who cover and mark such figures and occasions have already noted that in two months, almost to the day, we will commemorate the 25th death anniversary of the son she loved so much and the daughter-in-law she never knew.
On July 16, 1999 — as the evening, the century and the millennium began to draw to a close — publisher John F. Kennedy Jr. lost control of the plane he was piloting, killing himself; his wife, former Calvin Klein company publicist Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy; and her sister, Morgan Stanley executive Lauren Bessette.
In the quarter-century since, there has been an almost radical reappraisal of Bessette-Kennedy — by a generation of influencers who’ve adapted her classic, minimalist, monochromatic aesthetic; and by authors sympathetic to a lovely, empathetic woman ensnared by the image she helped to create.
Sunita Kumar Nair’s “CBK, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: A Life in Fashion” (Abrams, $65, 251 pages) is a nostalgic look back not only at Bessette-Kennedy and her elements of style but of a pre-9/11 New York in which the Twin Towers gleamed, the stock market always seemed to be up and the New York Yankees always won the World Series. There’s an absolutely stunning photograph of JFK Jr. by Antoinette Aurell in which sunlight refracted from the city’s skyscraper windows suffuses his handsome face, becoming and transforming it. It’s one of many striking images in the book, not the least of which are two Mark Tennant paintings of Bessette-Kennedy in her white slip wedding dress, designed by friend Narciso Rodriquez.
The $40,000 gown was a wedding present from the designer, writes Elizabeth Beller in “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” (Gallery Books, $29.99, 329 pages). Drawing on such works as “What Remains" (Scribner, 2005) — the poignant memoir by Carole Radziwill, Bessette-Kennedy’s cousin by marriage and friend — Beller paints a glowing if somewhat repetitive portrait of a spirited young woman whose generosity stopped short of the press that hounded her.
Far from being the pampered beauty with a Greenwich pedigree as she was often portrayed in the tabloids, Bessette-Kennedy grew up in a middle-class French-Canadian, Italian-American family — first in White Plains, New York, and then after her mother remarried, in a Greenwich that was still a mid-range bedroom community of New York City and not the luxury powerhouse it is now.
Early on, the family instilled in her a strong work ethic. Later JFK Jr. would marvel that he and his cousin and best friend, TV producer Anthony Radziwill, Carole’s husband, would both marry women who worked at Caldor’s, while the two women would joke that as their future husbands were paling around Aristotle Onassis’ Scorpios, they would be in their blue smocks behind the jewelry counter at the discount department store.
Beller writes that the need to earn her own way and her parents’ divorce when she was young gave Bessette-Kennedy both a vulnerability and the ability to reach out to the vulnerable in society. She was the woman who’d go up to the person no one was talking to at a party and start a conversation, the patron who always had an extra tip for the manicurist or waiter, because she knew their income depended on tips, the friend who draped one of her shawls around you or handed you an amethyst friendship ring just because.
In Beller’s book, she is never finer than in the months in which she buttressed the Radziwills as he battled metastatic cancer. (Anthony Radziwill would die three weeks after the plane crash, on Aug. 10.) There’s Bessette-Kennedy tacking up a photograph of her dog, Friday, in Radziwill’s hospital room — because everyone needs a dog to cheer him up, don’t you know — and giving him foot massages.
But there was also the talented public relations executive who somehow couldn’t handle her own press. Beller suggests that the tall, slender, brunet Bessette-Kennedy created her minimalist look — straight blond hair, tweezed eyebrows and rail-thin figure — to disappear in public. But rather than recede from view, the look created a feeding frenzy that coupled with her noncompliance led the tabloids to portray her as a cold, spoiled — well, rhymes with rich.
Time really is another country. Today, the tabloids and their proxies on the internet have new people to hate. Witness the conservative New York Post and Daily Mail taking Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to task for being a poor imitator of “CBK,” while the so-called CBK, never known by her initials in her lifetime, emerges as another blue-eyed, blond empath who was a style icon, had a troubled relationship with the paparazzi and met with a tragic end in part because she put her life in the hands of a man who liked to take risks— the duchess’ mother-in-law, Princess Diana.
But these are all very different women. What they had in common is that society continues to define them, and all women, by how they look.
At the end of her book, Beller quotes Carole Radziwill’s eulogy of Bessette-Kennedy in which she compares her to the innocent, doomed heroine of Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady,” Isabel Archer. But actually the reimagination of Bessette-Kennedy is like another James’ heroine, Milly Theale in “The Wings of the Dove,” whom James based on a beloved young cousin, Minny Temple, who died of tuberculosis.
It is Milly’s fate to love a man, Merton Densher, who only comes to understand her true worth when she’s gone. We are Bessette-Kennedy’s Merton Densher — in love not so much with a woman who graced life’s stage all too briefly but rather with her memory.