Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy 'As Brave As She Was Beautiful'

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER HER TRAGIC DEATH, A NEW BIOGRAPHY REVEALS THE PRIVATE SIDE OF THE ENIGMATIC WOMAN AND HER TEMPESTUOUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY JR.

- LIZ MCNEIL

After Carolyn Bessette began working in VIP sales for Calvin Klein in 1989, the designer requested that she and her fellow employees in the New York office take daily Polaroids of their outfits and send them up to his office. Before long, her signature looks: black pencil skirts, fisherman sweaters with track pants and Chuck Taylors with a black leather jacket worn as a shirt, were noticed by Klein—and imitated by coworkers. An influencer before there was such a thing, the beguiling beauty with sky blue eyes always did things her own way.

One of three sisters, she was born in Westchester, N.Y., before moving to Greenwich, Conn., after her parents, Ann, a teacher, and William Bessette, a civil engineer, divorced, and her mother married Richard Freeman, an orthopedic surgeon. Friends remember her East Village apartment filled with “mountains of clothes,” a few champagne glasses and not much furniture.

Still, there was always an air of mystery about the woman who became world-famous when she married John F. Kennedy Jr. but who never gave an interview. Twenty-five years after her death at 33, when the plane piloted by John, 38, which was also carrying her sister Lauren, 34, crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, a new biography, Once Upon a Time, by Elizabeth Beller, excerpted here, reveals Carolyn’s vulnerable and human side. “People wrote about her so harshly and cast her as icy,” says Beller, “but she was a lioness, effervescent, warm and so full of life.”