When JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette died in an aircraft crash on July 16, 1999, they had been married for less than three years, but their stunning, turbulent passion is still the stuff of legends.
When JFK Jr. originally asked Carolyn Bessette to marry him, she declined.
Interestingly, the 29-year-old Calvin Klein PR who had been seeing the eligible bachelor for nearly a year wasn’t yet certain that she was ready for what being married to him would entail. However, she didn’t say yes either.
Specifically, a blending of lives that would have many benefits but also demand a tremendous degree of self-sacrifice, not to mention the blatant invasion of her privacy.
Carolyn had spent enough time at the Kennedy family estate in Hyannis Port to know that the legend surrounding the larger-than-life name could not be overstated.
Although the Kennedy family was composed of actual people with flesh and blood, just like any other, it had become ingrained in American culture over the course of the majority of the 20th century.
And the Kennedy bond didn’t completely overwhelm her. Rather, she was turned off by the clannishness.
Although Carolyn loved John, she didn’t particularly enjoy spending holidays and weekends with his large family on the Cape, where their arrivals and departures were rather formally overseen by ruling matriarch Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, and the Kennedy men, whose touch football games and clambakes seemed lifted from a Ralph Lauren advertisement.
This would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives.
