Carolyn Bessette was not an icon, but a wife, a worker, a daughter, and a friend, with an insatiable appetite for life. VFArchive
ust as John F. Kennedy Jr. was inextricably bound to his father's legacy, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, from the moment she wed John on Cumberland Island in 1996, was destined to be enshrined by the media as the next Jackie Onassis. And, really, who could blame them? There were, for one thing, the on-paper similarities: like Jackie, Carolyn was Catholic and her parents divorced. And then there was thatthat smart, minimalist sexiness that instantly made her a gold standard of modern beauty.
Perhaps the reason that Carolyn never quite achieved Jackie's fashion-icon status was that she never really wanted to. For Carolyn, who was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, by her schoolteacher mother and orthopedist stepfather, life was simply too much fun forAnd it always had been.
As for how girl met boy, the fairy-tale version has them jogging into each other in Central Park. More likely, they met through their mutual friend Kelly Klein—and there was little fairy-tale about it. A proponent of postfeminist courtship, Carolyn was agirl who would never have been caught reading the actual book. When John held back, Carolyn would remind him about underwear model Michael Bergin, who was still on her back burner. Carolyn could also give John hell.