It’s interesting how you look back on your life and the events that took place in your formative years. I remember right where I was in 1995 watching this black guy in a courtroom on tv who did something to his blonde wife and I remember the whole exercise room at Harborview in Edmonds, WA erupted in “what?!” My mom was on the StairMaster and she stopped what she was doing. I dropped my Fruit Jubes I was eating—something was up. I was only 8 but I remember all these adults were infuriated and I didn’t know all the details. Something just as memorable struck in the summer of 1999 as I was sitting in my Aunt’s living room and we were watching a Breaking News Segment on JFK jr and Carolyn. At the time I had just started getting my hands on the lustrous images of tabloid magazines—I was fascinated by people in bigger realms. Like, what makes this person so special? We’re still trying to answer that question with Carolyn: her essence is like a wink that continues to beguile us to this day.
My mom also had biographies on Camelot, as Jackie dubbed the brood. I didn’t know why until later: she grew up with the Kennedys and was an impressionable teenager when the handsome and charasmatic JFK got shot. Media figures have a profound effect on people in their coming of age years. Now that John Jr and Caroline were the sole survivors left in their immediate family, she—along with so many other Baby Boomers—latched on to the Kennedy soul of yesteryear through the offspring of Jackie and John.
Tabloid magazines were the closest thing to the internet of the day and JFKJR+CBK stories formed the monopolized beating heart of the press. Carolyn, being the newly-wed squeeze of America’s favorite First son was met with scrutiny—a theory as to why she dressed her fashion and personality so blandly to thwart the intense interest. She had a notorious, albeit, admirable blasé /FU attitude toward the media. Never did she give one interview—which caused the press to salivate even more over her ever-growing enigmatic lifestyle. Heck, John Jr can empathize with the press because her element of elusivity is what captivated him from the start: she ignored many of his phone calls in the beginning of their courtship. So interesting is it that love often culminates between the tension of romantic gesture and passive reciprocation. Carolyn didn’t have to play hard to get—she just was.
The woman had such delicate features if you isolated them—overall, she looked strong and almost harsh looking. She rarely ever wore a smidgen of makeup—her charming demeanor was her lipstick, killer humor her mascara. Her aesthetics were akin to the strong jaw facial structures of John’s past ladies—Daryl Hannah, Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna. As a professional portrait artist I find the doppelgänger in everyone and although she possesses some of these physical similarities to these women, she cultivated her signature aura that made John’s former hunnies look like mere dalliances.
Her whole fashion aesthetic was wholesome classic--a tailored chic wardrobe that could do no wrong. Having been instrumental in getting Calvin Klein off the ground in the early 90s—oh, and coaxing him into signing Kate Moss, thus, launching her into USA stardom—she, nonetheless, shunned any attention to the credit and pronation to namedrop her stylish circle of comrades. She encapsulated au courant, even in her most understated looks. Carolyn was not flashy, but effortlessly stood out which gave her that “It Girl“ factor.
She was said to have not been photographed well, according to certain media outlets—her close friends said she actually looked a lot more beautiful in real life. Same with her personality: you couldn’t see her physical beauty through the lense just as much as you couldn’t see the vibrant funny individual she was, according to all of her confidants. Carolyn’s signature personality trait was making you feel like you were the only one in the world she cared about right then and there as she was talking to you. It was the little things about Carolyn that caused her to be as gravitational as the moon is to the tide. The women was a tour de force in her interpersonal relationships.
Somewhere between a french lavender macroon and a Nature’s Valley granola bar—trying to bite into Carolyn’s personality and peg her as this pretentious preppy princess only magnified her elusive gravitas and individuality stepping outside the shadow of John Jr’s. She was the salt-of-the-earth—the scarce kind that transformed the Middle Ages—and that the media would go to war for just to get some attention from her. And so would John Jr, like recognizing a raw diamond over a sparkling zirconium.
The mystique of Carolyn Bassette Kennedy rests in an age representing a bygone era of dynamic feminine women. It seems to me all that captivates the press’es attention today is if you are dynamic and a feminist. It’s an unnerving revolution. The more I read about Carolyn’s deeply personal interactions she had with the people in her life the more that affirms my preconceived notions of her—I knew who she was before looking into her. She was kind of like me or a derivitive of my website tagline: “the New Girl Next Door".” The coexistance of modernity’s independent woman and traditional femininity slow-cooked into a woman at the turn of the 21st Century seems like a kaleidoscope of wonder to us—and Carolyn rolled right up to it’s intersection at the right place and the right time.
Since witnessing the scene on tv in the summer of 1999, I have always been quietly fascinated by JFK Jr and Carolyn—mainly because I think that’s how they would have wanted it if I came across them in public: they just wanted to blend in with the crowd, like “don’t make a spectacle out of us, please.” Carolyn and John would be the couple that crept out of their own party through the back door, trying to not have anyone notice. Seemingly one by one the party goers would notice a change in the mood—the music couldn’t mask the silence of these two people gone. It’s almost as if the wine lost its bubbly, the beer went flat. They left this world in the same way: under the radar, disappearing mid flight. That’s ironically where he felt the most free and alive. Having taken private lessons after his mother died (subsequently going against her wishes), he just wanted to escape the crowds/papz. They were obsessed with the Kennedy Prince—and airports only led to a higher concentration of them.
Two people so sleek and modestly dressed were discretionary about sharing their lives to the public which only seemed to cajole more a hungry world seeking to unfold a new story that we now look back on: a celebrity’s fight against being known. This essence of the cool underpass power couple was like wholesale catnip to photographers that tabloid journalists sold to their end client: a devouring public feeding off every image and essay about John and Carolyn. 25 years later and we are still unsatiated, mainly because they never got to finish their story. So, we’re left trying to finish it for them and we fail everytime—because they are still so alive in spriit, arresting our hearts and minds, befuddling our imaginations of what coud be….
