Anthony Radziwill. His sister, Caroline, is the matron of honor, and her three children are the flower girls and ring bearer.
Staffers at the local Greyfield Inn sign confidentiality agreements about the wedding and reception details, and a fifty-person security team is brought in to cover the island—“In other words,” one outlet later notes, “there was more security than wedding guests.”
Carolyn wears a bespoke Narciso Rodriguez white silk crepe bias-cut gown that to this day inspires the flattery of imitation. “There is something mysterious and female in the world, and she has a good connection to it,” says John’s friend John Perry Barlow of the bride. “It’s deep and primordial and lovely.”
But the feeling of privacy is fleeting. The couple is recognized three days into their Turkish honeymoon. Two weeks later, at home in New York, John begs the relentless paparazzi for “any privacy or room you could give” his new bride. The New York Daily News translates John’s polite plea into tabloid language: “JUST LEAVE HER ALONE.”
For John, the paparazzi are a part of life. The demands of fame he feuded over with Madonna back in the late 1980s have only intensified. “We’re used to a certain degree of being watched,” he tells Oprah in a September 1996 interview not long before the wedding. He’s only half joking when he says that if he weren’t a Kennedy, “you wouldn’t have invited me on your show.” As RoseMarie Terenzio observes, “John was never not famous. He was born famous. So for John, it was a part of his life.”
For Carolyn, however, it’s a much bigger adjustment. “There were times when I went to their apartment on Moore Street, and you would see the paparazzi just waiting outside, behind cars, in cars, just on the sidewalk for her to leave her apartment,” Carole Radziwill recalls. “A lot of times we wouldn’t leave. We would order food from Bubby’s on the corner. Who wanted to leave and have to go walk through that? That was, like, every day of her life for the first year or more.”
Chapter 57
On Friday, July 16, 1999, a Justice Department special arbitration panel meets in Washington, DC. In a split yet binding decision, the members order the US government to pay the Zapruder family sixteen million dollars for rights to the twenty-six-second film made by Abraham Zapruder, the one-of-a-kind documentation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The dollar amount tops any price previously paid for an American artifact. But before news of the record-breaking award ever hits the wire, it’s held for an even bigger story—a triple fatality.
The name dominating the headlines is once again Kennedy.
* * *
In December 1997, a student calling himself “John Cole” registers for pilot training at the Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida. On April 22, 1998, he earns his private pilot certificate, licensing him to fly under visual flight rules (VFR) and returns for further study of instrument flight rules (IFR).
“To Flight Safety Academy, The Bravest people in aviation,” the student—a no-longer-incognito John F. Kennedy Jr.—inscribes a personal photo to his flight instructors, “because people will only care where I got my training if I crash.”
On one of John’s trips to Vero Beach, he visits the local Piper Aircraft factory and makes a three-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase—a 1995 Piper Saratoga II. The single-engine aircraft, though used, is an upgrade from his starter plane, a Cessna Skylane.
John is finally realizing his childhood dream of flying. He likes to study at the CJ Cannon’s restaurant at the local airport, where he can watch the planes take off and land. On several occasions, waitress Lois Cappelen and her famous customer talk about Jackie (“She was very strict with me,” John shares with her. “Caroline could get away with anything, but I always had to be good”), the Kennedys, and finally, flying. “He said he had wanted to fly all his life,” Cappelen recalls. “But he told me his wife didn’t want him to do it.” (Or his mother, who’d taken Lem Billings to task for allowing Caroline to try it. Unbeknownst to Jackie, John had actually begun flight training fifteen years earlier, while he was a student at Brown in 1982, but never completed it.)
However, John tells USA Today, “The only person I’ve been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife. The second it was legal she came up with me.” At the Martha’s Vineyard airport restaurant, Carolyn tells another waitress,