Book: JFK Jr., Wife Were Having Problems
NEW YORK – John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn, were having marital problems and were living apart when they died in an airplane crash in July 1999, a new book claims.
The August issue of Vanity Fair magazine contains excerpts from Edward Klein’s new book, “The Kennedy Curse,” which asserts Kennedy and his wife differed on whether to have a family, on drug use, on Kennedy’s outgoing lifestyle and on their TriBeCa apartment.
At times, each feared the other was being unfaithful, the excerpts say. Most of the information is attributed to unidentified friends of the couple.
Kennedy married Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Ga., in 1996.
It had been reported earlier the couple had marital problems.
In 1999, Klein says, the couple began marriage counseling but after four months, Bessette Kennedy stormed out when the therapist mentioned her drug use. She began sleeping in a spare room of the apartment and Kennedy, “on the verge of calling it quits,” moved into the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue.
Two days before they were killed, Klein says, they met for lunch at the Stanhope with Bessette Kennedy’s sister, Lauren Bessette, who persuaded them to fly together to the wedding of Kennedy’s cousin, Rory Kennedy, in Massachusetts. Lauren Bessette said she would go with them as far as Martha’s Vineyard.
Ann M. Freeman, Bessette Kennedy’s mother, did not immediately return a telephone call for comment Monday.
On July 16, 1999, Kennedy, 38, his wife, 33, and her sister, 34, were killed when the single-engine plane Kennedy was piloting crashed in the ocean near Martha’s Vineyard.
Klein says when Kennedy graduated from flight school, he gave his instructors a photo of himself and inscribed it, in part, with, “People will only care where I got my training if I crash.”
Klein is also the author of “All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy” and “Just Jackie: Her Private Years.”
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