Bessette Kennedy was private but style symbol

©New York Times

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 19, 1999

A special Web tribute

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, whose marriage to John F. Kennedy Jr. catapulted her and her understated glamor to fame, was reported lost and presumed dead on a flight Friday to Martha's Vineyard, Mass., along with her husband and her sister Lauren.

She was 33.

Until shortly before her marriage, Bessette Kennedy was an executive at Calvin Klein Ltd. in New York. Her rise there -- from saleswoman in Boston to director of publicity for Klein's flagship line, the "collection" -- had been fast, but her achievements were quickly overshadowed by her relationship with Kennedy, whom she married in 1996.

After her marriage, she quickly became a fashion icon herself, on the cover of numerous magazines.

Since her marriage, she had distanced herself from the fashion world, and settled into the role of Kennedy wife, with all the public appearances and public attention that entailed. But she kept a deliberately low profile.

"She's a very private woman," John F. Kennedy Jr. told USA Today in 1998. "It's like you go from having a life you've built on your own terms, and all of a sudden it's being snatched away from you."

Bessette Kennedy grew up amid the affluence of Greenwich, Conn. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Her mother, Ann, a teacher and administrator, later married Richard Freeman, an orthopedic surgeon; the couple now live in New Canaan, Conn. Bessette Kennedy's father, William Bessette, an architectural engineer, lives in White Plains, N.Y.

Bessette Kennedy had two sisters, Lauren and Lisa Ann, identical twins who were born 18 months before her.

Lauren, who graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., was a principal in the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. She joined the company in 1993 and spent several years in Hong Kong.

Carolyn Bessette graduated from St. Mary's High School in Greenwich in 1983 and went on to Boston University, where she majored in elementary education. She graduated in January 1988, and was briefly a nightclub promoter. She then began working at Klein's Boston store.

A Calvin Klein executive took her to the fashion house's headquarters in New York. She was hired to outfit the "personals": friends of the house, among them celebrities and socialites, who bought wholesale.

Paul Wilmot, the former director of publicity for Calvin Klein who hired her, said he was immediately struck by her intelligence and poise. She easily juggled the demands of the job, he said, which required both a keen fashion sense and attention to countless administrative details.

She was promoted to director of publicity of the collection, a job that entailed working with fashion editors as well as coordinating the shows for the line.

She began dating Kennedy in 1994. Their relationship was relentlessly chronicled in the tabloid press, but their wedding, in front of 40 people in a rundown church on a secluded island off Georgia, was carefully scripted to elude publicity.

Usually dressed in black, she had carefully colored blond hair that she often wore slicked back into a bun, and she favored simple clothing designers, such as Prada and Yohji Yamamoto.

The comparisons to her mother-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, were frequent: The two shared a Roman Catholic heritage, a thin, athletic physique, a cultivated mystique and a fierce possessiveness of their privacy.

Since her marriage, Bessette Kennedy had largely shunned the fashion world, as well as the press. Along with her husband, she lent her presence, and sometimes her name, to numerous benefits and cultural events.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.