Tragic He's Gone

He had a tattoo?!!! *gasp*

Too me, he always looked better in casual photos than posed ones like these.

At least we had him throughout the peak of his beauty.

Yes so sad...

That is an ugly tattoo.

What a whore!

We didn't deserve him.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone.

He got the best part of Jack and Jackie's genes.

He was dumb as a stump.

Gorgeous man, ugly tat. Extremely handsome and very charming. I met him once briefly at a fundraiser for his cousin, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Very approachable and not stuck up at all.

He had that tattoo before it was cool for non-working class people to have tattoos.

No hard cock?

No precum on the sheets?

Bitch was a tease!

Town & Country doesn’t know how to spell “pore over?”

^ Agree--it's fucking embarrassing. Are they using AI instead of well-educated humans? Shame on them.

He got the beauty. Carolina got the brains.

John John

should have been called

DUMB DUMB

Caroline, not Carolina. Fuck auto correct.

Tragic. Disappointed that John-John defaced his body with hideous ink.

Side-topic: Have you guys been watching Jack Schlosberg Edie Beale-ing it up on Tik Tok?

Jack went all out on that performance.

[quote] He got the beauty. Carolina got the brains.

Nothing could be finer!

A new book about Carolyn just dropped.

Too bad he died before OnlyFans came into existence.

He would have made a great president.

We need hotter Presidents.

The review in the Washington Post of the new book about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy makes it sound hilariously bad... the review says the biography claims outright she was basically a saint who could no no wrong, although the review also says the stories it tells about her actually make her sound in the end like quite the rich bitch.

In 1996, Sotheby’s auctioned more than 5,500 items from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died two years earlier. The winning bids shattered all presale estimates: A monogrammed silver tape measure went for $48,875, a faux-pearl necklace for $211,500. The four-day total topped an astonishing $34 million. “Most of the items were not exceptional works of art or craftsmanship, nor were they even from the White House era,” Elizabeth Beller writes in a new book. “They were all Jackie.”

The enduring romance and glamour of Camelot cannot be overstated. The Kennedys were the closest this country gets to a royal family, and Jackie’s beloved son — handsome, playful, adored — was America’s crown prince and most eligible bachelor. When John Jr. married Carolyn Bessette a few months after the auction, the fashion publicist was transformed into an international celebrity overnight.

They were a beautiful couple. She was a tall, elegant blonde with a cool reserve that complemented his effortless charm. Many people believed that one day John Jr. would become president, and she would be first lady. That dream ended tragically when John, Carolyn and her sister died in a plane crash in the summer of 1999.

Now, 25 years later, Beller has written a biography, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.” The writer, who never met Carolyn, very much wants her subject to be remembered as extraordinary in her own right, not as an ordinary young woman pulled into the Kennedy orbit. To underscore her point, the book opens with an author’s note: Beller says she wants to defend the “slanderous” rumors that Carolyn was shallow, difficult and manipulative, characterizations she attributes to a “dysfunctional culture,” the anti-feminist patriarchy and the media. Her decision to write this book “was not so much a choice as a compulsion.”

It’s fair to wonder if compulsion is the best starting point. A great biography is intimate but honest, compassionate but unflinching. Sigmund Freud believed that biographers were susceptible to transference — romanticizing and sanitizing the narrative in response to unconscious fantasies. At the very least, Beller stumbled into the classic rookie mistake: She fell in love with her subject and so could never see her objectively.

The result is an effusive, almost worshipful portrait of a modern-day princess, stripped of agency or nuance. In Beller’s telling, Carolyn is stunning, caring, brilliant, hilarious and passionate but surrounded and hounded by people who are jealous or simply cruel. Beller interviewed dozens of people — although not the Bessette or Kennedy inner circle, despite her efforts — and the memories are overwhelmingly positive. It’s not surprising that friends want to protect Carolyn’s legacy and diminish her flaws, but the book is a paean to a doomed goddess instead of a reflective examination of a woman thrust into a life she was unprepared for and ill-equipped to survive. (cont.)

(cont.) Carolyn’s star rose quickly. After graduating from Boston University in 1988 — a semester late because she was busy promoting local nightclubs — she landed a job as a saleswoman for Calvin Klein’s boutique in Boston. Soon she moved to Klein’s headquarters in New York. She was originally assigned to VIP clients and then became a public relations executive and a darling in Manhattan’s fashion and club scene.

In passage after passage, Carolyn is described as a muse, a mentor, dazzling yet unpretentious. Beller praises her subject as a “super empath” — someone exceptionally sensitive to the feelings of others. Never mind the friends who saw her throwing herself at her friends’ boyfriends. “It was a move at odds with her usually nurturing persona,” writes Beller, “but not necessarily with the fragility beneath the gentleness.”

Call it insecurity, call it vanity, call it a cry for help. Or don’t. Carolyn bragged that no man had ever dumped her. Beller argues that “it stands to reason” that Carolyn would have trouble trusting men because her parents had divorced when she was 8, and she was estranged from her father. (An armchair psychologist might call that unfair to her doting stepfather and to every daughter of divorce who doesn’t try to use friends’ boyfriends to soothe her ego.)

The problem, of course, is that this version of Carolyn has no flaws — or that any faults are uncharacteristic, or justified because of the actions of other people. This strips Carolyn of the capacity for self-awareness, maturity and growth, making everything that happened next a tragedy outside her control.

Myth has it that Carolyn and John met while jogging in Central Park. Beller writes that the two were introduced when he came into Calvin Klein’s headquarters in 1992, and they began a brief, turbulent romance. John broke up with her after receiving a letter from a friend claiming that she was a “user, partier, that she was out for fame and fortune.” Carolyn was down but not out: “She also knew, deep down, that this would not be the end,” a friend told Beller. “John was a prize and Carolyn had her eye on the ball.” Another said Carolyn wanted an “important life,” and she thought she could have that with John.

They renewed the romance in earnest two years later — shortly after Jackie died — and picked up where they left off: two people addicted to each other and the drama they constantly brought to the relationship. When he was an hour late for a dinner date, she threw a glass of wine in his face and stormed out. By early 1996, engaged and living together, the two were filmed having a huge fight in Washington Square Park. The tabloids had a field day; it was a massive embarrassment for John, who had just launched George magazine, and a realization for Carolyn that the spotlight was never turning off.

Whatever doubts they had were pushed aside: Their wedding in September — pulled off in secret — was a sensational fairy tale, complete with one of the most romantic photos in history. The groom was 35, the bride 30. (cont.)

(cont.) But two people can be deeply in love and wrong for each other. John, born into a rarefied world of suffocating fame and fortune, was earnest, loving, spoiled, careless, struggling with ADHD and dyslexia, and sensitive to any intellectual slight. He was accustomed to a world eager to give him whatever he wanted. Beller may describe Carolyn as generous, funny and thoughtful, but her heroine also comes across as spoiled, headstrong and insecure. Her insistence on living her life as she wished — including a husband who was an equal partner — was at odds with the man and history she married.

One of the many unexplored questions in this book is the naiveté on both John’s and Carolyn’s part about what was likely to happen when they married. They believed that the media interest would die after the wedding; it intensified. “John and Carolyn were woefully under-managed for their outsize life,” a friend of John’s told Beller. “They needed aides-de-camp. They needed security. And they should probably have moved away from that building.” But the couple continued to live in John’s downtown loft — with no doorman and one exit — where photographers could catch them coming and going.

Everything the newlyweds did in public was scrutinized: They were the undisputed stars at any gala they attended. Carolyn was hailed one of the most fashionable women in the world. But a ski trip to Bozeman, Mont., also made headlines when she wore boots with four-inch heels and the locals laughed at her. Beller attributes it to “jealousy or just plain cattiness — it was the age-old tradition of women turning on women.” So, not just the patriarchy.

Carolyn quit her job to be available for her husband, then found herself bored and resentful of all the people and things that demanded his time. She blamed the paparazzi for her unhappiness — and Beller concurs. John grew up with photographers and had a cordial relationship; Carolyn was never reconciled to the constant presence of cameras or the request for one smile. “No!” she told a Kennedy family friend. “I hate those bastards. I’d rather just scream and curse at them.” It became a vicious cycle — she was angry, the photos were angry, and Carolyn once even spat at a photographer. Perhaps had she lived longer she would have learned — like Princess Diana — to leverage her fame for good.

Maybe Carolyn was clinically depressed, but Beller doesn’t explore the question of mental health and the pressures of being a celebrity. She does say, near the end of the book, that Carolyn was prescribed antidepressants, and that by the spring of 1999 the marriage was in shambles and the couple were in counseling. “She was pretty angry,” said a longtime friend of the couple’s. “But, at a certain point, you have to slow down and ask yourself, ‘Do I want to be in constant outrage?’ Because you can’t grow in that state.”

John confided in friends that his wife refused to have sex with him and that he believed she was doing drugs. The persistent rumors that Carolyn had a problem with cocaine are left largely unexamined. Beller repeatedly says Carolyn never touched the stuff; she quotes one friend who says she “barely drank wine.” In the same vein, Carolyn’s alleged affairs are dismissed as mere friendships. John, on the other hand, may have been unfaithful, but his “infidelity came from pain.”

In July 1999, John persuaded Carolyn to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod. Her sister Lauren, who had brokered a reconciliation of sorts, flew along in John’s small plane with a planned drop-off on Martha’s Vineyard. The plane went down shortly after dark off the Massachusetts coast; there were no survivors.

In her epilogue, Beller asks whether any woman who married JFK Jr. would have elicited this obsession and tells herself no — Carolyn was “fascinating, intriguing, exasperating … a revelation.” For the rest of us, she is a cautionary tale, and this book a lesson in the perils of celebrity worship.

Nobody cares about Carolyn.

The tat in the photo was for a character he was playing at college play. He had a real tat of a small Irish shamrock on his back.

Was he engaging in masturbatia in the first photo?

John and Carolyn were both equally at fault for the crash. John for turning down the flight instructors recommendation to go with them, and Carolyn for being almost 2 hours late because she wanted to get her nails done and do some shopping even though the intention was to leave and reach destination before sundown.

He was a tattooed instawhore? Oh no!

That fag?

That book sounds dreadful.

[quote] In 1996, Sotheby’s auctioned more than 5,500 items from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died two years earlier. The winning bids shattered all presale estimates: A monogrammed silver tape measure went for $48,875, a faux-pearl necklace for $211,500. The four-day total topped an astonishing $34 million. “Most of the items were not exceptional works of art or craftsmanship, nor were they even from the White House era,” Elizabeth Beller writes in a new book. “They were all Jackie.”

A digression: Some of the items purchased at that sale have now made their way back to the auction block. Unsurprisingly, the prices now reached generally are nowhere near the incredibly inflated ones that people paid in 1996. The only reason the lots fetched those excessive prices was because of a severe case of auction fever. I cannot imagine anyone being foolish enough to pay $48,875 for a silver tape measure that is worth maybe several hundred dollars, even with the provenance of having belonged to Jackie O.

Back to mourning the loss of that beautiful man.

What's going on here?

[quote]Was he engaging in masturbatia in the first photo?

Do you think John-John masturbated?

^Yes-Yes.

Yes, of course John-John wanked his little John.

In terms of beauty, poise, and charm he was only rivaled by Chelsea Clinton and Billy Bush.

I saw him once and he was sooo much hotter in person and he walked with so much grace and confidence.

Also seen his wife. She was striking coz her height stands out.

Saw him around town a few times. he even sat in my row at the movies one night and I on the aisle, had to get up so he and his date could pass thru. Even if he wasn't famous, he would have turned heads. He was something.

Richard Wiese could tell tales about John John that would wake people up.

Are you implying that he had an affair with John John at Brown?

Richard Wiese in his modeling days.

Spill R46

Poor egotist with a rotten wife.

[quote]That is an ugly tattoo.

Might it have some Native significance?

JFK jr reminds me of Chris Evans. Rumored to be bi. Rumored to be a cocaine addict. Showmance with women to hide bi-rumors for politics career. An early death.

Friends said they saw him at Randolph Country Club, well known gay poolside club back in the day.

It appears he shaved his body, chest to legs. Pity.

Pretty but dumb. Can't even fly a plane.

R55 Yes, he had the intelligence of a twitch streamer. His whore mother basically killed him by forcing him into politics. He should have listened to himself and become an actor... and people say this is a patriarchy, where sons(males) listen to their mother's(females) wishes and change their whole lives because of that. I hope she rots in hell because if he were still alive as an actor these days, I could suck his cock(I would have loved to suck him in the 90s but I was only 7 when he died).

As R32 states, correctly, the tat is fake and it was for a college production of, I believe, "Fortune and Men's Eyes."

So enough about the fake tattoo.

[quote] John and Carolyn were both equally at fault for the crash.

Wrong, R34. She may have delayed them, but he was told explicitly not to fly that night by an experienced aviation expert due to the foggy conditions and, like every other arrogant, know-it-all Kennedy male, he chose to recklessly do what he wanted. He was the pilot; like any pilot, in a plane or a car or anything else, it's their responsibility to exercise caution for themselves and all the passengers.

Here are all trhe mistakes Kennedy made as a pilot, putting the blame squarely on him.

He did not yet qualify for instrument flight rules. With the dusk turning into night and the fog that was gathering, he was caught in spatial disorientation and he had not yet complete training on how to properly transition from visual flying to instrument flying. If they had left at the time originally planned there would still have been light when they reached their destination.

He was nothing but lovely to look at. Blank as a brand new Red Chief.

[quote] If they had left at the time originally planned there would still have been light when they reached their destination.

He was a fool who broke every every major rule about piloting. He eschewed radio contact, an audio pilot, never consulted about the weather, and most damning of all, did not alter plans.

He could have still changed his plans before or after takeoff when it would have been more apparent just how bad the weather conditions were.

He did not. It was entirely his fault, R60.

Sweetie, time to move on. It's been 25 years.

Who are you directing that at, sweetie R63?

Yes, looking at photos and film of him as a toddler, I might have speculated at the time that he’d grow into a “special”-looking adult. Clearly the gods were kind to him as he got older—and then, we lost him.

He also was getting over a broken ankle I think. The whole flight was ill advised. And I don’t know why anyone wants to whitewash them both now (other than to sell books, of course). If Carolyn “barely drank wine” it’s because she was content with vodka and cocaine.

I think he gets a bad reputation for being “dumb.” Yes, he wasn’t suited for a law and political career and was no intellect. But he had an emotional intelligence and possibly creativity. It would’ve been interesting to see what he made of himself farther from his mother’s death.

I do mourn the time when people in the public eye taught their children manners. By all accounts, his were impeccable.

Didn’t he fail the bar like 4 times?

Not hot like his sistuh.

This was one of the celebrity deaths that, as a young teen, I recall so vividly (like Princess Diana’s). My mother’s friend called screaming telling us to turn on the news. So bizarre that it happened 30 years to the day after Ted Kennedy drove into the water off of Chappaquiddick. I don’t believe in things like “the Kennedy Curse” but coincidences like that give you pause.

Crap pilot, though

Liked being naked. Visited nude beaches and showered with the curtain open at gyms. Like his father who skinny dipped with prep school friends in the White House pools.

I don’t think he was dumb. Dyslexia and ADHD can affect how one processes.

I do wish he were still alive and reading about him going about his life.

He passed the bar on his third try.

And somehow, over the past 25 years we have managed to just fine without him.

I always think of the comment one of the people on the street in the "American Voices" feature in The Onion made when he died:

"Think of all the expensive ties he had yet to wear..."

I've written this before(perhaps many times) but why not again? While he was studying law at NYU I was working in the area. I occasionally ate at a vegetarian buffet behind the school. You paid by the pound. One time I went in and as I started filling my plate I see this very handsome young man by himself reading the Post or News. I was blown away by his aura. I was stunned. I thought he was some actor I had never heard of. I couldn't get over it. Of course while I was eating I kept glancing at him. It was halfway through my meal before I realized who he was. I've only felt auras twice and his was very powerful. There was an old man at the table next to him who never looked at him only at his paper. John Jr noticed this and asked the man if he wanted the paper and the man eagerly said yes and the guy with the aura of a saint handed it to him. I saw him there once more.

And I saw his mother with that financial advisor at some fancy Italian restaurant I was taken to on the upper east side. She looked exactly like she did in her photos. Well I don't know why she should have looked otherwise.

While a student at Boston University, Carolyn was seriously involved with John Cullen, who played hockey for B. U..

Karen Black was a better pilot.

If only Otto had been on duty!

R83, I passed the NY bar on the first try. Not that hard to do.

did his loads taste special?

You give yourself too little credit, R80. The NYS bar exam is - or at least was - a notoriously difficult one.

I'm so sick of hearing about how he failed the bar exam. He failed it twice, then passed. Hilary Clinton is by all accounts one of the smartest minds in politics, and she failed the D.C. bar.

JFC just stop it.

BITCHES look at all these lawyers who FAILED THE BAR EXAM!

Should John have bothered to complete his flight training, he would've learned not to lose his head when trouble begins.

John-John had a hairy chest. He appears to have shaved it.

wow im so ugly lmao

Why do you keep sharing obvious AI art?