Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr

Adam White, The Independent

There are just two known recordings of the voice of fashion icon Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. One is eight seconds long. (“It was a very exciting and wonderful evening,” she tells a red carpet reporter at a ball in 1998.) The other is barely two. It is deep and elegant. Almost musical. A voice for gala receptions and charity dinners, for conversation about summer plans and trips to the Hamptons. It sounds like money. On the Instagram accounts dedicated to her memory, Bessette-Kennedy’s fans — often youngsters born long after she and her husband John F Kennedy Jr were killed in a plane crash in 1999 — pore over these clips. They pore over photos of her, too — the crisp lines of her wardrobe, the ice-blonde of her hair, that unmistakable aura of a beautiful and doomed woman. She’s a mystery to solve.

That hasn’t, in the 25 years since Bessette-Kennedy’s death, been much of a problem. One of the great enigmas of late 20th century American celebrity, she has been credited with popularising a quiet sort of luxury, long before “quiet luxury” became a trending term. Think minimalist separates, black sandals, oversized white shirts. Very chic. Very tailored. Very Calvin Klein, where she worked as a publicist before her marriage. She is one of the beacons of the “Flashback Friday” genre on social media — images pulled from the archives and representative of what feels like a distant and more innocent past. And if not more innocent, at least more fun. That she died so young and so tragically, at the age of just 33, only harnessed her mythological allure.

Two new books claim to fill in the gaps. JFK Jr, by his former executive assistant RoseMarie Terenzio and journalist Liz McNeil, is an oral history of the handsome crown prince of America’s most famous family, whose celebrity status and mogul ambitions looked set to make him as big as his parents, president John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Onassis.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by journalist Maureen Callahan, is as lurid as its title — a potted history of nightmares at the Kennedy White House and beyond. Both are being billed as definitive retellings, and both devote significant time to Bessette-Kennedy, her glamour and her multitudes. However, where JFK Jr is ever slightly too clean, Ask Not is too salacious. Bessette-Kennedy becomes even more of an unknown as a result. She’s either an aloof martyr or a drug-addicted social climber. You leave none the wiser.

What JFK Jr does do, at least, is drive home the fantasy of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy; the far-away idea of who she was and the world she occupied. Intriguingly, this has little to do with who she married. In modern Bessette-Kennedy fan circles, JFK Jr is merely an accessory — a gorgeous lunk attached to a Nineties trendsetter. Often JFK Jr is best read in that context.

The strongest parts of Terenzio and McNeil’s book are the memories of a pre-fame Bessette-Kennedy barrelling through a long-ago Manhattan, working as a publicity director at Calvin Klein by day and partying by night. “She was a club girl, and she dated a lot of people,” recalls Brian Steel, a friend of JFK Jr’s. Terenzio, who became close with the couple, remembers Bessette-Kennedy living in a brownstone apartment in the West Village before she moved in with JFK Jr. Kate Moss was her upstairs neighbour for a time. There are memories of Bessette-Kennedy smoking Parliament Lights at Tribeca sushi restaurants, doing recreational cocaine, and taking shopping trips to Neiman Marcus.

“She was pretty enigmatic in the sense of... who is this wild person?” recalls Robbie Littell, a JFK Jr friend. Another pal, Jack Merrill, adds: “She was able to get dirty. She and John understood that sometimes there has to be a little grime to have a good time.” Many contributors describe her in similarly abstract terms — “electric”; “dynamite”; “that kind of girl”. Even how she and Kennedy met is slightly opaque. He tells a friend they first encountered one another “at Calvin Klein” in 1992. Their relationship timeline is messy; Kennedy seemed to be simultaneously dating Carolyn and actor Daryl Hannah for a while before the pair became official in 1994.