Given what little we know of John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s final years, it’s sort of remarkable that FX’s Love Story completely edited out Carole Radziwill from the story. Carole was married to Anthony Radziwill, John’s cousin and best friend. Carole and Carolyn became extremely close in the 1990s, and Carolyn helped Carole as Anthony was dying of cancer in his final years too. John, Carolyn and Anthony all died in the summer of 1999, with Anthony passing away just weeks after John’s plane went into the ocean. Well, Love Story doesn’t feature Carole Radziwill whatsoever, nor did they consult with her at all. She hasn’t given any interviews about the series (before now), but she has fact-checked some details about John and Carolyn on her Substack. Well, the New York Times just got Carole’s first interview since Love Story began. She’s sort of promoting her return to RHONY, but really, she wanted to talk about Anthony, John and Carolyn. Some highlights:
Her 21-year-old memoir “What Remains.” Released in 2005, it in recent weeks has landed back on best-seller lists.
She hasn’t watched Love Story: That has not stopped her from sharing her thoughts about “Love Story” with subscribers of her Substack newsletter, The Voice of Reason, and in posts on social media. Rebutting others’ accounts of her friends and her husband has long been something of a duty for Ms. Radziwill. For instance, when Vanity Fair in 2003 published an article, Secrets and Lies, about Mr. Kennedy’s and Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s domestic life, Ms. Radziwill sent a scathing letter to the magazine’s editor at the time, Graydon Carter, disputing the story’s details.
She’s tired of defending the people she lost: “Defending Carolyn and talking about my husband was a hill I was going to die on. But honestly, I didn’t think that 25 years later, it would become a mountain.”
When she met Carolyn Bessette: She met Ms. Bessette Kennedy on Memorial Day Weekend in 1992, when Mr. Kennedy brought her to a beach house in the Hamptons, where Mr. Radziwill and Ms. Radziwill were also staying. “We had a lot in common in the weirdest ways,” Ms. Radziwill said, referring to Ms. Bessette Kennedy. They forged a bond as ambitious women with backgrounds vastly different from those of the men they were dating, Ms. Radziwill added. She noted that both she and Ms. Bessette Kennedy had worked for Caldor, the discount department store. “I was a worker, she was a worker,” Ms. Radziwill said, adding that she and Ms. Bessette Kennedy would often rib their partners about how the women were bagging products in smocks and badges as teenagers, while the men were more likely to be water-skiing.
Carolyn was always there for her when Anthony got sick: “She would just be my rock. She was there for me all the time.”
Carole’s years-long friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell: “Imagine knowing someone and even being friendly with them and then they turn out to be, like, a monster,” Ms. Radziwill said. Ms. Maxwell’s name can be found in copies of her memoir, beneath a portrait of Ms. Radziwill that she took and that is used as the author photo. Ms. Radziwill’s name is in a small number of the millions of publicly available Epstein files. They contain emails between Ms. Radziwill and Ms. Maxwell, as well as emails that Ms. Maxwell sent about Ms. Radziwill to others, including Mr. Waitt and Teresa DiFalco, Ms. Radziwill’s sister and an editor of her memoir, who died in 2021.
Ghislaine introduced Carole to Prince Andrew: Ms. Radziwill said that Ms. Maxwell had introduced her to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was known as Prince Andrew until he recently lost his royal title because of his ties to Mr. Epstein. Ms. Radziwill interviewed the former prince for an installment of her Lunch Date column.
Carole didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein: She and Ms. Maxwell attended events together, including a cocktail party that Ms. Maxwell hosted at her home, where Ms. Radziwill recalled seeing Mr. Epstein. But Ms. Radziwill said that Ms. Maxwell never spoke to her about him. “I never knew Jeffrey Epstein,” she added.
Her friendship with Ghislaine: “I was friends with her in the early 2000s, I don’t know, like, for five or six years.” She added that she was shocked when Ms. Maxwell’s crimes came to light years after their friendship had waned. “The thing about her that made it easy for me to spend any time with her at all was that she was very intelligent, she was educated,” Ms. Radziwill said. “If you lined up 10 women and you asked, like, pick the woman who would be involved in an international sex trafficking ring, it would not be her.”
Returning to RHONY: “To go back to something that I was such a big part of, you know, is a bit of a risk for me.” But Andy Cohen made her an offer that she couldn’t refuse, she added. “Andy said that I could film as much or as little as I want.”
The Ghislaine Maxwell stuff is a big YIKES and I’m not sure I believe everything Carole says about that period of her life, in the years following Anthony’s passing. I’m not saying that widowhood excuses associating with sex-trafficking degenerates, but I’d be willing to bet that all of those losses took a toll on Carole psychologically and she didn’t have her defenses up in a way other people might have. As for what she says about Carolyn… yeah, they were close, just as John and Anthony were close. More like brothers, and their wives were more like sisters-in-law.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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