He and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, endured the cruelty of the press long before Harry and Meghan
Because I’ve been watching a lot of 90s sitcoms recently, I’ve been thinking about John F Kennedy Jr. Seinfeld, Sex And The City, Murphy Brown: his name pops up in them all. It will be 22 years this summer since he died, so a lot of people have forgotten what a big deal he was back then, especially in New York. But John-John, as his parents and the media teasingly called him, remains the closest thing America will probably ever have to a prince. When his plane crashed, only two years after the death of Princess Diana, it really did feel like the cruellest fairytale: the fairest prince and princess in all the lands would not make old bones.
I have always been fascinated by Kennedy, the boy who, aged three, saluted his murdered father’s coffin, and then grew up to become America’s most gilded of youths. That surplus of handsomeness, that burdensome name, his efforts to live up to his mother’s high standards while skating around the familial whirlpool pull of politics. The media were never sure whether to sneer or swoon, so they did both, epitomised in the headline after he failed the New York bar exam twice: “The Hunk Flunks.” He had every privilege God could bestow on a man, but had to contend with the sting of his mother’s disapproval of both his career choices (acting, founding the magazine George) and his girlfriends (Daryl Hannah). He was a Shakespearean character in the body of a Ken doll.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3wGmlXY
