According to Town and Country, while speaking at a panel for the screening of A&E’s documentary JFK JR: The Final Year, which airs tonight at 9 p.m., Carole Radziwill, who was married to JFK Jr.’s cousin, Anthony Radziwill and became very close friends to Carolyn, recalled meeting her at their shared summer house. “We were sharing a summer house, Anthony and I and John, and he brought her for memorial day weekend,” the former journalist, who appeared on The Real Housewives of New York for six seasons, said. “They had been seeing each other for a few months super on the DL [down low]. And that’s when I first met her.” Carole, who wrote a book about the foursome’s friendship in 2005, What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love, says that Carolyn was so much fun. “You just felt like you knew her your whole life,” she said. “And then, he broke up with her a few weeks later because he got back with his ex-girlfriend Daryl Hannah.” JFK Jr. had dated the Splash actress on and off since 1988, before eventually calling it quits in August 1994. It was during one of those on-again-off-again breaks that Carolyn’s mom, Ann Messina Freeman, gave her some tough love advice. “There was this period where John was going back and forth, but didn’t say anything to Carolyn,” RoseMarie Terenzio, JFK Jr.’s chief of staff, said at the screening. “He just kind of went off the radar. And then she opened up the newspaper and there he was at a movie premiere with Daryl.” “And her mom, who is hilarious sent her the article in the mail: ‘Carolyn, please get on with your life, love mom.’ With a sad face,” RoseMarie added. Carolyn was famously private about her relationship with JFK Jr. and her family only released one statement following their deaths, so this tidbit of information gives small intel into the struggles they faced as a couple—and how Carolyn’s mom rallied around her for support. Carole, whose husband Anthony died a month after the tragic plane crash on August 10, 1999, at the age of 40 after a long battle with testicular cancer, reflected on her friends’ deaths in a moving personal essay. “I lost everything that night, I wasn’t the only one,” she wrote this week. “We all lost something. It was personal for me, and for their friends and family, but it was also bigger.” She continued: “The pain of losing them, once so acute it was unbearable, has eroded over time. Somewhere along the way their deaths became a thing I am able to live with. They inhabit my memory as their forever 30-something selves, while I turned 40 and then 50 and now 55.” https://parade.com/1236626/alexandra-hurtado/john-f-kennedy-jr-carolyn-bessette-pictures/
