Almost 12 years after JFK Jr and his wife Carolynn Bessette’s untimely deaths, his assistant has revealed how she talked his wife into taking the flight the couple perished on.
RoseMarie Terenzio, 44, was John F Kennedy Jr’s personal assistant, publicist and one of his closest confidantes during the last five years of his life.
In her book, ‘Fairy Tale Interrupted’, she reveals that the couple were having serious troubles in their marriage and Carolyn had initially refused to join John on that ill-fated flight on July 16, 1999.
With their marriage under intense strain, Carolyn, a Calvin Klein executive, who struggled with the constant media attention her husband attracted, had said she was not going to join him at his cousin Rory’s wedding on July 17.
John,39, who ran George magazine, had told RoseMarie that Carolyn was determined to stay at home and that he was not ‘going to fight with her about it’, she recalls in People Magazine.
But RoseMarie tried to change her mind.
‘I’m not a priority,’ she said. It’s always something else. George. Somebody getting fired. A trip to meet advertisers. I just want some normal married time. I’m exhausted’ RoseMarie remembers Carolyn telling her.
But RoseMarie said she urged Carolyn to take the flight and go to the wedding in Massachusetts.
Hours later, John’s plane crashed in the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vinyard, Massachusetts killing him, Carolyn and her sister Lauren.
After the tragic, untimely deaths, RoseMarie said her whole world came crashing down around her, along with her hopes for the future.
Only now as the head of her own public relations company, is RoseMarie finally ready to tell her story, giving a very real insight into the lives of the tragic couple
In her book, RoseMarie reveals John and Carolyn’s sometimes tumultuous relationship and the strain Carolyn felt from the constant media attention after their secret wedding in September 1996.
She added that she felt the marriage became strained because they struggled to find ‘peaceful marriage time’ amongst the media frenzy and the magazine struggling.
RoseMarie also delves into how she planned the couple’s secret wedding on Georgia’s Cumberland Island as well as their tragic funeral and how she struggled to cope with their deaths.