“JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography”

By RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil

Gallery. 432 pp. $30.99

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Into the blood sport world of Kennedy family biographies enters “JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography,” co-written by RoseMarie Terenzio — John Kennedy Jr.’s executive assistant and a close confidante of his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy — and People magazine editor-at-large Liz McNeil.

“JFK Jr.” is timed to the 25th anniversary of the still-unthinkable deaths of the couple, and Bessette’s sister Lauren, in the crash of a plane piloted by Kennedy on a foggy night off the Martha’s Vineyard coast on July 16, 1999.

The oral history offers extensive reminiscences from a friendly chorus of prep school classmates, colleagues, close friends, housemates, historians, multiple girlfriends and one National Park Service ranger who declined Kennedy’s request to rappel off the top of Mt. Rushmore to promote a book associated with his magazine, George. Pamela Anderson shows up to remember Kennedy fondly, as do Garth Brooks, Brooke Shields, Jeffrey Sachs and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

Sprawling and fascinating, “JFK Jr.” was clearly written by and populated with people who love him. Terenzio’s closeness to the couple was virtually unrivaled. She was staying at their Tribeca apartment the weekend of their deaths; she was the one everybody called in a panic, the one who called Ted Kennedy’s house to tell him his nephew’s plane was missing, the one who boxed up the couple’s effects.

The extent of her access to Kennedy’s inner circle, and the frankness of their recollections, are remarkable. In the first years after Kennedy’s death, few of his famously protective friends spoke to the press, and then it seemed they all did, all at once, producing a firehose of memoirs and documentaries. Terenzio herself has previously done both.

The book benefits from its distance from that gold rush, since Kennedy’s friends no longer need to jealously guard their recollections. It suffers as well, since so few mysteries remain. While “JFK Jr.” almost certainly provides the fullest portrait of Kennedy ever written, stacked with gratifyingly gossipy details, it offers few actual scoops.

Wisely, it doesn’t linger on the well-tilled Camelot years, or on Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s famously fraught relationship. “I’m not so sure he didn’t love her at the end,” says one of Jackie’s confidants, with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

The image of John-John (a name he came to hate) saluting his father’s casket came to symbolize the nation’s grief. It was his third birthday, and he had practiced the salute with his Secret Service detail. After that, John F. Kennedy, Jr. belonged to everybody.

Jackie, portrayed here as doting but strict, eventually moved her children to Manhattan, hoping to give them regular lives. Classmates remember Kennedy as a mostly normal kid, albeit one who took his friends dancing at Studio 54 and refused to discuss the Warren Commission. “He had a bit of sadness to him,” recalls one of Kennedy’s teachers. “He was a more complicated person than people think.”

Friends describe him as scattered — always late, always losing things, including cars and bicycles — and an indifferent student whose admission to Brown surprised everyone. He would later fail the bar exam twice. “We never thought he’d be very smart,” admits Secret Service agent Clint Hill.

When Kennedy was 27, People magazine named him the Sexiest Man Alive, something that seemed to both embarrass and secretly thrill him. “He knew he was beautiful,” recalls a gossip columnist who knew him. “He spent hours and hours at the gym. I never saw him take a shower with the curtain closed.”

Kennedy developed an alarming taste for adventure that resulted in several near-death experiences; he once wandered off-trail and got lost in the African jungle. He had been fascinated with flying since his days riding with his father in the presidential helicopter. In the air, he was free from the earthbound pressures that came with being a Kennedy, his friend William Cohan says. “He did do a lot of crazy things, but I don’t think he had a death wish. I think he thought he was invincible, which is pretty crazy given his father and uncle were assassinated.”

Under Terenzio and McNeil’s skillful navigation, a portrait of Kennedy emerges: He was a loyal friend, unpretentious and effortlessly likable, skilled at putting normies at ease with his ridiculous fame. He was always the biggest celebrity in any room, and never knew anything else. Regular New Yorkers would stop him on the street to tell him what his father meant to them (he usually loved this). Women, even supermodels, would swoon, sometimes literally.

But when he met and married Calvin Klein executive Carolyn Bessette, the spotlight became unbearable, at least for her. Kennedy’s friends speak of Bessette with what seems like a mixture of fondness, trepidation and resentment. They recall her electric personality, her alternating tendencies toward hostility and warmth, her maternal instincts.

The more they describe her, the more unknowable she seems. (Despite rumors to the contrary, Terenzio says she never saw Bessette-Kennedy use drugs, though her husband was a daily pot smoker.) She was hunted by paparazzi who would hurl insults to get a reaction, once sending her fleeing into traffic. Toward the end, she became reluctant to leave their apartment. She seemed to be unraveling.

Kennedy, who shared his family’s famous determination to get on with things, was mostly unsympathetic. It didn’t help that the photographers who tormented Bessette-Kennedy would pretend to be kind to her when he was around. “He could have done more to help her,” one friend observes. “He was brilliant in the deep end, so he thought Carolyn could do the same.”

If there’s one surprising thing “JFK Jr.” reveals, it’s how much the tabloids were right: about the tension between the couple in their last days, their likely extramarital dalliances, and the fact that Carolyn, unenthused at the prospect of putting on a brave face at Rory Kennedy’s wedding that terrible weekend, almost didn’t go.

On the day of the crash, Kennedy, according to one friend, was “fighting to turn around his life.” His marriage was crumbling, his best friend and cousin Anthony Radziwill was dying, and he was estranged from his beloved sister, Caroline. Neither sibling liked the other’s spouse, and Caroline, who did not speak for the book, is portrayed as frosty and distant throughout.

According to those who knew him, Kennedy was beginning to cautiously embrace his political destiny. The night before the crash, he told a friend he wanted to challenge New York Gov. George Pataki, the first stop on a likely inexorable road to the White House.

It had always been both obvious and necessary that he would pick up the mantle of the Kennedy family — he was their last charismatic member. At the time of his death, he was still struggling to figure out his own way there. “He wanted to be his own person,” recalls boxer Mike Tyson, a friend of Kennedy’s. “But how do you become your own person ... when you almost belong to everybody?”