Carolyn Bessette didn't say yes when John F. Kennedy Jr. first proposed to her .
She didn't say no, either, but remarkably the 29-year-old Calvin Klein publicist, who had been dating the eligible bachelor for about a year (after several years of the run-around), wasn't yet sure that she was ready for what marrying him would entail. Namely, a merging of lives that would come with a host of perks but also require a daunting amount of self-sacrifice , not even including the matter-of-fact assault on her privacy. Carolyn had spent enough time at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port to know that there was no exaggerating the legend behind the larger-than-life name , a family technically made up of flesh and blood just like any other but which had embedded itself in the very fabric of American culture over the greater part of the 20th century.
And she wasn't bowled over by the Kennedy bond. Rather, the clannishness turned her off. Carolyn loved John, but in what would become a point of contention for the rest of their lives, she didn't particularly enjoy going to spend holidays and weekends with his sprawling family on the Cape, where their comings and goings were rather formally presided over by reigning matriarch Ethel Kennedy , Robert F.
Kennedy 's widow, and the Kennedy men, who with their touch football games and clambakes seemed lifted from a Ralph Lauren ad. She wasn't exactly culturally adrift, having been born in White Plains, N.Y.
, and raised in posh Greenwich, Con.
