HEADLINES announcing the marriage of John Kennedy Jnr to Carolyn Bessette last Saturday read more like obituary notices. Even the respectable American press was funereal.
No Longer `Most Eligible' proclaimed the Boston Globe on its front page, toning it down on page five to "JFK Jr Is No Longer `Most Eligible'." The 35 year old Kennedy, dubbed the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine in 1988, and Prince Charming of the Camelot era by more sober, if fairy tale illiterate journals, disappointed his public by marrying - worse still, by marrying discreetly.
"He's something in the world of celebrity, women and hormones that we could always count on," Landon Jones, managing editor of People commented the day after the nuptials. "I was really hoping that he would date Princess Diana. My big fantasy was to have `Di and John John Wed' on the cover." Never mind that celebrities, women and, presumably, hormones were present, the press was stuck with a tasteful, non royal wedding and had to churn out flashback trivia.
There were interviews with Bellevue Cadillac, the rock band that nearly played at the wedding, and with residents of Cumberland Island, Georgia, who saw the Greyfield Inn being decorated for the event and pronounced the lighting "just like it would be for Christmas". Not the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes.
We learned the dress was designed by Narcisco Rodriguez of Cerutti 1881, that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's three children were flower girls and ring bearer, that the couple is most likely honeymooning on a yacht off the Florida coast.
The American public's appetite for scraps from this particular Kennedy feast is understandable. When three year old John Kennedy was photographed saluting his father's casket in 1963 he became a symbol of private dignity and of national loss. In one of the decade's defining images, a child icon materialised and was destined to be public property.
Despite a subsequently private childhood and adolescence, John John, in contrast with his older sister, Caroline, became that distinctly American mutant, a celebrity aristocrat.
Firstly, (and solely, his critics insist), there were - still are - his looks. Countless magazine shots capture powerful John emerging from the surf, all chest and chin; sweaty John jogging in Central Park; John, impeccably tuxedoed, trailing a blonde who is fated to be part of his backdrop. In the male Kennedy tradition, he fills the frame.
Even his bride is a cipher. "Who is this Princess of Camelot Jr?", one newspaper asked, proceeding to describe Carolyn Bessette as a tall blonde with a "flat face that looks rather Jackie esque". A colleague at the Lyons Group of Boston nightclubs where Ms Bessette worked before joining Calvin Klein noted: "She's got Princess Di and Jackie O down pat. She does the wave. She knows how to get out of a limousine".
And anybody who can recognise a limousine can recognise John Kennedy Jnr. The publishers of a 1993 biography, Prince Charming by Wendy Leigh, knew that when they chose a cover with no title, just a glowing close up photograph of its subject. The biography revealed that Mr Kennedy is left handed, is a talented actor who appeared in a small movie called "A Matter of Degree", but who abandoned the profession when his mother threatened to disinherit him, that Ari Onassis treated him kindly, that he is "addicted" to beautiful women and smokes one cigarette a day.
His 1993 hobbies appeared to be skating, cycling, sex, bodybuilding and fleeing from photographers. Women who qualified as "serious romances" included Christina Haag and actress Daryl Hannah, and "flings" reportedly involved Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cindy Crawford and Julia Roberts.
CRITICS noted that his romantic success was hardly matched by academic brilliance. "John is not very smart," Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam concluded in his review of Prince Charming, citing the fact that Kennedy repeated 11th grade of high school at Andover, Massachusetts, and, having attended Brown University and then New York University Law School, failed his bar examinations twice. "The Hunk Flunks" was one of the less charitable headlines at the time, and that image was reinforced when Kennedy, as a witness in a minor case, had trouble explaining Miranda rights.
In August, 1991, however, the celebrity staffer in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office won his first prosecution against a defendant known as the Sleeping Burglar. It was not a memorable debut. The real courtroom star turn occurred three months later in November when John Kennedy Jnr made a surprise appearance at Palm Beach Courthouse, Florida, pronouncing support for his cousin and close friend, William Kennedy Smith, who was about to stand trial for rape.
Kennedy's celebrity presence at Smith's side, just as jury selection moved into its final round was perceived to have bolstered the defence's case significantly. Rumours that he had been reluctant to appear did little to dispel the image of the Kennedy clan uniting to activate its twin engines of wealth and celebrity.
In September, 1995, John Kennedy unveiled George, a slick political magazine that had Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington on the cover of its first issue and a record setting 175 pages of advertisements. He assumed editing duties at the magazine in January when the editor, Eric Etheridge, resigned citing "editorial differences". The magazine now has a circulation of 450,000.
Under Kennedy's editorship,
George treats politics as popular culture, blurring the distinction between celebrity and statesmanship. The magazine's philosophy allows Madonna to write a column titled: "If I Were President". It also allows designer Isaac Mizrahi to ridicule the clothing preferences of national leaders.
Somewhere between the cleavage and the biceps there is a discussion of race relations with President Kennedy's old adversary, George Wallace. The slick production is a fitting creation for the son of the first television age president, a leader who pioneered the notion of politics as entertainment and who recognised the increased potency of substance when it is mixed with style.