Carole Radziwill on What It Was Like to Be Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Best Friend

Most people probably know Carole Radziwill from her time on The Real Housewives of New York City and while, don’t get me wrong, I loved her on the show—that’s nowhere near the most interesting part of her story. Carole is an extraordinarily talented journalist and had an esteemed career in the field, even working as a war correspondent at one point. She worked as a journalist and a producer for nearly two decades at ABC News, during which time she earned three Emmys. Carole married her fellow ABC News producer, Prince Anthony Radziwill—son of socialite Lee Radziwill and nephew of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—on August 27, 1994; he died of cancer on August 10, 1999. Anthony’s best friend was his cousin, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Carole’s best friend was his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. In the summer of 1999—which Carole refers to as “the summer of tragedy”—Carole knew the end of her husband’s life was near. What she didn’t know, of course, was that on July 16, 1999, John and Carolyn, along with Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, would die in a plane crash. Carole lost the three people closest to her in less than a month of one another, all of them 40 years old and younger—Anthony had just turned 40 six days before his death. Of her life with Anthony, Carole writes in her brilliant memoir What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love, which came out in 2005, that “We are young and happy and have all the time in the world,” except, tragically, they don’t. The book tells priceless anecdotes, like how hilarious Carolyn was—she left Carole a note about her Gap sneakers saying that if she didn’t get rid of them, their relationship couldn’t continue in a growth-oriented way. Carolyn was selfless. She was compassionate. Interesting. She was a wonderful, caring, kind friend. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book was when she declined signing an autograph for someone, saying “You don’t want mine. You want Carole’s. She has three Emmys.” Carolyn had this ability to make someone feel like the only person in the room—the most important person in the room. Carole writes in What Remains “She made me believe I was captivating.” The entire world knows who Carolyn is; very few got to call her a best friend. In this book, we get to learn what it was like to be Carolyn’s best friend. So many of our conversations in this series have been about John—and rightfully so, as he was and, quite frankly, still is captivating. But this episode is basically all about Carolyn. Carole writes that both she and Carolyn were not the women that people expected Anthony and John to end up with. John, by the way, was already, devastatingly, writing the eulogy of his cousin and best friend Anthony before John himself died. Who would have ever thought John, and Carolyn, for that matter, would be lost before Anthony? On that awful night of July 16, as the 16th turned into the 17th, Carole was one of the first to learn that John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s plane was missing. She describes learning they were missing and the time between that and learning that they had crashed “the terrifying quiet.” She must have felt like time was suspended in space. The lack of answers. The ambiguity. The hope. The fear. All of it. After Anthony died, she left ABC News to write what became What Remains, which, let me tell you—the topic is fascinating on its own, but the writing? The writing is unmatched. It, not surprisingly, became a New York Times bestseller upon its release, and we’re talking all about it today.

What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwill