Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller

Author:Elizabeth Beller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2024-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

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IN EARLY MARCH OF 1998, Anthony Radziwill went back to the NIH for surgery, and this time the recovery took much longer. Carolyn went down to DC again to be with Carole. The two women were driving to visit Anthony the day after the surgery when Carole remembered last minute that it was Lee’s birthday. Carolyn stopped the car. “Are you kidding? We can’t just ignore her birthday.” As Carole wrote, “She turns the car around, and we go to the florist in Bethesda and pick out arrangements of oriental lilies. Big, bright flowers. ‘These look like her,’ she says. We spend an hour with the florist getting them just right, and take them back to the hotel and put them in her room. Carolyn signed the card from the four of us.”

Carolyn maintained her close friendship with Betsy Reisinger, soon to be married to John’s friend Kenan Siegel on March 21, 1998, in Miami. “Carolyn came down a week early to help me get ready for the wedding,” Betsy remembered. “She took me shopping in Bal Harbour and guided me toward the perfect shoes and dress for the rehearsal dinner. There was a particular pair of white satin Manolo Blahniks she had that she also wanted me to have for the wedding. She called everywhere she could think of to get them for me, but they were sold out.

“Carolyn’s solution was to buy me this gorgeous pair of rhinestone and velvet Dolce & Gabbana shoes. They were absolutely gorgeous—except that I couldn’t walk in them. We tried to see if I could take a couple of steps, and it was clear I couldn’t. Carolyn laughed and told me, ‘Well, at least you’ll always have them.’ ”

John and Carolyn had a good time at the wedding, and asked their friend Robert Curran, who was shooting photographs, to take a few of them. That’s how he got the picture with Carolyn’s head thrown back in laughter while John embraces her. “He was singing a song into her ear,” Curran recalled. In another, Carolyn and Betsy hug tightly while Carolyn gives Betsy a big, clutching, grandma smooch.

“Our wedding was such a happy day,” Betsy said. “For us, but for our friends as well. You can see from the pictures our friend Robert Curran took, Carolyn and John were deeply in love, and in love with life. That is how I remember them, when they felt safe.”

These were the moments when Carolyn seemed to be able to step out of what could possibly be called depression, though that was a word not often spoken at that time. These moments often occurred outside the familiar places of her life. That she had such a blast at a wedding in Miami, far from what had become the routine rounds of fabulousness—the galas and dinners that populated their New York social life—may speak to a subtler disappointment at play in Carolyn after she married. She had crossed over from being the person who greeted celebrities to being a celebrity herself.

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