Tracking a Shooting Star: My Years Covering JFK Jr. for PEOPLE

Liz McNeil is PEOPLE’s JFK Jr. expert — she wrote the book, JFK JR: An Intimate Oral Biography, a New York Times bestseller, alongside RoseMarie Terenzio, JFK Jr.’s former executive assistant and a close friend of both him and Carolyn Bessette. Here, Liz relives the surprises — and challenges — of covering JFK Jr. in 1990s Manhattan, long before Love Story became a cultural obsession.

I had no sources and no leads. That’s how it started when my boss told me in 1995 that JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were about to get engaged and I’d better find out what was happening.

I was a newish reporter from San Francisco who’d recently moved to New York. Back then, no one close to John and Carolyn ever spoke to the press. Ever. As I’d later learn, this gave them some sense of normalcy. In those days, we’d get a lot of leads from Page Six. “John was spotted at Bubby’s,” and then I’d run over.

Bubby’s never gave up the goods (the owners were friends of John’s). But another neighborhood place, the Socrates Diner — where John would speak a few words of Greek to the owner (back from his time on the private island of Skorpios with stepfather Aristotle Onassis) — would give us a smidge. This was before Instagram and social media. We did everything on the phone or in person. Basically, I ran around town.

I once got a call back from John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill, who was a producer at ABC News. He said, “Liz, you know I can’t talk to you,” and we had a short convo. He was sooo nice. I told my editor, he’d returned my call! “Did you get any usable quotes?” Not exactly.

Within a few years, I discovered John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist and Wyoming rancher whom John’s mom, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had asked to host her son one summer back when he was 16 or 17. As the story goes, John was pouring concrete down the garbage chute at 1040 5th Ave. and she needed him out of the house. The two Johns struck up a deep friendship — and experimented with some mind-altering substances. Years later, Barlow became a point person for us reporters. And the guy loved to riff. Here’s classic Barlow on John’s passion for Carolyn: “We used to talk about it as though we were living in the tropics and every once in a while you get in a hurricane. John loved her desperately and she was a creature with a lot of weather and you had to be ready to ride the storm.” This time, I got the quote!

Later in 1995, John’s magazine George debuted. It was about politics and pop culture. John never got enough credit for an idea that doesn’t seem surprising now but was back then. We mostly read George to find out about John. Still, there were fascinating historical breadcrumbs if you looked, including his 1996 interview with former President Gerald Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, which had investigated the assassination of John’s father. John didn’t ask him about it directly, but at one point, Ford told him: “The truth is, John . . . there is no doubt in my mind that Lee Harvey Oswald committed the assassination.”

When John and Carolyn secretly got married on Sept. 21, 1996, it was a mad scramble for reporting. Where’s Cumberland Island? The gorgeous Narciso Rodriguez slip dress! After they were back home, I covered a few events they attended in N.Y.C., including the Riverkeeper Gala at the World Trade Center for the Hudson River charity, then run by John’s cousin, RFK Jr. I asked John what brought him to the party. He said, “Honestly, I’m not really sure, but my cousin, Bobby, asked me to be here…” So honest! Carolyn, in a long elegant black dress, was right by his side and motioned it was time to leave. What about my other questions???

I lived a few blocks from their Tribeca place and would see them downtown or sometimes catch a sight of John rollerblading. It was cool to give them their space. They lived in a building without a doorman. There was no entourage. No publicist. They were just part of the city.

Everything changed with their death on July 16, 1999. The city mourned. So did I. I thought I wouldn’t write about John and Carolyn anymore. What was there to say? All too sad.

A year later, I reached out to his executive assistant at George, RoseMarie Terenzio. We’d never spoken before. But of course, I knew of her. I was just checking in. I didn’t want or need anything for a change. We had coffee downtown. I knew she loved John and Carolyn and her sister, Lauren. Over the years we became friends. She has the best stories.

In the years that followed, there were a few books from John’s closest friends, such as Robbie Littell and Christina Haag, who’d dated John in the ’80s. I was glad they were keeping his memory alive. A few years after his death, Robbie told me that John didn’t hate the reporters or the photographers who followed him. “They’d been there since the day he was born….” Another friend told me John would tell him (every once in a while) “Hey, will you talk to Liz McNeil at PEOPLE for me?” In other words, to give me a tidbit. That blew my mind too.

In 2024, I wrote a book with RoseMarie, JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography. We interviewed over 300 people, including his friend Jack Merrill, whom he met via the downtown theater troupe Naked Angels. John was on their board.

Jack had never given an interview before — and he gave us one of my favorite quotes: “Some people have asked, why talk after all these years? You’ve shut up for so long. And it think, it’s for him. John wasn’t interested in being in the VIP section. He didn’t want to be behind the ropes. He wanted to be on the dance floor in the middle of it….”

John tried so hard to be an ordinary guy. But no one will ever have a life like JFK Jr. He turned 3 years old on the same day as his father’s funeral. When the world watched Jackie walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in a black veil. The nation lost a president. A little boy lost his father.

John would be 65 now. His close friend Sasha Chermayeff is a grandmother. She put it best when she told me: “I do feel like John and Carolyn’s incredibly untimely loss served in this very sad way to make life so precious. The fleetingness of it. That sense of the beauty, the brevity. They gave it to us.“

For more on the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, check out PEOPLE’s special edition, available here.

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