INTO THE MYSTIC

How I landed the biggest story of the year, but chose to keep it a secret

With all the hubbub surrounding the F/X series “Love Story,” - about the life and times of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, I felt it only right to include this chapter from my 2001 memoir, Fame, Ain’t It A Bitch: Confessions of a Reformed Gossip Columnist. Back then, as a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, I was often around John and Carolyn. But it all began with my friendship to a publicist named Rosemarie Terenzio. Ro was/is a tough chick from the Bronx. And as it turned out, she was perfect at protecting John and Carolyn. She still does all these years later. So…the story goes like this.

“OH MY GOD, he’s here” came the breathy voice over my telephone.

“Who’s he?” I shot back.

“Oh my God, oh my God, I can’t talk. I’ll call you back.”

In all the years I spent covering the biggest names in the world, no name elicited more insanity from women than John Kennedy, Jr.

On that particular day, the breathy voice belonged to my friend, a publicist named Rosemarie Terenzio. Rosemarie is a remarkably funny and extremely tough Italian girl from the Bronx. And on that very afternoon, John Kennedy had walked into the firm she was working for to lunch with her boss, Michael Berman. No one except Kennedy and Berman could have known the meeting that day was to discuss developing a political magazine together. Actually, Rosemarie might have known, but because she was a tight-lipped and true-blue employee, her lips were sealed to me.

“What’s Kennedy doing in there?” I asked her when she calmed herself and phoned me back a few hours later.

“I have no fuckin’ idea. But he said ‘hi’ to me.”

“Wow, sounds like true love to me, Ro.”

“Just because it’s sunny over by you, doesn’t give you the right to piss on my parade.”

It went like that a lot between me and Ro.

Remarkably, over the years before George magazine was started and during its run, Rosemarie climbed the ranks within the organization until she finally settled in as John’s executive assistant and, to be honest, somewhat of a bodyguard and a voice of reason amid all the ass-kissers flitting around him.

Once Ro was firmly planted in the seat outside John’s office and was enjoying all the perks of being around him and under his employ, I’d have to call her to get a comment on any number of stories I were running on John in the column. I never wanted to, but my editors knew I was tight with Ro and I was pretty much the only journalist who’d get a return call during crunch time.

“Ro, it’s A.J.”

“Yes, what can I do for you, A.J.”

“I need a comment, baby. Don’t make me beg. Is he going to marry this girl, Carolyn Bessette?”

“No comment. I’m sorry.”

A few seconds later the phone would ring and it was Ro.

“Are we off the record?” she’d ask.

“Yeah.”

“I hope he does marry her. You would love this girl. She doesn’t take any shit and she seems like the only real girl who has ever phoned here. And, believe me, I know. I field every call for him. And there are tons.”

“Ro, I can’t write any of that?”

“Not if you ever want to talk to me again.”

Before long I knew everything I wanted to know - everything anyone wanted to know about John Kennedy - but my desire to print any juicy details waned with each passing year. I had heard too many good-hearted stories from Ro, too many humorous moments that seemed uncommon for a man as big as JFK Jr., to care about passing the word to my readers. I didn’t want to be another nudge with a notepad or pain in the ass behind the paparazzi.

On the day before John and Carolyn’s wedding, I phoned Rosemarie on a hunch.

“Ro, I got a gut feeling something is going on this weekend.”

“Like what?”

“Like a wedding.”

“Nothing is going on. I can assure you John and Carolyn will not be in Hyannis Port or Martha’s Vineyard this weekend for a wedding,” Ro said.

“Who said anything about Hyannis Port or Martha’s Vineyard,” I said. “Is that the only place people can get married? Ro... I know all about it.”

Ro was battle weary.

“Come on, A.J., leave me alone.”

And I did. I did because I loved Ro too much, and I didn’t want to subject her to the bullshit that gossip columnists sometimes dish out to the important people behind the Very Important People. The bottom line was I knew about the secret wedding on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, and I was telling Ro that I wasn’t going to do anything about it. What was most important to me was that word of my classy treatment of Kennedy’s privacy get back to John and Carolyn.

“Ro, I swear on my mother’s eyes, I won’t print a single detail about the wedding nor will I tell anyone about them. I just want him to know I knew and didn’t do anything about it.”

“Whatever, A.J. There’s no wedding.”

Let me just say, it didn’t take a lot of great reporting to nail down what would have been a huge front page, as well as a world exclusive. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And it also helped who I was with at the time.

It was September 18, 1996 - three days before John and Carolyn’s big night. I was enjoying dinner with a buddy, along with Ashley Judd, who just happened to be very handsy while she was rubbing up against Jack Nicholson.

Jack was in town shooting As Good As It Gets and he was very sure it was going to be a hit movie. “Great script. And they got me playing a germaphobe and a obsessive compulsive,” he devilishly smiled. And it’ll be good to work with old Louise (Fletcher) again. And I’ll tell you what, this Greg Kinnear plays a great fag.”

And then he got a little serious. “The Kennedy kid really wants me to pose for his magazine while I’m here, but I don’t know…”

I said, “That would be great. You gotta do it.”

And then he unintentionally dumped the story of the decade in my lap. “They’re after me like crazy, but I’ve been ducking them,” he said. “But now, the kid is headed to Georgia to get married this weekend, so I think I’m in the clear.”

As he delivered that sentence, my mind wandered at breakneck speed. All I had to do was call into the NY Daily News’ desk and dictate the story and - voila! - that exclusive would’ve meant a lot to my career. But in those maddening seconds, I became certain not reporting it and allowing the lovebirds get away with fooling the world was a better way to go. As long as John knew about it. And, if you ask me, it all worked out right. I would’ve rather had his trust and friendship than a world exclusive. Some months later my editors became aware that I knew and did nothing, and if I’m really being honest I will always feel that had a hand in my Editor-in-Chief Pete Hamill wanted me gone. But it definitely had the effect I thought it would on John, who called me to thank me for keeping my mouth shut.

“Yeah, no problem. But now you owe me,” I said.

“I know. I get it. Come to the office and let’s talk about you writing for me.”

Music to my ears. I wanted John’s friendship for a long time, but none more than one night I walked into a club with him called Fez. John had his cap on backwards and flashed that big smile as he entered the doorway. And standing behind him I got to see all the crazy expressions of the faces before him who couldn’t look away. And after that night I always told people, “Walking into a nightclub with John, is like walking into heaven with God.”

Eventually, as the months passed, I would call Rosemarie to shoot the breeze-making fun of our Italian families and stuff like that - and sometimes John would talk to me through Ro in the background. “Tell him he made me laugh on The Gossip Show last night,” John would say. Small shit like that, but it would make me feel like a million bucks, nonetheless. As in, “Holy shit…John Kennedy knows who I am? I make him laugh? I’m funny? Funny, how?” It was a bit dizzying at first. But then I seemed to always want his approval.

Toward the end of my tenure at the News, I had written a freelance piece for George magazine on the whole paparazzi dilemma. That went well enough that barely a month after I was resigned from the news in May of 1997, John asked me if I’d like to write for George magazine on a regular basis. I was thrilled. “I’m on 6-months severance right now. A regular gig would be perfect.”

“Come on in and we’ll talk about it,” he said.

“Before I do that,” I hesitated. “Can you guys pay me for the paparazzi piece I wrote months ago?”

John was incredulous. “We haven’t paid you yet? Shit, do me a favor, fax me over an invoice for payment and I’ll get on it right away.” I sat at my computer and I banged out a letter. I was still in awe of John, but something told me I could get away with writing something smirky:

”John, Please remit payment of $800 for services rendered on A.J. Benza’s paparazzi freelance article. Please hurry payment. Times are tough around here. I didn’t sell all my mother’s shoes in a garage sale and make 20 million bucks.”

I was referring to the estate sale John and his sister Caroline had on the wishes of their deceased mother Jackie Onassis. An hour later John called me laughing like crazy, his sense of humor intact. “You’re a sick bastard.”

On the day I walked into his office, shoes were once again the subject of conversation. I was wearing a pair of sky-blue leather loafers I picked up at Otto Tootsi Plohound in SoHo and John went crazy for them. “Cool shoes, man. Where’d you get them?”

“Somewhere downtown,” I told him. “Look at this Italian leather.”

“I should get them,” he said. I wanted to give him my pair. They were only two days old. “Yeah, I should. But I know I never will. Anyhow, those are some pretty cool shoes.”

During the meeting - which was also attended by the magazine’s editor Biz Mitchell-John and I went back and forth on what I thought I could bring to the magazine. “Don’t look at me for political insight or political knowledge,” I said. “I would just like to write insightful, irreverent stuff. I want to make people laugh.”

John was hip to my take on things and even more willing to listen to where I thought the mag needed bolstering up.

“You can do whatever you want,” I said. “I don’t know if you know this from where you sit, but I think the days of making fun of John Kennedy, Jr., are over. I don’t think people expect to see you fail or even want to see you fail. This ain’t about you flunking the bar anymore.”

John sat there amused.

“You’re JFK - John Fuckin’ Kennedy, Jr., man. Just do whatever it is you want with the magazine. You can totally afford to let your nuts hang. No one’s gonna cut them off anymore.”

“As long as you think so. A.J.” He was amused.

“I’m telling you. I’m telling you as a former member of the press. It’s over. Do whatever you want. Everyone has their swords down. You’re untouchable.”

I’m not trying to make this sound like “John Kennedy, Jr., Owes It All to Me,” but there was something cool about having an audience with a guy like that. And John let you talk. So,I was going to tell him what I wanted. How many times do you get a chance like that in life?

Anyhow, the meeting went great, even though I don’t think Biz understood a word of it. But before I left, we agreed I’d deliver a piece on the gross changes around the world of journalism and paparazzi in the wake of Princess Diana’s tragic death. Some of those changes would have me railing at the fact that the price of roses ironically went sky high all around England just in time for the thousands of mourners to drop off bouquets outside Buckingham Palace.

“Italians go through the same thing with the price of seafood around Christmastime,” I said to John. And now the rest of the world knows the true horrors of that sort of bullshit.”

You get the idea of the article. My usual take on things, only this time for a highbrow political magazine.

I was so happy with the deal, and the fact that John said he’d pay me $1,000 for the piece - let alone listen to any other ideas I had - that I walked to the same West Broadway boutique where I bought my shoes and I purchased a pair for him. I had them sent over by bike messenger the next day. John called my office to thank me and suggested dinner one night soon.

We never did do dinner, though I would always bump into him at NY Knicks games up in Suite 200 where the VIPs ate gourmet food before the game and at halftime. And John was gracious to invite me to George dinners after I was gone from the News. Sometimes, I’d sometimes see him on line with the rest of the regular folks at Bubby’s, which was their favorite breakfast spot right around the corner from his place in TriBeCa.

The last time I spoke to John and Carolyn was a cold and rainy day in late September 1998. My then-girlfriend Kara Young and I wandered into the Moondance Diner on 6th Avenue on a Sunday morning. And sitting at the cramped counter were John and Carolyn. They called us over and made room for the two of us to eat alongside them. I had the News and the Post under my arm.

“Let me see your Post,” John said to me.

“Why? You ain’t in it. I already checked.”

He laughed out loud. “Come on…check again.”

John and Carolyn had just returned from the island of Dominica the same day they arrived to find natives and shopkeepers hammering plywood to all their windows. A hurricane, ironically named Hurricane George, was headed their way. Carolyn said the couple boarded another plane a few hours later and flew straight home.

“We literally spent a whole day in the air,” she said. “So much for our second-year honeymoon,” she said, laughing.

It was a pleasant breakfast sitting there with America’s Most Beautiful Couple. Eventually, John and Carolyn said good-bye and walked out into the cold, holding hands, to hail a cab.

“I love that dude,” I said to Kara. “What a cool guy. He’s like James Bond with a backpack.”

Less than a year later, on the ugly day the remnants of his Piper Saratoga were spotted in the ocean and reports came on that said that divers had retrieved the bodies, I was lying bed watching FOX News, Shepherd Smith reporting and close to tears. I was with another girlfriend at that time, who had just arrived in Los Angeles to stay with me the day before. But as soon as I saw that report, I picked up the phone and made a flight for the next morning to New York. “I have to go to his apartment,” I said to her. “I can’t stay here. I gotta be in my city.”

The next day, after landing at Newark Airport and renting a car, we made our way through the Holland Tunnel and tried, in vain, to get to John and Carolyn’s place on North Moore Street. Traffic was so snarled I had to find a parking space about 10 blocks away because the sidewalk in front was already overflowing with flowers and teddy bears and pictures of young John John saluting his dead father. It was impossible to do anything but just bend over and cry.

Little did I know that that very weekend Rosemarie’s AC died in her uptown apartment, so John tossed her the keys to his loft and told her, “Don’t go home. Just stay here till we get back. The air works great.” It would be the last words he spoke to her.

Later that day, I called Ro’s cellphone and was finally able to get through. Naturally, she needed lots of consoling. And every few seconds I’d hear her phone click, as well as John’s answering machine pop on in the background, playing the messages of horrified friends calling his number. Just to hear his recorded voice one more time. I did the same thing after hanging up with Ro.

It was the first and last time I ever called his home phone.

Some days later, The New Yorker hit the shelves depicting the Statue of Liberty, with a black veil draped over her head, depicting a nation in grief. Less than two years later we all watched the Twin Towers come down. But the tragic deaths of John, Carolyn and her sister Lauren, was the first time New York City took a punch to the liver. And the city hasn’t been the same since.