The Other Passenger: Who Was Lauren Bessette?
In honor of the anniversary of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and JFK Jr.'s tragic death, we're resurfacing this story.
“JFK Jr., Wife Feared Dead” was a common headline in the days after July 16, 1999, when the tiny airplane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr., 38, and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, went missing off the coast of Massachusetts. The headlines often failed to mention a third fatality: Carolyn’s older sister Lauren, whose recovered business card was one of the first indications that the plane had gone down in the Atlantic.
While Lauren’s story was a parenthetical in the breathless coverage of the event, for her friends, colleagues, and, most significantly, her family, the loss was shattering.
In any other grouping, Lauren would have been the star. Thirty-four years old and on the fast track at Morgan Stanley, Bessette had an Ivy League MBA, was fluent in Mandarin, and had a sophisticated group of friends. She was the kind of New York City talent many people dream of befriending. Her friends say she was brilliant, compassionate, quick witted, and a champion of those who were struggling. One colleague told the New York Observer, “She may have been more successful than [John and Carolyn] were.”
Those who worked with Lauren during the four years she spent at Morgan Stanley’s Hong Kong office in the mid-1990s say she shared her sister’s sense of style and the poise of someone much older. “She would walk into a room and people would think, Okay, somebody brought their assistant. And she’d get up and present the IPO pitch in Mandarin, and people would be like, ‘What? I’ve never seen anything like this,’ ” says Adam Clammer, a co-worker and friend. “She was so humble yet so smart and poised.”
Raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, Lauren (and her twin, Lisa, the only surviving Bessette sister) was 14 months older than Carolyn. The three girls spent their early years in White Plains, New York, with their mother, an educator, and their father, an architectural engineer. They were young when their parents divorced and their mother married Richard Freeman, an orthopedic surgeon, and the family moved to Greenwich. Lauren attended Greenwich High School, where she joined an all-female community service group before graduating in 1982.
At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where a lab in the Asian Languages and Cultures program now bears her name, Lauren majored in economics and was invited into the economics honor society Omicron Delta Epsilon. After graduating in 1986, she worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley before leaving to get an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She graduated in 1991 and reportedly spent time in China learning Mandarin. In 1994 she moved to Hong Kong, where she went to work at Morgan Stanley.
Lauren was a popular face on Hong Kong’s expatriate social scene, among whom she made close friends. “She had a huge heart, she had time for everybody, she had no ego, she had a wonderful sense of humor, she had a great sense of style,” Clammer says.
Chip Arndt worked with Lauren in both New York and Hong Kong. Four years her junior, he was surprised that she took an interest in her younger colleagues. “She was always there to ask, ‘How are you guys doing?’—understanding that we were the last ones to turn the lights out in the office and the first ones in the office,” he recalls. “She didn’t have to do any of that. She built a camaraderie with the junior cadre. She understood leadership in that regard: really understand and respect your underlings and the work they’re doing.”
When Arndt was having trouble with spreadsheets (the bane of many a young analyst's early career), Lauren worked with him one-on-one to help him get up to speed. He turned to her when his mother died, and she was one of the few colleagues who knew he was gay. When he wanted to figure out how he could live in Hong Kong with his boyfriend without coming out professionally, he confided in her, and they worked together to make it happen.
The city’s international community in the mid-’90s was a lively one, and Bessette’s group of friends came from England, Australia, and all over Asia. She would take weekend trips to the Philippines to go scuba diving or rent a junk boat for an outing with friends. With Arndt she visited Lantau Island, to the west of Hong Kong, and hiked up the 268 steps to see the Tian Tan Buddha. Lauren had occasional wine-filled dinners at the Peninsula Hotel, but she also ate grasshopper stew with monks and would wake up early to buy flowers at the market on Sunday mornings. “Lauren just loved it,” Arndt said of the flower market. “She loved color—color in human beings, color in how they dress, color in their personalities.”
“We would find the spiciest dive Indian restaurants or dim sum restaurants and spend our weekends going to random hole-in-the-wall places to eat,” Clammer says. “It was a very social expat community; it was work hard, play hard. We all had a great, great time, and she was right in the middle of it.”
During her time in Hong Kong Lauren worked on a deal to take China Eastern Airlines public, and she made frequent trips to Shanghai. “This was before business in China had Westernized at all. She spoke fluent Mandarin, so here was this young, superattractive, very stylish woman half the age of all of the executives in these Chinese companies, and they spoke no English. Her ability to command a room and get things done was just unbelievable,” says Clammer, who worked with her on that deal.
In early 1998, Lauren transferred to Morgan Stanley’s Manhattan office. She paid close to a million dollars for a loft on White Street in Tribeca, just a few blocks from Carolyn and John’s, and she became a closer part of her sister’s life, often meeting her for weekend brunch with their friends. “Every time I saw them together it was just smiles and laughter and sometimes serious conversation. You could really tell that they were each other’s confidantes in that regard,” Arndt says.
The Bessette sisters shared a love of fashion, and Arndt believes they might one day have gone into business together. “Lauren was very fashion-forward. That was right at the time when women started to dress more expressively at work, especially in our industry,” says another New York colleague. “Rather than wearing little gray and black suits, women started wearing much more fashion-forward things: boots, dresses. Lauren was very, very fashionable.”
As Clammer remembers, “she loved her Prada. This was back when Prada was the coolest thing ever.”
Lauren cultivated an enviable New York City life, hitting new restaurants in the East Village and going out to the ballet, opera, and performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Arndt went with her to fundraisers in the Hamptons and galas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two would go dancing at Webster Hall, and they lingered over dinners at the West Village restaurant Cowgirl, one of their favorite spots. “She’d always get there five or 10 minutes early. It would drive me crazy. She’d have a big smile on her face,” he says. “I say this as delicately as possible, but if I weren’t gay I would have married her.”
Lauren kept a lower profile than her sister, though. She was much less of a presence on the Manhattan social scene, and she enjoyed a degree of freedom and anonymity that Carolyn never could as John’s wife. “I remember that when they got engaged Lauren was very private about it. She was super-happy for her sister, but at the same time, in a positive way, she tried to keep that entirely separate from her own life,” says Clammer, who later became a partner at KKR & Co. before co-founding the hedge fund True Wind Capital Management.
(The burdens of being a Kennedy clearly hadn't scared Lauren off. At the time of her death she was rumored to be dating John’s first cousin Bobby Shriver.)
While in Hong Kong Lauren had been quickly promoted to vice president, and in late 1998 she became a principal in New York. “People clamored for her to be on their deals,” says Arndt, who left finance to work in entertainment (he won The Amazing Race in 2003) and went on to become a gay rights activist. “There’s no question Lauren could have done whatever she wanted.” He believes she could have risen to the top of the ranks at Morgan Stanley or been poached to serve as a CEO elsewhere.
But in July 1999, Carolyn and John offered her a ride on John’s small private plane. Lauren had plans to visit Martha’s Vineyard, so she agreed to join them on a Friday evening flight; John and Carolyn would drop her off before continuing on to Cape Cod, where John’s cousin first cousin Rory Kennedy was getting married that Saturday.
After her workday ended around 6 p.m. on July 16, Lauren walked over to meet John at the George magazine headquarters, and they drove together in his convertible to New Jersey’s Essex County Airport, where Carolyn met them. At 8:38 p.m., John’s Piper Saratoga took off. It never landed.
Friends became concerned when the trio didn’t arrive at their destinations and a wide-ranging five-day search was launched. When a piece of luggage bearing Lauren’s business card was found on Saturday, family and friends began to assume the worst.
“I put that on her bag,” Arndt says of the business card. On a business trip years earlier he had noticed that Lauren’s black garment bag had no identification. “I put in one of the old Morgan Stanley business card that’s a manila-type color, beautiful black font. I was in L.A. at the time, and I saw that on television, and I just went numb. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything. It was a feeling I’ve never had before.”
On July 22 the ashes of Lauren, Carolyn, and John were deposited in the Atlantic during a brief ceremony on a navy ship reportedly attended by 17 family members. On the evening of July 24, a day after Carolyn and John were memorialized at Manhattan’s St. Thomas More Church, a service was held for Lauren at Christ Church in Greenwich.
The month they died, Carolyn and Lauren’s mother, father, and stepfather released only one statement to the press. “John and Carolyn were true soul mates, and we hope to honor them in death in the simple manner in which they chose to live their lives,” it said. “We take solace in the thought that together they will comfort Lauren for eternity.”
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