JFK Jr took drugs ‘every single day’: Everyone knows about Carolyn Bessette’s cocaine snorting and cheating. But friends hid his binges, experimental sex and Jackie Kennedy’s gay fears… until now

Few people knew John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette as well as artist Sasha Chermayeff.

She’d befriended the handsome hunk when they were both teenagers at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and she later became just as close to his beautiful wife.

And her friend, Chermayeff confided in a 2024 biography, used marijuana ‘every single day’, adding: ‘I’m not exaggerating, from fifteen onward.’

However, when Chermayeff told biographers Liz McNeil and RoseMarie Terenzio about a drug habit that spanned decades and also included dabbling with cocaine and psychedelic drugs, she wasn’t talking about Bessette – whose substance abuse is well documented – but about Kennedy.

Her bosom buddy’s drug-taking, she said in JFK Jr: An Intimate Oral Biography, was ‘a significant part of John Kennedy that nobody wants to talk about.’

No, it appears they certainly don’t.

As FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, a glossy new drama series from Ryan Murphy, provides yet another take on the rise and fall of America’s 1990s ‘golden couple’, many viewers may wonder if there’s anything new to say about their short but intensely scrutinized lives.

After all, few can nowadays still believe the original narrative that they were god-like creatures whose fairytale love affair was destroyed by the crushing weight of global attention (and, of course, by Kennedy’s fatal loss of control of the small plane he was flying them in to a Martha’s Vineyard wedding in July 1999).

Instead, successive accounts – written by biographers and journalists who relied heavily on talking to the Kennedy family, and particularly his loyal mother, Jackie – have reinforced the notion that if either of the tempestuous couple was at fault, it was definitely Bessette, who was only 33 when she died.

Providing parallels to Princess Diana, another mentally unstable, blonde style icon, Bessette was middle-class girl from the suburbs who they say cracked under the pressure of living in the blinding spotlight that surrounded the Kennedy family.

As the woman voted ‘Ultimate Beautiful Person’ in her 1983 high-school yearbook struggled with the unremitting attention, she was criticised as an aloof ice queen.

Insiders have since spoken about her rocketing drug habit – particularly cocaine (which kept her thin) and anti-depressants to cope with the pressures of her famous marriage.

Biographies dating back to Edward Klein’s controversial 2003 tome The Kennedy Curse (whose most startling revelations came from friends of Kennedy) have provided further black marks against Bessette.

She was serially unfaithful, foul-mouthed and violent (his friends believed she was the culprit when Kennedy once had to rush to hospital with a severed nerve in his wrist).

She refused to give Kennedy the children he craved, instead cavorting all night with her debauched fashionista friends and was so addicted to cocaine that she’d return from restaurant bathrooms with white rings around her nostrils.

Klein also claimed Bessette refused to have sex with Kennedy, which – if true – might explain rumors of his philandering, if not excusing reports of hers.

Former Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin told Klein that he and Bessette resumed their sexual relationship during her marriage to Kennedy. He also said she was such a viciously jealous person that when, pre-Kennedy, she saw Bergin lighting a cigarette for an ex-girlfriend at a bar, she went into a screaming frenzy, tearing apart his apartment.

In short, it was said, she drove Kennedy to distraction, so much so that – following a string of public fights including a memorable 1996 clash in a New York park in which they were photographed screaming at each other – he was on the verge of ending the marriage when they died in their plane crash.

Kennedy’s failings may not have been so dramatic or obvious but they have generally been underplayed in the blame game that observers have played since the couple’s untimely deaths.

Instead, he’s generally been portrayed as the mellow, loving husband who – unlike his mentally crumbling wife – was used to the intense media attention, and just wanted to settle down and have children.

And yet insiders whispered that behind that self-assured and composed exterior, Kennedy was almost as much of a mess as Bessette – entitled, moody and insecure.

He also had a genetic compulsion for dangerously risky behavior – combined with an arrogant belief in his invulnerability – that had shown itself in other Kennedys.

It certainly helps explain why he ignored myriad reasons – particularly his solo flying inexperience and the worsening visibility – why he shouldn’t have gone into the air for that final flight that killed them and Bessette’s sister Lauren.

According to Klein’s biography, in 1993 molecular geneticists reported a major scientific breakthrough regarding thrill-seeking behavior that captured Jackie Kennedy-Onassis’s attention.

The scientists said they’d discovered a rare variant of the gene that makes the protein receptor for dopamine, the brain’s chemical messenger, in the part of the brain controlling personality.

Jackie told Klein that fifty percent of people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, like her son John, were found to have this variant of the DRD4-7R gene.

People who abuse alcohol and drugs were also more likely to possess the gene – and, of course, the Kennedy family had more than its fair share of people who fit that category.

‘The best evidence that the gene DRD4-7R probably runs in the Kennedy family is in the consistent thrill-seeking behavior of its members,’ Dr. Robert Moyzis, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of California at Irvine, told Klein.

‘Like all thrill seekers, the Kennedys take risks because the payoffs are big. And since, over the years, they’ve enjoyed uncommon success, that behavior has become reinforced and part of their family culture. That is why so many spectacular things happen to them. But it’s also why they are always setting themselves up for a big fall.’

And JFK Jr had long been reckless, not only with his own life but with those of others.

He habitually speeded while driving, sometimes crazily mounting the sidewalk to get around a traffic jam.

He’d go skiing while high on magic mushrooms and swim too far out to sea – challenging those around him to do the same.

He was invariably woefully inexperienced in all the hazardous pursuits in which he indulged. That included paragliding, in which he’d had an accident that broke his ankle just before he took Bessette on their final flight.

Kennedy reportedly almost killed his first serious girlfriend, Christina Haag, in 1986 when he took her kayaking in open sea off the Jamaica coast. They had neither life jackets nor the spray skirts to keep the water out of their boat.

Although they were mercifully saved when they were swept on to a remote beach – ‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ he whispered to Christina – and despite offers from local fishermen to take them home, Kennedy insisted they went back out on the kayak as night fell. They almost drowned in the heavy swells that submerged their little craft.

‘We could have died,’ Christina told Kennedy when they reached land. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘But what a way to go.’

Given that attitude, it’s not hard to see why he would be attracted to drugs.

According to his close friend, Sasha Chermayeff, Kennedy used cannabis because it ‘frees you from self-obsession – and that was medicine for him, because he came from a place where your f***ing family, they’re brilliant.’

Chermayeff said while her friend ‘didn’t become an alcoholic — he did some recreational drugs. He did coke in the eighties and nineties, eighties more. I guess it was nineties, too, sometimes.’

Chermayeff recalls going to Studio 54, the notoriously debauched and celebrity-filled New York nightclub, with Kennedy. ‘We would be ushered up to [club owner] Steve Rubell’s office to do coke… there was a lot of coke at Studio 54,’ she said.

‘I used to brag that I’ve never done bad coke, because I’ve never done coke except with John Kennedy,’ she added.

She insisted her friend was never a coke addict, but the fact that she only ever did it with him suggests he might have taken rather more of it than she was aware.

The inveterate thrill seeker, she admitted, ‘was not an angel in any way at all – he just winged it, assuming that it would work out.’

Of their teenage years at school, she recalled: ‘Kids going in and out of his room, smoking weed and experimentation with drugs, and rock and roll, and sex, and all of the stuff we loved so much in the seventies.’

She also said Kennedy experimented with psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient of magic mushrooms: ‘We did mushrooms together and went skiing. Oh my God. It was a great day.’

Writer William Cohan, who also went to Phillips Academy, recalled a teenage Kennedy ‘certainly liked to smoke pot, and he smoked a lot of pot… I’m sure there were other kinds of substances that he liked, too. He wasn’t shy about any of that.’

Kennedy’s wayward behavior certainly worried his mother, said biographer Ed Klein. The former First Lady told him that she associated John’s ‘difficulties’ with his father’s assassination when he was only two.

‘She was pained that John had been robbed of a father figure at such an early age, and although she never came right out and said so, she spoke in an indirect way of her concerns that John might turn out to have sexual-identity problems, or even be homosexual,’ he wrote.

Jackie even felt that she was to blame, cursing her son by naming him after his father. ‘I sometimes feel as though I’m a kind of Typhoid Mary,’ she told Klein.

‘She was deadly serious about her premonitions of disaster,’ he added.

Jackie’s daughter-in-law certainly had premonitions of disaster when it came to letting Kennedy fly her in his plane.

‘I don’t trust him,’ Bessette told friends and family, insisting that he didn’t have the patience or attention span (his was famously short) to be a good pilot.

Whether they’d still be married now if they hadn’t taken that flight we will never know for certain, but given the flaws that both of them possessed, it seems most unlikely they would have been able to live with each other for long.