Carole Radziwill

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Carole Di Falco Radziwiłł was born in 1964 and raised in Suffern, New York. She started her news career at ABC, eventually working for Peter Jennings. Radziwill produced documentaries and won several awards, including three Emmys and a Peabody. In 1994 she married Anthony Radziwill, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's sister, Lee Radziwill. Carole Radziwill's husband died at age 40 after a five-year battle with cancer, and she left ABC News to write her memoir. Entitled "What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love," it was published (Fall 2005) by Scribner Publishing, and made the New York Times Best Sellers List. It brought the author a measure of fame through television interviews on such popular American programs as Oprah Winfrey, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose and Larry King Live.

Carole Radziwill's brave memoir deals with her childhood in a large Italian-American family, her friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and the death of her husband. Although largely a chronicle of her effort to manage her husband's cancer, the memoir provides glimpses into the Bouvier and Kennedy families as well. Di Falco met Radziwill while both were assigned to cover a news story for ABC News in Los Angeles. But they did not begin dating until that assignment ended and both were again living in New York City. They dated for two years before Radziwill introduced Di Falco to his mother. Di Falco seems to have maintained cordial but distant relations with Lee Bouvier: She declined to use any of the wedding gown designs Bouvier had prepared for her by famous couturiers, nor did she solicit her mother-in-law's consent prior to publishing What Remains. The memoir's references to Bouvier are minimal, careful, and generally lack warmth. But that also describes her relations, and those of Carolyn Bessette, with the formidable Kennedy clan, including John Jr.'s only surviving sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. Although her ailing husband had been John Kennedy, Jr.'s first cousin, best man, and designated executor, and despite having been asked by Bessette's mother to attend a family meeting to plan the funeral of her daughters and son-in-law, the Kennedys politely uninvited her -- although later she was asked to read a poem at the memorial service.

It was Carole Radziwill who, upon receiving a late-night call from a family friend who had expected to meet John Kennedy's private plane upon its arrival at Martha's Vineyard the night of July 16, 1999, notified the Coast Guard and Kennedy family that the plane was missing. Her memoir vividly details how she fought back panic during her futile efforts to track the plane's whereabouts without alarming those she was interrogating by phone: As a professional journalist she knew that, once alerted, the media might broadcast the plane's disappearance worldwide before she could notify the couple's relatives. Yet as hope faded for alternative explanations of the plane's disappearance, she also realized that a public search might hold out the only hope for the pilot and passengers' survival if they were injured or stranded at sea. Unable to reach the family patriarch, Edward Kennedy, or Caroline Schlossberg, she unilaterally decided to risk sounding a false alarm rather than to lose precious rescue time. During that long surreal night, she also informed Bessette's mother that not one, but two of her daughters were missing on the fatal flight; Lauren Bessette as well as Carolyn Kennedy.

According to her memoir, Radziwill had become best friends with Carolyn Bessette during the women's marriages to the pair of cousins. Carolyn Bessette, by nature playful and outspoken, kept Radziwill's spirits up during the gradual deterioration of her husband's health -- although a time came when Bessette could no longer bring herself to accompany her cousin-in-law on hospital visits. That supportive role was taken over by Anthony Radziwill's close friend, television journalist Diane Sawyer, and her husband, director Mike Nichols, who placed their private plane at the Radziwills' disposal for hospital shuttles.

Radziwill began seeing a therapist after Bessette admonished her to seek counseling, "Your husband is dying and you married into the goddamn royal family!" The discomfort both women felt as small town girls in the midst of the genteel Bouvier and over-achieving Kennedy families cemented a strong bond between them. Yet Radziwill's book brims with admiration and affection for John Kennedy, Jr., whose bond with her husband remained one of the dwindling sources of joy in his life. When the two couples shared a summer home in the last year of both men's lives, he took to defending her against the occasional anger her husband vented upon her. Nor is there any hint in Radziwill's reminiscences that Bessette and Kennedy were having marital difficulties, as was much-rumored before and after their deaths. She does acknowledge that Bessette seemed to gradually give up one career plan and project after another, at least partially because of the constraints of living in the "fishbowl" of publicity that surrounded her husband, who was preoccupied with saving his magazine, George.

In the last weeks of his life, Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to persuade Radziwill to initiate a candid dialogue with her husband to help him prepare to die. Later, she was overwhelmed with feelings of despair and anger after the couple's sudden deaths left her to face her husband's final days without their support. It was Anthony himself who, two weeks after the plane crash, jolted his wife out of lethargy with the angry reminder that they had to get on with living their lives. The following week he himself died.

The couple had no children. While dating, Anthony Radziwill told his future wife that he had previously been treated for testicular cancer, and could not father children. His own father, Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł, belonged to one of Poland's wealthiest and most illustrious noble families, although most of the family fortune was abandoned behind the Iron Curtain after World War II. Carole Radziwill developed the habit of concealing from merchants her husband's surname to prevent being over-charged for goods and services. After marriage, she was startled to discover when visiting the European continent that she and her husband were known, by custom, as Their Serene Highnesses the Prince and Princess Radziwiłł, since Prince Stanislaw's native Poland had abolished titles under communism, and he had officially relinquished its use upon becoming a British subject; nor was her husband known by title in America -- with the notable exception that John Kennedy Jr.'s lifelong nickname for his cousin Anthony had been Principe.

In 2005, Carole Radziwill moved to Oregon to complete work on her first novel.