Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, November is the month of the Dead Kennedy. It’s a time of remembering a day of blood and brains on a pink dress in Dallas, a portal into a black hole in the last half-century’s history.

For those of us born in and after the 1960s, who can’t literally recall the day of the assassination, the real figure from November 1963 haunting our childhood imaginations was a boy, our age, standing in short pants and saluting his father’s coffin.

John Kennedy Jr., who would have turned 52 this week, was our Kennedy. The beautiful man known as John John, who grew up cavorting on the Cape and Skorpios with Jackie O, discoing in New York with Mick and Bianca and Andy, was a symbol of sex and privilege, his elitism so gracefully carried. 

I met him on a few occasions when I wrote for his magazine George. His pet project was idealistic, and a bit ahead of its time. The magazine was first of all an extension of the Kennedy brand: substance, celebrity and just enough whimsy to appeal to those who had flipped the channel from the nightly news to MTV.

In person he was an easygoing thoroughbred, perfectly mannered, all varnished normalcy. Sitting beside him at lunch in a Washington bistro, you knew that he knew exactly which fork to use first, but he wasn’t going to make you feel bad for not unfolding the napkin properly, either.

Turning up at New York parties in the 1990s, he and his blond wife were luminous creatures, towering over everybody else, tall, sylphic and fair. Olympians.

In the 13 years since he died, I remember Kennedy whenever I exit the Franklin Street subway station by Bubby’s, the corner restaurant where the paps so often staked him out, across from the Tribeca loft he shared with his lovely, restless and unhappy bride until the day they died.

This month, though, I found myself thinking about him while driving west from the city at Thanksgiving, beneath the contrails of small jets and planes crisscrossing sky over Essex County Airport, the location from which he took off on a summer day in 1999.

Before the 2000 election and 9/11, that plane crash in the fog over the Cape was one of the tragic millennial plot twists. I’m not saying Kennedy would have been president or changed the course of history. But he was our generation’s Kennedy, possessed of that rare quality from another era called charm, who might have helped recharge the progressive politics that were his birthright. Maybe, just maybe, he would have shown the brutes in Washington how to be civil in an uncivilized age.

Our Kennedy was, like the rest of us, a self-indulgent underachiever, a little lost. He loved his Frisbee, and he flunked the bar exam a couple times. But his greatest underachievement was his untimely death. What he might have been—perhaps a senator or governor—we will never know.

JFK JR.’S DAD ENDURED A SECOND, reputational death with revelations about CIA plots and his seedy private life, the revolving door of women in and out of the White House, feeding the now-named sex addiction. The younger Kennedy didn’t want to see that. I wrote a book about one of the mistresses and I never wrote for his magazine or saw him again.

He protected his dad’s legend, surely, but the rest of us came to expect, if not to revel in, the failures of his storied clan, from the peccadilloes of Bobby and Teddy, to the lost souls of the next generation, the heroin addictions, the rape charges, the car crashes, and most recently, the divorce ending in suicide of Bobby Junior’s wife in Katonah.

As children of the 1960s, we grew up knowing better than to put our faith in great men and higher institutions—starting with Nixon's resignation, the Church committee naming the dirty deeds done in service of our free enterprise around the world, the coups and assassinations, drug experiments, the dirty wars.

Born at the end of the Baby Boom, we were cowed into learned helplessness by black ops and nuclear Armageddon and by easy drugs and cheap gas, too young to protest, too high to care. We partied because tomorrow might never come, pretty sure we were the final generation before nuclear Armageddon. We had no clue that a different sort of Armageddon was underway, slow, painless and invisible, until the streets of Detroit turned into apocalyptic movie sets and our ponds stopped freezing in winter.

In their book, That Used to Be Us, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum lay out the statistical decline that’s occurred on our generation’s watch.

Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education.

The shameless abandonment of all communitarian impulse that lay behind the Reagan era wealth shift happened on our watch: the top 1 percent now holds 40 percent of the wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the top 12 percent held 33 percent of the wealth.

The truest measure of our generation’s decline is in the kids of a gutted middle class. The descendants of Greatest Generation are fat, diabetic, meth-addicted sloths who couldn’t make it through basic training if they were so inclined. “Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24,” Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum wrote, “are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”

The authors blame outside forces: globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits and its pattern of energy consumption.

But we know better. We know that the decline started inside of us. Like Kennedy—our best and brightest—our own squandered potential comes from the don’t-give-a-shit decades of our extended youth, from the classes we cut in college to smoke dope and play Ultimate, from the planet we heated with the fumes from so many cross country road trips, and from the island of plastic in the Pacific we would make with our limitless intake of bottled water and supersized soda.

Frank DiGiacomo, in a July 1999 obit for John Jr. he wrote in these pages, tried to describe what Junior’s death meant for his peers. Mr. DiGiacomo didn’t know that it was one dispiriting tragedy preceding so much worse—the imminent disastrous election of 2000 and the falling of the World Trade towers.

But he sensed something dark coming, as we all did.

“We’re all older now,” Mr. DiGiacomo wrote. “And somehow, New York’s 21st century seems a little colder and more distant knowing that John Kennedy—who was supposed to be in our future, who may be irreplaceable in our lives—is contained forever, back here with our youth, in his father’s century, the 20th.”

John John died just as he was getting his act together at age 38—belatedly, like the rest of us, getting less diffident, gaining hope, finding a purpose. He would have been gray around the temples by now and, who knows, maybe living up to his birthright and promise as another desperately needed, persuasive voice for progressive ideals in Albany or D.C.

We, his peers, forge into middle age and these troubled times that none of us foresaw or, it must be admitted, would or could have tried to prevent.

RIP this week then to our misspent youth, and to the very symbol of its lost promise, the boy saluting death, forever.

editorial@observer.com

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

The heat-softened plastic flowers, the withering balloons and the sightless stares of the teddy bears made me lose my appetite and feel faint. Who had placed these tokens there? Certainly not anyone who really knew the Kennedys or Bessettes. These offerings had been left by persons who wished to be connected to this event, who felt elevated by presuming this closeness to a famous family.

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

This is not your 90's variety Steinberg clan.

In late May, as Manhattan emptied into the Hamptons and Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg held a fire sale of gilded furnishings at Sotheby's, the Steinberg family sold its share of Reliance Group Holdings, the company that had made them billionaires. With poor earnings stretching back a year or so, the extended clan has been downshifting since the beginning of the year into a new life as millionaires.

"The family's pot of gold is greatly diminished," said a source familiar with the clan.

Saul Steinberg, the former chairman of Reliance Holdings Group, and his wife, Gayfryd, hawked their prized triplex penthouse, the former home of John D. Rockefeller, in late February for $37 million, the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan co-op apartment. While living in a three-bedroom apartment at the Helmsley Carlton House, a hotel on Madison Avenue near 61st Street, they are in the market for a $10 million townhouse, brokers say.

But at that price, nothing seems to suit them. Aside from East 62nd Street, the couple has passed on a four-bedroom house at 16 East 69th Street being sold by the English Speaking Union for $9.2 million and 15 East 80th Street, a five-story, 21-foot wide, 8,400-square foot house with a $7.5 million price tag.

"They have not bought a townhouse yet," said a broker.

The sell-off has spread to Mr. Steinberg's sister and brother-in-law, Ronni and Bruce Sokoloff, who sold their five-story townhouse at 16 East 68th Street for $10.5 million on April 12. The buyer is Robert McKeon, president of New York merchant bank, Veritas Capital.

One broker told The Observer that the townhouse, which was never officially on the market, had an accepted offer in "2.5 seconds!"

"It was sort of a classic townhouse that [Mr.] Sokoloff had upgraded in terms of plumbing, wiring–everything was pretty much intact," said Leslie J. Garfield, who own a realty firm which specializes in townhouses.

Mr. Sokoloff bought the 21.6-foot-wide, 78-foot-deep townhouse in 1997 for $6 million from the estate of Mrs. William D. Bell, whose father built the house in 1922. It features two elevators, fireplaces, a library, four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The real estate taxes are $42,000.

Mr. Sokoloff, 51, remains the senior vice president of administrative services of Reliance Group, the insurance company founded by Mr. Steinberg. The Sokoloffs have moved to a rented apartment on the Upper East Side. They did not return calls for comment, nor did Mr. McKeon.

The family's financial crisis has meant riches for Kathy Steinberg, a real estate broker who works for Edward Lee Cave and the ex-wife of Saul's only brother, Robert Steinberg, she has emerged as Saul and Gayfryd's exclusive broker, despite talk that her relationship with the couple had cooled off. She is not on as good terms with the Sokoloffs, who gave their business to Ms. Steinberg's colleague Linda Stein, also a broker at Edward Lee Cave.

Robert, or Bobby, the former president of Reliance Group, was fired by his brother last November when things at Reliance began to look seriously bad. Since divorcing Kathy about seven years ago, Bobby has sold the apartment they shared at 944 Fifth Avenue to Hollywood producer Peter Guber for $7 million and another home designed by Charles Gwathney on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton. He has been living in a house in northern New Jersey and renting a pied-à-terre at 211 East 70th Street. Kathy lives in a $2.25 million six-room penthouse at 1 East 66th Street.

TRIBECA

AT J.F.K. JR.'S LOFT, IT'S OFFICIAL, ED BURNS IS IN, HEATHER GRAHAM IS OUT For the record, filmmaker Ed Burns got the keys to the former loft of John F. Kennedy Jr. at 20 N. Moore Street on May 9, just two weeks after he was approved by the building's co-op board and about the same time he and actress Heather Graham split.

While angling for the title of Hollywood's "it" couple in April, Mr. Burns and Ms. Graham took a tour together of the 2,400-square-foot penthouse apartment with a private elevator and a wall of windows to the east. To observers, they seemed almost beautiful enough to inherit the former home of Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the late Prince and Princess of Tribeca.

But then it seemed like someone yelled, "Cut!" The co-op board's president, Ruth Hardinger (a real estate broker with Douglas Elliman) had already unofficially rejected one buyer, a foreign businessman who offered to pay cash, but who only wanted the place as a pied-à-terre . The board didn't want a part-time owner, and actors, directors and writers like Mr. Burns are known to be on location.

Residents said the financial security of the building–which is partly based on having a high percentage of owners in residence–was the only issue, despite reports indicating that Mr. Burns was being summarily dismissed. "We're not thrilled to have lots of attention," said one tenant who was tormented when people mourning Kennedy and his wife made pilgrimages to the address last year. On the other hand, in February, the co-op made talk-show host David Letterman, an owner in the building for the past 10 years, grovel before them in order to buy his third apartment in the building–that of Larry Everston, owner of Tootsi Plohound shoe stores–in February, while recovering from quintuple-bypass surgery.

In the meantime, the actress and the director reportedly went their separate ways. On June 8, a resident of 20 N. Moore told The Observer that Mr. Burns, a Queens native, had already moved in–alone. He bought his new apartment, on top of the nine-story building near Varick Street, for just under the $2.4 million asking price, said brokers. Mr. Kennedy bought it for $700,000 in 1994. Stephen McRae and Debby Korb of Sotheby's International Realty sold the apartment on behalf of Mr. Kennedy's estate, and Halstead Property Company represented Mr. Burns.

Apparently, the co-op board will be flexible on one thing: They'll consider giving over the building's roof to Mr. Burns for the right price.

SOHO

THE MODELS HAVE LEFT THE POLICE BUILDING In the late 80's, when supermodels reigned, the troika of Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista flocked to Soho's Police Building in catwalk lockstep, each forking over a couple of days' pay to gain another asset. The threesome made the building famous, despite the often unwielding layouts of most of the former police headquarters' apartments. But the models are all gone now, and the building's 15 minutes are over.

On June 2, Ms. Turlington, who bought a townhouse in the West Village several years ago, sold her sixth-floor apartment at 240 Centre Street for $850,000. The 31-year-old yoga addict had been renting out the 1,500-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom duplex co-op apartment for almost four years. She put it on the market in mid-January for $875,000. In just a few days, a "single and cute" businessman in his late 20's had signed a contract, said a broker. Ms. Turlington couldn't be reached for comment and her broker, Linda Gertler of the Corcoran Group, wouldn't comment on the deal.

Ms. Crawford got out of the Police Building in 1998, when she sold her fourth-floor apartment for $685,000; she now lives on Park Avenue. And Ms. Evangelista fled too; she has been renting out her apartment while living in France. These days, the building is only famous for the 2,500-square-foot, three bedroom apartment directly under the building's dome, which is supposed to resemble the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. It has a 25-foot-high living room with 12-foot windows and was purchased for $1.8 million in 1998 for Saturday Night Live co-producer Marci Klein, whose father, Calvin Klein, writes some of Ms. Turlington's paychecks.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

2 Fifth Avenue

3-bed, 2-bath, 1,600-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $965,000. Selling: $940,000.

Charges: $1,650; 12 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: One week.

RAISING KIDS ON THE SET OF KIDS This may be the perfect New York City address–directly across the street from Washington Square Park, at the beginning (or the end, depending on where you sit) of Fifth Avenue–if you can wait long enough. A father of three who works on Wall Street did, first for this three-bedroom apartment on the 16th floor, and possibly for the smaller apartment next door. "A lot of people are buying up apartments to the left, to the right, above and below, to stay in this building," said Janet Weiner, a senior vice president at the Halstead Property Group, the broker for the Wall Streeter and the seller of the three-bedroom unit. The board doesn't seem to mind. "They want families in the building," she said. Then what is Ed Koch doing living here?

CARNEGIE HILL

25 East 92nd Street

Five-and-a-half-story, 6,500-square-foot brownstone.

Asking price: $5.7 million. Selling price: $4.7 million.

Time on the market: 10 days.

TEN-YEAR ITCH In 1969, real estate veteran Leslie J. Garfield sold this 20-foot-wide brownstone between Fifth and Madison avenues to a young couple for $225,000. Ten years later, when their kids were grown, the couple decided to chop the building up into five separate units, turn it into a co-op and sell off the apartments; they made more than $400,000 in the process. Now, with the rich scouring the city for ever-larger mansions, every shareholder in the co-op has agreed to sell out to a Wall Street couple who will reunite the separate floors. Around the same time and one block away, another 20-foot house, which had been carved into two duplex apartments, was purchased for $4.2 million by a couple expecting a baby; they, too, will restore their place to a single residence. The frenzy has raised the high price for townhouses on this block–despite the neighborhood uproar over the proposed construction of a high-rise on the corner of Madison Avenue and 92nd Street–to $6.6 million. It even lured Woody Allen, who purchased a five-story home one block east last year.

GRAMERCY PARK

136 East 19th Street (Gramercy Mews)

Three-bed, 2.5 bath, 2,500-square-foot condo.

Asking: $2.1 million. Selling: $1.86 million.

Charges: $1,018. Taxes: $1,605.

Time on the market: Four months.

CO-OPTING THE MAISONETTE Having cheaply imitated every other aspect of the prewar co-op down to the mail chute, today's condominiums have gone after the exalted maisonette, using the term to describe every variety of first-floor duplex apartment. The term was first associated with the vertical, townhouse-like apartments with entrances off the lobby of a 1920's or 30's co-op building (the type of residence fit for the William F. Buckleys and the Tina Browns). In 2000, "maisonette is just a glorified word for first-floor living," said one broker. "Nobody wants to say they live on the first floor." (Remember when buildings had only one penthouse apartment?) This recently completed building consists of five apartments fabricated out of two side-by-side townhouses. This "maisonette" has a library with a fireplace, a small powder room, a kitchen and a dining room that leads out to a greenhouse and then a 400-square-foot backyard on the first floor. Upstairs are a master bedroom with floor to ceiling windows, two smaller bedrooms and a tiny laundry room. The sale, which closed in June, was co-brokered by Kathy Sloane (Hillary's broker) of Brown Harris Stevens and Joan Kaplan of the Sunshine Group. The new owners are a couple of out-of-towners. The rest of the building is one other "maisonette" with a similar layout, an apartment occupying the entire third floor and two duplex penthouses (yes, two) on the fourth and fifth floors.

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? Where were you when John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane disappeared? Fashion retailers and editors had convened in Paris for the last couture shows of the 20th century. "It is such a strange disconnect from America," offered Fairchild Publications' editorial director Patrick McCarthy, a friend of Mrs. Kennedy. "It is not very satisfying being away from home now."

Denial, anyone? The shows go on. Ivana Trump and Joan Collins, hair apparent, blazed front row at Valentino's show on July 18. Madonna avoided most reporters' questions about her alleged onetime affair with Mr. Kennedy, and kept the dancing going until the wee hours at Donatella Versace's party after her show at the Ritz Hotel on July 17. The rock star formerly known as Prince was in residence at his apartment on the Avenue Foch. Wearing another beaded jumpsuit, he also attended the Versace show and party, as did Star Wars director George Lucas. On the evening of July 19, at the end of an impossibly beautiful sunny day, the action shifted to Versailles, where John Galliano's couture show for Christian Dior was presented at L'Orangerie of the Château de Versailles. Royalty used to arrive in horse-drawn carriages. Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs and his entourage came in a parade of Mercedes jeeps with bodyguards.

The beat goes on.

But it is not the same. "I can't even go to our office here. I can't speak," said Katie Ford, president of the Ford Models agency. She and her husband, hotelier André Balazs, arrived in Paris earlier that day from Hyannis Port, Mass., where they had expected to attend Rory Kennedy's wedding on Saturday, July 17. "We just sat, and waited. And waited. What do you tell all the little children who were there?" Ms. Ford said. Like other guests who were not members of the immediate family, the couple left the Kennedy compound the next day.

Oscar de la Renta, who had made a dress for Ethel Kennedy, the mother of the bride, is here, too. His couture collection for Pierre Balmain was shown on July 20. "For me, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was the incarnation of modern style," he said.

"Paradise Lost" read the front page of the July 19 issue of Women's Wear Daily . The fashion newspaper's coverage focused on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: She "has been the kind of designer's dream that comes along once in a lifetime: a striking woman of easy unstudied style who, along with her husband, commanded a room the minute she walked in," WWD reported.

American fashion needed her glamour. And she was one of fashion's own. Carolyn Bessette worked as a public relations executive for Calvin Klein until she and Mr. Kennedy married in 1996. Narciso Rodriguez's career was assured when she wore a wedding dress he designed. Various international fashion companies wanted to hire her. "We talked on several occasions about her coming to work for Chanel," said Arie Kopelman, Chanel's president. "But she was worried about conflict of interest with John's magazine and the other fashion advertisers he dealt with."

Describing her tireless loyalty to helping Mr. Kennedy's magazine succeed with its advertisers, she told friends, "I'm Georgie's girl." No doubt Mrs. Kennedy suffered because of her fashion connection. Her ready style incited the paparazzi. "John told me over and over it would be bad, but I didn't believe him until we were actually married," she told a mutual friend. She feared the paparazzi. They were waiting for her to do something wrong. Her suspicions were confirmed when she slipped and fell outside the couple's TriBeCa residence "I couldn't get up," Mrs. Kennedy told another friend. "They just kept snapping."

She was circumspect in her public appearances after that, which was reflected in how she dressed. She favored severe, dramatic fashions by Yohji Yamamoto. When she wore a shining white Versace evening dress to a charity party in Los Angeles a few months ago, friends suggested Mrs. Kennedy was signifying a more willing return to society.

I didn't know Mrs. Kennedy well. I was cordially acquainted with Mr. Kennedy beginning years ago with some overlap of friends from New England school circles. At the height of his iconization in the late 1980's as, in People magazine terms, one of the "world's most beautiful people," I happened into the small men's bathroom at Radu, the Manhattan gym, just as Mr. Kennedy was getting out of the shower.

"Not for your column," he smiled and grabbed a towel.

It wasn't. In 1993, however, I interviewed him for Vogue . It was his first interview with a glossy magazine. At the suggestion of his mother, or so I understood, he contacted me through a mutual friend who suggested the piece. At the time of the interview, Mr. Kennedy had recently completed a three-year commitment as an assistant district attorney. He was taking some time for himself; he was considering various career pursuits, including starting a magazine. He sat for the Vogue interview because he wanted to promote the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award established in 1989 by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The award honored his father and recognized exemplary acts of political courage by elected officials.

Mr. Kennedy spoke with enthusiasm and humor. Talking about his family, he was cautious. It was an intimate subject that meant the world to him. His mother, and beloved sister Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, were his family, not his American royalty. "We're a family like any other. We look out for one another. The fact that there have been difficulties and hardships makes us closer," he explained.

Concerned that an Irving Penn Vogue portrait might make him look too much like a movie star, or a Bruce Weber photograph might make him look too glamorous (he had already earned the nickname "the hunk"), he agreed to let Annie Leibovitz photograph him at her downtown studio. He admired her work, especially her photographs of political people. A hair stylist, makeup person and fashion stylist were employed to ready him for the camera. They weren't necessary. Mr. Kennedy rode his bike to the shoot. He wore a plain suit, shirt and tie. The hairdresser brushed his hair once. That was it. No makeup. No change of clothes. No cell phone. No assistant. No entourage.

A great gentleman, he put everyone at ease.

I'll miss all the things these fine young people were.