For 20 years Carole Radziwill ignored the interview requests that rolled into her email inbox each June and July.

The journalist and ex-Real Housewife had no interest in publicly revisiting the summer of 1999, the most painful one in her life—when she lost not only her husband, Anthony Radziwill, to cancer, but also, just weeks earlier, lost her close friends John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in a shocking plane crash. This year, however, Radziwill found herself considering the press requests differently.

“I started thinking about legacy instead of privacy, and I wanted to have the opportunity to talk about my husband, and talk about Carolyn, as much as I wanted to talk about John,” the journalist told Vanity Fair, explaining her decision to open up about the foursome’s friendship for an A&E documentary Biography: JFK Jr. The Final Year, premiering July 16. The film untangles John’s complicated last months—during which he struggled to keep George magazine afloat amid a changing media landscape; preserve his marriage in spite of paparazzi stalking the couple’s every move; and accept the fact that, after wrestling with the world’s expectations of him, he might actually want a political future. But by far the most devastating challenge John faced was accepting the fact that he was going to lose another family member too young: his cousin and best friend Anthony, an Emmy-nominated television producer.

The sons of fabled sisters Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, John and Anthony were close growing up, as illustrated by home movie snippets showing the boys laughing and cavorting as children. The boys knew and loved each other before they could understood the weight of their family legacies. And for John, who had no choice in being born a public figure, Anthony was a lifelong safe harbor—one who loved and understood the actual man beneath the mythology.

Explained Carole, “They were like siblings in the way that there was sibling rivalry and competitiveness, and a lot of inside jokes that neither Carolyn nor I ever got. Given the life that John led so publicly, I think he really felt completely himself around Anthony. He knew Anthony had his back, and Anthony felt the same way about him. That was a nice thing to see, and it was nice to be around—that feeling of complete trust.” One especially tender anecdote Carole shares in the film encapsulates this brotherly bond: during a medical scare requiring Anthony’s hospitalization, John rushed out of a black-tie event to be by Anthony’s side. Sitting in the hospital room in a tuxedo, John started singing a favorite childhood song of theirs—“The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”—and Anthony, recalling the words, started singing along.

When Anthony was released from the hospital, both couples spent many weekends prior to the plane crash cloistered in a beach house—trying to savor every moment of what the group expected would be Anthony’s final summer. John had inherited his mother’s stoicism, and spent much of Anthony’s cancer battle believing he could find his cousin the right doctor or treatment to help him make a miraculous recovery. His hope faded one day when the group ventured to the beach and Anthony removed his shirt, revealing the extensive sores left behind from his chemotherapy. John began sobbing—trying to hide it from his cousin. Afterward, having accepted his cousin’s fate, he started working on a eulogy worthy of his best friend. Then, in a dark twist of irony, John died along with Carolyn and Carolyn’s sister Lauren on July 16, during a tragic plane crash attributed to pilot error and weather conditions. In the end it was Anthony—shocked, devastated, and weak—who ended up offering words of consolation at his cousin’s funeral.

Part of Carole’s decision to revisit these painful memories was to correct the record about that summer, and the state of John and Carolyn’s marriage. After the couple was photographed fighting in Washington Square Park, tabloids questioned the strength of the relationship. “I think when people watch this film, they will see a much fuller depiction of what was going on, specifically that summer,” said Carole of the various pressures the couple was facing. “Pictures of them arguing could be construed as fighting, and then that creates a whole, complete narrative. That’s not the truth of what was going on. I think the public sees a very thin, top layer of any public person’s real personal life. That wasn’t any different for John and Carolyn. I could name a thousand times when we were together, and it was fun and loving, and those two loved each other.”

John’s connection with Carolyn was different from the connections he had with women he had dated in the past—including Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Daryl Hannah. “I met some of John’s previous girlfriends, but I knew the minute he introduced us to Carolyn that she was it,” said Carole. “He was really besotted with her...He was so enthralled with her, and she with him, but she was kind of fierce. She was very confident. He liked that. She was very much her own person. She was this great combination of kind of seriousness and wild child.... There was this instant chemistry. And the four of us easily fell into a cute foursome.”

Still, Carole clarified, “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It was a very difficult, stressful summer for all of us.” By the summer of 1999, John and Carolyn had begun couples therapy; she resented him for various reasons, including her loss of privacy. “There were times when I went to their apartment on Moore Street, and you would see the paparazzi just waiting outside, behind cars, in cars, just on the sidewalk for her to leave her apartment,” said Carole. “A lot of times we wouldn’t leave. We would order foods from Bubby’s on the corner. Who wanted to leave and have to go walk through that? That was, like, every day of her life for the first year or more.”

In the film Carole said she never heard “one conversation or anything to indicate there was this impending divorce.” That being said, according to Carole, Carolyn “wasn’t afraid to get John angry...and John needed that...John didn’t need anyone else who was going to say yes. So she said no. He loved her. And she loved him. And they drove each other crazy.”

Stress is “hard on any marriage—let alone a young marriage,” said Carole. “But the reason for that stress had mostly to do with the fact that my husband was dying, and it was difficult for John to really accept that. [Carolyn] had a natural empathy...She not only helped guide me through a series of hundreds of doctors visits and hospital visits, but also helped John reconcile the fact that Anthony wasn’t going to make it, and that he wasn’t going to be able to pull out this miracle that John was so hoping for. She was doing her best to try to get him to a place where he would accept it, and we would enjoy the summer...I like to think we would’ve came out of it fine. But God had other plans.”

Carole hopes that when they see this documentary, audiences “will have a better understanding of who my husband was and what his legacy was. I think he was an extraordinary person in his own right, and I was happy to be able to tell a little piece of that story. And I hope also the same in terms of Carolyn, because I think the public has such a superficial, one-sided picture of her...She was a very, very, very interesting person and a great girlfriend, in that she balanced better than most this superficiality of life and the fun, on one hand, [with the seriousness of it]...If they walk away thinking she’s a pretty cool chick, I’ll be happy.”

Revisiting the memories of that final summer with John, Carolyn, and Anthony ended being more cathartic than Carole expected.

“Once I made the decision to be part of this project, it was actually nice to revisit those memories and look at the old photo albums that I hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years,” she said. “So I didn’t find it sad. I found it almost comforting to relive that part of my life.”

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