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There are just two known recordings of the voice of fashion icon Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. One is eight seconds long. (“It was a very exciting and wonderful evening,” she tells a red carpet reporter at a ball in 1998.) The other is barely two. It is deep and elegant. Almost musical. A voice for gala receptions and charity dinners, for conversation about summer plans and trips to the Hamptons. It sounds like money. On the Instagram accounts dedicated to her memory, Bessette-Kennedy’s fans – often youngsters born long after she and her husband John F Kennedy Jr were killed in a plane crash in 1999 – pore over these clips. They pore over photos of her, too – the crisp lines of her wardrobe, the ice-blonde of her hair, that unmistakable aura of a woman both beautiful and doomed. She’s a mystery to solve. Answers are rarely forthcoming.
