Howard Stern complimented Carolyn Bessette Kennedy during rare comments on his Sirius XM radio show.
“I knew the real Carolyn Bessette,” he said during the Monday broadcast of his eponymous show, clarifying that he wouldn’t “say [he] knew her well.”
“But we had many, many conversations, more than casual conversations. She was very lovely. She was a really nice woman.”
The shock jock, 72, stopped short of telling listeners exactly how he knew the 1990s fashion icon, and confessed he didn’t have a “juicy, gossipy story” about Bessette.
“I don’t want to go into how I knew her, but I knew her,” he explained. “I know enough to keep my mouth shut about that. Some stuff you do have to keep private.”
Stern noted that the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jr. “was very nice to me, very open and talkative,” and that she “didn’t give me the nose-up-in-the-air kind of thing.”
Notably, Stern had once appeared on the cover of George, JFK Jr’s political magazine, in 1996, cracking that he “looked like Paul Revere in drag” in “one of the worst covers” he’d ever done.
In the April 1996 cover image, he was portrayed chopping down a cherry tree with a chainsaw in “colonial garb.”
Still, Stern couldn’t say no to John, whom he described as “literally American royalty and the nicest guy in the world.”
FX’s series “Love Story,” which is based on the lives and tragic deaths of the couple, has heightened interest in their romance.
The iconic pair married in September 1996 in an ultra private ceremony after a highly publicized courtship, and died three years later in July 1999 in a small plane crash — along with Carolyn’s older sister, Lauren Bessette — while heading to the nuptials of John’s cousin, Rory Kennedy.
Carolyn and Lauren were 33 and 34, respectively, at the time of the fatal crash. John was 38.
Stern’s comments aren’t the only complimentary recollections of the former Calvin Klein publicist. Her wedding dress designer, Narciso Rodriguez, once described her as “Strong. Authentic. Incredibly beautiful. And quite complex.”
Best friend and former fashion designer Gordon Henderson told Page Six that the blond beauty “would talk to people, but she preferred being alone — she didn’t want to be bothered.”
He added that he didn’t think Bessette was “a high-life chick” and described her as “groovy.” Still, her portrayal as a person who valued privacy was accurate.
“She would always stand behind John and hide behind him,” he recalled. “If she didn’t know you, she really hid,”
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