Drug Revelations in New Carolyn Bessette Biography and Griffin Dunne Memoir

A new biography, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller reveals that both Caroline and her husband JFK Jr. were "bohemians" who smoked pot, but carefully so. 

The book quotes a "close friend" saying, "Carolyn was very bohemian, a downtown girl, which John loved, and he himself would walk around barefoot and smoke pot. Not to excess, but he could be bohemian, too." (It's possible the friend was Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who told author Christopher Anderson that John had a "Bohemian streak" that included the occasional joint.)

"In the eighties and nineties, recreational drugs were often part of the atmosphere, and John would occasionally smoke pot," writes Beller. "But he was always sure never to get out of control, and, as [his friend Robert R.] Littell wrote, 'John's attitude towards drugs was more cautious, perhaps because getting caught would have been wore for him. He was too committed to being healthy and fit, too conscientious, maybe afraid of the consequences.'" 

Carolyn "felt the same way, though with a different set of motivations," according to Beller. "When she was in college, the consequences of getting caught were not nearly as outsized. But there was a similar sense of caution. As her Boston friend Jonathan Soroff, who was a reporter on the club scene at the same time Carolyn was doing PR for clubs, remembered of their club days, 'She would have a glass of wine, maybe two. Maybe smoke the tiniest bit of pot once in a blue moon. But that was the extent of it.'" Another friend, MJ Bettenhausen, said that the night they snuck tequila into a concert by pouring it into Ziploc bags and tucking them into their boots was "more in the spirit of fun that getting wasted." 

Carolyn was dubbed a "raging party girl" by the Washington Post, and she was rumored to be a cocaine addict who had numerous love affairs during her marriage to John, says Once Upon a Time. An unnamed friend of John's is quoted in the book saying that John suspected his wife of having an affair and said that she was "snorting more and more cocaine." 

Meanwhile, a new memoir titled The Friday Afternoon Club is out from actor/writer Griffin Dunne, the son of writer/producer Dominick Dunne, and nephew to screenwriters John Gregory Dunne and his wife, author Joan Didion. Griffin plays the former-drug-addict editor/mentor to the budding, flubbing journalist Sadie McCarthy on The Girls on the Bus (on which gummies are consumed), now streaming on Max.

Dunne "took Carrie Fisher’s virginity and smoked pot with Harrison Ford when Ford was just his Aunt Joan’s carpenter," Vulture writes, noting, "There is almost as much acid as there are names dropped in this book." 

Many, including Bill Maher, have called for Ford to out himself as a pot smoker; I have a theory about the kind of pot he got Fisher too stoned on when she was 19 and they were shooting Star Wars together.