Madonna’s letter
John F. Kennedy Jr.
She was almost the First Lady Madonna.
John F. Kennedy Jr. asked the Material Girl to dress up as his mother for the cover of his magazine, George, but Madonna declined, insisting she would “never do [Jackie O] justice,” according to a new book.
“We’ll have her in a pillbox hat, sitting on a stack of books,” JFK Jr. told his assistant, RoseMarie Terenzio, author of the memoir, “Fairy Tale Interrupted,” which chronicles her five years as John John’s confidante and publicist until his untimely death in 1999 at the age of 38.
In the summer of 1996, JFK Jr. asked Terenzio who should grace the cover of his September “Women in Politics” issue.
Terenzio suggested then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, but JFK Jr., who co-founded the magazine in 1995, had a different idea.
“I think we should dress Madonna up as my mother,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be a riot?”
Terenzio thought he was joking; Madonna was then at the height of her bad-girl image.
She warned him it would create a media “s–tstorm.”
And although Terenzio insists it wasn’t among her concerns, the cover would have undoubtedly raised eyebrows given JFK Jr.’s once-rumored romance with Madge, who was often compared to his father’s reputed paramour, Marilyn Monroe.
“If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother anyone else?” Kennedy said.
So they drafted a letter to the “Like a Virgin” singer, asking her to pose as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The next day, Madonna faxed her handwritten response, flirtatiously addressed to “Johnny Boy.”
“My eyebrows aren’t thick enough, for one,” she offered.
“When you want me to portray Eva Braun or Pamela Harriman, I might say yes!” she wrote, referring, bizarrely, to Hitler’s mistress and the British socialite who married New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman and Winston Churchill’s son Randolph.
JFK Jr. eventually tapped actress Drew Barrymore for the cover, portraying, ironically, Monroe in her legendary white halter dress singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
Terenzio, whose book is due out on Jan. 24, says there was nothing untoward at the time of the fax between the Material Girl and the heir to Camelot.
In fact, later that month, JFK Jr. married his longtime girlfriend, Carolyn Bessette.