Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy first dabbled in cocaine use when she launched her professional career as director of publicity for fashion designer Calvin Klein, where she "studied" the pin-thin models and how the ladies maintained their svelte figures.
This aspect of her life is one of many claims explored in a bombshell new tell-all book, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, authored by Maureen Callahan.
Carolyn didn't feel that she was conventionally pretty, and "she turned toward her psychical reinvention" when a romance withJohn F. Kennedy Jr. blossomed in 1994, RadarOnline.com has learned.
At this point, she made extra efforts to secure his attention and boost her own self-confidence, according to newly revealed excerpts from the book. "She was only 28 years old but [she] took to erasing her small facial lines with Botox. She plucked her lush, thick eyebrows into wisps, bleached and ironed her hair, and dropped 15 pounds with the help of cigarettes and cocaine [to kill her appetite]," Callahan wrote.
Behind the facade was a woman who wanted love but soon found her marriage riddled with problems by 1996.
The couple argued regularly including one instance in New York's Washington Square Park back in Feb. 1996 when he was infamously seen "shoving" his bride then trying to "yank off her engagement ring."
Carolyn began taking "anti-depressants on top of the cocaine" to cope with the stress of her strained relationship, according to the book.
She and JFK Jr. met their tragic fate on July 16, 1999, alongside Carolyn's sister Lauren when JFK Jr. crashed the plane he was piloting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, as RadarOnline.com previously reported.
They were en route to a Kennedy family wedding. Carolyn was 33; Lauren was 34. JFK Jr. was 38.
The world judged Carolyn in the years to follow. "In the aftermath of [the crash], it was Carolyn's vanity, her superficiality, her drug use, her all-around 'shrewish' behavior that was often blamed for leading [JFK Jr.] to crash his plane into the ocean," noted Callahan.
"Carolyn has only ever been depicted as the drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America's prince so miserable," she wrote. "The implication: if John Jr. hadn't been so miserable he wouldn't have been so distracted; and if he hadn't been so distracted, he wouldn't have crashed the plane."
The National Transportation Safety Board ultimately found JFK Jr. responsible, declaring in a report that pilot error was the most likely cause of the plane crash.
It was believed that a haze obscured the horizon and Kennedy became disoriented.
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Kennedy's friend, historian Steven M. Gillon, said he should've been more careful to PEOPLE, "At the first sign of danger, he should have done what a lot of pilots did that night and flew inland, away from the ocean, spend the night somewhere and then pick up the next morning."