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On Friday morning he met with Jack Kliger, the recently named president of Hachette Filipacchi, George's publishing partner, to discuss the magazine's financial state. Rumors were rife that the company had lost confidence in George and was ready to turn off the funding spigot. According to Kliger, however, no decision had been made, and the two were exploring how to revise the magazine's business strategy. "He and I agreed that there had not been a well-thought-out business plan," Kliger says. "So we said, 'Let's figure out how to go forward.'" Kennedy left the meeting, Kliger says, feeling "fairly positive" about the outlook for the magazine.
Kennedy spent the rest of his day tending to editorial business in George's midtown Manhattan offices and reportedly found time for an afternoon trip to a health club. And at 4:05 p.m., he sent a gentle e-mail to John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a longtime friend. Barlow's mother had just died, and J.F.K. Jr., who knew something about that kind of loss, commended him for having been at her side at the end. "I will never forget when it happened to me," Kennedy wrote, "and it was not something that was all that macabre." Saturday was Barlow's mother's funeral, and Barlow did not have an opportunity to open the e-mail until later that afternoon, when its author was already gone. "It was like a voice from the grave," Barlow says. "He said, 'Let's spend some time together this summer and sort things out.'"
Kennedy's wife Carolyn spent part of that afternoon in midtown Manhattan as well. With Rory Kennedy's wedding only a day away, she needed a dress for the occasion, and late in the afternoon she went shopping for one at Saks Fifth Avenue, eyeing the designer lines in the boutiques on the third floor. She found an outfit that suited her famously uncluttered style: a short, $1,640 black dress by Alber Elbaz, a designer working for Yves Saint Laurent.
Lauren Bessette, the third member of the trio that planned to fly together that evening, was, in the meantime, putting in an ordinary workday in the investment-banking division at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. She intended to head over to the George offices, just a few blocks away, after work so she could drive with Kennedy to the Essex County Airport in Fairfield, N.J., in his white Hyundai convertible. Some reports have suggested that Lauren was late meeting Kennedy, a potentially crucial delay. But Lauren arrived at the office around 6:30, and staff members say there was no indication that either she or Kennedy was running late. When she had left her office for the trip to Kennedy's, some noticed she was carrying a black garment bag. Before the weekend was out, that same piece of luggage--wet, wilted, flecked with sand--would wash up on the beaches of Martha's Vineyard.
Driving from midtown Manhattan to Fairfield in normal traffic usually takes about 40 min. But after work on a summertime Friday, the route Kennedy probably took--muscling through traffic along one of several West Side avenues, crawling through the choke-point entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel--can take much longer. He and Lauren did not arrive in the neighborhood of the airport until after 8 p.m., as dusk was approaching.