Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg’s wedding emerges in the diary as both a lavish family celebration and a scene of sharply observed social behavior. The account moves from the meal and speeches to a troubling encounter involving Grace Jones at the exit, setting the event’s ceremonial display against the less decorous conduct around it.

Celebration and ceremony

The food made a particular impression: guests watched raw vegetables being steamed, and the narrator remembered the meal as exceptionally good. The cake, by contrast, impressed through sheer scale, rising six or ten feet. Guests also came up to tell the narrator how much they loved the painting, making the artwork another focus of attention within the celebration.

The speeches gave the wedding its public emotional register. Shriver spoke of “losing a daughter,” a phrase the narrator undercut by noting Caroline’s age—twenty-nine—and treating her departure from the family as hardly a loss. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in turn, spoke of love and promised to make her happy. The narrator singled out the directness of his declaration as a rare instance of love made fully announceable: not merely implied, but said aloud.

Photography and the Kennedy presence

The account also dwells on who controlled the wedding photographs. At Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body-building friends’ event, their cameras could not be stopped, but the Kennedys had their own photographer and arranged for people to pose for him; the pictures, as a result, belonged to the family. The narrator contrasted that arrangement with Madonna’s wedding, where guests might have been allowed to take pictures for themselves rather than rushing them to the New York Post the next morning. The comparison makes photography part of the event’s social choreography: an image could be a private keepsake, a family-controlled record, or material for immediate publication.

Grace Jones and the uneasy ending

Grace Jones danced with Ted Kennedy during the celebration. Later, she and Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about what she should do about Dolph, whom Grace said was sleeping with her girlfriends. The narrator advised her to marry Dolph briefly because it would make a great wedding, while acknowledging a history of giving Grace bad advice—including having once told her that her extreme look would prevent her from succeeding. The exchange links the wedding’s romantic spectacle to the more unstable relationships being discussed around it.

The evening ended on a jarring note. As the narrator was leaving, two Kennedy boys stood with Grace Jones by the door, and one rubbed himself against her. The diary records the act without softening it into the celebration’s general glamour. That abrupt closing incident complicates the account of a wedding filled with loving speeches and carefully managed family images, exposing a boundary-crossing moment within the same social world.