Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MITCHELL LANDSBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
``Hi. I'm Car-o-line,'' she says, the three syllables each distinct, the last pronounced with a long ``i.''
She is here to talk about a new book she has written with friend and co-author Ellen Alderman, with whom she wrote the best-selling ``In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action.''
But wait a minute. Let's back up a bit and savor this image: Caroline Kennedy, daughter of a president, daughter of the world's most photographed woman, sister of the most ogled magazine publisher in America - THAT Caroline Kennedy squeezing unnoticed onto a New York City subway train.
Later the same day, she walks along a crowded Manhattan sidewalk, sunglasses her only disguise. No one pays any attention.
The fact is that Caroline Kennedy, who grew up under the doting eye of 200 million Americans, appears to have done the near-impossible: skillfully juggle the demands of a public and private life. As a private citizen, she is quietly raising three children and staying out of the gossip columns. As a public citizen, she has now co-written a book about ... privacy.
``The Right to Privacy'' continues, in a sense, where ``In Our Defense'' left off. It is a thoughtful, balanced and sometimes dry recitation of privacy law, written by lawyers (Kennedy and Alderman met in law school) for a general audience.
Appropriately enough, it will do nothing to part the curtain on Kennedy's private life. She is happy to talk about the book and the legal concepts it describes, but if a question veers into forbidden territory she is quite capable of screwing on a sly smile and whispering, ``I'm not going to tell you.''
``I think it's a balance,'' she says of this juggling of public and private personae. ``But I think if it's something that I've worked on or that I care about, I'm happy to talk about it. There are other aspects of my life that are just sort of mine. And so it works out pretty well. It's not as hard as you would think.''
The idea for the privacy book came, in part, out of the publicity tour the two authors took after their first book was published in 1990.
``What we found when we were going around talking about the Bill of Rights ... was that most of the questions that we got involved privacy issues, either reproductive or the effects of new technology on various aspects of the law,'' Kennedy says. ``And so at that point, we had to keep saying, `Well, you know, that's not really covered by the Bill of Rights,' and that's sort of a lame response.''
The two began doing research for the new book 31/2 years ago, working on it more or less full time while juggling busy personal lives. Along the way, there were two pregnancies (a boy for Kennedy, a girl for Alderman), one major uprooting (Alderman moved from New York to the outskirts of Portland, Maine), and the illness and death of Kennedy's mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
For ``The Right to Privacy,'' they adopted a format similar to their first book, in which broad legal concepts are illustrated through the court cases of ordinary people.
It was a bit of a revelation for Kennedy, 37, whose own privacy concerns grew out of her celebrated lineage.
``I think that was one of the most surprising things to me ... that the law now is really being made by people who are not well-known. And that these types of invasions ... are much more likely to happen to people who are not in the public eye.''
Not all the book's subjects are unknowns. In one of America's most unlikely celebrity encounters, Kennedy and Alderman interviewed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt - in person - about a case in which he was successfully sued for invasion of privacy.
``It was very interesting,'' Kennedy says. ``I mean, the whole office is...''
``... what you would think,'' Alderman completes the thought.
``Yeah, you know, you wouldn't mistake it for someone else's office,'' adds Kennedy, snickering.
Flynt aside, the two acknowledge that there was an inherent irony involved in publicly retelling the stories of ordinary people's battles for privacy - women who were strip-searched by Chicago police, for instance, or an adopted child whose past was exhumed, much to her dismay, for a front-page newspaper article.
``That wasn't lost on us,'' Alderman says. But, she adds, ``We found that people were amazingly open.''
The book describes privacy intrusions from the press, the government, employers and computers, among others. It is, at times, so balanced as to make it impossible to divine the authors' own viewpoint.
Alderman says their viewpoint is clear: ``We definitely think privacy is in danger.''
But Kennedy, whose late mother famously sued a paparazzi and was once secretly photographed in the nude; whose family's deepest secrets are the stuff of popular books and magazines; whose wedding to businessman Edwin Schlossberg drew an uninvited crowd of 1,000 - THAT Kennedy seems less than alarmed.
``When you look at the whole thing, you wonder, are we now at the point where the balance has swung too far away from the individual? And I don't think it's clear.''
by CNB