It was 1997, and Matt Berman, the creative director of JFK Jr.’s *George* magazine, had just gotten back to his hotel in Los Angeles. He had left the ‘Garden of Eden’ style set he’d concocted for the cover of the September issue: lush with greenery and replete with live animals. It would reach peak ripeness once the star, Pam Anderson, arrived on set the next day as the “first woman,” to illustrate a feature on the 20 most fascinating women in politics. 

But there was a problem. A note was waiting for him at the front desk of the hotel. It was from Anderson. She was canceling. “She was like, ‘I can’t, a million apologies,’” recalls Berman. “Something like that. It was just crazy.” Amazingly, he secured Kate Moss that night through her former boyfriend Mario Sorrenti, who’d arrived to photograph the shoot. You wouldn’t guess from the talent, set design, and tabloid-like plot twists that this was for a political magazine. 

But that was the creative—and challenging—conceit of *George*: to dust off politics and give it broad, glossy appeal. “He wanted a magazine that would seduce people, and that comes from the fashion world, the music world; different, other kinds of magazines in the world I came from at *Elle*,” says Berman of his former friend and boss, who died in 1999 at age 38. 

For the issue, Kennedy Jr. posed as Adam in his illustriously candid, bantering editor’s letter (no image, sorry). And he suggested he was clued into the criticism: “I’ve heard about substance abuse, and I’m staying away from substance,” he wrote. “To whom much is given, much is expected, right?” An apple dangled overhead. The insider and Berman, a young artistic director outsider, encouraged readers to take a bite.

Inside the creative collaboration that turned JFK Jr.’s political magazine into a sexed-up cultural moment