Charlize Theron should give some credit for her A-list career to John F. Kennedy Jr., says the former creative director of the political scion’s now-defunct magazine, George.
Matt Berman, whose memoir “JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir” is out in April from Simon & Schuster, told Page Six that Kennedy made the call to put the leggy South African on a cover in 1998, well before she was a household name.
As an editor, “he wanted something unusual that people hadn’t seen before,” says Berman of his close friend.
Kennedy, who’d already featured Cindy Crawford and Robert De Niro on his covers, found Theron by canvasing connections like Miramax’s then-production head Meryl Poster, who tipped him off about “this beautiful model.”
Berman recalls he and Kennedy “called [photographer] Ellen von Unwerth, and she had never heard of her, either. We picked Charlize up at her apartment. This fun girl just jumps in the van . . . we drove to Central Park [and shot her] as ‘sexy Martha Washington.’ John just knew all these people. He was really ahead of his time.”
The magazine traditionally put A-listers in colonial costumes on its cover.
Berman said the star most similar to Kennedy was George Clooney, who put on a powdered wig and started singing “Come on-a My House” by “‘my aunt Rosemary'” Clooney on set. “[He and John] were so similar.”
Berman, now creative director for Lucky Brand, was about to shoot Rob Lowe for the mag’s cover when Kennedy’s plane crashed in 1999. The mag closed in 2001. He still misses his former boss.
“It was hard to be intimidated by John,” he says. “He had this informality about him that put people at ease. At a party, he’d find the shyest person in the room, go up to them and ask them something easy to answer. He would find a way to relate to whomever was standing in front of him.”