In the summer of 1977, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was about to turn seventeen years old. He was out of Secret Service protection and didn’t have constant babysitting anymore. He was like a gigantic golden Lab puppy and needed a lot of running room, which was not something he could find at home on 1040 Fifth Avenue. As a consequence, he was being a pest and doing shit like mixing up five gallons of wallpaper paste and then pouring it down the mail chute.
His mother was anxious because there was no man around to control him. Her real fear was that John was going to get himself into serious trouble because he was always pushing the envelope. She decided that he needed to be placed in a slightly secret location far from public view and came up with the very Democratic idea of putting him with the Youth Conservation Corps in Yellowstone National Park. But that did not work out well. The other kids were all from the inner city but not from the part of the inner city that he was from. It just wasn’t happening for him, and the press had picked up on the fact that he was there.
But his mother still did not want to bring him in from the cold. Both of his families, the Bouviers and the Kennedys, had a practice of tossing their sons out at a certain point without much ceremony. She decided it might be a good idea to put him on a ranch somewhere. So she called up Representative Teno Roncalio, who was dear to her heart because while serving as the chairman of the Wyoming delegation, he had essentially handed the nomination for president to John F. Kennedy by delivering the state to him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
Teno, who had helped raise me, was a badda-bing Rat Pack guy. He was a ladies’ man to the max and drove the first Corvette Stingray I ever saw. My father basically apprenticed me to him when I was twelve or thirteen years old, because I wanted to ski all the time and my dad didn’t want to learn how. Teno was always going off skiing and liked me, and so he became like an uncle to me.
John’s mother called Teno and said, “Do you have a friend who has a ranch that John could work on?” And Teno said, “I’ve got just your guy.” As it happened, at the time she had that conversation with Teno, her daughter, Caroline, was going out with my good friend Tom Carney, whose family owned a ranch up the Green River from the Bar Cross.
Tom was having dinner at Jackie’s apartment that same night and she said, “Do you know this John Perry Barlow?” And he said, “Do I know him? He’s a co-conspirator.” I think he also mentioned to her that I was a Grateful Dead lyricist. He said he thought sending John to the Bar Cross was a good idea, but part of what he was thinking was that having John there would make it easier for him to see Caroline when she came to visit her brother in Wyoming that summer. Which, of course, it did.
So I was sitting at my desk one night when the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear this breathy voice on the phone saying, “Hi. This is Jacqueline Onassis.” And I said, “In the highly unlikely event that this isn’t a joke, what can I do for you?” And she said, “It isn’t a joke. I have something I’d like to discuss with you.” A couple of days later, John was on the Bar Cross.
My first impression of him was that he was incredibly good-looking and had a kind of thoughtless grace that was great to see in someone his age. In some respects, John was a lot younger than his years but also had a wise-fool quality in that he was permanently rambunctious but charming as well. He was also exquisitely beautiful but very sweet-natured and funny. Really hilarious. And not full of himself in any way. Not a preppie guy at all.
I stuck him in a bunkhouse that was partially filled with irrigation water, but he was cool with that because it was dry where he was sleeping. The hands on the ranch thought it was funny, but they were all oddities of their own sort. They saw that he was very green indeed, but many of them were also kind of green. I had found that I could hire kids from urban and suburban areas and they would work like hell and not necessarily be good at it at first, and so John fit right in.
John was physically powerful and fearless, and I could put him to anything and he would do it and then do it again when he didn’t get it right the first time. He was not a great horseman, but cowboying is not dressage.
He stayed on the ranch for about two and a half months, and his sister, Caroline, came around quite a bit as well. During that summer, John and I took acid together for the first time. He had already taken a little but never as large a dose as three hundred micrograms. He liked it, though, and we had a terrific time together. We went driving because back then what I liked to do when I was tripping was get in my truck and see how far I could go in directions where you weren’t supposed to get very far at all.
Another thing John and I did while we were tripping was drop explosives down one of the uncapped gas wells that were all around. I had gleaned from The Blaster’s Handbook where I could get these canisters made out of plastic that were about two inches in diameter and eight to ten inches long that packed a pretty good charge. I’d prepare the charge with a lit fuse, rather than an electrical one, then I would set it so I could drop the charge down the holes, some of which were four or five miles deep, and it wouldn’t go off until the canister itself was at least a mile and a half to two miles down.
When it did go off, the sound that would issue forth from the belly of our earth at this particular kind of tickling was just extraordinary. If anything came flying back out of the hole, it was a sign that I had done something wrong. I either didn’t have enough of a fuse on it or I hadn’t taken into consideration that there were gas pockets down there. I definitely did not want to start a gas-well fire. That would have been kind of a dead giveaway.
About a year later, in November 1978, there was a big party at Le Club in New York City to celebrate John’s eighteenth birthday and Caroline’s twenty-first birthday as well as to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. Eddie Hill, who was then John Jr.’s roommate at Andover, came up to me that night and said, “Mr. Barlow, I have to tell you the Grateful Dead are more important to me than my family, my religion, and my school.” And I said, “Hey, man, you had better reexamine your priorities.”
That night, I got a crash course in what it was like to be a Kennedy in New York City. The paparazzi were everywhere and as people were coming out of the birthday party, there was a fracas when one of John’s more jock-y friends from Boston decided he was going to engage in fisticuffs with some irritating guys. The next day, the story was all over the New York Post and the Daily News.
I first got to spend some significant time with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when I drove out to Peapack, New Jersey, to have Thanksgiving dinner with her, a boyfriend candidate, John, Caroline, and my wife, Elaine. It was just us, and Jackie and I hit it off immediately.
At one point after we had gotten to know each other better, I asked her, “What is it like to be so goddamn famous? It must be weird.” And she said, “I realized Jack was going to become a big deal, and it took a while for me to understand the consequences that might have on me. Because, as you see, I’m really kind of shy. But I wanted to be with him and if that was the price, I was willing to pay it. I then came to see that people were making a big deal out of me, too. At first, I liked this. But then it made me feel like prey.
“Gradually, I realized that all this stuff in the press really wasn’t about me. It was actually a comic strip that had a character in it that looked like me and did some of the things I did but wasn’t me. It was something they were making up. And I read it quite avidly for a while, and then I realized that it was making me sick so I stopped.”
She was a truly extraordinary human being, and one of her greatest accomplishments was the ability to tear people’s gaze away from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon the media had made of her and bring their attention to the person she actually was, who was even more remarkable.