My time with Cynthia was the happiest I had ever been in my life. Many of those who saw us when we were together still talk about us, because it was an extraordinary thing to be in our presence. People would come around us like cats to a fireplace.
On occasion, it was also the most miserable I had ever been. Our relationship was not completely without conflict, because we could get ourselves pretty cross-threaded at times. There was so much passion and need that we overidentified with each other despite the fact that we were very different people.
Periodically, we’d have these pretty stark little meltdowns, but we knew—and this was the most important thing—that the relationship was indispensable and that we couldn’t live without it. It was a little like living in the tropics. Most of the time, the weather could not be better but on occasion, a big blue storm would erupt out of the sea and tear the shit out of everything.
Therefore, whenever trouble came we never considered the possibility that we would just walk away. That was never an option. Instead we would look at the trouble as though it were a foreign invader that had manifested itself in the action and reaction between our two psyches. We had created a home for it and it had grown up in this home, but we had to drive this demon out of our garden. Doing so required making common cause against it. We couldn’t say, “You’re doing this and you’re doing that…” Instead, it was always, “We’re doing this. This is what we do here. And at the point where I do this, if you could stop yourself from doing that…” We were our own therapy.
We traveled together a lot and went overseas when I had speaking gigs in Spain, but we spent most of our time in New York. I was living there because I still had not delivered my book to Viking. In order to get me to finish it, they put me in an office next to my editor, but that still didn’t work. I would go there regularly, but I learned that I could not relieve myself of the tale without someone there to hear it.
Cynthia and I began living together in my apartment at 24 Fifth Avenue, where she also had her office. But then we had to leave. My place was a sublet from a good friend who had spent the summer at his farm in Vermont but now was coming back to reclaim the apartment. It was a terrible moment for us because real estate and romance are very tightly connected in New York. They are deeply bound to each other. You kind of are where you live, and we were panic-stricken because we couldn’t seem to find anything.
Then we went to a movie at the Quad Cinema on West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, and there was a note pinned to a tree right outside the theater that described this way-too-good-to-be-true apartment. Cynthia actually laughed at me for calling the guy. “This is a trap of some sort,” she said. “I’m amazed you’re so gullible.”
The apartment was on Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue, and it turned out to be a wonderful place, too good but also true. It had a rose garden and a bedroom that was a conservatory made of glass. As a container for the two of us, it could scarcely have been any nicer. Especially given the fact that we were both exhibitionists. We could lie in bed and see the moon and also absolutely be seen by all our neighbors.
Before I had taken Cynthia to see the Grateful Dead for the first time, the only thing that had ever really mattered to her about music was that her best friend from the time she was about six years old was Diana Krall. This was before Diana had much of a reputation, but we would go to every one of her shows and find ourselves in the cocktail lounge at the Ritz-Carlton. Cynthia was Diana’s most devoted fan and best friend and was practically her manager at the time. After Diana married Elvis Costello, she bought a really beautiful piece of property right next door to Cynthia’s parents on Vancouver Island and that is where they live now.
Because of my relationship with John Kennedy, Jr., and Cynthia’s affection for him and Daryl Hannah—his girlfriend at the time—the four of us became like a team searching for adventures in New York.
After graduating from Brown, John had spent a couple of years working for the city in their Office of Business Development before becoming the head of a nonprofit dedicated to helping the working poor. He’d earned a law degree from NYU, finally managed to pass the bar exam on his third attempt, and begun working as a prosecutor in the white-collar crime unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He had also done some acting but had not yet begun his next career as the publisher of George magazine.
John had known Daryl Hannah ever since their families had vacationed together on St. Martin in the early 1980s, but they had started dating only after he ran into her at his aunt Lee Radziwill’s wedding to director Herb Ross in 1988. Daryl was then just coming out of what I gather had been a fairly calamitous relationship with Jackson Browne, and for a while John was seeing other women as well, but once he and Daryl became a couple, it was definitely what I guess you might call headline news; they were featured on the cover of People magazine.
Although Daryl is mildly autistic, she had a great way of deemphasizing it. But it was there all the same and made her seem like she was permanently twelve years old. Right down to the minor details, Daryl was the one who had come up with the plot and treatment for the movie Big. Although she wasn’t in it because the whole thing got taken away from her, Big described what it was like to be her.
John himself was not particularly a dope smoker, but he did like psychedelics and the four of us tripped together on acid. Cynthia and I also took MDMA with John and Daryl, and that was interesting. Three really good-looking people on ecstasy and me. I was like, “What is wrong with this picture? Like, how did I get into this group? I get the other three but what about this ugly fuck over here in the corner?”
What I didn’t know back then but learned much later was that John was also in love with Cynthia. Was I in love with Daryl Hannah? I know my limits, and she was far beyond them. Although I spent a hell of a lot of time around her, Daryl had so many trust issues. I am not an untrustworthy person at all, but for some reason people often feel that I might be, especially if they are not terribly sophisticated. And so I think she had a hard time really trusting me.
It was not out of the question that Cynthia would have responded to John’s interest in her. I mean, this was John Kennedy, Jr. Nobody ever spent any time around the guy without falling in love with him. Cynthia was very, very fond of John, but we never discussed this. The way things turned out, it didn’t matter one way or the other.