JFK’s son returned to Andover in 1978 with a renewed sense of purpose. Academically, he continued to falter, but now he took pride in the work he was doing for the school’s community outreach program. For two days each week, John taught English to immigrant junior high school students in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts.
John also took the time during this period to rekindle memories of his father. One day Chuck Spalding dropped in on John while he was listening to a tape of one of his father’s speeches—a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt—for a history class at Andover.
“Listen!” he told Spalding, his voice filled with excitement. “Right in here is where I crawl under the desk and Dad kicks me. It’s coming up now. Here it is. He was talking on the radio and I crawled under the desk and grabbed him.”
Such moments were rare. The only other memory he claimed as his was of that time they all sat on the Truman Balcony to the bagpipes and drums of the famous Black Watch Regiment. John remembered squirming in his mother’s lap, straining to get a better look over the balcony rail. It was nine days before the assassination—the last time they were photographed together at the White House.
John later admitted that, for the most part, he viewed his father “through the color of others and the perception of others and through photographs and what I’ve read.” In the course of his life, John looked at photos and film of his famous salute to JFK’s coffin thousands—tens of thousands—of times, trying to trigger some flicker of memory in his brain. He always came up dry. “Do you really remember things that happened to you when you were two years old?” John would sometimes ask. “Do you? Really?”
Meanwhile Caroline, who did remember, was also making her mother proud by never falling off the dean’s list at Radcliffe College. To celebrate Caroline’s twenty-first birthday and John’s eighteenth, Jackie invited 150 people to New York’s chic Le Club on November 26, 1978. All the Kennedys were there, as well as friends of the birthday boy and girl, and more than a few luminaries from the worlds of society, show business, and politics. (President Jimmy Carter couldn’t make it, sending Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in his stead.)
“The ‘passing of the torch’ theme was pretty obvious,” said one guest. Indeed, the invitation actually showed an angel holding two torches. It had been fifteen years since JFK was shot to death, and now his only surviving brother stood to toast John and Caroline. “I shouldn’t be doing this tonight,” Ted Kennedy said, his voice quavering. “By rights, it should have been the father of these two children. Jack loved his children more than anything else. Young John and Caroline bring new life to the family.”
Christina Haag, who years later would become John’s lover, chatted with the host. “It’s all going so well, don’t you think?” Jackie asked. They both watched John in the middle of the dance floor and agreed he was having fun. Watching Jackie’s face light up, Haag thought, “Remember this moment, that one day you might be forty-eight and filled, as she is, with this much joy and wonder.”
Bunny Mellon, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Gill, Plimpton, Vance, Tempelsman, Jackie’s distant cousin Louis Auchincloss, and the rest of Jackie’s crowd sipped Dom Perignon while John’s Andover pals guzzled beer and tequila and smoked cigars. Most of those over thirty drifted off by eleven, and a little after midnight Ted, Eunice, Ethel, and Jackie headed home.
Once they were gone, John and his friends lit up joints, drank Hennessy stingers from wine goblets, then danced to the disco beat of the Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor, and Donna Summer. At 4 a.m., Billy Noonan stuck his head out the door and snarled at the pack of photographers who had been gathered for hours. “I’m giving you fair warning,” he told them, “don’t start any shit.”
Within seconds, John emerged wearing a black jacket, a long white scarf, and sunglasses. The paparazzi lunged forward, and Noonan bolted for them as promised. As Noonan got ready to throw the first punch, John not only tried to hold his friend back but put his hand over his mouth to shut him up.
It was too late. A donnybrook ensued and John was knocked to the pavement. “Stop!” he yelled, pleading with everyone to back off as he struggled, sunglasses in hand, to pull himself up on the rear fender of a parked car. That didn’t work, either. As his friends and the photographers wrestled outside the club, John grabbed Jenny Christian’s hand and sprinted to the corner. There they flagged a cab that took them straight to 1040.
Newspapers the next day were filled with photos of the brawl—the most memorable images showing John spread-eagle on the sidewalk while his buddies clenched their fists and spewed epithets. Mortified at his behavior, Billy Noonan wrote a long letter of apology to Jackie. She responded by inviting him to the Kennedy family birthday party, although she was not about to let them forget this lapse in judgment. From now on when she saw John and his friends headed out the door wearing sunglasses, she delivered the same line: “Oh, dark glasses. Are you boys going out looking for a fight?”
John and Jackie faced the press together at his Andover graduation ceremony, when they had to make their way through a mob of photographers just to reach the buffet table. John was visibly angry. “Look,” he said, “I just want to spend some time with my mates and enjoy my graduation.”
An old hand at moments like these, Jackie merely ignored the interlopers. “Oh Ted,” she told the senator within earshot of reporters. “Can you believe it? My baby, graduating!”
By this time, John was making ample use of the apartment his father kept on Bowdoin Street in Boston. Sparely decorated, it served as little more than a crash pad for John and his Andover buddies. Between visits to local pubs like the Black Rose and the Bull & Finch (famous as the inspiration for the bar in the television series Cheers), John continued his work with troubled teens. At the Massachusetts State House, located just up the street from the Kennedy apartment, John showed groups of juvenile offenders Scared Straight, the graphic documentary about life behind bars. Even the most incorrigible delinquents watched in shocked silence. “Jesus,” John said after screening several episodes. “It should have been called Scared Shitless.”
Jackie was scared, too—scared that, left to his own devices after prep school graduation, John would now fall prey to Ethel’s Hickory Hill mob. “Jackie was hearing one horror story after another,” Duchin said, “and she was more determined than ever that John not be sucked into that.”
Just how far Jackie was willing to go surprised even John. With a half dozen others, he spent the summer of 1979 trekking through the wilds of Kenya as part of a ten-week course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School.
Confident that her son was in the hands of trained professionals, Jackie was blissfully unaware of the fact that John’s party got hopelessly lost on its first week out. A vote was taken, and his fellow survivalists agreed that John had the requisite skills to lead them back to their base. As they hacked their way through dense undergrowth with John in the lead, all he could think of was how upsetting this all was for Jackie. “I just hope the press doesn’t get wind of this,” he told the others. “My mother will be frantic.”
Not surprisingly, course officials began to panic. In a spare-no-expense effort to locate JFK Jr., search planes were dispatched along with scores of Masai warriors who scoured the region on foot. After two full days, a lone Masai tracker stumbled upon John and his team. They had wandered into a village in the remotest part of Kenya, where, on the wall of one family’s hut, hung a photo of John’s father.
Jackie was nonplussed when she was informed that her son had been rescued. “Rescued?” she asked. As it turned out, no one had bothered to tell her about John’s ordeal until after he had been found.
There was no time to dwell on the tragedy that might have been; Jackie was far too immersed in getting her son into just the right college. John was accepted by Harvard, his father’s alma mater, but didn’t want to go. “He knew he hadn’t earned it,” John Perry Barlow said. “John knew it was strictly because of who he was, and that he didn’t have the grades, so he didn’t go there.”
John wanted to chart his own course, and Jackie understood completely. “It’s hard enough being in his father’s shadow out in the wider world,” she told Arthur Schlesinger. “Can you imagine the expectations at Harvard, what a burden that would be?” ‘
John had his pick of schools like Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia, but he was also realistic about his chances of ever measuring up academically. Founded in 1764, Brown University had by 1979 become the school of choice for wealthy prep school graduates for one reason: it provided the Ivy League experience without the rigorous academic demands. For starters, Brown had no core requirements for graduation, and each student was encouraged to devise his own academic program.
A cluster of white clapboard and redbrick buildings perched on a hill in the middle of Providence, Rhode Island, Brown offered John little protection from the press. When he showed up to register, photographers caused such a scene that he promised to pose in front of the Brown University sign at the campus entrance if they just left him alone long enough to enroll.
As accustomed as he was to such attention, John hated being embarrassed in front of the other students. “Half the time he was sort of saying under his breath, ‘Okay, have you had enough?’ ” one photographer recalled. “ ‘I feel really dumb doing this. Can we stop now, guys? Guys?’ ” According to Bob Littell, one of John’s closest friends at Brown, John just “wanted to be a college kid, not a freak show.”
One time-honored way to gain immediate acceptance with one’s peers, of course, was to join a fraternity. John happily endured the indignities of Hell Night at Phi Psi, going through an initiation ritual that included wallowing in animal entrails, guzzling a pitcher of beer, swallowing a goldfish (of course), being paddled, and picking up an olive by clenching his derriere—all topped off by streaking naked across the campus.
John was soon impressing his fraternity brothers with, among other things, his ability to attract beautiful coeds. Fairly typical was the time Billy Way, who had been a friend of John’s at Andover, burst in the front door trailed by several coeds. The minute one of them realized John was sitting on the couch, she walked up to him and demanded that he prove he was really JFK Jr. and not a look-alike. Once John produced his wallet, the young woman thrust her hand down the front of his pants, then led him off to one of the bedrooms.
John’s frat brothers weren’t above taking advantage of his star power. When they hung a sign outside saying he was in residence, there was a line of attractive coeds waiting to get in.
“When you’re eighteen years old,” Bob Littell said, “you can get into a lot of trouble when people respond to you like that. An astounding number of women wanted to sleep with him . . . but he almost always resisted the sexual opportunities that came his way, preferring real relationships.”
At Brown, perhaps some of those relationships were too real. By this time, John realized that he would spend his life constantly in the crosshairs of young women, not all of them completely sane. One young lady showed up carrying an album of photographs with cutouts of John’s face pasted into every picture. “Here are John and I at the beach,” she said, proudly turning each page, “and here we are at my birthday party.” Rob Littell was John’s roommate at the time, and when the strange young woman (“Miss Crazy”) tossed out Littell’s things and declared she was moving in, Brown security was finally called.
Not long after streaking across the campus to howls from ogling Brown coeds, John delivered his very first public speech, at the October 29, 1979 dedication ceremony for the I. M. Pei–designed John F. Kennedy Library outside Boston. Not yet nineteen and already standing a broad-shouldered six feet one inch tall, the skinny adolescent who had scuffled with the paparazzi just the year before was now a strikingly handsome cross between the Kennedys and the Bouviers. Looking out over an audience that included President Jimmy Carter and dozens of familiar faces from JFK’s New Frontier, John held the crowd spellbound with his reading of Stephen Spender’s poem “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”
As they filed outside after the ceremony, John and Jackie paused by JFK’s sailboat Ventura, which is displayed outside the library. “You know,” he whispered, “I don’t even remember him. Sometimes I think I might, but I don’t.”
Jackie put her hand on John’s shoulder, and then, slowly, led him toward their waiting car.
At Brown, he tried to conjure up those lost memories, studying his father and his policies like any other student, taking an American history seminar on the Kennedy administration and the war in Vietnam. “I had heard John was a dummy, that he was more interested in sex than in school,” said Steve Gillon, who taught the course on JFK’s presidency. “But he was very articulate and intelligent. He contributed things to the discussion that went beyond the textbook.” Gillon went on to say that John, who referred to his father in class simply as “the president,” actually “dominated the discussion in certain areas, such as civil rights and the role of the Supreme Court.” John received a respectable B+ in the class—not enough to counterbalance his failing grades in other classes.
Spurred on by a desire to tackle the issues that had confronted his dad, John tapped several classmates for an informal debate society; they quickly discovered that, although he could debate both sides of an issue, he had strong opinions on everything from abortion rights to racism to nuclear disarmament. “We were all impressed by how much he knew, how passionate he was,” said one student. “He wasn’t at all reluctant to show his serious side.”
According to the man John came to call his best friend, John’s own passion for politics could be traced back directly to debates with Jackie and her intellectual friends over dinner at Hyannis Port. John used that setting as “theater,” Billy Noonan recalled. “He pondered aloud his interests and concerns, gesturing with his hands, cutting the air to make his point . . .” This was where “John developed, like an actor, his love of debate and engagement.”
As perfectly suited as he may have seemed for the world of politics, John’s true passion wasn’t world affairs or history. It was acting. When he appeared in March 1980 as the soldier Bonario in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the reviewer for the Brown Daily Herald gave John a five-star review—then publicly retracted it in a follow-up piece.
In his retraction, the student critic decided that “John doesn’t move well—he’s very inhibited and self-conscious on the stage. And his voice is off-putting. He sounds like a rich New York preppie.”
So what made the Daily Herald reviewer change his mind? “I didn’t think John was as good as I made him out to be,” he explained. “But I was sitting next to his mother on opening night and I guess I was dazzled.”
Undaunted—and encouraged by his mother not to give up—John went on as an undergraduate to have major roles in plays ranging from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Miguel Piñero’s gritty prison drama, Short Eyes. Before going on in The Tempest, John was forced to deal with a wardrobe malfunction. As he left his frat house for the theater in elaborate Elizabethan costume and full makeup, John was hit by a volley of water balloons fired from a cannon set up across the quad.
“He kind of gasped,” recalled Rick Guy, a fellow history major and a player on Brown’s lacrosse team. “But he didn’t yell or scream like a lot of other people would have.” Instead, he shook his head and went back inside to clean up before his performance. “John took everything in stride because he wanted more than anything to be treated like an ordinary guy.”
For everyone, the greeting was always the same: “Hi, I’m John.” Guy pointed out that it was “never John Kennedy, always just John. He would totally disarm you by asking questions—and not in that artificial way people have of pretending to be interested in you. He really wanted to know about other people’s lives.” In the end, Guy said, everyone who met John walked away feeling he was “just a tremendously decent, regular guy.”
There were plenty of reminders that John was anything but a regular guy. On the opening night of David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room, another actor in the play, Rick Moody, was backstage waiting to go on when a hearty laugh boomed from the audience. “That’s my sister,” John said, grinning. “That’s Caroline.” Appearing for the first time in public wearing a crew cut, John even managed to upstage the coed who played his girlfriend. She had gone topless for the role.
Describing JFK Jr.’s acting style wasn’t easy. “A little Brando, a little De Niro, a healthy dollop of Nicholson, maybe a dash of his dad’s inaugural pluck,” Moody said, adding that he was initially surprised that John delivered his lines “with uncanny reserves of charisma.” Then he wondered, “What’s the surprise in this? He’d been acting his entire life.”
“All actors are hiding behind a mask,” said Katharine Hepburn, who found John’s interest in acting “perfectly logical. It’s really the perfect way to cope with celebrity, because people are only seeing you play a character. They don’t get to the real you.” (Adding to the Freudian mix, John began collecting actual masks—from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Eventually “there were scary ones and hairy ones, comical and mystical,” Robert Littell said. “The implication, in a Psych 101 way, is that John was attracted to masks because he wore one himself for so long, figuratively speaking.”)
Jackie dutifully came to nearly all of John’s openings, and was invariably caught up in the moment whenever he set foot onstage. “Her reactions were pretty intense—especially if something bad was happening to John’s character,” a fellow student said. “She’d gasp and grab Caroline’s arm. She was completely caught up in it.”
“John’s acting,” Jackie told Robert Littell at one point, “is the thing that brings me the most joy.” But when Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood offered nineteen-year-old John the chance to play his father in a feature film based on JFK’s early years—a part John desperately wanted to take—Jackie vetoed the idea.
Caroline was proving easier to handle. After graduating from Radcliffe with honors in 1980, she went to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Film and Television Department. There she met Edwin Arthur Schlossberg, founder of a small company that produced multimedia video projects for museums and businesses. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Ed Schlossberg was thirteen years Caroline’s senior and—like Maurice Tempelsman—Jewish. Soon Caroline was living in Schlossberg’s million-dollar loft, and Jackie was breathlessly introducing him to her friends as “my daughter’s new friend.”
In the meantime, Jackie had asked Tempelsman to quietly arrange for John to spend the summer of 1980 in South Africa learning the ins and outs of the diamond trade. There was always the possibility, Jackie reasoned, that John might wish to join the Tempelsman family business. “This must have been to ingratiate herself with Maurice,” Gore Vidal mused. “Yes, Jackie loved money and very rich men, but she wasn’t about to see Jack Kennedy’s son grubbing around in the jewelry business.”
John was clearly not about to follow in Tempelsman’s footsteps. But his South African sojourn did yield results of another sort. Having witnessed the evils of apartheid firsthand, he returned to Brown determined to take action. With Jackie’s blessing and financial backing from Tempelsman, John set up a campus lecture series aimed at spreading the word about the dire political situation in South Africa. His first speaker was Andrew Young, civil rights pioneer, onetime Atlanta mayor, and former ambassador to the United Nations.
His social consciousness aside, John was digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself academically. Jackie rightly feared that John might drop out of college at any moment—or, even more likely, be pushed out. He had always been a less-than-conscientious student, but throughout his time at Brown, John flirted with expulsion. John was reminded that, in his first two years at the university, he had failed to pass four courses in any given semester. “Even with our modest graduation requirements,” Professor Edward Beiser warned John, “you are skating on very thin ice.”
“Neither I nor John will fail to be galvanized by your message,” Jackie wrote back when faculty contacted her directly with the news that John was about to be expelled. Informed that her son was on academic probation, she wrote to the academic dean that the “vital lesson of how to allot every second of his time” would “sink in as he frantically tries to make up his work.” A year later, as he did extra work to make up for unfinished assignments and poor test results, Jackie sat down in Hyannis Port and dashed off a letter to John’s professor. “I look forward to hearing that he is off probation,” she wrote, “and to never getting another notice that he is on it.”
Yet John still yearned to be an actor, and sought out his ex-uncle Peter Lawford for advice. “If that’s your dream,” Lawford told him, “then do it.” Jackie was anything but pleased when she found out, and wrote Lawford telling him not to interfere. “That, of course, made Peter even more determined to support John,” said his widow, Patricia Seton Lawford, “in whatever it was he wanted to do.”
If there were underlying tensions—and there undoubtedly were—John and his mother never let on. To all outward appearances, said John’s fraternity brother Richard Wiese, theirs was a “very warm” relationship. Wiese got his first look at the Jackie-John dynamic when John had to do a last-minute errand and asked Wiese to look out for his mother. “You know what she looks like,” John said. “Dark hair, big sunglasses . . .”
“Yes, John,” Wiese interrupted, “I think I’ll recognize her.”
Later, Wiese escorted Jackie to John’s room so she could use the phone. Unfortunately, it “looked as if someone had tossed a grenade in there.” In search of the phone, Jackie waded through the sports equipment, clothes, pizza boxes, cans, papers, books, Styrofoam cups, and Coke bottles that covered the floor. Spotting a black cord, Jackie crawled through the debris until she realized it led to a stereo. “But where is the phone?” she asked, throwing up her hands. Wiese led her to the phone in his room.
John came by his sloppiness naturally. “He never hung anything up—just dropped it on the floor where he took it off,” Wiese said. His mother ran a tight ship, but when left to his own devices, John opted for squalor. The interior of his battered gray Honda Civic was strewn with bags, beer cans, and fast-food wrappers. He was an eager participant in cafeteria food fights, and at one point drove out to the country and purchased a pig—not a small potbellied pig, but a farm-bred hog—that he intended to keep at the frat house as a pet. He named the pig Litpig, after Rob Littell, and kept it in the fraternity’s basement for a week before returning it to its original owner.
John continued to smoke pot, and, perhaps driven by the need for acceptance, experimented with stronger stuff. At one party, he was present when his friends allegedly passed around a silver straw and an ashtray filled with cocaine. Each time someone took a hit, a little more of the design on the bottom of the ashtray was revealed.
Once the ashtray got to John, the face of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was staring up at them, with “1917–1963” printed below. Everyone paused. Then John, said one witness, “saw what was on the ashtray and took it anyway.”
Every single day of his life, there was something there to remind John of the father he lost. It might have just been a passing mention of the airport, or of one of the countless highways and schools named after JFK. There was an unspoken rule among John’s friends never to bring up his father’s name, and certainly never to mention the assassination. But the event was so embedded in the nation’s consciousness that it “came up all the time,” said Rob Littell. And when it did, Littell added, “he didn’t flinch.”
JFK Jr. even seemed to take some solace in cultural references to his father. A die-hard fan of the Rolling Stones, John never hesitated to sing along to his favorite Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” when it was playing on the car radio or on the stereo at Phi Psi, putting special emphasis on the lines:
I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?
When, after all, it was you and me.
Given all that was expected of him, John was keenly aware that most people felt he had fallen short. Although most reporters agreed that John had already proven himself to be the most polite and down-to-earth of the Kennedys, their stories painted a very different picture.
When he was mugged in Central Park on the way to a private tennis lesson, John was portrayed as a clueless brat who lacked the street smarts of any other New Yorker. Newspapers ran story after story about his poor academic performance, and when John was held back a year at Andover, the press seemed to confirm that he was the dimmest bulb on the Kennedy compound’s porch. The birthday party fracas that left him sprawled on the pavement didn’t help much, either. Nor did photos that ran around the world of John in the foppish period costumes he wore for student productions like The Comedy of Errors and Volpone. Even his hairstyles over the years—from Little Lord Fauntleroy bob to Prince Valiant pageboy to pre-Raphaelite curls—conveyed an unflattering image of upper-class snobbery and entitlement.
John was the first person to acknowledge that this growing perception that he was a spoiled rich kid wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “Well, aren’t I all those things?” John conceded. “Let’s be honest here. I’ve got it pretty damn good. I know that, and I’m very grateful.”
Ted Kennedy knew that his favorite nephew didn’t deserve his reputation as an aristocratic airhead. During the summer of 1981, John was earning a hundred dollars a week as an intern at former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford’s Institute for Policy Sciences and Public Affairs at Duke University. Ted begged Jackie to let her son give a press conference there. “People should see,” Senator Kennedy reasoned, “that there is a lot more to John than what they’ve been reading in the papers.”
The news conference gave everyone their first real glimpse of the media-savvy charmer John had become. One reporter couldn’t resist teasing him about the ink stain on his white shirt. “I would wear one of those plastic pocket protectors,” he shot back, “but they make you look like a Republican.” He also informed the press that he was teaching himself the guitar.
Was he thinking of a political career? one reporter asked. “I’m not really thinking about careers at the moment,” John replied offhandedly. “I’m not a big planner.”
Uncle Ted was thrilled with the outcome of John’s first press conference, and passed his feeling along to Jackie. “He is a natural,” the senator told her. “He had them eating out of the palm of his hand, just like his father.”
In his junior year, John decided to move off campus and into a house atop a cobblestone-paved hill at 155 Benefit Street. His new housemates were Rob Littell, tennis team captain John Hare, aspiring actress Christina Haag, and Christiane Amanpour—“Kissy” to her roommates—destined to become one of the most famous names in television news as a star correspondent for CNN and CBS.
By this time he had also broken up with Jenny Christian, who was at Harvard studying psychology. The two remained friends. As a matter of course, John would maintain warm and lasting friendships with all his former lovers; not a single one would go on record making even a mildly negative comment about him.
John’s new love was a comely, chestnut-haired literature and history major named Sally Munro. Born and raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Munro so closely resembled John’s sister that captions routinely misidentified Munro as Caroline. Moreover, Munro and Caroline had attended the same prep school, Concord Academy.
John’s on-again, off-again romance with Munro would stretch over five years. During this time, John explored relationships with a number of other women. “John was not a womanizer like his father,” one of his frat brothers said, “but his thing with Sally wasn’t exclusive.” As he grew to manhood, the number of women making a play for Jackie’s son had grown exponentially. “His phone was ringing off the hook from girls he knew—and some he didn’t know. Women were mailing him their panties . . . We all thought John showed remarkable restraint, considering.”
Jackie showed restraint as well, never commenting on his romantic life and always warmly welcoming his main girlfriend-of-the-moment into the Kennedy household. Over dinners at 1040 and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Munro would learn, as Jenny Christian had before her, all about her host’s little idiosyncrasies—how, for instance, Jackie picked up her fork as soon as dinner was served by her longtime butler Efigenio “Effie” Pinheiro and set it across her plate (“At the White House I learned nobody eats until the hostess picks up her fork”), how she rang a tiny silver bell to summon each course, how she moved the conversation along by deftly engaging each person at the table (managing, as one guest put it, to coax a witty remark out of the shyest person there).
John’s girlfriends would also learn that, particularly when she was relaxing at Hyannis Port or on Martha’s Vineyard, no one was to disturb Jackie between lunch and dinner. When one unlucky girl made the mistake of striking up a conversation with Jackie at 4 p.m., she was upbraided by John. “Why did you do that?” he demanded. “That is her time to be alone with her thoughts. Just don’t do it again.”
Yet such tense moments were rare. The same women who spoke so highly of John even after breaking up with him were no less in awe of what one called Jackie’s “innate generosity of spirit that instantly put you at ease.”
Not that Jackie was introduced to more than a tiny fraction of the women who drifted in and out of her son’s life. In the early 1980s, the New York disco scene was at its peak, and no VIP guest was more highly prized than JFK Jr. Many weekends, John drove down to New York to dance and drink the night away at clubs like Xenon, the China Club, and Nell’s. On Sunday night, John would drive his Honda Civic three hours north to the University of Connecticut, where he and his cousin Timmy Shriver taught English to the children of immigrants.
In keeping with family tradition, John racked up speeding tickets as he crisscrossed New York and New England—and then ignored them completely. Finally, in March 1983, Massachusetts branded him a scofflaw and suspended his license. John ignored the suspension as well, and kept right on driving. He also thought nothing of commandeering his friends’ cars; on more than one occasion he “borrowed” a buddy’s Mazda GLC or VW Rabbit, only to report the next morning that he had “crashed it.”
He was especially fond of driving in Manhattan, where nearly all John’s friends got around by cab, bus, or subway. His roommate and future girlfriend Christina Haag recalled the night they drank cheap red wine and then wound up driving from one end of Central Park to the other—three times. “My legs were bare, too close to his hand on the stick shift,” Haag recalled. “He drove fast, and I leaned back in my seat, letting my fingers trail the air outside.”
John’s wider reputation as the Hyannis Port heartthrob gained traction when tabloids began running photos of John horsing around with friends on the beach, or getting ready to scuba-dive. “You’d be standing on a street corner and he’d just whip off his shirt for no apparent reason,” one friend said. John, who then weighed 175 pounds but could bench-press 250 pounds, was “proud of the fact that he was in great shape,” Rick Guy said. “It was no good trying to meet girls when Mr. Adonis was around,” a classmate added. “They had absolutely no interest in you—unless somehow they thought you were the way to get to him.”
Closing in on graduation, John capped off his college acting career essaying the role of the heavy in Short Eyes. “The gum-chewing, tattooed Kennedy throws his bulk around the set with infinite self-assurance,” wrote campus theater critic Peter DeChiara, “and an air of stubborn defiance.”
At last, a rave that the critic didn’t retract. John decided that he wanted to go to Yale Drama School—an idea that was immediately nixed by the Big Lady. Jackie wanted him to go to law school, the logical next move in a course charted for Washington.
There were reports—all fallacious—that Jackie threatened to disinherit her son if he didn’t play along. As crestfallen as he undoubtedly was, John did not put up a fight—not this time. “He was very protective of her,” Duchin said of John’s attitude toward his mother, “and wouldn’t do anything to disappoint her—even if it meant giving up something that was important to him.” He would not be going to Yale Drama School, but he wasn’t rushing to enroll in law school quite yet, either.
On June 6, 1983, John marched onto the green at Brown University with the rest of the graduating seniors, all sweating in their polyester gowns beneath a blazing sun. John was seriously hungover from the party at his Benefit Street digs that had dragged on until seven that morning. Searching above the heads of his classmates as everyone filed to their seats, he finally spotted Jackie in the crowd and waved. “Hi, Mom!” John shouted loudly.
A cheer went up from the Kennedys, and Jackie pointed up at something in the sky. Everyone looked up to see the skywritten message she had arranged for her son—the same bungled inscription on a birthday cake that years earlier had them all howling with laughter: GOOD GLUCK JOHN.
They needed to laugh. The day before, Ted Kennedy had once again invoked JFK’s name at a Brown forum on nuclear disarmament. “I know how much my brother Jack cherished John’s future,” Ted said, his voice trembling, “and how proud he would be if he could be here today.” Later that night at a dinner held for John at Providence’s swank Providence Biltmore hotel, it was John’s turn to get emotional when Ted presented him with a framed copy of notes scribbled by his father at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The night of his graduation, John threw a party for fifty of his Brown classmates at Hyannis Port. The swimming pool next to Grandma Rose’s house had yet to be filled for the season, so many guests, feeling the effects of alcohol and pot, simply slept on the bottom. Rose, needless to say, was not in residence at the time.
Jackie no longer worried that her son would end up a pampered weakling, that he needed more “toughening up.” Ready for any physical challenge, Jackie’s boy had proven himself over and over again to be a rugged, self-reliant outdoorsman.
That said, John was up for another summer adventure now that he had his bachelor’s degree in history. For the young man who grew up on tales of the seven seas and whose mother had an affinity for pirates, it was hard to imagine anything more exciting than what his old diving buddy Barry Clifford had to offer.
Clifford had embarked on a quest to raise the pirate ship Whydah, a square-rigged, three-masted galley that had wrecked on the shoals off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717. When it went down, the Whydah was said to have taken with it $200 million worth of purloined treasure—booty accrued by the infamous buccaneer Black Sam Bellamy.
Before he could join the crew aboard Clifford’s research vessel the Vast Explorer, John had to dispel the prevailing notion that he was just another soft, coddled neophyte. “He’s a good diver and a helluva athlete,” Clifford told the Vast Explorer’s six-foot-ten, 325-pound captain, Richard “Stretch” Gray. “You can depend on him, believe me.”
Maybe so. But before the Vast Explorer departed from Martha’s Vineyard, Captain Gray put young Mr. Kennedy to the test. John was given the onerous task of swabbing out the lazarette, a nauseatingly filthy storage space at the extreme stern of the ship that is often referred to as the “glory hole.” The cesspool smell emanating from the lazarette was so powerful that it caused even seasoned sailors to retch. John did the job perfectly, in record time, and—as always—without uttering one word of complaint. “John never complained about anything, ever,” Clifford said. “He just did whatever he was told to do, period—and with a smile.”
It was hard to imagine anything more perfectly suited to John than hunting beneath the sea for buried treasure. All the things he craved were there: danger, excitement, camaraderie, the thrill of discovery, and—during moments alone on deck or in the silent depths of the sea—solitude.
Diving six hours a day, unwinding with his mates at local Vineyard pubs, and then bunking with the rest of the crew belowdecks, John quickly became one of the most valuable members of the salvage operation. He was also the Vast Explorer’s resident cutup, imitating Gray’s squint and teasing Clifford for violating ship rules he himself had laid down (“Hey! Who left personal belongings in the dive room? Let’s throw them overboard!”).
“John was someone we all liked and appreciated,” said Clifford, who would take two more years to finally locate the Whydah—the only pirate ship ever found. “I had the highest respect for him.”
With good reason. At one point, Clifford’s team decided to explore the inside of a World War I freight vessel that had sunk off the Vineyard. They were deep inside the bowels of the ship when one of the divers, John Beyer, suddenly couldn’t breathe. Beyer’s regulator had broken, Clifford remembered, and John “immediately gave him his regulator and they buddy-breathed.”
The experience was similar to the time years earlier when John’s breathing apparatus malfunctioned and Peter Duchin led him slowly to the surface—but with an important difference. This time the two men had to find their way through the decaying passageways of the ship. “It was like going through a maze to get out of the ship,” Clifford said, “but John didn’t even blink. There was no panic. It was just cool, calm, collected, business as usual.”
(Incredibly, it was John who first spotted the Whydah’s cannons, but at the time his reports were discounted by experts. In 2007, divers found John’s weathered, plastic compass with the initials “J.F.K.” attached to one of the cannons—precisely where he said it would be.)
John’s “cool, calm, collected” side masked a roiling inner turmoil over who he really was, where he fit in, what he really remembered about his father. One reason John kept in more or less constant motion—working out, running, biking, skiing, waterskiing, kayaking, swimming, roller-skating, hiking, even skydiving—was to avoid having to dwell on the historic events that shaped his young life, and where it all might lead in the future. “If I stop to think about it all,” he told Rob Littell, “I would just sit down and fall apart.”
Yet he did stop to think. There was an introspective side to John unknown to the public and even some of his friends. This was the side of John that found comfort in heading into the wilderness alone for days, or spending endless hours paddling a one-man kayak off the shore of Cape Cod. With college now behind him, John took more solitary walks at night atop the narrow breakwater that extended from Hyannis Port into Nantucket Sound. The wind was often howling and waves crashed against the rocks—it was often not the safest place to be. “What the hell were you doing out there by yourself?” Noonan would ask his friend.
“Pondering,” John would answer.
It did not help that his birthday was just three days after the anniversary of Dallas (Caroline’s November 27 birthday was also too close for comfort, and the proximity to Thanksgiving added to the jumble of emotions). “I just wish the two dates weren’t so close,” John would say to Littell and others. “The press just never lets up.”
This year—the twentieth anniversary of JFK’s murder—promised to be especially trying. Jackie dreaded the inevitable media frenzy, and what impact it might have on John at a time when he needed to focus on what direction he wanted his life to take. She was determined to take bold steps to remove John from the line of fire.
It had been twenty-one years since millions of Indians lined the streets of New Delhi shouting “Jackie Ki Jai! Ameriki Rani!” (“Hail Jackie! Queen of America!”) during her visit to India and Pakistan as first lady. Now Jackie, who had always claimed a spiritual connection to the subcontinent, was sending John to India. There he would travel the country doing research on rural development—a nine-month stint under the auspices of the University of New Delhi.
Jackie’s friend, the writer Gita Mehta, praised this bold move as an example of how “subtle and intelligent a parent she has been.” John Kenneth Galbraith, who as U.S. ambassador to India had been Jackie’s host during her famous visit, agreed. “She wanted to get away from the circus atmosphere at home, certainly,” he said. “But that was a small part of it. India was worlds away from anything he had ever known—a place where he would be left alone to focus on the things that really matter in life.”
There was an obvious element of risk—John no longer had his Secret Service protection, and would be traveling the remotest, most undeveloped regions of the country. As alien and daunting as it all seemed, Jackie still felt John would be safer there.
In another unexpected yet shrewd move, Jackie did not resist when John asked if he could bring his girlfriend, Sally Munro, along. “Why not?” she said with a shrug. “India is a very romantic place. Best to enjoy it with someone.”
John, as was his habit, worked hard at making the most of his time in India. In addition to his studies and the research work that took him to villages in the most remote corners of India, John clambered over temple ruins, climbed mountains, made side trips to Sri Lanka and Nepal, hit the beaches with friends, bathed in the Ganges—and sampled the hashish that was in plentiful supply.
He also met Mother Teresa, and was surprised when she scolded him for walking in the street. “It is very dangerous. Did you not hear what I told you?” she barked. “Why don’t you listen?”
Returning to New York in June 1984, John moved with his friend Robert Littell into a two-bedroom, two-bathroom sublet at 309 West Eighty-sixth Street. John went straight to work as deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation, which his mother had co-founded, collecting an annual salary of just twenty thousand dollars. He also helped get two fledging charities off the ground: Reaching Up and the East Harlem School at Exodus House.
On any given day over the next fifteen years, John could be spotted weaving in and out of traffic on his $1,500 Univega bike as he headed to the next place he had to be. Sometimes he’d be wearing an Armani suit, other times only shorts and running shoes—wherever he ventured in the city, said a neighbor, “people might point, or even call out his name, but usually they just paid no attention.” Either way, “John just looked straight ahead and kept right on going.”
As dependent as he was on these expensive bikes, John made little effort to hold on to them. Out of impatience and absentmindedness, he seldom took the time to lock his bike or chain it to a stationary object. The results were predictable: John had a bike stolen every two or three months. “He could spend thousands for a bike,” Billy Noonan said, “and have it stolen an hour later.” Littell believed his friend “set some kind of record” when it came to bikes—and wallets. Once, John and Littell drove an hour back to a rest stop on Interstate 95 because John had inadvertently flung his wallet into a trash can at McDonald’s. (Scores of frustrating incidents like this finally led John to chain both his wallet and his keys to his pants.)
As always, John left plenty of time for play as he weighed his long-term career options. He continued to frequent the clubs where he gained instant entree (“Doormen bowed and velvet ropes fell,” Littell said). Monday nights were usually spent at sports bars around the city watching football with his friends, and he had courtside seats for Knicks games at Madison Square Garden.
And then there was the time John invited a dozen friends and their dates over to watch a World Series game, turned on the remote—and a XXX porn scene lit up the screen. Realizing that he’d left one of the many porn videos he owned in the VCR, he scrambled to turn off the set and then sheepishly offered to freshen everyone’s drinks.
For a short time John, who made a special visit to see the erotic carvings at Konark and Khajuraho when he was studying in India, seemed fascinated by pornography. One midtown video store owner accused him of owing more than a thousand dollars in fines for neglecting to return dozens of X-rated tapes. Wearing shorts and carrying a backpack, John went unrecognized as he strolled through Times Square, stopping to sample the live sex shows that proliferated there at the time.
During this hedonistic phase of his life, John was also acquiring a reputation as a bit of an exhibitionist. He had already posed for a series of provocative, seminude photographs taken by a female friend at Brown—including one apparently making imaginative use of his mother’s sable coat.
“He loves to walk around in the nude,” said Couri Hay, who worked out at the Aspen Club in Colorado when John was there. “He walks around in the gym with his bathrobe open, and when he takes a shower he leaves the curtain open.” On Cape Cod, Hay said, John was equally cheeky, skinny-dipping at a Hyannis Port pool party, then strolling around naked while waiters served guests drinks. In Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, locals claimed he walked around town wearing only a towel, giggling when he coyly let it slip. Hay’s verdict: JFK Jr. “could have been a porno star.”
Several years later John caught the attention of vacationers at St. Barth’s in the French West Indies. This time, New York travel agent Shelley Shusteroff captured John swimming and walking along on the beach in the altogether. Shusteroff, presumably mindful of John’s privacy issues, turned down a six-figure offer to publish the photographs.
In 1984, Jackie was still doing everything she could to prevent John from being swallowed up by Ethel’s unruly tribe. That became even more imperative after August 25, when Bobby and Ethel’s heroin-addicted son David was found dead in a Palm Beach hotel after injecting himself with the painkiller Demerol, the tranquilizer Melaril, and cocaine. David was twenty-eight.
That Christmas eve, Jackie and John suffered another blow. After decades of alcohol and drug abuse, Peter Lawford died at sixty-one. Jackie, who remained close to her former brother-in-law, called Pat Seton Lawford and wept over the phone. John was upset, too; he had counted on Lawford’s support in convincing Jackie that he belonged on stage and not in a courtroom.
John spent Christmas with Caroline and Jackie at 1040, then flew to Los Angeles the next day for Lawford’s funeral. “Jackie was grief stricken—very emotional, and very kind,” Pat Lawford said. “John was so sweet, and a little lost. Peter was one hundred percent behind his wish to become an actor. With Peter gone there was really no one else in the family who would back him.” Indeed, all the Kennedys—including Caroline—agreed with Jackie that he should go to law school. Most of Jackie’s friends felt that way, too, with the notable exception of Rudolf Nureyev. “Show some balls!” Nureyev told John with his usual Russian flair for the dramatic. “Do what you want!”
John found a new accomplice in his old Benefit Street housemate, Christina Haag. The daughter of a wealthy marketing executive, Haag, like Caroline, had attended Manhattan’s exclusive Brearley School. Growing up in the same Upper East Side circles, Haag had actually known John since they were fifteen. In March 1985, they both signed on to play the lead roles in Winners by Brian Friel, the Irish playwright who would go on to win a Tony for Dancing at Lughnasa. The drama, about star-crossed lovers named Mag and Joe who drown in a boating mishap, eerily foreshadowed events in John’s own life.
Christina, who had spent a year studying acting at the Juilliard School, was taken aback by John’s talent for mimicry—although, given his background, it seemed only logical that he’d be able to deliver a flawless Irish accent. When they got into a fight over the correct way for an Irishman to pronounce the word God, it was left to the Dublin-born director Nye Heron to decide—and he ruled in John’s favor. “Humbled, I was grateful he didn’t gloat,” Haag recalled. “His ear, the gift of any actor, was superb.” After that, Haag added, “I took my pointers from John.”
Unfortunately, the play’s opening was postponed a month after John somehow managed to fracture his right ankle while working out at the gym. It was one of many such mishaps that plagued the accident-prone John throughout his life. He actually embraced these minor failings that led to the broken bones, the lost keys, the stolen bikes. These were the shortcomings, one friend said, that “he knew made people feel more comfortable around him, that made him seem a little more like the rest of us.”
Around the same time, Jackie was dealing with another family tragedy—one that the press paid very little attention to. John’s aunt Janet—Jackie’s half sister Janet Auchincloss Rutherfurd—had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer for six months. Jackie even donated bone marrow in a vain attempt to save her.
“Jackie really came through for our sister,” Jamie Auchincloss said. “Jackie pushed aside everything else to be there for Janet. I think that was one of Jackie’s finest moments, really.” Yusha Auchincloss agreed. “The strength and concern and love she showed for Janet were inspiring. When the chips were down, Jackie was that kind of person. Totally loyal to her friends and to her family.”
Jackie was holding her sister Janet’s hand in March 1985 when Janet, thirty-nine and the mother of three, died at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. Jamie was equally impressed with the way Jackie swung into action to handle Janet’s funeral. “Jackie was so acquainted with death . . . When it came to funerals, she understood ritual better than anyone. She was like a priest.”
John was among the mourners at his aunt’s memorial service in Newport. Yet his focus was more on the cumulative effect all this grief was having on his mother. “Janet was so young,” Yusha said, “and even though there was a big age difference she and Jackie were very close. She was devastated, of course. We all were.”
John made his professional acting debut on August 15, 1985, at Manhattan’s seventy-five-seat Irish Arts Center. Jackie had permitted him to do the play only if critics were barred from seeing it. “Jackie was terrified,” her cousin John Davis said, “that the critics would come and see John in Winners, since rave reviews might encourage him to continue a career in acting.”
To minimize the publicity, Jackie and Caroline boycotted the show entirely. It was just as well, John said. Their presence, he told the cast, would only “cause a fuss”—and guarantee front-page headlines in the next day’s New York Post. “John just wanted to see if he could measure up as a professional,” Davis said, “in something other than a college production.”
John was hardly likely to get booed off the stage. This production of Winners would be performed only six times, and before an invitation-only audience of family and friends. Yet the words of praise from those involved in the production were effusive: “John is the best young actor I’ve seen in twelve years,” proclaimed Nye Heron, who went on to produce such films as In the Name of the Father, In America, and The Boxer. The Irish Arts Center’s Sandy Boyen called John “an extraordinary and very talented young actor. He could have a very successful stage and film career if he wanted it.” But, Heron added, “evidently that’s not going to happen.”
Not unaware of John’s star power, several producers offered to take Winners straight to Broadway if John stayed in the cast. John declined. “This is definitely not a professional acting debut by any means,” he asserted. “It’s just a hobby.” (Five years later he would flex his acting muscles for the first and only time onscreen, delivering just two lines as a “guitar-playing Romeo” in the indie film A Matter of Degrees.)
Winners did mark a turning point of sorts for John, who by this time had broken up with Sally Munro. He fell hard for the lushly beautiful, blue-eyed Christina, and after taking her home to Brooklyn on the back of his new motorcycle (which was stolen days later), told her so. Unfortunately, Haag had decided—for the time being at least—to stay with her longtime boyfriend, the actor Bradley Whitford. (Whitford would go on to fame playing Josh Lyman in TV’s The West Wing.)
Not accustomed to rejection, John tried to make sense of why anyone would choose a struggling young actor with a pretentious name like Bradley Whitford over him. Not that he lacked for female companionship. Littell recalled the day six-foot-tall Sports Illustrated cover model Ashley Richardson showed up at their Eighty-sixth Street apartment looking for John, wearing nothing but a mink coat and Prada booties. On another occasion during this period between serious girlfriends, John failed to hang up the phone properly when he was in bed with one girl, giving an earful of noisy sex to another. The girl on the phone remained on the line long enough to scream at John, but forgave him the very next day.
“Is he sexy?” asked Clic model Audra Avizienis, who homed in on John’s seldom-recognized capacity for introspection. “Oh yes, he has this quiet sadness. There’s something pensive and sad about him.”
John’s mother, meanwhile, was having a difficult time trying to come to terms with the senseless death of her sister. “She was such a happy person, so much fun and just so alive,” John said of his aunt Janet. “Watching her suffer like that was just too much for my mother.”
Emotionally drained, Jackie decided to visit the place she had come to regard as her spiritual wellspring: India. By all accounts her fascination with all things Eastern—particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, and the mystics—bordered on the obsessive. She now made pilgrimages to the subcontinent on an annual basis. John joined her in India that fall, staying in the glittering palaces of Delhi, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Hyderabad. It became clear to John on this journey—the first time he visited India with Jackie—why she kept returning to the region. “The people of India,” John Kenneth Galbraith said, “revered her.”
Restored by their Indian interlude, Jackie resumed her mind-spinning social schedule in New York while John added Christina Haag to the guest list for his annual birthday bash. Within months, John and Christina began an intense affair that lasted a tempestuous five years. It was easy to see why she changed her mind. Beyond the obvious, John was an unabashed romantic. “I love your hair,” he would tell Christina, cupping her face in his hands. “I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me.”
Yet from the very start, John also made it clear that, if Christina cheated on him, he didn’t want to know. John admitted to having a strong jealous streak, and to being unable to cope with that sort of personal betrayal.
As time progressed, photos of street corner spats between John and his lovers would fill the tabloids, filling him with embarrassment and regret. One classmate conceded that John might “blow up and yell, or pound his fist against something—I even saw him stamp his feet like a little kid.” But “three minutes later he’d regret it and apologize.” John Perry Barlow chalked this up to John’s being “a passionate person. He had a temper, no doubt about it. But he never let it get the best of him.”
If he was angry about his mother’s opposition to his acting, John never let on—not even to his closest friends. When Haag brought it up, he merely laughed it off and changed the subject. “Disappointed? Yes. Frustrated, certainly,” Tish Baldrige said. “But it wasn’t as if Jackie just put her foot down and threatened to cut him off. She very deftly steered him in the direction they both knew in their hearts was right for him—toward public service, toward politics.”
Jackie was careful never to appear ham-fisted or intrusive—particularly when it came to her son’s love life. She was “strong-willed and opinionated,” Rob Littell said, but “careful not to overstep her bounds.”
Even before their affair began in earnest, John repeatedly referred to Christina Haag as “the girl I’m going to marry.” Two years into their relationship, he called his mother to say that he had a big surprise for her and Marta and would drive out to the New Jersey house to fill them in.
When he got there, Jackie had broken her engagement ring out of the safe and informed him the moment he walked in the door that it had taken a while, but she had finally come to terms with the idea that her son was getting married. John’s news, however, was that he had spotted an orange Karmann Ghia on the street with a “For Sale” sign in the window and purchased it on the spot.
“Isn’t it great?” he asked his dumbfounded mother. “Don’t you just love the color?”
“John, this is your big news? This garish old jalopy?”
Jackie eventually saw the humor in the situation, but Marta didn’t. She had spent $l,300 on an Ungaro dress for the engagement party—a dress that could not be returned.
John would eventually marry, of course, and the bride would not be Christina Haag. But in 1986, twenty-five-year-old JFK Jr. was focused on finding a career path now that he had put his dreams of an acting career behind him. “Jackie didn’t really have to pressure him to give all that up,” George Plimpton said. “He always knew greater things were expected of him.”
That winter, John took part in a roller-skating party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, set up by his uncle Bobby. He strapped on a pair of skates, grasped the hands of two neighborhood children, and took them for a spin around the rink.
It was hard not to notice that the press was swarming all around John, the photographers recording his every move. “I think they’re waiting for me to fall,” he told his skating partners.
“I didn’t know you were so famous,” one of the boys said, perplexed by all the attention John was getting. “What’s your name?”
“John Kennedy.”
“John Kennedy! He was one of our presidents,” the boy said.
“Yeah, I know,” John replied. “He was my dad.”