America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  Amid their intense rehearsals, a story appeared in the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer claiming that John had his gender switched at birth. The other actors kiddingly banned him from using the men’s dressing room. “I don’t think the women minded at all,” joked Emigh. For the play’s promotional materials, John posed for a photo wearing a seventeenth-century French plumed hat. His mom and sister attended opening night and teased him about the extravagant image. “That’s going to follow you for the rest of your life,” Mrs. Onassis said.

  While John appeared in a few plays that Emigh directed, he passed on one. It was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, which tells the story of a young man who transcends his misspent youth to become king. Even though most of his friends were in it, Emigh reflected, “John wanted nothing to do with that play. It hit too close to home.”

  During his sophomore year, John appeared in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, in which he played the lead, Christy Mahon. The role required John to evolve from a shy, meek son controlled by his father into a strong, robust man. Critics claimed that John had been miscast because he was too attractive to play the character. According to The Brown Daily Herald, the role required “a metamorphosis that Kennedy is incapable of producing.” But the critic blamed poor casting, not John’s acting. It was difficult for Kennedy, “with his athletic frame and good looks,” to come off as meek. But Emigh disagreed, praising John for transforming himself brilliantly throughout the course of the play. “John shrank into himself and pulled in his energy and then made the transformation,” he explained. “He stooped his shoulders, pulled his chest, and made his voice smaller.”

  In January 1982 John again showed his commitment by cutting off his hair for David Rabe’s play In the Boom Boom Room. He played the role of Big Al, a foul-mouthed street hoodlum who was dating a go-go dancer. “Kennedy’s performance was really the high point of the evening,” the Brown Daily Herald critic wrote. He brought out his “more sensitive side in a very realistic manner, all this without hardly ever succumbing to the characteristic Pacino-type movements and speech patterns so many actors feel obliged to take on.”

  John’s final theater performance came in April 1983 for Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes. John played the role of a child molester sent to prison with a bunch of other rough characters. “It was not John F. Kennedy and the guys,” recalled Richard Gray Jr. “It was an ensemble.” John, he reflected, went out of his way to be like everybody else. “It was clear in the theater community that John never wanted to get anything because of his name. He wanted to be right for the role.”

  Short Eyes required John to be an abrasive tough guy who used profanity freely, but sometimes the actors would stay in character outside rehearsal. One day the conversation turned to mother jokes. “Especially in the African American community, mother jokes are the building blocks upon which all your humor is built,” reflected Stephen Hill, another actor in the play. One day the “mama” jokes turned on John. One of the actors referred to John’s mom as Jackie O., opening his mouth wide as if simulating oral sex. John, who laughed at the other mother jokes, did not find the gesture funny. “Hey, man, don’t talk about my mother. Don’t talk about my mother. Don’t talk about my mother,” he repeated. “John was as angry as I ever saw him,” Hill said. At that moment, Hill realized how fiercely protective John was of Jackie.

  In one scene, Gray, as the prison guard, and John, as the prisoner, needed to fight, with Gray grabbing John and throwing him down on a table. “My mom is coming. You think you guys can tone down the language?” John asked. “Yo, man, I don’t care,” fellow actor Kenneth Robert Jones II told him. “We have to do the play the way we know how to do it.” But Gray did ultimately modulate his part. In the scene where John fought another prisoner, Gray was supposed to push him to the ground and say, “I will fuck you up, man. I will slap you down with my dick.” Gray thought, “I can’t say that with Mrs. Onassis in the front row.” So instead he said, “I’ll slap the hell out of you.”

  John was one of the few white actors in an ensemble that included African Americans from backgrounds very different from his own. Jones credited John with changing his views of race relations in America. The two men had grown up in vastly different worlds. John lived amid wealth and privilege, while Jones confronted a gang-infested, black and Hispanic neighborhood in South Phoenix, Arizona. “Yet John was the most genuine, open, and nonjudgmental person I ever met,” he reflected. Jones never felt that he was treated any differently than John’s rich, white Andover friends. “He never showed there was a line between us,” Jones stated.

  John was color blind, and Jones noticed another quality that John tried to nurture in himself: he never wanted to appear weak. “He thought that people believed he was soft because he was a president’s son and was raised by his mom,” but Jones was convinced that John did not want to be perceived that way. He pushed himself physically, participated in sports, and enjoyed outdoor adventure because he felt he needed to constantly prove himself.

  Jones also discussed with John whether he planned to enter politics. “My family business hasn’t done well for us,” John responded. “We don’t have much longevity in our family business.” When Jones pointed out that people sometimes saluted him when he walked by, John snapped, “Do you think that makes me feel good? It actually reminds me of a terrible time.” John stated that he wanted to do something completely different with his life. Although he wasn’t sure exactly what his occupation would be, he insisted to Jones that “it definitely will not be politics.”

  Mrs. Onassis, who attended the opening-night performance of Short Eyes, gave them rave reviews, telling the actors, “This was as good as anything on Broadway.” Stephen Hill recalled that John’s famous mother “radiated this glow of friendliness and warmth. I remember how proud she was of John, how happy John was to be with his mom and introducing her to all of us. It made me realize Jackie Onassis is just another proud mother.”

  Many people have written that John wanted to be an actor and that his mom objected and forced him to pursue a more traditional legal career. Christopher Andersen quoted a friend as saying, “His mother laid down the law. She told John in no uncertain terms that acting was beneath him, that he was his father’s son, and that he had a tradition of public service to uphold.” But not all close friends shared that opinion.

  “I really think that’s just myth,” reflected Sasha Chermayeff. “I think he enjoyed acting. But he had no intention of pursuing acting professionally, ever. I never ever heard him say anything seriously about wanting to pursue it as a real life’s work.” Although director Emigh claimed that John confessed he liked the theater because he would be evaluated based on his talent and not his family name, John was not so naïve as to believe such neutrality existed. He knew there was no escaping his past—not even when he was pretending to be someone else.

  As previously mentioned, John once told me that he was actually two people. He was forced to play the role of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., the son of the dynamic president who had inspired our nation. He understood what he represented to millions of people, and he was willing to carry that burden. But he never confused his public role with his private identity. At his core, he remained just John, a typical guy who happened to be the scion of a famous family. People wondered why John loved acting so much. Like Sasha, I agree that he never wanted to make it his career. Instead, I suspect it was largely because he had been acting his whole life, brilliantly playing the part that the country had imposed upon him.

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  By the time I taught John in the spring of his sophomore year, he had evolved into a respectable B student. In the history department at Brown, most professors lectured twice a week. The class was then broken down into smaller discussion sections of roughly twenty students each, and my job as a teaching assistant was to lead two of these sessions a week to help students synthesize the reading and lec
tures. I was also responsible for grading exams and papers. Back in the day before computers, the teaching assistant would post a piece of paper with the times of our discussion groups, and students would sign up. It was all very random.

  In the class on modern American political history for which I was his teaching assistant, John alternated between engagement and indifference. He logged more than his share of absences, and even when he was present, his mind appeared to wander elsewhere. But once in a while, John came alive and could be passionate about discussing topics, especially civil rights. We spent a session talking about his father’s presidency, a potentially tricky situation, but John referred to his father almost clinically as “President Kennedy.” He did not try to offer unique insight into his father’s thinking or become defensive when other students criticized his father’s administration. Students were surprisingly not intimidated by his presence. One young woman even said that JFK was overrated and that people admired him because of the tragic way he died.

  Every student was required to write a short review of a book from a preselected list of options. John chose Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, a classic text from 1956 that blamed the oppressive nature of corporate capitalism for the growing restlessness among young people. I don’t remember much about the paper other than that it was a rather standard B. John failed to adopt a critical voice and seemed more interested in championing the author’s cause than in placing it in its appropriate context and exposing flaws in Goodman’s thinking.

  Students submitted their reviews near the end of the semester; when they finished writing the in-class final, I handed them the graded papers. As John approached, I pulled his paper from the stack. He thanked me and then left the room. A few minutes later, he marched back in and confronted me, asking why he did not get an A. I explained to him that if he wanted to contest the grade, he needed to write a response explaining why he found it unfair. He never responded.

  My experience with John was similar to that of Mary Gluck, who taught John in her European intellectual history lecture class in his junior year. He also earned a respectable B in that class, then signed up the next year for her capstone seminar on the same topic. Over two years, she had an opportunity to observe him closely and to evaluate his academic work. “There was a sweetness about him,” she recalled. “He possessed a spirit of generosity, engagement, and respect. It was very hard not to like him.” She also noticed that he could be very naïve. In one instance, an attractive young woman, one of the brightest students in the class, asked John if he could help with her presentation. She clearly did not need help, but John went to Gluck and asked if she would mind if he helped his classmate. “He seemed oblivious to the larger motive,” Gluck said.

  John enrolled in Gluck’s seminar in the final semester of his senior year, needing to pass the class in order to earn the twenty-eight credits required to graduate. At no point, Gluck recalled, did anyone from the administration inform her that if John did not pass her class, he would fail to graduate. John did not meet the deadline for submitting his twenty-page research paper. On the last day that Gluck could submit grades, John rushed into her office with a copy of his paper on William Wordsworth, a poet who launched the Romantic Age in English literature. Gluck described the paper as “competent” and assigned a grade of B+. “He never had enough patience to sit down and do the work,” she reflected. “He liked ideas. He was interested but not that good at exploring complex concepts. He was not a scholar by temperament. But he was an observer of culture and history. John had the social skills and intellectual skills, but he lacked the technical skills to excel.”

  In the last meeting, Gluck asked John what he planned to do after he graduated and whether he intended to enter politics. “A wall went up,” she said, a reaction that surprised her because they had developed a relationship over the previous two years. After a moment, John ventured an answer. “I’ve been involved in my uncle’s campaigns, and it is a very hard life.” Because John saw the challenges of political life at a young age, he knew the sacrifices involved, and he was not prepared to take that leap until he felt certain about wanting to join public life. If and when he made that move, he would do so with his eyes wide open.

  Though sensitive to his character and weaknesses, Gluck went out of her way to avoid showing John special treatment. She even placed him on the wait list for her seminar and accepted him only after other students dropped out. Yet, in retrospect, she believed that in the effort to treat John the same as everyone else, she ended up handling him differently. Oftentimes students would come to her office hours and talk about their lives and futures. Few people were willing to have that conversation with John, she reflected, “because they feared they would be prying into his life. We censored ourselves. We knew there are places you could not go.”

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  I taught John in the spring of 1981 but had little contact with him the next fall and spring of his junior year. I did, however, have my first exposure to the way the media treated John and his friends. John once described November as “hunting season” on the Kennedys because newspapers and magazines tried to unearth something new and shocking about his father’s assassination. It was always a difficult time for him and especially for his mom. Beginning in late October, a reporter from People magazine started leaving messages for me with the department secretary, saying that she needed to speak with me. I ignored them, but one day I walked into the building to pick up my mail and found her waiting for me.

  She told me that she had talked to John’s classmates, who described him as “dumb and disruptive.” She wanted to know if I agreed with that assessment. It was not true, and I immediately felt the need to stand up for John. I was too naïve to believe that a reporter would invent stories, and she seemed nice enough. Most important, she offered to buy me lunch at one of the nice restaurants lining Thayer Street, which graduate students on a small stipend could never afford. While stuffing a week’s worth of calories in my mouth, she disclosed all the allegedly bad things students were saying about the class. I knew that I could not discuss anything specific about John, such as what grades he earned, but I did need to defend him. I recall saying that John was “bright, intelligent, and articulate.” But I was horrified when the issue came out over Thanksgiving. The story quoted me as saying, “I heard that John was a dummy” who “was more interested in sex than in school. But he was very articulate and intelligent.” The reporter used me as a prop, substituting her own thoughts for mine. Since it was Thanksgiving, John was away from campus. One day after classes had resumed, I saw him walking toward me, but before I could apologize for my stupidity, John grabbed me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Stevie, I’m so sorry that I put you in that position. Don’t worry about it. They do that to lots of my friends. Now you have a sense of what I put up with all the time.”

  I often saw John around campus that year, but it was not until his senior year that we started spending a considerable amount of time together. I was a frustrated former baseball player, and, since I was now working out with the Brown varsity baseball team, the coach granted me access to the weight room. Beginning in the fall of 1982, I went dutifully every day at three o’clock. John had been playing rugby, but because he’d hurt his shoulder, he started showing up in the weight room around the same time as me. Initially, we said hello to each other, made some small talk, and then went about our individual workouts. But after a few weeks, John started asking me to spot him on the bench press. Soon we were working out together, grunting and sweating, competing to see who could lift the most weight.

  One evening I was sitting in the lounge outside the second-floor reading room of Brown’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library—“the Rock”—when John strolled up to me. “Stevie,” he said, “we need to add some cardio to our workouts. Let’s find a place around here that has racquetball courts. All Brown has are squash court
s, and squash is for pussies.” Turning to the Yellow Pages, I discovered a sports complex in Seekonk, Massachusetts, about a twenty-minute drive from campus. On a Friday evening, I hopped into John’s Honda hatchback and we drove to the gym. A membership official explained that the gym had both an initiation fee, which I believe was around $90, plus a small monthly charge of around $20. But he said they had a special deal beginning the next day in which they would waive the initiation fee. John knew that I was living off a $5,000 stipend and that it would be difficult for me to afford the initiation fee. Before I could say anything, he thanked the guy and told him that we would return the next morning. He did not want to embarrass me by offering to pay, nor did he want to put me in the position of asking, so he volunteered. He picked me up the next morning, we signed up, and worked out at our new gym for the first of many times.

  It was not until we traveled off campus that I witnessed the frenzied way the world reacted to John. He lived a fairly sheltered life at Brown. While there were the usual head turns when he walked down the street, students grew used to seeing him on campus. But every time we went to the gym, there would be five or six very attractive and well-dressed women standing behind the front desk, waving us inside with big smiles. Once, John, who struggled all his life with holding on to keys, lost his locker key while we were working out. “Let me check at the receptionist desk,” I told him. “Maybe someone found it and turned it in.”