America's Reluctant Prince

by Steven M. Gillon

  Despite (or perhaps because of) such efforts, the tabloids continued to document his every move around the city. The widespread use of handheld camcorders made every citizen a potential filmmaker and fed new tabloid television shows that were ready to hand over bundles of cash for any images of John in a compromising position. The two most popular tabloid shows each had a ten-year life-span. A Current Affair went on the air in 1986, followed by Hard Copy three years later. Nearly every time John was spotted with a different woman, a story would appear on Page Six of the New York Post or on tabloid TV.

  John’s busy social life provided gossipmongers with plenty of fodder. The tabloids salivated when John briefly dated actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who would later star in the popular TV show Sex and the City, and pop singer Madonna. While the public seemed to know every detail of John’s private life, I remained willfully ignorant. It was complicated for me. For the first decade that we were friends, I had a secret: I was living in the closet. Actually, I was living in a closet inside a locked vault. It’s a long story, but coming to terms with my sexuality was a long and difficult struggle. Certainly in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was not ready to discuss it, except with a few very close friends. My fear was that if I asked John questions about his personal life, then mine, too, was fair game. He was clearly curious. Occasionally, he would delicately probe.

  “Stevie,” he would ask, “what do you do for fun?” Or: “Stevie, do you ever go out on weekends?”

  I would quickly, and often awkwardly, change the subject. John, whose emotional IQ was off the charts, clearly picked up on my discomfort and, much to my relief, stopped asking.

  But the interest in John’s personal life was impossible for anyone to ignore. Jackie’s friend Joe Armstrong recalled staying with her on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1993. One day after sailing, they walked into a small country store, where she spied a magazine with John’s picture on the cover. She let out a sigh and said, “They’re going to do to him what they did to me.” Jackie, who knew what it was like to be hounded by photographers, be the subject of scurrilous gossip, and sacrifice any semblance of privacy, worried that John would suffer a similar fate.

  Like his mother, John always had a love-hate relationship with the tabloids. His mom used to send people to purchase them for her, and she’d read just about everything written about her. Similarly, as much as John disliked being followed by paparazzi, he remained an avid reader of New York’s gossip rags. “He was funny because he hated the tabloids, but he loved gossip,” recalled a close friend. “He hated being mobbed, but you could sense that if enough time went by and he hadn’t gotten any attention, he would do something like take his shirt off or rent a convertible, when the car he was driving wasn’t getting him the attention.”

  The tabloids also loved the fact that John often juggled more than one girlfriend at a time, but it was actually a conscious strategy on his part. John was neither as monogamous as some friends claimed nor as promiscuous as the tabloids suggested. John always needed to appear to be dating because if word spread that he was single he would be “barraged” by dating offers. “John described receiving messages from distant contacts in his father’s administration and members of far-flung aristocratic families proposing introductions, which he gracefully sidestepped,” recalled friend Barbara Vaughn. John would be monogamous for long periods of time, but once he felt the relationship was fizzling out he would search for a replacement before breaking up.

  Unfortunately, that meant there was often overlap, which could lead to awkward moments. One evening he was in bed with a woman when the phone started ringing. He waited for it to stop and then took the phone off the hook, resting it on the table to avoid being interrupted again. John then rolled over and continued what he had been doing. What he did not realize, however, was that he had lifted the receiver prematurely and ended up answering the call. The girlfriend on the other end of the phone listened while John made love to someone else. She started yelling into the receiver. After a few minutes, John realized his mistake and quickly hung up the phone. For most cheating men, that moment would have marked the end of both relationships. But people rarely held John accountable for his actions, and both women forgave him.

  In 1985 John started a serious relationship with actress Christina Haag. The two had met as teenagers on New York’s Upper East Side, attended Brown together, and even lived in the same Benefit Street house. They did not become romantically involved until they both moved to New York and appeared together onstage in six invitation-only performances of Brian Friel’s Winners at Manhattan’s Irish Arts Center, which was directed by fellow Brown graduate Robin Saex. John thought it would be fun to perform in a play with Christina, and he tamped down any speculation that he would become a professional actor. “This is definitely not a professional acting debut by any means,” he told reporters. “It’s just a hobby.” But the romance with Christina was real. While rehearsing for the play, they traveled to Mrs. Onassis’s country estate in New Jersey, where John kissed Christina for the first time. “I’ve been waiting to do that for a long time,” he told her.

  John was smitten. “I’m obsessed with you,” he told her at one point. “You make me an emotional person, and I’m not.” He told Rob Littell that Haag was “the girl I’m going to marry.” And Christina was equally enamored of John. “He had his faults, like anyone,” she admitted, “but never arrogance, never meanness, never snobbery. What he aimed for, and succeeded some days entertaining, was a remarkable equipoise of humility and confidence that is grace.” She introduced John to Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, where they stayed at the same inn where, ironically, John would hold his wedding to a different woman a few years later. It was here that John professed his love for Christina for the first time.

  Christina also got a taste of John’s attraction to danger when they took a kayak trip near Treasure Beach while vacationing in Jamaica. They set out on the two-person kayak with three sandwiches, a mango, and a liter of water. The water seemed calm, so they kept paddling farther. They then moved through a stiff current to reach Pedro Bluff, where they stopped, ate lunch, and watched the dolphins frolicking nearby. John insisted on testing their limits by paddling even farther out in search of a secluded beach. As they inched closer, the gentle swells had turned into angry waves that were breaking on a coral reef just off the shoreline. John spotted a possible opening in the coral just wide enough for the kayak. “If we are going to do this, I need you with me,” he pleaded. “And I need you to paddle hard, so we can pull ahead of the break. I can’t do it alone. What do you say: Are you game?” Christina nodded. They were only a few yards from the beach when they saw a large boulder blocking the narrow entrance to dry land. She was convinced they would hit it and get thrown into the jagged coral. But just as they approached, a wave lifted them up above the boulder and carried them safely to shore.

  The encounter left both John and Christina shaken and too scared to speak. John, who rarely showed fear, paced the beach muttering, “Don’t tell Mummy, don’t tell Mummy.” Christina said that he appeared to be in a trance. His hands were shaking. “I had never seen him like this—not skiing down the chute during a whiteout in Jackson Hole or nearly colliding with a gray whale in Baja.” Just as with other dangerous situations John had put himself into, he managed to extricate himself and walk away unscathed. Maybe that was one of the reasons that John remained so careless until the end. He always managed to survive.

  * * *

  —

  After graduating from Brown, Pat Manocchia spent two years playing professional hockey in Spain. In the spring of 1985, he returned to New York and spent a few days living with John and his mom at their New York apartment. Even though it could be intimidating for his guests, it was not uncommon for John to invite friends to stay at 1040 Fifth Avenue, sometimes for extended periods of time. The experience gave Pat unique insight into John and his relationship with Jac
kie.

  “His mom was a character,” Pat reflected. On the first night, just the three of them ate dinner together. “When you play hockey, you learn not to be intimidated by people no matter how big they are,” Pat said. But Mrs. Onassis was “the most intimidating person” he had ever met. His nerves soon calmed, however. Jackie thanked Pat for inviting John to his house for Sunday dinners while at Brown. “It’s good for a mother to have another person’s mother taking care of him,” she said. Pat responded, “It was fun. And he was reasonably well behaved.”

  As they chatted, Marta Sgubin, the cook, brought out the dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. John went berserk. “You can’t do that!” he shouted. “You can’t make that for him! His mother has the best meatballs in the world.” Manocchia tried to defuse the situation by pointing out that he would take meatballs any time he could. “I’m not a gravy snob,” he assured Mrs. Onassis. “Yes you are!” John retorted. Pat found the situation disarming, and it helped lighten the mood for the evening.

  Over dinner, “Mrs. O” talked about the surprising similarities between Pat and John. “You both chose to go to Brown, and you both decided to live abroad. You both are back in New York. Both lost your fathers at a young age. And now you’re both discovering how hard it is to find a job.” Pat was initially shocked by the suggestion that his friend was having trouble getting a job. “It’s a little more complicated than you might think,” she said, smiling. Manocchia realized quickly what she meant: everybody wanted to hire John F. Kennedy Jr., but not necessarily for the right reasons.

  “At that moment, I really understood how hard it was for him,” Pat reflected. “It was difficult for John, or just about anyone else, to know whether people wanted him for his qualifications or for his name. He never knew who was using him.”

  A few years later, when Manocchia began working daily as a private trainer, he got a glimpse of John’s forgetfulness. John had been hounding him to come visit Martha’s Vineyard. One day Pat came home from work and found a plane ticket for that Friday taped to his door. The note read, “Just show up.” Pat decided to take John up on his offer. He called in sick and used the ticket that John gave him to fly to the Vineyard. He landed at the island’s airport, expecting John to be there waiting for him. But no John. Pat called the house, and Mrs. O answered the phone.

  “Hi, Mrs. O. This is Pat.”

  “Are you coming to visit us?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m actually here.”

  Dead pause.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “I’m at the airport.”

  Dead pause.

  “John’s not there?”

  “No, he’s not here.”

  Dead pause.

  “Wait there.” A few minutes later, Jackie arrived, driving a red jeep and wearing her distinctive kerchief and extra-large sunglasses. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

  She handed Pat the keys and said she needed to stop in town to grab a few things. They pulled up in front of a small market, and as they walked into the store, two elderly ladies started to approach her. “She looked at them, and they stopped dead five feet from her and walked away. She froze them like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  Shortly after they arrived at the house, John came sauntering up from the beach. “Did you forget that your guest was here?” his mom asked. Pat, never missing an opportunity to tease John, repeated her question: “Yes, did you forget that your guest was here?” “You were supposed to come later,” John responded. Pat reminded John that he was the one who bought the ticket, so he should have known what time the plane would land.

  In 1989 Manocchia, an avid mountain climber, invited John to join him with a few others to scale Mount Rainier in Washington State. Although John had completed Outward Bound, he had no climbing experience. But as usual, he threw himself into the adventure. They went with a group of hard-core climbers who worried about having a novice climber in their ranks and had to be convinced to allow John to join them.

  On the first day, they reached ten thousand feet and decided to camp for the night. The next morning, the party woke up early hoping to reach the summit. They eventually made it to a ridge of solid ice positioned at a forty-five-degree angle and a three-thousand-foot drop to the bottom. As they started making their way across the ridge, the wind picked up, and the guide decided that it was too dangerous to proceed. “We’re going back,” he announced. John, though the least experienced, exploded.

  “I didn’t come all the way here not to climb the mountain!” he screamed.

  Pat, who usually delighted in poking fun at John, was not impressed by his temper tantrum. “Okay, Mr. People Magazine, get the fuck back to the camp!”

  As they descended the mountain, events took another unexpected turn. They came across a young girl sitting on a bench in the middle of nowhere. “I knew you were coming here, so I came up because my prom is tonight,” she told John. John sent the others down to the camp and spent a few minutes talking to her. When John returned, he told them that the girl had climbed halfway up Mount Rainier just for the opportunity to meet him.

  The story did not end there. The next day, they boarded a plane from Seattle to New York for the trip home. As usual, John went wandering around the airport and had to rush to get on the plane before the doors closed. He was supposed to sit in the aisle seat in front of Pat but spied two empty seats farther back and plopped down there. A few seconds later, a woman boarded the plane, saw John, and asked if she could sit in the empty seat beside him. About forty-five minutes into the flight, John signaled to Pat that he needed to talk. They went to the back of the plane near the bathrooms. “You gotta rescue me,” John begged. “She is a flight attendant who is from New York. She found out my itinerary and flew today from New York to Seattle to be in the seat next to me for the flight back to New York. When she saw that I had switched seats, she followed me.” John told him that the first words out of her mouth were, “You know, my ex-boyfriend said you would not even talk to me.”

  Pat got a huge laugh out of the situation and told John that he was on his own. John returned briefly to his seat, told the woman that he needed to talk with his friends, and then maneuvered back to his original seat.

  After arriving in New York, they headed to the baggage claim, where they found a well-known actress in a full-length mink coat (and nothing else) waiting for him. Manocchia refused to name the actress, but other sources identified her as Sarah Jessica Parker. It was not the first time that Parker had appeared in a similar outfit while waiting for John to retrieve his luggage. She scooped up John, and the two jumped into the backseat of a waiting limousine. Later, John told Pat that he had gone mountain climbing to escape the constant dating and women seeking his attention. “That really worked out for you,” Manocchia wisecracked.

  * * *

  —

  Family obligations continued to call. In March 1985 John and his sister, Caroline, met with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. Teddy Kennedy had arranged the visit so that the two of them could ask Reagan to participate in a fund-raising drive for the JFK Library. The Kennedy Library faced a unique challenge because it did not have a living former president to help raise money. Reagan wrote them a follow-up letter saying he would be “delighted” to join them and that he would “stand ready to help in any way I can.”

  The president kept his promise. On June 24 Reagan joined 250 people for a fund-raising event at Ted Kennedy’s home in a high, heavily wooded bluff overlooking the Potomac in McLean, Virginia. The cost amounted to $25,000 a couple. A Reagan speechwriter noted, “This is a great time for Ronald Reagan to take the high road and not discuss party differences but unity, patriotism, the office of the presidency.”

  The themes of the night centered on patriotism and nonpartisanship. In a symbolic gesture, John presented Reagan with an eagle that had adorned his father’s desk in
the Oval Office. In his remarks, Ted Kennedy welcomed the president and thanked him for being “extremely kind and generous and hospitable” to members of the family. “You remind us anew of the enduring truth that we are Americans first and only then are we Democrats or Republicans. That we can disagree, we can debate, we can campaign, but beyond that, we treasure a mutual respect and civility towards each other in a shared heritage of freedom.” He acknowledged that although President Kennedy would have disagreed with Reagan on many policy issues, “he would have admired the strength of your commitment and your capacity to move the nation.” When Reagan began speaking, he praised JFK as a man who “seemed to grasp from the beginning that life is one fast-moving train, and you have to jump on board and hold on to your hat and relish the sweep of the wind as it rushes by.” The president described John’s father as “self-deprecating yet proud, ironic yet easily moved, highly literary yet utterly at home with the common speech of the workingman.”

  According to one news report, John “looked contemplative and somber” as he listened to the speeches. The tone and tenor of the evening impacted him hugely. During the 1980s, Teddy Kennedy had emerged as the leading voice of liberalism and a tough critic of President Reagan’s conservative agenda. Reagan entered office promising to dismantle many of the social programs that John’s uncle had championed for the past two decades. Yet they managed to unite for a common cause, acknowledging their differences while embracing the core values they shared. A few years later, as he contemplated starting a magazine centered on politics and culture, John would recall that pivotal evening.

  The following year, on a sunny July afternoon, the entire Kennedy clan gathered at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts, five miles from the Kennedy family compound, to celebrate the marriage of twenty-eight-year-old Caroline to forty-three-year-old Edwin A. Schlossberg, a conceptual artist with a PhD in literature and science from Columbia University. Caroline had graduated from Radcliffe College at Harvard, worked in the film department at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and had recently completed her first year of law school at Columbia. A crowd of more than a thousand people stood in the heat to catch a glimpse of America’s royal family. In a thoughtful gesture, Ed asked John to be his best man.