“What will you do?” I asked.
John laughed. “I’m starting a magazine.”
CHAPTER
2
“Random Ventures, please hold. Random Ventures, please hold.”
Although I had pictured myself staying at PR/NY for much longer, promoting new brands and partying with Liz and Tricia, the company had been dissolved. Will jumped to another firm and brought his clients with him. Liz landed a job at a marketing company that did product tours in malls and would later come back to work with John, and Tricia went to work for Michael’s girlfriend, Victoria Hagan, an interior designer.
Only three of us—Michael, John, and I—were left in the old offices, but the new business, Random Ventures, was much livelier than PR/NY had been, starting with the phone lines. Before John’s arrival, the office was a quieter and slower-paced environment. Now it seemed frenetic, and the phones were ringing off the hook. My new job description included the role of receptionist. I felt like a switchboard operator, juggling lines and jotting down messages—all of them “urgent,” at least according to the voices on the other end. The phones began ringing before I opened the door in the morning and kept on ringing long after I’d left.
Just answering the phones would have been fine. But I was more than overwhelmed spending all day answering questions—or, rather, avoiding them, since Michael and John’s new enterprise was still a secret. Random Ventures started out as an idea to sell custom-made kayaks. Once John and Michael realized they couldn’t mass-produce the handcrafted boats, they scrapped the plan and decided to start a magazine. When I joined Random Ventures, it was nothing more than the two of them looking for a publisher.
At that point, I didn’t know what John and Michael were telling people about the company or whom they were telling it to, but they told me they wanted to keep word of their affairs quiet while they looked for a backer. Until there was a definitive plan, they hoped to keep their venture out of the news.
I soon found out, however, that nothing about John’s life stayed quiet for long. As he gave his new office number out to friends and contacts, word of his whereabouts spread and the phones started going crazy. People weren’t calling for Random Ventures; they were calling for John—even if they didn’t know what he was doing.
Who knew it was possible to have that many friends? They wanted to meet for drinks, make dinner plans, or ask a small favor (“Please . . . just have him call me back. . . .”). Mountains of mail also poured into the chaotic new office, mostly letters from charities begging John to lend his famous name to this or that cause, each worthier than the last.
My nerves were frayed because I now had a million opportunities every day to say something stupid to the wrong person or piss off someone important. The less I said, the better, so I quickly devised a script for myself that was essentially “I’ll see if he’s in.” And I stuck to it.
I didn’t want to do anything to screw up their plan to start a magazine that blended the opposing worlds of politics and pop culture. The timing was right for their concept: politics was moving in a younger and decidedly more mainstream direction. A couple of years earlier, in June 1992, a young and charismatic presidential candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton had played his sax on The Arsenio Hall Show during his campaign. President Clinton (who later appeared on MTV, where he was asked whether he wore boxers or briefs, to which he answered, “usually briefs”) was rewarded when election polls the year of his win showed a 20 percent increase in youth turnout over the prior presidential election, reversing a twenty-year decline of young voters.
Reaching out to young people through late-night shows was only part of the effort to change the long-standing conception of politics as uncool. Rock the Vote, a group that used music, celebrity, and pop culture to get young people interested in the political process and voting, was heating up with PSAs from artists like R.E.M., En Vogue, and Eddie Vedder, as well as TV specials featuring such A-listers as Madonna, Tom Cruise, and Chris Rock. I couldn’t imagine anyone more suited to merge the two worlds of pop culture and politics than John, since he exemplified both.
While I didn’t have an actual title at Random Ventures, it was clear from day one that my job was strictly administrative, assisting both John and Michael. In the beginning, that meant typing and mailing letter after letter to media companies and private investors that John and Michael viewed as potential backers. Getting a response was never a problem, since everyone wanted a meeting with John. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that an eager reply didn’t necessarily indicate an intention to finance the political magazine. But John and Michael kept feeding me names from their Rolodexes, and I kept typing them into cover letters.
Had that been all it demanded, my new job would have been a cakewalk. But nothing with John was ever simple. His personal and public lives mixed in the most unique manner, and every detail was nuanced in a way that my upbringing hadn’t prepared me for. What did I know about serving on the benefit committee of the Whitney Museum or attending the celebration of the newly restored Grand Central Terminal? Growing up, my idea of culture was the Daily News.
At first, I was at a total loss to understand his circumstances, and like many people who didn’t know John well, I initially misinterpreted some of his behaviors as insensitive or spacey, when in fact they were coping mechanisms for his insane life. Take the fifteen-minute rule, for example. Whether attending a movie screening or meeting a friend for lunch, John was always right on time—which is to say, exactly fifteen minutes late. As his new assistant, I fielded more than a few panicked calls from people fearing they’d gotten the location wrong or, worse, were being stood up. But it didn’t take long to figure out that John’s tardiness was intentional—he was late because he couldn’t risk standing on a street corner or at a restaurant bar if his appointment was running behind schedule. He’d be a sitting duck for anyone wanting an autograph or hoping to tell him a story about his mother or father. Hence the fifteen-minute rule. It even applied to one of his favorite pastimes, attending Knicks games, where he’d ease into his courtside seat long after the thousands of fans had already filed into Madison Square Garden.
Unfortunately, I had to figure that stuff out for myself. As foreign and enigmatic as John’s life was to me, it was normal to him. He didn’t deconstruct the details of his day; he acted on instinct, and I had to learn to do the same.
When I started working for him, I was unsure how to approach some of the minor details. For example, the first couple of times I booked his plane tickets, I wasn’t sure how to refer to Kennedy Airport. I mean, should I say “JFK” or “Kennedy” or “the airport named after your father”? It was awkward. He finally said to me, “I don’t mind going out of Kennedy,” and that’s the term I used from then on.
Reserving a hotel room for him for the first time was particularly confusing. I decided that using his name was out of the question, because it would cause havoc if people knew he was coming. Without asking him how he would like me to handle his travel arrangements—I hated to bother him with minutiae—I decided to reserve the room under my name. After I’d booked two or three trips like this, John approached me.
“Hey, Rosie, when you book my hotel room, it’s okay to put it under my name.”
“Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure you wanted that, but I will from now on. Was there a problem?”
“Well,” he said, his face breaking into a shit-eating grin, “I don’t get the fruit basket, the upgrade, or the champagne when it’s under your name. It sucks to travel as you, Rosie.”
It also sucked to deal with all the crazies who loved John. Every celebrity has a contingent of fanatical admirers. But the depth of feeling that John evoked in many, many people—celebrities included—was over the top. Yet while there were plenty of magazine stories about him, alongside the obligatory picture of him flinging a Frisbee or dashing into a cab, for the most part John kept his private life private. The gap between people’s intense interest and the lit
tle they actually knew about him allowed them to fill in details of their own choosing. They could easily superimpose their fantasies onto the blank slate of his public persona.
John was the perfect storm for those with obsessive tendencies: good-looking, famous, single, and part of a family with more conspiracy theories than cousins. What amazed me was that while many of his fans clearly didn’t have a firm grasp on reality, they were extremely resourceful, always finding a way to track down his address or phone or fax number. Once, I watched our fax machine spit out seventeen pages of a completely unintelligible rant in small, serial-killer-like handwriting. Some would call, often starting out perfectly normal before rapidly descending into something along the lines of “I am the child of Marilyn Monroe.” I became adept at feigning confusion and insisting the caller had the wrong number, confident that they wouldn’t call back.
Although mostly freaks wrote to John, I think he got more letters than Santa Claus. At first, I’d just collect them and leave them in a carton on his desk. But one afternoon, I peeked into his office to see if he wanted something from the deli and found him opening an envelope with his engraved letter opener, a considerable stack untouched before him. Realizing how much time his mail consumed, I took on the task myself, for which John was wordlessly thankful.
I had to sift through mountains of Valentines and Christmas cards, photos and requests for autographs, packages and paranoid delusions, before arriving at his charity invitations, bills, and business correspondence. Imagining dark and lonely apartments where the writers furiously scribbled their mad thoughts, I felt sad for these people.
Early on, one particularly insane-looking missive landed on my desk. The address was written in tiny, precise capital letters on a nondescript white business envelope. The letter rambled on about homosexuality and other topics that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the stationery felt sticky to the touch. I gagged and pushed the letter aside.
Later that day, John saw the empty envelope on my desk and smiled. “Ah, Robert,” he said.
“Do you know him?”
“Sort of.”
Hearing that he knew the guy, I was relieved I hadn’t made fun of the crazy letter. Maybe he had an eccentric friend in a mental institution. Who knows?
“He’s been writing to me since I was at Brown,” John said. “He’s nothing if not resourceful.”
“Phew. I thought you were going to say he was your long-lost friend.”
John looked at the letter for a beat before turning back to me.
“No,” he said. “But if you’re nice, I’ll fix you up with him.”
It wasn’t just weirdos who reached out to John. Known for his sense of obligation to give back, he received many solicitations to lend his name to charitable causes. He couldn’t respond to all or even most of the requests. But reading a particularly confident and upbeat letter (along with the cutest photo ever) from a ten-year-old boy about how much he loved his five-year-old brother, who had Down syndrome, I felt I had to do something for this kid. He was collecting business cards from famous people to raise money for his brother’s school. “You would love my brother, too, if you ever met him,” he wrote. After looking at that photo for what seemed like forever, I went into John’s office and said, “You know I never ask, but I can’t put this request down.” After reviewing it, John said to leave it with him and he’d “figure something out.” Not only did John send a business card and buy an ad in the program but he also wrote a personal letter to each of the brothers.
John was generous, but he wasn’t nuts. He wasn’t about to invite his unhinged admirers in for a cup of coffee. Still, that didn’t stop many of them from showing up in person at the office, often traveling great distances to get there. As a result, I was concerned about John’s security. He didn’t seem to worry too much about his personal safety, but it was always in the back of my mind.
It didn’t take a degree in psychology to distinguish the real threats from the annoying hangers-on—and it didn’t take long to identify the wackos. They wore hats decorated with flowers or carried journals fat with clippings. More often than not they were in the process of saving the world and absolutely had to speak with John. They were his long-lost brother, his best friend, even the mother of his children.
One woman, who regularly sent index cards with food stamp covers attached to them, insisted he was the deadbeat dad of her kids and wanted to know where her child support was. “I will see you in court, John Kennedy,” she wrote on the backs of the cards, which arrived at the office at least three or four times a week.
My job was to shield John from the onslaught of freaks, as we came to call them, so I didn’t bother him with these incidents, even though some made for pretty funny stories. Like the lady who brought a suitcase to the midtown offices we later moved into and unpacked it in the middle of the reception area, or the time the receptionist, Aramenta, called to tell me that John’s sister was at the front desk. I knew that couldn’t be right—Caroline of all people would never make an unscheduled visit to the office—but I still raced to reception.
When I approached the front desk, Aramenta pointed to a heavyset woman in a stained turquoise sweat suit. As I got closer, I saw she was missing a tooth and had no laces in her sneakers. Aramenta, an elderly lady from the South and everybody’s surrogate grandmother, was sweet but not the best security buffer.
“That’s not John’s sister, Aramenta,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” she replied, shaking her head. Like everything else I did for John, my role as his gatekeeper was never officially defined. It just happened naturally. If a particularly ardent fan was in the lobby, I’d pop my head into John’s office and tell him to make a few more phone calls before leaving for the day, or I’d call him at home to say he should maybe hit the gym or run an errand before coming into the office. I used that code, even though he knew what I was talking about, because I didn’t want him to feel like a freak himself. John downplayed his fame, and I was following his lead.
My job didn’t come with a training manual, and relying on instinct occasionally steered me wrong. Once when John asked me to decline an invitation, I fibbed to the hostess that he couldn’t attend her event because he was going out of town for the weekend. That’s the excuse I always used when I wanted to get out of something—but then again, I wasn’t constantly followed by paparazzi. A huge half-page photo of John in the gossip section of the tabloids the following Monday caught me in my white lie. Whoops.
Many eyes were constantly on him, scrutinizing his every move, whether out of outsized affection or bitter jealousy. So such mistakes made John look bad and me look like a fuckup. Since my actions directly reflected on him, I became more vigilant. There was no margin of error.
I wish I had been more attentive while typing up a note for John to Mort Kondracke, the veteran journalist and executive editor of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. I sent such letters out several times a day, so I didn’t think twice about it, until a few days later when I saw it reprinted in the New York Post. I had misspelled Kondracke’s name.
Oh no, this is bad, I thought. Within minutes of the paper’s arrival, John called me into his office. My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding when I heard John’s voice tightly articulating my name. Stepping into his office, I realized it was worse than I’d feared. John was behind his desk, white-knuckling the paper. He was so mad that I tried a preemptive self-effacing remark to avoid getting chewed out.
“I’m so humiliated,” I said.
He wasn’t having any of it. “How do you think I feel? Like people don’t think I’m dumb enough already.”
I swore to him and to myself it would be the last time I was so careless.
But being a decent assistant isn’t just about making your boss look good. I had to understand John’s motivations and aspirations so that I could act on his behalf without embarrassing either of us. As with any relationship, figuring him out took time—and my screwu
ps sometimes offered the best insight into the real John.
When John asked me to make a lunch reservation for two at La Grenouille, the legendary French eatery, I made the rare mistake of completely forgetting to call. He was planning to ask Marie-Josée Kravis, the glamorous economist wife of the billionaire financier Henry Kravis, to join him on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization that fights poverty in New York City. John knew the elegant philanthropist would feel at home at the upscale restaurant. However, when they entered the dining room, the maitre d’ had no reservation listed for John Kennedy.
John called the office from a pay phone (this was before cell phones) and lit into me.
“They don’t have my name down. There’s no reservation,” he yelled. “What am I supposed to do, take her to Hamburger Harry’s?”
I knew I’d messed up, but John’s anger surprised me. He was always so laid-back. Had I misread him? Was he really an entitled asshole? I don’t know if I was caught off guard or simply scared by his fury, but either way, I lied to him.
“I-I don’t know what happened,” I stammered. “I made the reservation. Even if they don’t have your name, won’t they just seat you anyway?”
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