The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  The park in County Cork had a bronze-relief sculpture of John F. Kennedy at the entrance, youthful and smiling. I walked by it the next morning, wondering if he’d been responsible for the surprisingly good sleep I’d had. John looked at it as well. I can’t even imagine what he was thinking. We left the park and drove directly to Dublin, where we were staying one more night before returning to London. In search of music and some girls to flirt with, we went to a nightspot called the Paris Disco. It had the feel of a high-school dance, with an open bar. The phrase sexual tension does not begin to describe the atmosphere. There were maybe forty men in the basement club, lined up in five rows of eight at the bar. When the front line was served, the group of eight, who all seemed to know one another, would rotate to the back of the line. The next row up, as if guided by a metronome, would finish their beers just as they reached the bar. The whole rotation took about fifteen minutes, and it went like clockwork.

  John and I got in formation and mastered the rhythm quickly, though John needed two cycles to finish his beer. As we watched, we saw there was another component to the process: Every ten minutes or so, when one of the lads was cockeyed enough to ask a woman to dance, he’d totter across the dance floor, where maybe twenty women were congregated about their own, smaller bar. The other men would look on as if one of their own had died, sometimes leaving their position to retrieve a mate who fell, drunk or perhaps disoriented by the flashing disco ball. John started to help one guy who’d fallen but he was held back by the man’s pals, who let their buddy stew on the floor for half a minute before jostling him upright. The women giggled.

  “Well,” said John as we were leaving, “that helps explain why Grandpa Patrick left.”

  By the next evening, we were back at the Ritz in London. Sadly, our stay lasted only the ten minutes it took for kind Victor Legg to give us the cash Mrs. Onassis had wired. Victor asked us where we were staying that night. We smiled politely, thanked him for his help, and left. We spent the night snug in our sleeping bags in Hyde Park, a stone’s throw from the honeymoon suite I’d slept in not long before. Our urban campsite was encircled by eight park chairs we’d set up to protect us from the police Land Rovers that roared through the park at night. I missed the room service. John, of course, was perfectly content.

  The following day, we were off to the port city of Newcastle, on the southern coast of England, embarking on an overnight ferry to Amsterdam. It was a miserable trip salvaged by the sight of a magnificent tall ship making its way up the Amstel River in the morning. Actually, this was typical of our Grand Tour: We’d get off to a miserable start, not being morning people, and then go on to memorable adventures and hours of hilarity. Our wondrous view this time was the 375-foot Kruzenstern, from Russia, which I’d seen at the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976 and would see again with John at the Liberty Centennial in 1986.

  On to the Kabul Inn, a youth hostel in the red-light district of Amsterdam. The rooms were huge, filled with enough bunk beds to hold forty people, and the facilities looked exactly like a stadium bathroom. We were awakened in the morning by the sound of the naked Swedish twins giggling in the bunks next to us, but we checked out anyway and found a cozy little inn called the Dam right off the main plaza in the old city. That night we went out to experience Amsterdam’s famed red-light district. Our evening began at the famous Milkweg bar and dance club. After witnessing a criminal assault on some musical instruments there, we proceeded up the street, stopping at another Heineken outpost and ordering a round to screw up our courage. Then we headed back to the red-light district to avail ourselves of the reasonably priced talent that preens in the ruby-lit storefront windows. Sadly, my libido was overcome by my guilt, or maybe a lack of cojones. But John, who was between serious girlfriends at the time, suffered no such pangs. I felt like a total loser, waiting down the street for John to arrive with tales of a tall, beautiful blonde.

  Sticking to our traveling method, we saw very few of the recommended tourist sites in Amsterdam. We did visit the zoo, where I took pictures of large tropical fish. We rented bikes with the idea of touring the city, though within a few blocks of the bike shop we lost interest in touring and hurled ourselves into a fiercely competitive race to an unknown finish line. We literally careened through the city for three straight hours, trading the lead back and forth, attempting to lose the back rider in the alleys. The final lap turned out to be a stretch of road, the Stadhouderskade, that passed right under a large ornate building. I was ahead at the time and noticed a brightly colored poster indicating that we were flying past the Rijksmuseum, one of the finest museums in Europe. We blew by it in seconds. John, focused on regaining the lead, didn’t even notice that we were hurtling past the House of Rembrandt. Without slowing, I yelled back, “Hey, that was the Rijksmuseum.”

  “What?” he barked, the museum three blocks behind us by now.

  “That … was … the … Rijksmuseum!” I shouted breathlessly.

  At which point, out of energy and apparently finished with our race, we slowed and fell in a heap of metal and flesh. Lunch and a long nap completed the barbarian tour.

  We ran out of money again that evening. It was my fault. I was missing Frannie badly and decided to give her a call. I entered the little phone booth embedded in the wall of the hotel lobby and called the States. There was a meter in the booth, a little silver box with maybe ten digits of rotating counters that indicated the cost of the call in guilders. (Guilders, gone now in the wake of the euro, were beautiful banknotes that looked just like play money.) As I was talking, saying nothing in particular but completely lost in the pleasure of talking to my girlfriend, the meter reached twenty guilders, then stuttered and stopped. I didn’t think twice about it. A short while later, a hotel attendant whose face did not reach the window on the door started banging on the booth. He was yelling, in crystal-clear, panicky-sounding English, “One hundred twenty guilder!”

  Then moments later, with a higher pitch, “One hundred twenty-five guilder!”

  Now, I was in love, so this faceless gentleman had absolutely no effect on me. I just kept talking. What’s a guilder, anyway? A moment later John, who’d been fetched by the desperate attendant, burst into the phone booth and ripped the phone out of my hand.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded incredulously. But he knew. And it was too late.

  My extended love call had left us with just enough money to get back to London, where we could place another cash call home, my uncle acting as the intermediary this time. We stuffed our wardrobes into our backpacks the next morning and headed for England. Which was a bummer, because we’d just scratched the surface of Europe. We’d missed much of what we were supposed to see, the museums and the historic sights, because we were too busy having a ball, enjoying each other’s company in these new, fantastical settings. But the date on my return ticket said it was almost time to go home.

  English Customs, this time in the coastal city of Brighton, once again proved a problem for John. Two young border guards with big, red-faced heads noticed that his passport was special. “Special” in that it was valid only for entry into South Africa, a formality required by the State Department because of U.S. sanctions against apartheid. John had lost track of his regular passport a few days before, when it was either stolen from his pack at the Kabul (his theory) or lost during our wanderings (my theory). John hadn’t worried much about it, because, well, he was John and he also had a superofficial ID in the form of his “special” passport. We figured entering England wouldn’t be a problem.

  It was a problem, or at least an entertaining diversion for the border guards. The two immediately realized who was standing in front of them, without the requisite documents. Like two cats who’d just cornered a mouse, they began quietly. They mused out loud, looking at John’s inadequate papers, “So, you don’t have a valid passport and you want to come into England?”

  That’s what they said. But this, when John and I compared notes later, is what
we both heard: “Ahhhh. Mr. Big Swinging American Prince is upstream without a paddle on our watch.”

  I was already on British soil by now, having been stamped through by the same two blokes moments earlier. When I realized what was happening, I snorted softly. John’s interrogators looked up, acknowledged their audience with sly smiles, and returned to their game.

  The shorter, stouter one asked John, “Well … do you have a plane ticket home?”

  His face a little red, John admitted that no, he didn’t have a plane ticket. The taller guard then repeated the chorus: “No passport, no ticket home, and you want to come into England.”

  Short-and-Stout then asked John if he had any money. He did not. Not one dollar or guilder or pound. I had the cash, all three pounds of it. John wisely assumed a humble stance, lowering his head and replying, “No, I have no money. Either.” This last was sort of squeaky.

  The tall one summarized again, this time in a tone that implied he might just turn John back, leaving him stuck between ports on the English Channel forever.

  “Let’s get this straight, guv-ner,” he said slowly, speaking to John as if he hadn’t seen anyone as clearly criminal in a long time. “You have no passport, no ticket, and no money. And you want to come into our country.” It was a question, but he didn’t say it like a question.

  At which point I let loose a loud American-style guffaw.

  John didn’t look at me, either because he was annoyed or because he was afraid he’d burst out laughing himself. Instead, he raised his head, looked them both in the eye, and mustered a truly sincere “Sorry.”

  The cats let the mouse go. In fact, having had their fun—as they were entitled—they actually carried John’s pack over the line for him. John, as red-cheeked as I ever saw him, kept his eyes on the floor on his ten-foot perp walk across the border.

  Our tickets took us through to a London tube station, but we lacked cab fare and so had a long, cold walk to the Ritz. We asked to see the one and only Victor Legg, who lent us five pounds.

  You should always repay your debts. Several years later, while making conversation with Mrs. Onassis during the intermission of a play at New York’s Public Theater, I suffered the shame of the deadbeat.

  “Oh, Rob, did I mention that I saw the good Victor Legg this past month?” Mrs. Onassis asked casually.

  Instantly reminded of our irresponsible behavior, I stammered, “Uh-uh-uh … n-n-no … uh … no … What a great guy!”

  She leaned over, dropping her whisper of a voice a notch softer, and said, “You’re all square with him now. He is truly a lovely man.”

  I may as well have baaed like a sheep, but I said, “Yuh, great! Thanks a lot. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

  She smiled. I felt a little nauseous.

  It’s probably good she didn’t know how we spent the money: on two pints of Guinness and two tickets to Caddyshack. When the movie was over, we made camp about half a mile away from our last spot, in a grassy area called St. James’s Park. We unfurled our sleeping bags up against a pond to avoid getting run over. I was actually sound asleep, having learned against all odds to sleep in the dirt, when a ferocious barking sound woke me with a jolt. Two lunging, snarling rottweilers, barely restrained on their leashes, were snapping and growling less than a foot from our faces. Their owner, no doubt a good citizen who didn’t appreciate the New World trailer park we’d made of the queen’s grounds, didn’t say a word. He just allowed his two terrifying beasts to snap and growl at us as we lay there, frozen in fear. Then he walked away. When the adrenaline subsided, we fell back asleep. Until a Range Rover drove right up to our feet and a chipper bobby asked, through the 120-decibel public-address system attached to his truck, “Nuf sleep, gentlemen?”

  We leaped to our feet, grabbed our stuff, and stumbled away, my seersucker trousers dragging behind my backpack. We made it to the relative comfort of a wooden bench at the park’s entrance before collapsing. Only then, eyes open in the light of early morning, did we realize that we had slept right in front of Buckingham Palace.

  Given how badly the night had gone, it only made sense that we’d be a little grouchy the next day. We were in the British Museum, attempting to compensate for all the art-and-culture stuff we’d missed, when we started arguing. I don’t remember what it was about. All I remember, as did John later, is that John was so distracted that he walked right by a large mirror in the lobby—and didn’t look in it. This was a first in my experience. I had never known him to miss a mirror. Still angry over whatever it was we were fighting about, I said loudly, “You missed one!”

  He knew exactly what I was talking about. He turned around and stomped out of the museum. I wasn’t about to follow. So we lost each other and had no backup plan. We were supposed to stay at the house of my ex-stepuncle that night, a man by the name of Johnny McCarthy. But I’d never given John the address, so he had no idea where to go.

  I made my way over to my uncle’s for supper, looking forward to a real bed and the cash my mother had wired over. I walked into the living room and there was John, drinking tea and sharing stories with my uncle as if they were old friends. Two points for him. I have no idea how he got there, because I refused to ask. For the next eighteen years, though, whenever a mirror came into view, one of us would shout, “You missed one!”

  Am I saying that John was vain? Yup. Can you blame him? The guy was a walking, talking Greek statue. And he knew it. If People magazine had ever replaced him as the world’s sexiest man, I’d have had to watch him cry.

  John also loved clothes. He came by his sense of style naturally, of course, given that Mrs. Onassis was the epitome of chic. And it didn’t hurt to get the gifts and discounts that designers and manufacturers give to celebrities. If designers sent me nice clothes and invited me to shop at a discount in their stores, I might look better, too. Actually, I looked better just for knowing John, since he gave me loads of sports stuff he received from Adidas. (I’m still wearing it, even though I’m a Nike man.) He took great pleasure in mocking my rumpled wardrobe, though in fact most of his friends weren’t stylish in the least. He would often tug my collar to see what label I was wearing and then laugh at me for having too little taste and paying too much money. Later in life, he had at least fifty suits arranged by slight gradation of color in two closets in his apartment. He’d sometimes thumb through my three, usually dirty, suits with grunts of pity, muttering words like “threadbare” and “dry cleaner.” Fashion was one of the few areas where John assumed the role of an elitist. He was a natty dresser with a competitive streak, and because style is a sport where nobody gets hurt, he mercilessly vanquished all around him.

  Having added the mirror to our shared repertoire of private jokes, we came to the end of our Grand Tour and made our way back to the States separately. I left my uncle’s house a day earlier than John because his passport issues needed ironing out. Mrs. Onassis had invited me to stay at her place when I got back, to wait out John’s return so he and I could debrief each other. I slept late the first morning back, jet-lagged but giddy from the whole incredible (at least to me) travel experience. As I wandered out of the bedroom in search of food, I walked by a large study, one of the apartment’s fifteen rooms, and saw Mr. Tempelsman working at a big table. A beautiful old gilt desk that looked as if it had snuck out of the Louis XIV collection of the Met across the street stood between two sets of doors that led to a terrace. Mrs. Onassis had her chair facing away from the small television—strange, I thought—that was housed in a cabinet under the bookcases. Bookcases covered the walls, filled with old hardcover books, including several large black portfolios that were Mrs. Onassis’s private family anthologies. These leather-bound tomes were part of a tradition started by John F. Kennedy after his brother Joe was killed in World War II. The first volume in the series was titled “As We Remember Joe.”

  Walking by the study that morning, I said cheerfully, “Morning, Maurice!”

  Then stopped, took three steps ba
ck to the doorframe, and corrected myself. “I mean, Mr. Tempelsman.”

  I walked on, hearing him call out warmly, “Maurice is fine. Get some breakfast!”

  Maurice had just arrived from Africa that morning and was no doubt eager to reclaim his room, where I’d slept the previous night. The guest room was large and bright during the day, situated on the south side of the apartment. It was not a suite but shared a door with Mrs. Onassis’s room. Incorrigibly curious, I’d opened that door, not knowing where it went, and was shocked to find myself looking into Mrs. Onassis’s bedroom. Thankfully, she was long gone for the day. Her room was bright and airy, with a dazzling view of Central Park. There was very little furniture and just a few decorative objects. I recall two framed pictures, of John and Caroline as toddlers. The most remarkable thing about the guest room was the closet, home to maybe forty pairs of seemingly identical, well-ironed white slacks. I had found the original source of all Capri pants.

  On the way toward the kitchen, I passed two large mirror-backed tables, each covered with jewel-encrusted swords and enameled boxes that looked Ottoman. After Mrs. Onassis died, John kept one of the smaller swords, a highly detailed blade with a ruby-covered dagger attached to the scabbard, on the coffee table at his apartment on North Moore Street. I walked by the French doors in the living room and was momentarily stunned by the vastness of Central Park, which spread out to the north and south of the apartment. The Central Park reservoir, now named after Mrs. Onassis, sparkled in the sun directly in front of the living-room terrace.

  In the dining room, I knew, sat the one reference to Mrs. Onassis’s role as First Lady, at least the only one I ever saw. It was a big black photo album with an enormous gold presidential seal on it. It sat on top of a concert grand piano. I never looked in it. There, in that house, it looked formidably private and, despite the official seal, utterly personal. It was an inanimate object that somehow felt alive. I felt as though there was a Secret Service agent behind the curtain to guard it.