The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Our life on Eighty-sixth Street had a different rhythm than at school, what with jobs and all, but we found time to party. I was working at a small brokerage firm, Evans and Company, and John worked quietly for various good causes, essentially taking a working break between his undergraduate education and law school, where he’d decided to go soon after graduating from Brown. The Kennedy family had a longtime interest in special education and John devoted many hours to working on projects that ultimately became serious charitable efforts, including the East Harlem School at Exodus House and Reaching Up. He took a small salary from the New York City Office of Business Development from 1984 through early 1986 and served as the deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation in 1986, working under his mother’s good friend Fred Papert. He did some acting for fun during this period. He began to study for the law boards in 1985, with the idea of starting law school in the fall of 1986.

  But work was just one priority: It was the mid-eighties and New York was unbelievably exciting. I know New Yorkers get accused of thinking that our city is the center of the universe, and I know (sort of) that it’s not. But at that particular moment in history, there wasn’t a more exhilarating place to live. The city was edgy, raw, more dangerous and less civil than it is now, but also coursing with energy. Cocaine and pot were the drugs of choice in the city then, available anywhere anytime. You could have your cocaine delivered, or you could stop by the dry cleaner and pick it up on your way home. It was fun on occasion, but we managed to keep our activity limited and “recreational.” The allure faded over time. In part, I think that was our own discipline—we were both particularly sensitive about abusing our bodies—but it was also luck. No one wants to get addicted. We both had friends who lost control, some who battled back to a healthy life and others, sadly, who were swept away.

  Going out with John at night was like having a key to the city. He was invited to everything. Doormen bowed and velvet ropes fell when he stepped out of a cab. Sometimes I felt as though I was with Moses, watching the crowd in front of Area or Save the Robots part like the Red Sea. We didn’t go out every night, but the opportunity was always there. Monday was the China Club, where the New York Giants partied and Lawrence Taylor was known to do “shots” with fifths of vodka. Tuesday was Nell’s, sometimes for dinner, better for dancing. Wednesday heated up with a regular gig at the Roxy. On Thursday you’d try to find Sasha Bardet’s moving club, which had its best run on Beach Street. At the Pyramid Club you might find an entire wedding party in drag, while the World had a starry ceiling and great DJs. I liked it more than John did. He went out often, loved the energy, enjoyed being the center of attention, but he had just as good a time hanging out at home with his friends. And both of us valued our sleep, which precluded constant clubbing.

  We had people over, but only occasionally. One night we invited some friends over to watch the sixth game of the Red Sox–Mets World Series and the Giants versus the Redskins, which were on at the same time. We stacked two TVs and put out some chips and dip. The guests arrived, we dipped our chips for a bit, and then it was game time. Everyone found a seat, John picked up the remote, and the screen lit up—to reveal the XXX porno tape that someone had left in the VCR. John and I went beet red as the fifteen people in our living room watched in stunned silence.

  Instinctively, John and I pointed at each other. We’d been doing this for years. Except we both knew that John had left the movie there. He leaped up and pushed the VCR’s ON/OFF button practically into the next building. The crowd started breathing again and everyone burst out laughing. John rubbed his hands together and asked, “Does anyone need anything? Beer? More chips?”

  Our apartment was indeed the site of some strange sexual adventures—sadly, not all of them ours. One time, a friend came to visit for a few days and brought with him a flight attendant he’d met on his trip. Being good hosts, John and I offered up our rooms. Strangely, he chose John’s, though it was the smaller one. We learned why later in the night, after they had retired for the evening and inadvertently (I hope) left the door open a crack. We shouldn’t have seen this, but we did: our lusty friend rubbing the sheepskin collar of John’s father’s official commander in chief leather flight jacket on the bare breasts of his guest. He was whispering seductively something about the “First Coat.” Truth. John and I stumbled out the front door and into the stairwell, snorting with laughter. We never said a word about the incident, even when the woman stepped out of the bedroom the next morning wearing only a thong and the aphrodisiac coat.

  Another time a friend of John’s, a transplanted New Yorker living in San Francisco, was coming to stay with us. He arrived at the apartment one winter afternoon and went out to dinner before I got a chance to meet him. John left me a note saying that he’d given his friend, also named John, the house keys and that I should expect to see him about eleven that night. But he didn’t show up. The next morning, as I munched my dry Cap’n Crunch and John inhaled his twenty-nine-grain toast and bowl of Euell Gibbons feed, John explained that his friend was in New York to tell his family he was gay. He was surprised that he hadn’t come back the previous night. We showered and started to walk out together, leaving a note for the missing guest. As we stepped out into the hallway, we were greeted by the sight of two gray-trousered legs sticking out of the utility closet. Cuffed and nicely creased. It was a little creepy. Then the legs stirred and our guest stood up and stepped into the light. John, the roommate, introduced us with his usual manners.

  “Robert,” he said, addressing me formally, “I’d like you to meet my friend John. Who came to New York to come out of the closet.” And so he did.

  Our problems in those days were small and easily resolved. I learned to leave my pressed shirts at work to avoid drenching them in subway-generated sweat. John struggled with how to hold on to a bicycle. He lived on his bike, using it to get around in all seasons, and had one stolen at least every three months. I’ve had a number of bikes stolen in the city over the years—it happens, especially to nice shiny new bikes, which was what John always had. But he set some kind of record. He got my bike stolen once, explaining later that he’d left it right outside the window of a diner where he was eating. He couldn’t believe it had been pinched. “Did you lock it?” I asked.

  “No,” he responded, seemingly surprised at the question.

  The BGM (bike gone missing) problem annoyed John, but he hated losing his wallet more. It left him all the time. We once drove an hour back to a rest stop on I-95 because he’d tossed it in the garbage pail at McDonald’s. He finally solved the problem by buying a wallet that chained to his pants. Making sport of John’s seeming absentmindedness was a favorite pastime of all who knew him. I think he wasn’t so much absentminded as overbooked. With so much going on all the time, a few things were bound to get lost in the shuffle. And he liked the ribbing he got. It made him accessible and balanced out his intimidating features. In that, it served his purpose: to make people comfortable.

  John chose to go to law school because it was the logical thing to do. It’s the straightest line to the many different careers, including social justice and politics, in which he was interested. I think it was also something of a family tradition—that’s what the majority of Kennedys did, they went to law school. He encountered a speed bump, though, in the form of the LSATs, the required test for all law-school applicants. He never did that well on standardized tests, but whatever his learning issues, he didn’t make excuses. When he got his scores, I asked how he did and he gave me the old thumbs-down. The only time I saw him truly dismayed was the day he got rejected from Harvard Law School. He got home and went right to the mail. I’d already noticed that the letter from Harvard was thin—a bad sign. He opened the letter, tossed it on the table, and said darkly, “I’m not going there.” Then he went to his room and closed the door. He came out the next morning cheerful and calm. And proceeded to get rejected again. It was painful to pull the thin envelopes out of our mailbo
x—I wanted to hide them. At one point he wondered if he was going to get in anywhere. He worried that the schools he’d applied to assumed he wasn’t serious about the law. I don’t think he wanted to be a lawyer forever, but the law is the logical path to public life in this country and he was committed to doing well. Finally, he got into New York University Law School, a great school and maybe a better place for him than Harvard, where his family name was currency. I was sorry he’d had to go through the wringer but was glad he was staying nearby.

  Seven

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  ABOUT THE TIME that our lease on Eighty-sixth Street was expiring, John and I were invited over to his mother’s apartment for a casual weekday supper, ostensibly to get a home-cooked meal, Marta-style. As we sat down to eat, I noticed something odd that I’d seen Mrs. Onassis do many times before. As soon as Efigenio (“Effy” Pinhiero was the family’s longtime butler and beloved man Friday) served her—he always put her plate down first—Mrs. Onassis lifted her fork and placed it across the plate. This time, since it was just the three of us at the table, I asked, “What’s with the fastest-fork-in-the-East thing?”

  She explained that it was a custom, one of the myriad protocols of state and home etiquette she’d mastered. Before anyone else at the table could eat, the lady of the table must either take a bite out of something on her plate or simply put her fork on it. I insist on that at home now. Moments later she showed me the real meaning of “hostess.” I’m a heavyweight oddball when it comes to food. Picky doesn’t begin to describe my plight. I literally cannot eat most things served at a proper table without gagging. It’s an issue that’s always made me nervous at dinner parties. My stomach was in a knot that night at the prospect of having to push scallops or veal around my plate under the all-seeing gaze of Mrs. Onassis. And there wasn’t a pet in sight to help me. Efigenio came through the kitchen door again, this time smiling like the canary who’d escaped the cat. He placed my plate in front of me and I looked down to see a burned hamburger on a toasted Wonder Bread hamburger roll, with a large mound of white Minute Rice on the side. My favorite meal! Before I could stutter out my gratitude, Mrs. O smiled and waved her hand in the air to stop me. My shoulders dropped an inch, and we all started eating.

  As the meal progressed, Mrs. Onassis got to the point: We were there for a reason, it turned out. She suggested that since John was deeply immersed in the work of law school and I had embarked on my own career, perhaps our living together—our extended fraternity run, as it were—wasn’t such a good idea. This was done gently but firmly. She even asked whether I’d help John with his schoolwork, if needed, when we lived apart. She ended the dinner with a toast, wishing both John and me a speedy ascent to the top of our respective professions.

  This was vintage Mrs. O. She didn’t tell John what to do. She presented her opinion in a way that made sense and with the utmost respect for the feelings of everyone involved. It was hard not to see her point: Our lease was ending, John was in law school, and hard work was not what we did best together. John described us, jokingly, as “breaking up,” but she was right and we took her advice.

  When we moved out, People magazine quoted our landlord complaining that the apartment had been abused. An unnamed source told New York magazine, “It looked like a herd of yaks had lived there.” I’ll admit that we’d made several large dings in the plaster walls, the result of some roughhousing gone bad, and that the rug was worn in front of the couch. But we had the walls replastered and the rug cleaned (John’s idea—irresponsibility always cost him more than me). So we weren’t model tenants. It wasn’t the kind of offense that rated national coverage.

  I moved to an apartment on West End Avenue with another Brown friend, while John moved alone to a hotel apartment on the East Side. I don’t remember the name of it. He worked hard at law school, made a bunch of friends, graduated in 1989, and went to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He considered an offer to work for the Clinton administration, in the Justice Department, not long after joining the DA. (He’d actually interned for the Reagan administration’s Justice Department in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1987, a move that was seemingly out of Democratic character, but John liked President Reagan and was really just looking to gain some practical experience.) He asked me what I thought about his taking the job. I advised against it, saying it would be a mistake, politically, to hook up with an unproven quantity out of Arkansas. I believed that, but I’m sure I was also rationalizing to keep him in New York. He’d done a stint as a paralegal for an old Kennedy counselor and ex–Democratic National Committee chairman, Charles Manatt, in Los Angeles in the summer of 1988, while he was in law school, and I’d missed him a lot.

  As is standard, John began working in the District Attorney’s Office before taking the bar exam, that cerebral shakedown cruise all lawyers must survive before practicing. He took the bar exam in late 1989 and flunked. The tabloids had a party, but John shook it off and persevered. He took the exam again and flunked again. This time the experience drove him to drink.

  He called me the afternoon he received his second bar exam score. I was living downtown with Frannie by then. A water main had broken on an icy night in January and filled up my duplex basement apartment on West End Avenue like an ice cube tray. I headed downtown for good, Frannie and I forced to live together, despite our misgivings, by an act of God. John’s voice was low as he said, “Yo … I failed the bar again. Not good.”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t come up with a helpful response. I tried a platitude or two, but John was too frustrated even to mock my words. He finished the conversation by telling me he was going to “haul up north with a bottle of Macallan.” He drove his little blue truck, a GMC Typhoon, up to a motel near Lake George, checked in, and slowly drank a bottle of Scotch over the course of the weekend, alone and listening to self-help tapes. I’m not sure the tapes did much good, but he did get a therapist not long after. He found it a great help, allowing him to articulate the enormous complexities of his life without worrying about sounding ungrateful or weak.

  When John failed the second time, it seemed to precipitate a crisis of sorts regarding his father. By the age of twenty-nine, his dad had already written a bestseller, won a Purple Heart, and been elected to Congress. One day, about a week after the second no-pass, an older colleague at the District Attorney’s Office made some flip comment about John’s career relative to his dad’s. I don’t know exactly what the guy said, and John wasn’t about to repeat it, but it hurt. John scowled at me as he told the story, stating adamantly, “I’m not my father.”

  I shot back, “You’re not? Well, who’s going to be him, then?”

  He smirked appreciatively. I think he was finally ready to come to terms with the subject. His choices were fairly clear: He could drive himself insane trying to compete with the legacy of a legend, or he could figure out a way to live his own life. And from experience, I can tell you that the pressure of a dead father is less than that of a live one. For one thing, you can tell yourself that he would have wanted you to be happy. That’s what most loving parents want for their children.

  Faced with the district attorney’s rule that failing the bar three times got you fired, John hired a tutor and arranged for a special test session, alone and with looser time restrictions. It worked and he passed. He ultimately spent four years as an assistant district attorney. He might have stayed longer—he was good at his job and won all six of the cases he prosecuted—but his celebrity proved a huge hindrance. For one thing, his boss, the respected Robert Morgenthau, was understandably wary about putting John in the courtroom, given the media circus it caused. There were problems with the defendants, too: They would confess to him. They’d confess to win his attention and sympathy. It frustrated John no end. He said they saw him as a potential ally. “They think I can help them,” he told me. “So they confide in me—the prosecutor. Greaaaat.”

  Eventually he decided to abandon the legal profe
ssion. To me there’s no mystery as to why. He’d never spoken with any passion about being a lawyer. The defendants were giving up their right to remain silent, and thus out of jail, in exchange for a few kind words from him. And every time he set foot in a courtroom, the media put him on trial, too. The guy was not meant to be a lawyer. His departure was not according to plan, though. John wanted to come out of the District Attorney’s Office after a successful career corralling big bad guys, much as Rudy Giuliani had done as U.S. attorney. When that proved impossible, he had to shift gears.

  He moved to the business world, setting up a corporation, Random Ventures, aptly named to pursue whatever opportunities came down the pike. He considered such things as selling handmade kayaks before coming up with George. The idea was his—he could see the rising demand for celebrity journalism, and he knew that politicians filled the bill. Jann Wenner, an old friend of John’s, influenced his decision by example.

  The premise of George was that the juncture of politics and celebrity was an interesting, even important, place. John was born at that juncture. He understood the media better than most and was at ease in the corridors of Washington, D.C. He grew up in the era of Ronald Reagan, living proof that if you can act the part, you can get the role. The civic value of George also mattered to John—he wouldn’t have published a pure entertainment magazine—and he argued that if you got people interested in politicians, you’d get them interested in politics. Time has proved him right, of course.

  John had a good idea—and the courage to put his reputation on the line in a most public way—but he wisely let others come up with the financing for George. It’s one thing (a very big thing) to risk your name and credibility. It’s another to risk the family fortune by pouring millions of dollars into a magazine start-up. So John, who always bought the best but had a pennywise New Englander’s grip on his wallet, structured George as an earn-out deal. He received his ownership stake based on the success of the project, ending up with a 50 percent share, the maximum possible. Given what his name and presence alone were worth to the magazine, he probably sold himself short.