The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  On the deck at the Snowbird Lodge. (Courtesy of Dave Eikenberry)

  For five long, mountain-cold minutes he composed himself and readjusted his equipment. He’d look up every thirty seconds or so, acknowledge my polite smile, and grumble, “Dick.”

  As if I’d done something wrong. I suggested that he take a break and offered to go in with him so that it would remain our little secret. My compassion infuriated him, as I’d known it would. Waving me off, he skied away in the direction of the base lodge to get new sunglasses, unwilling to admit defeat as long as the day was still young. (Any guy who has skied with another guy knows exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a mad competition. Who’s stronger, faster, and better? I can’t walk normally for weeks after a three-day ski outing with the boys—we pretty much try to kill one another.) John and I almost called a truce on our last trip to Deer Valley. We spoke like two old Cold War negotiators, at the top of the lift on our first run. I suggested that we were equal skiers and we could relax for a run or two. He agreed, but it wasn’t much fun. Before we got back to the top for the second run, we were lobbying our chairlift mates to pick the better skier.

  For us, competition was a fundamental element of friendship. But it wasn’t a ferocious contest of egos, as it seemed on the football field in Hyannis Port. It was one of the ways, maybe the purest way, we connected to each other. Some friends have heart-to-hearts over dinner. We didn’t do that. We played racquetball. And skied. And talked a little between bantering. People will ask me questions about John sometimes and not understand how I don’t know the answer. Well, I never asked the question. Ours was a bond forged in activity (though it was more than that, too), and we enjoyed each other’s company most when we were wholly engaged in something physical.

  As John skied off with his sunglasses still askew, he yelled back that he’d meet us at Chick’s Place, the mid-mountain eatery at Alta. Not long after, while our group made its way to lunch, we heard John yelling from the chairlift, “Hey! Wait up. Wait uuuuuupp!”

  Which didn’t sound like him at all, indicating to me that he was still dazed from his fall. We found a flat spot under the chairlift and settled on the trail to wait. With a fresh set of sunglasses on his head and an introspective chairlift ride under his belt, John took off down the steep hill like a shot, taking the fall line directly toward us. Bad luck intact, he hit a gnarled twig poking out of the snow and wiped out completely. Skiers call it a “yard sale,” because all your equipment flies off and lands scattered about the hill, spread out as if for sale. John then slid a good thirty yards at increasing speed until he wrapped around the lone sapling on the slope, a little like a wet newspaper. He yelled, with all the anger and frustration left in his body, “Littelllll!”

  Everyone looked at me, perhaps not seeing the connection. Victory in hand, I suggested that the others go on to lunch, and I’d wait for John. He schussed down soon enough, and to my dismay his sunglasses were cockeyed again. Nobody likes to see his buddy lose his dignity. I adjusted his glasses while he snorted appreciatively and then we skied to lunch.

  I took my turns as the goat, too. Once, after a monster day on the slopes of Park City, we settled in for some après-ski food and cocktails at a Mexican restaurant on the plaza. Already naturally doped up from the day’s exhilarating activities, I had three margaritas and got silly drunk. I handed the car keys over to my sister, while John and another friend, Dave Eikenberry, made fun of my sodden state. I giggled like a little kid in the backseat and suffered a harsh hangover the next morning. We headed out again for another big day of skiing and an encore visit to Marita’s Cantina. We sat at the same table and had the same friendly waitress. I ordered a margarita, swearing that I was going to have only one. She looked at me strangely and suggested I try getting some tequila for my drink. You see, in Utah back then, they didn’t put the liquor in the drinks. The waitress brought you a “setup,” and you had to go to the control point to buy the minibottle to make a real cocktail out of it. Meaning I’d been hammered the night before on the pure power of suggestion. Needless to say, it was a long evening.

  *

  I had a running dialogue with Mrs. Onassis over the years as to the best name for John’s and my generation. We were not quite baby boomers and not quite Gen Xers. We were the first generation in many to grow up without a draft, much less a war to fight. Too young for Vietnam and too old for the Gulf War, we were just pups during the civil rights movement, the sixties, Watergate, and other societal upheavals. We’d come of age in a time of calm and plenty and been coddled to near apathy. Mrs. O and I agreed upon the title “the Inheritors.” Which was, in fact, a reasonable name for our generation as a whole, and particularly for John. When I told him what we’d come up with, he snorted and said, “I’ll say!”

  One of the many things John had inherited was use of the family estate down in Palm Beach. The house was designed by Addison Mizner, the legendary architect who created Palm Beach in the 1920s. It had been in the family since 1933, purchased by John’s grandfather Joe for $100,000. It was a beautiful place, with ocean views, a pool, a tennis court, and a croquet lawn. Rodman Wanamaker, who built the house, called it La Guerida, but in the early 1960s it was known as the Winter White House. It wasn’t used much by the time we went, but the extended family had a sort of time-share arrangement that allotted John and Caroline the first two weeks in March. John, his new girlfriend, Christina Haag (a Brown alumna he’d had a crush on—or in John’s words, a “sneaker for”—for a long time), Frannie, and I flew down, rented a convertible, and immediately got lost in West Palm Beach. We were puzzling over a map at a stoplight when a man in the car behind us, too polite to honk, stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Don’t get no greener.” I love that line.

  The house was grand but eerie. As I remember it, there was a vast living room running almost the length of the house with a large fireplace and a stairway up to the master bedrooms in the middle. The wall facing the beach had multiple glass doors and windows that opened onto a simple lawn with thick green grass. Not a lot of fancy gardening. We made camp in the southwestern corner of the manse, near the tennis court and pool. That first night, Frannie wanted a snack and sent me off to search for the kitchen. I’ve never been afraid of the dark, but I was spooked. I passed a small study and stepped inside to look for a good book. The room was filled with memorabilia and Kennedy lore—framed speeches, photo albums, knickknacks from high office. It was like a mini–congressional library, dark and musty and stuck in time. There was nothing remotely similar to this at 1040 or on the Vineyard or in Mrs. Onassis’s little farmhouse in Peapack, New Jersey, which I visited just once. I think Mrs. O, knowing that the past can be oppressive, had limited its presence in her own homes. I clearly remember a framed speech by Teddy Kennedy leaning on a bookcase. It was a plea of sorts, a passionate defense of liberalism that had clearly been written during the height of Reagan’s conservative administration. I was already sensing spirits, and the speech made me sad. It was a bugler’s call to battles never finished, a reminder of soldiers fallen. There were big pictures of John’s father and Bobby Kennedy on the walls. The whole house, as I resumed my search for the kitchen, felt like a monument to lost possibilities. John and I talked about the weird energy of the house the next day. He was shaken, too, unable to dust off the cobwebs, real and emotional, that seemed everywhere. We spent as much time as possible outdoors.

  The house was sold in 1995, furniture and all, not because it was haunted but because it had become financially impractical. I think of it often now—I’ve even dreamed about it—and would love to walk there again, late at night. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but then again, I can’t imagine a more likely place to encounter John’s spirit.

  *

  Extreme sports and adventure travel were catchphrases of the early nineties, but the only really extreme thing that John and I ever did was go skydiving. (I guess you could count helicopter skiing because it was extremely fun.) I probab
ly wouldn’t have come up with the idea on my own, and I can’t say I enjoyed it, but as soon as it was over I loved telling the story.

  It started, as so many adventures with John did, with an out-of-the-blue phone call late one night. John’s great friend George Shurrell, whom he’d met at NYU Law School and who ended up working with Maurice Tempelsman in Africa, was in town and wanted to realize an old dream of parachuting. I remember the call clearly because it ruined my chance for a good night’s sleep. John began: “Yo, Rob.”

  “Yes, Goatboy?” I responded warily, hearing something up in his voice.

  “Me, George, and Eddie Hill are going skydiving tomorrow and we need some ballast,” he said.

  “What time?” I asked, cringing.

  “Six-thirty A.M.”

  “Jesus. That’s cold. Where do I go?”

  “We’ll swing by in Eddie’s van.” He added, “No showering and eating after we buzz.”

  I started to protest, but he just said, “Are ya coming?”

  He may as well have said straight out, “Do you have any cojones?” To me this was a ball check. I said yes.

  They arrived right on time the next morning in a beat-up old van driven by Ed, a good buddy of John’s from Andover. Ed, now a prominent lawyer out West, was just coming out of a hippie phase and the van was a remnant of trips gone by. We headed deep into western New Jersey, to Pittstown, where we found Skydive East inhabiting a homegrown airstrip with the improbably grand name of Alexandria Field. We took a three-hour preparation course, me cheering inwardly at the rain outside that was sure to keep us grounded. After the classroom session, during which we were required to sign our lives away on quadruplicated insurance forms, we suited up and headed outside.

  Next was jump-and-roll practice: You stand on top of two stacked blue plastic milk crates and leap off, attempting to roll along the ground into a standing position. I’m still not entirely clear on the motion. I stopped paying attention when the instructor pointed out that the actual landing was more like jumping off a two-story building but that you can’t practice that. Without paramedics standing by, I guess he meant. As we leaped from the milk crates, a jalopy of an aircraft was rolled out of the hangar and cranked up. We were going up in the original Spirit of St. Louis.

  By then, the rain had stopped, the morning clouds had blown east, and the sky was entirely blue. My emotions, which I sometimes store in my stomach, were roiling: I didn’t want to hurl myself out of an airplane. I wasn’t about to back out. It didn’t look as though the rain would return. The only thing I could hope for now was to live. I could see that Ed was thinking along the same lines, though John and George remained gung-ho.

  The noise from the ancient plane was deafening. We said a few words to the gap-toothed pilot as we climbed in, but he just revved the engines by way of response. So many people had climbed into this craft before us that the corrugated steel floor had lost its corrugation. The four of us huddled in the cabin with our bearded jumpmaster as the pilot began the slow, circling ascent to one mile. There (which is to say, nowhere) the jumpmaster asked who wanted to go first. John answered, “I got it.”

  And within thirty seconds he’d hurled himself out of the plane and into the great blue sky. George raised his hand next, his testosterone on his sleeve, and made the valiant leap as well. At that point, the jumpmaster queried Ed, who had turned the mottled green color of his van. Ed, choking down the bile, muttered, “Of course, dude. The faster I get down, the better.”

  Then it was my turn. The jumpmaster signaled me to go, though it wasn’t the “go” you’re envisioning. We were not leaping out a big door in the side of the plane the way they do in the movies. No, we had to crawl out the small passenger door and onto an eighteen-square-inch piece of rusty steel that was welded to the plane’s wheel cover. Then hold on to the wing strut with no goggles. Picture, if you will, a scared 230-pound man clinging to a plane’s wing strut a mile above the ground. I mention 230 pounds because I was five pounds above the recommended limit for our T-10 parachutes, military surplus from World War II. I was assured it was no problem—far bigger fellas than I had jumped successfully.

  I followed my instructions as if my life depended on it (duh), releasing my grip, arching my back, and counting to five. I tumbled backward as though I’d been flicked off the wing, my eyes shut like bank-vault doors until I sensed a tug at my shoulders. That meant my main chute had opened successfully. I unclenched my eyes and started laughing. Jonathan Livingston Whiteboy! The feeling was amazing—extreme freedom. And relief. Because if the main parachute hadn’t opened, we’d been told to engage in a nine-point maneuver meant to get the little reserve chute out and away from the tangled main chute. I would probably have gone fetal midway through step two. Even assuming I’d managed to get to the reserve chute, it was made for a good-size dog, not an oversize human. The instructors had breezily warned us that if the reserve chute deployed, our legs would break at touchdown.

  Below me, I watched first John and then George land. The radio attached to my reserve chute began to yap at me. “Feet together! Feet together! Feet together!”

  The urgent voice on the radio was no doubt aware that I was over the suggested weight limit for the chute, a fact that had been conveniently overlooked when my credit card cleared. As I neared the ground, the voice grew more insistent. I could just hear John’s and George’s laughter coming into range when I hit the ground. And not like a ton of bricks. I hit like a 230-pound sack of human, landing in a cornfield with both legs and feet together. My left foot found a furrow, but my right foot didn’t. Like overstretched guitar strings, several muscle strands attached to my right knee went bo-iing. The pain was sharp and immediate but was gone a moment later, at least until the next day. The Skydive East welcoming committee, a beautiful Australian girl, ran up and planted a congratulatory kiss right on my lips. This had the effect of momentarily obscuring any pain. Sweet Eddie the Eaglet came down seconds later. And he did look like a sack of potatoes, bouncing a good foot and a half off the ground upon impact.

  We shared a round of high fives and hugs. We did it! Back at the airport, we were presented with a bumper sticker, a certificate, and a report card of sorts—a little flight log that determined whether we were ready for the next level, free-falling. The initial novice jump we’d done started with a five-second free fall, after which a tether on the plane yanked the chute open. The next step took you up twice as high and let you fall freely for up to a minute, leaving the rip-cord pulling up to you. John’s report card was glowing and he became teacher’s pet that day, earning the right to free-fall on his next jump. (It never happened.) George got the go-ahead as well. Ed and me? We got stuffed. The instructor wrote in my logbook that I looked like a “beagle tossed from a pickup truck.” I was crestfallen, although of course I just stuck my chin up. Before getting back in the van, we formed a line at the phone booth to call our beloveds back in New York and inform them of our “alive” status. It was easy to promise I’d never do that again.

  Nine

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  SOMETIME IN THE mid-1980s, people started getting married. I knew that people got married, of course, but I didn’t take any notice until I’d participated in a few weddings myself. The marriage of John’s sister, Caroline, to Ed Schlossberg was one of the first I attended. And it set the bar high. Not only was it elegant and emotional, it was unpretentiously, unexpectedly fun.

  John and Caroline were as emotionally close as they were temperamentally different. Respectful and protective of each other, they had the kind of bond that parents wish for their children. I never spent a lot of time with Caroline—she rolled her eyes a lot when John and I were together, which seemed right, given that she was his elder sister and far more serious—but she graciously invited Frannie and me and a bunch of John’s other friends to her big day.

  The wedding was held on July 19, 1986, on a warm, sunny afternoon in Hyannis Port. Frannie and I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in town
the night before, arriving near midnight after an eight-hour, traffic-filled drive from New York. This drive was made all the more annoying by Frannie, who spent hours worrying aloud about her forty-dollar dress from Casual Corner. I considered leaving her at the McDonald’s in Milford, Connecticut.

  Interestingly, although Caroline was always the more reticent of the two, she planned a much bigger, more inclusive wedding than John did ten years later. No doubt that had something to do with the fact that Mrs. Onassis was still alive and knew how much joy a big festive ritual can bring to an extended family. The “family” in this case included not just Kennedys and Schlossbergs but their friends and also many members of John F. Kennedy’s administration, men and women who had known Caroline since she was a baby. The ceremony took place at a church in Centerville, Massachusetts. At the last minute Frannie decided that maybe a hat would help, and we were almost late while she dashed into a shop in town and bought a purple straw thing with flowers. After church we went back to the family compound in Hyannis Port, where two big tents had been set up. What can I say? It was a happy, gorgeous event, everyone excited for Caroline and Ed and glad to be celebrating in the name of love.