The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  I got to meet the globe’s biggest testosterone warehouse, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was pleased to note that I was maybe an inch taller. We shook hands and he scowled at me, which I took as a compliment. John liked Arnold a lot and found our “big man” posturing funny, especially considering how big Arnold actually was.

  Soon enough the dinner gong rang and the whole party moved toward the enormous white tent where dinner was being served, buffet-style. After finding our table, I went with John to get some food and found myself standing next to Mrs. Onassis’s sister, Lee Radziwill. John, the respectful nephew, introduced us, a bit gingerly I thought. She gave me a steely once-over and then basically dismissed me with a sneer. John looked as surprised as I was. But since I hadn’t had time to offend her yet, I just assumed she’d probably met one too people that day and needed some food. Mrs. Radziwill complimented John on his handsome best man’s outfit, a cheerful deep violet Perry Ellis jacket and white pants number put together by William Ivey Long. Then she turned her attention back to the service line. And a weird thing happened. As she passed a silver tray that was part of the dazzling spread laid out by the New York caterer Glorious Food, the Sterno can underneath went out with an audible sputter. John and I both saw this happen. I looked around to see if any other flames were flickering in the breeze. No breeze. I checked to see if the fuel had run out. Plenty of pinkish jelly left in the tin. John looked at me. That didn’t happen, did it? We took some chicken from the tray and went to sit down. A little shiver flashed down my spine.

  A roving videographer provided a warmer touch, walking about with a video camera and capturing the guests’ good wishes on film. He arrived at our table late in the dinner, just as Caroline was visiting. Asked to say something for the camera, I said, “May you live and love and pass on as Will and Ariel Durant.”

  John looked at me as though I were crazy. He said, “What are you talking about?”

  So I had to tell him the moving story of Will and Ariel Durant, the renowned husband-and-wife team of philosopher-historians who wrote The Story of Civilization. Two brilliant individuals, they worked together for decades, winning a Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They had a long and famously loving marriage. In 1981, at the age of ninety-six, Will was admitted to the hospital for surgery. Worried for Will’s survival, Ariel stopped eating and died shortly thereafter. When Will heard that his beloved Ariel had passed on, his heart stopped beating. As I finished telling this tale, with a catch in my voice, John continued to look at me as though I’d been caught with the caterer’s silverware in my pocket. Caroline looked at me sweetly, gave John a sisterly glare, and said, “That’s nice, Rob. Thank you.”

  Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s sister, stepping out in New York City in 1997. My introduction to her didn’t go well. (Courtesy of Mitchell Gerber/Corbis)

  John gave a now-famous toast at that wedding, welcoming Ed into the family. “All my life there has just been the three of us, Mummy, Caroline, and I,” he began. And finished with a heartfelt welcome to the fourth member of his family. I remember being surprised at the depth of John’s emotions, because I hadn’t spent much time around him and his sister. Some years later, just before his own marriage, he wrote in George that “the crises and isolation of a public life create a sense of shared burden that can bring a couple closer.” I think that also explains why Mrs. Onassis, Caroline, and John were so close.

  At the end of the evening there was a fireworks display, a gift to the couple from George Plimpton. By then, though, the sparkling day had been overrun by a classic Cape Cod fog. The crowd gathered at the edge of the lawn, near the beach, to watch the eagerly awaited program. George was handed a microphone. We heard the thud of the first firework’s rocket launch off the beach. The fog flashed a luminous pink. George quietly announced the name of the shell. After the fifth or so firework exploded unseen, Plimpton glumly began to describe each shell, telling us what it would look like if we could see it. The wedding guests would hear a whoosh, then George would say, with his patrician accent, “That was an imperial dragonflower, a bouquet of comet sparklers complemented by a central burst of red and gold and a stunning concussion. Just spectacular.” The sky would turn reddish, the smoke would swirl, and then everything went back to gray.

  To encourage him, we all exclaimed oohs and aahs on cue, looking up excitedly as if the fireworks were right in front of our eyes. Picture several hundred people huddled up against the dunes, marveling loudly at nothing. It was great fun. As the crowd’s cheers grew, George’s spirits rose. By the rousing finale, a particularly large and loud blur of pastel-colored smoke, his voice and mood reached a crescendo. And we, the viewers, knew we’d participated in something much better than a fireworks display.

  Mutual friend John Hare’s wedding—I won best man for this one. (Courtesy of Clare Hare)

  Joseph Campbell, one of Mrs. Onassis’s favorite authors, said that humanity is given definition by its rituals. Weddings were such a big part of our life from 1985 to 1995 that we were like one big traveling wedding party. John was the best man for at least five grooms over the years, including his duties as “best dude” for Chris Oberbeck when he married Liz Birkelund. He was not my best man when the time came, because Frannie and I decided to ask our siblings to stand with us. But as my wingman, he hosted a memorable bachelor party and gave a teary toast at our rehearsal dinner.

  Encore! Encore! John Hare’s bachelor party high jinks at the Iguana Grill in 1987. (Courtesy of the author)

  The early weddings were the hardest, involving brain-cell-busting bachelor parties and days-long nuptial celebrations. By the time we were thirty, the words bachelor party scared the snot out of all of us. John Hare’s dusk-to-dawn New York club crawl entered the annals of pain, followed by a memorable fete for Chris Oberbeck, whom we referred to as the king of Connecticut for his regal countenance. John arranged for Chris’s party to begin on a Friday afternoon on Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue in New York in a rented Winnebago. Our crew of about fifteen guys headed up to John’s mother’s estate on Martha’s Vineyard, called Red Gate Farm, for the weekend, but we missed the last ferry out of Woods Hole, as usual. So we detoured back to Hyannis Port to spend the night. The senator was there when we arrived. He sat with us up on the widow’s walk of one of the houses until the wee hours, telling hilarious tales with the voice and delivery of a member of Parliament. We took a ferry to the Vineyard the next morning and partied until dawn on Sunday. Ouch. John escaped to his bedroom before the sun came up, but he mused the next day, as he sometimes did after these raucous events, that someone in the group would prove to be his Judas. He knew it was possible that someone might turn and concoct a false tale to sell to the press. It never happened, though, because his friends were loyal.

  Frannie and I decided to get married in 1991, no surprise to anyone around us. Still, we were excited and our friends were more than willing to raise the flag of celebration in our honor. We planned an April wedding, at an Old World, now-defunct club in Battery Park. I asked seven good friends, including John, to be my ushers. At a rowdy Christmas party given by John’s friends Kevin and Helen Ward a few months before the event, John grabbed Frannie by the shoulders and asked, “Do you realize you’re marrying Rob Littell?” Like I was Alexander the Great or something. Now, that is a wingman.

  He came through on the bachelor party, too, inviting everyone up to the Vineyard for a party that was a reprise of Chris’s. All went according to plan: We rented the Winnebago, drove to the ferry, and missed the ferry. John was already on the Vineyard, waiting for his mates to arrive, and when we didn’t show by midnight, he called Frannie in New York.

  “Hey, Frannie, it’s John,” he started off. “Sorry to call so late. Um, do you know where those guys are?”

  We were sitting in a bar overlooking the dock in Woods Hole, having abandoned the Winnebago for a motel. We caught the first ferry out the next morning, played nine holes of golf in West Chop
, picked John up, and went to the beach for a marathon football game in the sand. Saturday night we decided to leave Red Gate Farm to go to dinner in the town of Vineyard Haven. I was toasted and roasted to a golden brown. Somehow we ended up on top of a picturesque two-story gazebo in nearby Oak Bluffs long after the town had gone to bed. We were fifteen guys in blue blazers, swapping howlers and making enough noise to turn back the tide. Suddenly John stood and quieted us. Something was wrong. We hushed long enough to hear a policeman yell up at us, “What in God’s name are you doing up there?”

  My bachelor party up at Red Gate. (Courtesy of Harold O. Mix)

  Temporarily stunned and imagining all kinds of worst-case scenarios, we looked at John. He gestured for us to come close to the railing. Then, letting loose a rebel yell, John leaped over the railing, dropped ten feet to the ground, and came up running. With fourteen men right behind him. We stampeded past the cop to the Winnebago, jammed inside, and thanks to our teetotaling designated driver, Jay Budd, were gone in seconds flat. The good officer is probably still wondering today what the hell happened that night.

  Frannie and Johnny at our wedding. (Courtesy of Sara Barrett)

  At our rehearsal dinner, John gave a beautiful toast. He spoke about our friendship, cracked a few jokes, and claimed to have learned much from our relationship, a bond between two polar opposites. He said that our “calm, knowing acceptance of each other” for who we are was an example he hoped to follow. And I remember, too, that he said our love “would always serve as a beacon” for him.

  I dated Frannie for eleven years, and we’d been married for eight when John died. In all that time, even when John and I were randy pups, he never once mocked my fidelity or questioned my emotional commitment. I think he really did enjoy the fact of our relationship and respected that I was so serious about this one thing in my life. I wasn’t the best buddy for chasing women, but he never made me feel that I was stepping on his good times. The opposite, really: He often seemed to admire that I was in love, and he treated Frannie like a friend. As far as I know, none of his closest friends were womanizers, and as we all got married and started to have children, John, still single at that point, happily engaged with our families.

  John and two of my cousins, Jenny and Elizabeth. (Courtesy of Sara Barrett)

  Ten

  ON THE VINEYARD

  JOHN AND I shared a belief that the first half of one’s life is for generating stories and the second half is for telling them. He even suggested that I’d be writing about him one day. At the time, he was reading Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, a memoir of John F. Kennedy by his father’s friends Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, and uncharacteristically pondering his own place in history. I just laughed at him.

  We lived out many of our best stories on Martha’s Vineyard, even though it was a pain to get there. In the early days, not long after Mrs. Onassis built the place, we would drive for a good eight hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic up I-95 and then ride the ferry from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven. It was a long haul, but once we arrived we never wondered if it had been worth it. Over the years, as time became more precious and money more available, we would travel by chartered plane. Sometimes John would let me contribute toward the cost of the flight, sometimes not. After he got his pilot’s license, my family got door-to-door service, right down to the 1969 GTO that would be waiting for us in the parking lot of the Martha’s Vineyard airport.

  A big slice of heaven—Mrs. Onassis’s Red Gate Farm on Martha’s Vineyard. (Witt Vince De/Corbis Sygma)

  Red Gate Farm was named by a previous owner and was situated about half a mile inland from Moshup’s Trail, a winding road that passes along the coast of Aquinnah (then known as Gay Head). The name is a mystery—I never saw a red gate anywhere. It was a remarkable place, more peaceful than anywhere I’ve ever been. The land, which John said was about 150 acres on the west end of Martha’s Vineyard, was purchased by Mrs. Onassis in the early 1980s. Ironically, she was bidding against a group consisting of Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense, and several associates. John was pumped that his mom trumped the old war dogs and snagged the extraordinary, completely undeveloped parcel for a great price. He told me, proudly, that Mrs. O had underbid McNamara’s group but that her grace won the day.

  I was probably there forty times over the next two decades, and I never found it less than amazing. To drive the long dirt road from the main road to the estate was inevitably the start of a visit even more fun than I expected. Part of the beauty of Red Gate Farm was due to the extraordinary nature of Martha’s Vineyard. And part of it was due to the soft, elegant way that the buildings and the grounds had been designed. The “compound,” really two houses and some playground equipment, along with a caretaker’s house set back on the access road, was surprisingly unimposing. If you drove by those two houses somewhere else, you’d think, “Nice houses,” but nothing more. To me, this understated sensibility felt exactly right. Especially once you stepped inside and experienced the amazing light and implicit comfort of the design. I’m not an architect, so I can’t tell you how Hugh Newell Jacobsen did it, but there was something about the inside of both houses that made you feel you were being wrapped in a big robe of clean, soft, white terry cloth.

  John and I visited Red Gate just after it was finished. The houses smelled of fresh paint, and everything on the property was brand-new. The main house faced the ocean, about half a mile away. In between were low scrub-covered hills, a chunk of Squibnocket Pond, and a cathedral of dunes. You could hear the waves pounding and see the shape-shifting sands from the many decks and sliding glass doors that opened up to the fresh sea air. About a hundred yards west of the main house, through a small orchard-to-be, was the “barn,” really another, smaller house. The barn had bleached-wood floors, antique New England furniture, a sweet stereo, and five bedrooms. One of these was the silo, which contained a circular room at the top of a spiral staircase. The silo was John’s room, really a bed with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the ocean. That was all the boy needed for years to come.

  The barn at Red Gate. (Courtesy of the author)

  My favorite room in the barn was a bedroom at the end of the upstairs hallway that had three large watercolors of castles that were, to me, obviously representative of Camelot. I loved staring into and through their pastel imagery on sun-filled mornings, hoping that John’s mom still had a place in her heart where she could revel in her more pleasant memories. She was the one who had coined the metaphor of Camelot to describe the Kennedy years. “There’ll never be another Camelot again,” she told her writer friend Theodore H. White shortly after her husband’s assassination. I think that’s why there was so little of her life, pre-1963, in the apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, and nothing at all in the main house on the Vineyard. Because it could never exist again. That era of grace and possibility had ended, and ended terribly. Besides, she was too good a mother to let her children dwell in a dark past. It made perfect sense to me that Mrs. Onassis adored the work of Joseph Campbell, especially his award-winning series, The Power of Myth. She understood the power of myth and the loss that accompanied its demise. Which is not to say that it was ever sad up there—quite the opposite. Even on the darkest, coldest winter day, Red Gate was starkly beautiful and almost mystically serene.

  The main house was as airy and light-filled as the barn, though slightly more elegant. It was decorated with sisal rugs; comfortable, plump couches and chairs; sparse old New England furniture; and a mix of art that ranged from big Audubon prints to contemporary paintings. While Mrs. O was alive, the main house was her domain and John and his friends hung out at the barn. We followed a certain routine on our visits, established at the start and kept right up to the end. This routine was in itself a pleasure, giving time a relaxed but healthy-feeling structure. Most days we’d wake up late (until the kids came along) and straggle over to the main house for breakfast. The kitchen was Marta’s realm, and her scrambled eggs were famous, but she tole
rated my big sleepy presence as I rooted around in the fridge for milk and toasted my own English muffins in the big stove. A window by the breakfast table looked out onto the yard and beyond to the ocean. You could read the morning papers or watch the birds eat from the feeders right outside. Then we’d straggle back to the barn to read on the deck, play wall ball against the house, and listen to the Rolling Stones. If the weather was nice, we’d head to the beach, on foot or by car, depending on our mood, and swim and play football. Lunch was usually waiting on the counter in the kitchen when we got back. Afternoons were equally lazy: more reading, a nap, maybe a trip into Menemsha or some fiddling with John’s Ultralight, a kind of flying machine.

  The main house at Red Gate. (Courtesy of the author)

  Then it was time for dinner, always the best part of the day. Dinner was served in the simply furnished dining room, candles lit and all of us showered and changed. We ate at a beautiful old table that might have been a thick old barn door. Above the table, instead of a chandelier, hung two stark, Calder-esque mobiles of small whalebones that John had made years earlier with his longtime friend Sasha Chermayeff and her husband, Philip Howie. The food was superlative. Marta (and later, Efigenio) were more than able to hold their own with the best chefs in New York. (I know this from hearsay and the reactions of my tablemates, since I was always kindly served my favorite meal of burned burgers and rice.) I’ve tried to figure out why dinner was always so special up there. It had something to do with the setting, the company, the food, the standard of sophistication—a mix of warmth and style and civility that made your heart beat a little faster.