The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  I know a little Coco

  And she is very sweet,

  I’m gonna take her home

  And have her for a treat!

  Though they didn’t have children, John and Carolyn lavished absurd amounts of love and attention on their animals. They had a dog, Friday, a cat named Ruby, and for a while a pair of raucous lovebirds in a big white cage in the bedroom. But the noise was overwhelming, so the birds had to go. Friday had the life of a pasha; he was coddled, cared for, and fussed over endlessly. The two of them could tell Friday stories for hours. The dog was photographed by Herb Ritts, among others, because he was “so regal,” they claimed. (I’m sure it had nothing to do with his family connections.) Ruby was a truly mean black cat that Carolyn doted on even while warning everyone in sight to stay away because they’d get hurt. It makes me sad to write all this. I’m not one to hang my hat on what might have been, but I would have loved to bounce one of their kids on my knee.

  Seventeen

  THE HOME TEAM

  JOHN ONCE WARNED me not to turn my “family into a fortress,” meaning not to let my friendships wither once I’d reached the tipping point of family contentment. I mention this because after John and Carolyn got together, his relationship with his friends and his extended family didn’t change much. The two of them continued to live a life full to the brim with other people.

  There were a few casualties, though, exiled from the party because of Carolyn’s fierce and uncompromising attitude toward her husband’s fame. Unlike John, who’d grown up dealing with the distorting effects of fame and generally cut everyone a little slack, Carolyn was new to the impact of celebrity. And it made her deeply cynical. Though John might get momentarily angry when someone took advantage of him, he never held a grudge. He made friends easily and generally held on to them forever. But if Carolyn perceived that someone was using John, she went into battle mode. As a result, she made some enemies. I’d hear about it when a banished friend would call me, trying to figure out why he’d been tossed aside.

  I can’t say whether she was right or wrong, because I didn’t spend much time thinking about who was a friend of John’s, or why. I’d known him for almost twenty years and knew he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. I do think that some of the ugly stories about Carolyn that emerged later were the result of her war against those she considered false friends. I also know that she was eerily empathetic, so it’s entirely possible that she was right in her judgments. In any case, the role she took on was a draining one, and over time she found it frustrating. Carolyn used to divide people into three categories regarding their behavior around John: the “regular Joes,” who remained essentially unaffected by his fame; the “windblown,” who were good eggs but were visibly influenced by John’s celebrity; and finally, the “freaks,” who lost all self-respect in their effort to suck up to John and get whatever they thought he could give them. The “freaks” didn’t last long.

  Most of John’s friends got along well with Carolyn and were thrilled to add this fascinating person to their lives. Our sense of the value of friendship had deepened over the years as the invincibility of youth gave way to reality. John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill, who was also his closest friend, was already fighting the cancer that would eventually take his life. And we were watching our old friend Billy Way lose a battle with addiction.

  Billy—smart, handsome, and incredibly athletic—had had trouble for years, almost since we all moved to New York after school. You don’t necessarily see these things clearly as they’re happening, though. It wasn’t until we reached our thirties that we started to look at Billy’s life, an endless round of nightclubs and cocaine, and realized he was losing himself. After talking with Billy’s family in Bermuda, a group of his friends decided to attempt an intervention. There were five of us in on the plan: Todd Turchetta, Bobby Potter, John, myself, and Robert Kennedy Jr., who had overcome his own addictions more than a decade before and agreed to help us. We asked Billy to meet us at the apartment of a friend, ostensibly a meeting place before we went out for the night. We had a bag of his clothes in a dial-a-car downstairs and John had arranged a spot for him at a twenty-eight-day rehabilitation clinic in Connecticut. Billy was furious when he realized what was going on. After walking into the living room and staring each of us down, he agreed to hear us out. Bobby did a lot of the talking, as we’d asked him to do. He’d had a highly publicized bout with heroin addiction many years earlier, including an overdose on the plane as he was heading to a treatment center. His story was so dramatic that Billy found his way out. When we all were done talking, Billy stood up, pointed his finger at Bobby, and said, “I can handle it. I never did any of the stuff he did!”

  To our everlasting shame, we let him off the hook. Billy convinced us that he would take care of himself, that things weren’t really out of control, that he appreciated our concern and would moderate his excesses. He used the gap between Bobby’s public struggle and his own private decline to convince us that we weren’t seeing what we thought we were. And so he didn’t go to Connecticut that night. I don’t know if our actions that night could have made a difference. But it hurts to write that we all ended up having a beer together at the Royalton Hotel. Less than a year later, Billy was killed when he stepped in front of a cab outside a trendy East Side restaurant late one June night. John went with Bobby Potter to identify Billy’s body at the morgue. It was a shattering experience. He called me afterward and asked if he could come over. He needed company. He sat on the couch and looked at the wall, overwhelmed by his not being able to recognize Billy’s face. With a haunted look, he told me that “Billy isn’t Billy anymore.”

  A group of us spent July 4, 1996, in Bermuda burying our friend. I remember that John was particularly moved by Billy’s parents, who were strong and gracious though they had just lost their son. Billy’s death was an accident, and it’s possible that he would have vanquished his demons had he lived. But his loss, and subsequent revelations about how dark his life had become in the year before he died, made us think about the downside of drugs. Truthfully, this wasn’t something we’d given much thought to. We came of age in the late seventies and eighties, when recreational drugs were a fact of life. Getting high wasn’t an act of rebellion or intentional self-destruction. It was just a good time. We assumed you couldn’t get hurt if you stayed away from the hard stuff. We were wrong, obviously, but we saw what we wanted to see. John’s attitude toward drugs was more cautious, perhaps because getting caught would have been worse for him. He partied, enjoyed the occasional joint, but never ventured into crack or heroin or Ecstasy. He was too committed to being healthy and fit, too conscientious, maybe too afraid of the consequences. I credit his self-discipline, but there was luck involved, too. No one sets out to get addicted.

  At about the same time, Anthony’s health took a turn for the worse. Indeed, Anthony’s illness was the heaviest weight I saw John bear. The two were extremely close, warm and supportive and without the competitiveness that existed among the Kennedy cousins. Anthony and John were like brothers, proud of each other but also quick to tease, with the ease of people who have grown up together. Of the two, Anthony was the less flashy, a quiet, thoughtful man with a wicked wit and a particularly clear-eyed intelligence. He battled testicular cancer for ten long years. In the beginning, it seemed that he might beat the disease. He won Emmys and Peabody Awards for his work as a television producer, got married to his great love, Carole DiFalco, and was the best man at John’s wedding. But then things started to go downhill. If Anthony was feeling poorly or recovering from some terrible surgery, of which he had several, John was symbiotically affected. He knew his cousin hated the hushed tones and tongue-tied sympathy he got from so many people. So John and Anthony continued to talk like locker-room buddies, as though they’d just walked off the field together. John would occasionally refer to him as “Old One Ball,” which made everyone laugh, especially Anthony.

  As the summer of 1999 beg
an, Anthony’s condition deteriorated precipitously. Of all the things on John’s mind that season, Anthony’s state preoccupied him the most. Here was his childhood playmate, still so young, dying before his eyes. John and Carolyn devoted themselves to caring for Anthony and Carole, spending as much time as possible with them. Carole and Carolyn seemed to grow very close. And John didn’t shy away from the pain and darkness that came with caring for a dying person. I last saw Anthony over the Fourth of July weekend in 1999, when Carole brought him over to the house on the Vineyard for a visit. He was in a wheelchair and John was distraught. John died two weeks later, and Anthony three weeks after that.

  On the Kennedy side of the family, John was closest to Timmy Shriver and Bobby Kennedy. Joe, Bobby’s elder brother, was the one who seemed to get John’s competitive juices flowing the most. That makes sense, given the family dynamics. Joe was the eldest, and so first in line to the throne. In my opinion, in those years they had their eyes on the same prize.

  Outside of his family, John’s friendships were diverse and numerous. His oldest buddy was Billy Noonan, a childhood friend he knew from summers on the Cape. Billy is classic Boston Irish: loyal, blunt, strong, and devoted to his family. He speaks with the purest Boston accent I’ve ever heard. My favorite memory of the two of them is from Cumberland Island, where Billy and John practiced an old Irish poem the afternoon of John’s wedding, John nodding off on Billy’s couch for his last nap as a bachelor. John also had a rugby crew, a football gang, an acting posse, a publishing team, a legal covey, a political assembly, and a band of loose nuts, myself included, on the side. Dan Samson fell into the nut category, a man constitutionally incapable of holding his tongue. If he thought it, he said it, to hilarious effect. He once nearly crossed some line of propriety with Carolyn, though, because I remember her saying, mock sternly, “Watch it. Dan! You don’t want to mess up, what with Wifeswap 2000 coming up.” She kept John in line, too, when she thought his head was getting too big. He was ranting to me about something once and she cut in to say, “Uh, John, I think you mistook Rob for someone who gives a shit.”

  Carolyn wasn’t one of those wives who insisted that her husband be around all the time. Which was lucky for those of us who made up the football squad. The most brilliant message ever left on an answering machine came from John one sunny Saturday morning about 1997. He took the famed St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V as his inspiration. With an accent better than Kenneth Branagh’s, John said something like this:

  Good day, my countryman. I ring to inform you that we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, are headed to the football pitch as you lie in peaceful repose. Whilst I don my cleats and prepare for battle, let it be known that he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. And when sweet victory is in hand, we shall see that from this day to the ending of the world, we in it shall be remembered for the feats we do. But do not think yourself cursed that you were not here, and do not hold your manhood cheap while any speaks that fought with us on this glorious morn. And do not feel compelled or shamed to come either, for with the fewer the men, the greater share of honor.

  I was in fact asleep when he called. And listened to his message through the quilt. I made it to the park before they started.

  John did great imitations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his cousin by marriage and someone whose company he and Carolyn enjoyed a lot. He liked to tell of the time he and his friend Kevin Ruff were having dinner at Spago in Los Angeles. Kevin had to leave early. As he was getting up, Arnold came strutting in, a bit late but clearly in the house. Arnold surveyed the scene, noted Kevin’s exit, and proclaimed loudly, “Ahhhh … I see the B team is leaving. Good.” Arnold liked to tease his in-laws about their relatively puny earning power, something John found funny. He told me that the big man once said to Bobby, “Ahhh. Bobby, I think I will gross sixty [million] large this year; at least that’s what I have banked so far. How is your year going?” I imagine Bobby replying that he’d saved a snail darter and two endangered bird species.

  A number of John’s friends became Carolyn’s closest buddies, especially his beloved assistant at George, RoseMarie Terenzio. Listening to one end of a phone conversation between the two of them was like hearing that sound a modem makes just before it connects. His friends were also his partners in the many charitable efforts he undertook, efforts that consumed more time and did more good than most people know. He helped his grade-school classmates Hans and Ivan Hageman found the East Harlem School, at Exodus House, and his friend Bobby Potter still serves on the board. John was an active and inspirational board member at the Robin Hood Foundation, an organization dedicated to alleviating poverty in New York that was begun by his friend the hedge-fund magnate Paul Tudor Jones and run by another close buddy, David Saltzman. He gave his time freely to the outreach programs run by the Kennedy Library, and in 1989 he helped found Reaching Up, an organization that pioneered the advancement of education and training for mental-health workers. It’s typical of John’s modesty that I never heard a word about this organization from him. Rather, I learned about it last year while chatting through a mouthful of cotton with my dentist, James Murphy. He told me that his father (also James Murphy), then the chairman of the City University of New York board of trustees, and Jeffrey Sachs, who was Governor Cuomo’s health czar, had worked with John to bring the organization to life. Mrs. Onassis had even held a fund-raiser at her apartment for 150 people. I called the senior James Murphy, who told me that John had poured himself into the effort, in the process becoming good friends with another Murphy son, Michael, who suffers from Down’s syndrome. Reaching Up was and is a success story, and the health-care workers it trains are known as Kennedy Fellows. The program, run by CUNY, has been renamed the John F. Kennedy Jr. Institute for Worker Education at the City University of New York.

  John and friend Michael Murphy at an annual ARC (Association for the Help of Retarded Children) dinner. (Courtesy of the ARC/New York Chapter)

  When I think of John and his buddies, I see him in his favorite shirt, an old Racer X T-shirt. Racer X was the mysterious, long-lost brother of Speed Racer, the popular cartoon character of our youth. An orphan of sorts, Racer X wore a face mask to conceal his true identity. He was a top Formula One driver as well as a secret agent for the international police who would appear out of nowhere “to save his brother … from dire circumstances,” according to the official Speed Racer history. Eventually Racer X stops racing to become a full-time secret agent. “No longer lured by fast cars, he turns his attention to the much more dangerous game of establishing world peace,” the story goes. Just before Racer X leaves racing for good, though, he vows to his unconscious brother (whom he’s just saved again) that he’ll “be near if you ever need help, no matter where you might go.”

  Eighteen

  HEARTACHE AND HOPE

  SO MUCH HAS been written about John and Carolyn and their marriage. And so much of it is wrong. Even when the particulars seem possible, the context and especially the characters are completely inaccurate. I’ll admit that they had some serious troubles. They were trying to cope with the same issues that splinter most marriages, plus a few elephant-size problems all their own. But they were two good people who loved each other, and I never believed their romance would end badly. I know the statistics on divorce as well as the next guy. But I had faith that they’d work things out because they truly loved and respected each other. And when you think about it, who, really, could have matched either one except the other? Somehow these two charismatic, fun-loving, and surprisingly softhearted bright lights had found each other. There’s no way they would have let go.

  Right from the start, Carolyn disliked the glare of the flashbulbs that illuminated her every moment, from walking the dog to shopping at the Gap. And being the intense, passionate person she was, she didn’t just object, she reacted violently. She withdrew in fear and anger, just as you would if you were being stalked. Shouldn’t she have known what
life would be like as Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr.? I guess so, though she married John because she loved him, not because she longed for a life in the tabloids.

  Compounding the problem was that Carolyn quit her job as soon as she got married. In theory, she wanted to be able to travel with John, who was frequently on the road for George. Besides, it wasn’t as though she were leaving some long-dreamed-of career. But quitting right away was a big mistake. It left her, a woman with enormous energy and too many thoughts racing around her brain, without a focus outside of herself, without an independent identity. She thrived on solving others’ problems, loved to be around people, and had a personality electric enough to light up the state of New York. Staying home alone, watching the paparazzi watch her, was not good for her emotional health. John was sensitive to her situation, asking the press to give his wife time to adjust to fishbowl living. “This is a big change for anyone, and for a private citizen even more so. I ask that you give Carolyn all the privacy and room you can,” he requested of the media. And after asking my advice, he set up a bank account for her day-to-day expenditures so she wouldn’t feel like a kept woman. But no one can control “public interest,” and money was never the real problem.

  The first year of their marriage was an up-and-down affair. Sometimes Carolyn would be her old self, glamorous and wisecracking, the centrifugal center of any room she entered. Other times she seemed unhappy and frustrated, like a caged animal backed against a wall. That was the summer Princess Diana died, and Carolyn watched the coverage constantly. Her identification with the young, beautiful princess who was chased to her death by photographers seemed intense. Carolyn was scared by it all, shaking her head and muttering, “That poor woman,” each time the topic came up. But she was hardly in a fetal position, and it didn’t take much to nudge her from her corner. In September of 1997, Frannie and I asked the two of them out to dinner to celebrate their one-year anniversary. I arranged for a limousine to pick us all up in front of John’s apartment, thinking this would spare Carolyn from having to stand in the street while we hunted for cabs. We got to their apartment on North Moore Street, and they came downstairs when we buzzed. John started to climb into the limo, but Carolyn turned away and walked over to the stoop, where she sat down. She told John she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t go. The limo was a mistake. It made her feel more ostentatiously “famous.” I felt horrible. She began to sniffle, and I said to John that we’d do it another time, no big deal. Carolyn sat there on the concrete, looking so alone. John put his arm around her shoulders and spoke quietly into her ear. Her face regained some color and she smiled a little. Still tentative, she stood up and climbed into the limo, looking physically drained from the effort.