During those six weeks in Wyoming, “John never once complained about anything,” Barlow said. “It took no time at all for him to be totally in his element—working hard and learning the ropes and just loving it, completely loving every minute of it.” When he returned to 1040 weather-beaten and ten pounds lighter, Jackie was thrilled. “They kept saying I was a miracle worker,” Barlow said. “But he was already a miracle when he got here.”
Jackie had a profound sense of responsibility—not obligation—and she managed to impart that to her son. She was one of the great human beings.
—JOHN PERRY BARLOW, FAMILY FRIEND
The single most important thing in John’s life was his mother.
—PETER DUCHIN, JACKIE’S FRIEND
9.
“My Mother Will Be Frantic”
* * *
JFK’s son returned to Andover in 1978 with a renewed sense of purpose. Academically, he continued to falter, but now he took pride in the work he was doing for the school’s community outreach program. For two days each week, John taught English to immigrant junior high school students in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts.
John also took the time during this period to rekindle memories of his father. One day Chuck Spalding dropped in on John while he was listening to a tape of one of his father’s speeches—a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt—for a history class at Andover.
“Listen!” he told Spalding, his voice filled with excitement. “Right in here is where I crawl under the desk and Dad kicks me. It’s coming up now. Here it is. He was talking on the radio and I crawled under the desk and grabbed him.”
Such moments were rare. The only other memory he claimed as his was of that time they all sat on the Truman Balcony to the bagpipes and drums of the famous Black Watch Regiment. John remembered squirming in his mother’s lap, straining to get a better look over the balcony rail. It was nine days before the assassination—the last time they were photographed together at the White House.
John later admitted that, for the most part, he viewed his father “through the color of others and the perception of others and through photographs and what I’ve read.” In the course of his life, John looked at photos and film of his famous salute to JFK’s coffin thousands—tens of thousands—of times, trying to trigger some flicker of memory in his brain. He always came up dry. “Do you really remember things that happened to you when you were two years old?” John would sometimes ask. “Do you? Really?”
Meanwhile Caroline, who did remember, was also making her mother proud by never falling off the dean’s list at Radcliffe College. To celebrate Caroline’s twenty-first birthday and John’s eighteenth, Jackie invited 150 people to New York’s chic Le Club on November 26, 1978. All the Kennedys were there, as well as friends of the birthday boy and girl, and more than a few luminaries from the worlds of society, show business, and politics. (President Jimmy Carter couldn’t make it, sending Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in his stead.)
“The ‘passing of the torch’ theme was pretty obvious,” said one guest. Indeed, the invitation actually showed an angel holding two torches. It had been fifteen years since JFK was shot to death, and now his only surviving brother stood to toast John and Caroline. “I shouldn’t be doing this tonight,” Ted Kennedy said, his voice quavering. “By rights, it should have been the father of these two children. Jack loved his children more than anything else. Young John and Caroline bring new life to the family.”
Christina Haag, who years later would become John’s lover, chatted with the host. “It’s all going so well, don’t you think?” Jackie asked. They both watched John in the middle of the dance floor and agreed he was having fun. Watching Jackie’s face light up, Haag thought, “Remember this moment, that one day you might be forty-eight and filled, as she is, with this much joy and wonder.”
Bunny Mellon, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Gill, Plimpton, Vance, Tempelsman, Jackie’s distant cousin Louis Auchincloss, and the rest of Jackie’s crowd sipped Dom Perignon while John’s Andover pals guzzled beer and tequila and smoked cigars. Most of those over thirty drifted off by eleven, and a little after midnight Ted, Eunice, Ethel, and Jackie headed home.
Once they were gone, John and his friends lit up joints, drank Hennessy stingers from wine goblets, then danced to the disco beat of the Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor, and Donna Summer. At 4 a.m., Billy Noonan stuck his head out the door and snarled at the pack of photographers who had been gathered for hours. “I’m giving you fair warning,” he told them, “don’t start any shit.”
Within seconds, John emerged wearing a black jacket, a long white scarf, and sunglasses. The paparazzi lunged forward, and Noonan bolted for them as promised. As Noonan got ready to throw the first punch, John not only tried to hold his friend back but put his hand over his mouth to shut him up.
It was too late. A donnybrook ensued and John was knocked to the pavement. “Stop!” he yelled, pleading with everyone to back off as he struggled, sunglasses in hand, to pull himself up on the rear fender of a parked car. That didn’t work, either. As his friends and the photographers wrestled outside the club, John grabbed Jenny Christian’s hand and sprinted to the corner. There they flagged a cab that took them straight to 1040.
Newspapers the next day were filled with photos of the brawl—the most memorable images showing John spread-eagle on the sidewalk while his buddies clenched their fists and spewed epithets. Mortified at his behavior, Billy Noonan wrote a long letter of apology to Jackie. She responded by inviting him to the Kennedy family birthday party, although she was not about to let them forget this lapse in judgment. From now on when she saw John and his friends headed out the door wearing sunglasses, she delivered the same line: “Oh, dark glasses. Are you boys going out looking for a fight?”
John and Jackie faced the press together at his Andover graduation ceremony, when they had to make their way through a mob of photographers just to reach the buffet table. John was visibly angry. “Look,” he said, “I just want to spend some time with my mates and enjoy my graduation.”
An old hand at moments like these, Jackie merely ignored the interlopers. “Oh Ted,” she told the senator within earshot of reporters. “Can you believe it? My baby, graduating!”
By this time, John was making ample use of the apartment his father kept on Bowdoin Street in Boston. Sparely decorated, it served as little more than a crash pad for John and his Andover buddies. Between visits to local pubs like the Black Rose and the Bull & Finch (famous as the inspiration for the bar in the television series Cheers), John continued his work with troubled teens. At the Massachusetts State House, located just up the street from the Kennedy apartment, John showed groups of juvenile offenders Scared Straight, the graphic documentary about life behind bars. Even the most incorrigible delinquents watched in shocked silence. “Jesus,” John said after screening several episodes. “It should have been called Scared Shitless.”
Jackie was scared, too—scared that, left to his own devices after prep school graduation, John would now fall prey to Ethel’s Hickory Hill mob. “Jackie was hearing one horror story after another,” Duchin said, “and she was more determined than ever that John not be sucked into that.”
Just how far Jackie was willing to go surprised even John. With a half dozen others, he spent the summer of 1979 trekking through the wilds of Kenya as part of a ten-week course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School.
Confident that her son was in the hands of trained professionals, Jackie was blissfully unaware of the fact that John’s party got hopelessly lost on its first week out. A vote was taken, and his fellow survivalists agreed that John had the requisite skills to lead them back to their base. As they hacked their way through dense undergrowth with John in the lead, all he could think of was how upsetting this all was for Jackie. “I just hope the press doesn’t get wind of this,” he told the others. “My mother will be frantic.”
Not surprisingly, course officials began to panic. In a spare-no-expense effort to locate
JFK Jr., search planes were dispatched along with scores of Masai warriors who scoured the region on foot. After two full days, a lone Masai tracker stumbled upon John and his team. They had wandered into a village in the remotest part of Kenya, where, on the wall of one family’s hut, hung a photo of John’s father.
Jackie was nonplussed when she was informed that her son had been rescued. “Rescued?” she asked. As it turned out, no one had bothered to tell her about John’s ordeal until after he had been found.
There was no time to dwell on the tragedy that might have been; Jackie was far too immersed in getting her son into just the right college. John was accepted by Harvard, his father’s alma mater, but didn’t want to go. “He knew he hadn’t earned it,” John Perry Barlow said. “John knew it was strictly because of who he was, and that he didn’t have the grades, so he didn’t go there.”
John wanted to chart his own course, and Jackie understood completely. “It’s hard enough being in his father’s shadow out in the wider world,” she told Arthur Schlesinger. “Can you imagine the expectations at Harvard, what a burden that would be?” ‘
John had his pick of schools like Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia, but he was also realistic about his chances of ever measuring up academically. Founded in 1764, Brown University had by 1979 become the school of choice for wealthy prep school graduates for one reason: it provided the Ivy League experience without the rigorous academic demands. For starters, Brown had no core requirements for graduation, and each student was encouraged to devise his own academic program.
A cluster of white clapboard and redbrick buildings perched on a hill in the middle of Providence, Rhode Island, Brown offered John little protection from the press. When he showed up to register, photographers caused such a scene that he promised to pose in front of the Brown University sign at the campus entrance if they just left him alone long enough to enroll.
As accustomed as he was to such attention, John hated being embarrassed in front of the other students. “Half the time he was sort of saying under his breath, ‘Okay, have you had enough?’ ” one photographer recalled. “ ‘I feel really dumb doing this. Can we stop now, guys? Guys?’ ” According to Bob Littell, one of John’s closest friends at Brown, John just “wanted to be a college kid, not a freak show.”
One time-honored way to gain immediate acceptance with one’s peers, of course, was to join a fraternity. John happily endured the indignities of Hell Night at Phi Psi, going through an initiation ritual that included wallowing in animal entrails, guzzling a pitcher of beer, swallowing a goldfish (of course), being paddled, and picking up an olive by clenching his derriere—all topped off by streaking naked across the campus.
John was soon impressing his fraternity brothers with, among other things, his ability to attract beautiful coeds. Fairly typical was the time Billy Way, who had been a friend of John’s at Andover, burst in the front door trailed by several coeds. The minute one of them realized John was sitting on the couch, she walked up to him and demanded that he prove he was really JFK Jr. and not a look-alike. Once John produced his wallet, the young woman thrust her hand down the front of his pants, then led him off to one of the bedrooms.
John’s frat brothers weren’t above taking advantage of his star power. When they hung a sign outside saying he was in residence, there was a line of attractive coeds waiting to get in.
“When you’re eighteen years old,” Bob Littell said, “you can get into a lot of trouble when people respond to you like that. An astounding number of women wanted to sleep with him . . . but he almost always resisted the sexual opportunities that came his way, preferring real relationships.”
At Brown, perhaps some of those relationships were too real. By this time, John realized that he would spend his life constantly in the crosshairs of young women, not all of them completely sane. One young lady showed up carrying an album of photographs with cutouts of John’s face pasted into every picture. “Here are John and I at the beach,” she said, proudly turning each page, “and here we are at my birthday party.” Rob Littell was John’s roommate at the time, and when the strange young woman (“Miss Crazy”) tossed out Littell’s things and declared she was moving in, Brown security was finally called.
Not long after streaking across the campus to howls from ogling Brown coeds, John delivered his very first public speech, at the October 29, 1979 dedication ceremony for the I. M. Pei–designed John F. Kennedy Library outside Boston. Not yet nineteen and already standing a broad-shouldered six feet one inch tall, the skinny adolescent who had scuffled with the paparazzi just the year before was now a strikingly handsome cross between the Kennedys and the Bouviers. Looking out over an audience that included President Jimmy Carter and dozens of familiar faces from JFK’s New Frontier, John held the crowd spellbound with his reading of Stephen Spender’s poem “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”
As they filed outside after the ceremony, John and Jackie paused by JFK’s sailboat Ventura, which is displayed outside the library. “You know,” he whispered, “I don’t even remember him. Sometimes I think I might, but I don’t.”
Jackie put her hand on John’s shoulder, and then, slowly, led him toward their waiting car.
At Brown, he tried to conjure up those lost memories, studying his father and his policies like any other student, taking an American history seminar on the Kennedy administration and the war in Vietnam. “I had heard John was a dummy, that he was more interested in sex than in school,” said Steve Gillon, who taught the course on JFK’s presidency. “But he was very articulate and intelligent. He contributed things to the discussion that went beyond the textbook.” Gillon went on to say that John, who referred to his father in class simply as “the president,” actually “dominated the discussion in certain areas, such as civil rights and the role of the Supreme Court.” John received a respectable B+ in the class—not enough to counterbalance his failing grades in other classes.
Spurred on by a desire to tackle the issues that had confronted his dad, John tapped several classmates for an informal debate society; they quickly discovered that, although he could debate both sides of an issue, he had strong opinions on everything from abortion rights to racism to nuclear disarmament. “We were all impressed by how much he knew, how passionate he was,” said one student. “He wasn’t at all reluctant to show his serious side.”
According to the man John came to call his best friend, John’s own passion for politics could be traced back directly to debates with Jackie and her intellectual friends over dinner at Hyannis Port. John used that setting as “theater,” Billy Noonan recalled. “He pondered aloud his interests and concerns, gesturing with his hands, cutting the air to make his point . . .” This was where “John developed, like an actor, his love of debate and engagement.”
As perfectly suited as he may have seemed for the world of politics, John’s true passion wasn’t world affairs or history. It was acting. When he appeared in March 1980 as the soldier Bonario in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the reviewer for the Brown Daily Herald gave John a five-star review—then publicly retracted it in a follow-up piece.
In his retraction, the student critic decided that “John doesn’t move well—he’s very inhibited and self-conscious on the stage. And his voice is off-putting. He sounds like a rich New York preppie.”
So what made the Daily Herald reviewer change his mind? “I didn’t think John was as good as I made him out to be,” he explained. “But I was sitting next to his mother on opening night and I guess I was dazzled.”
Undaunted—and encouraged by his mother not to give up—John went on as an undergraduate to have major roles in plays ranging from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Miguel Piñero’s gritty prison drama, Short Eyes. Before going on in The Tempest, John was forced to deal with a wardrobe malfunction. As he left his frat house for the theater in elaborate Elizabethan costume and full makeup, John was hit by a volley of water balloons fired from a cannon set up across
the quad.
“He kind of gasped,” recalled Rick Guy, a fellow history major and a player on Brown’s lacrosse team. “But he didn’t yell or scream like a lot of other people would have.” Instead, he shook his head and went back inside to clean up before his performance. “John took everything in stride because he wanted more than anything to be treated like an ordinary guy.”
For everyone, the greeting was always the same: “Hi, I’m John.” Guy pointed out that it was “never John Kennedy, always just John. He would totally disarm you by asking questions—and not in that artificial way people have of pretending to be interested in you. He really wanted to know about other people’s lives.” In the end, Guy said, everyone who met John walked away feeling he was “just a tremendously decent, regular guy.”
There were plenty of reminders that John was anything but a regular guy. On the opening night of David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room, another actor in the play, Rick Moody, was backstage waiting to go on when a hearty laugh boomed from the audience. “That’s my sister,” John said, grinning. “That’s Caroline.” Appearing for the first time in public wearing a crew cut, John even managed to upstage the coed who played his girlfriend. She had gone topless for the role.
Describing JFK Jr.’s acting style wasn’t easy. “A little Brando, a little De Niro, a healthy dollop of Nicholson, maybe a dash of his dad’s inaugural pluck,” Moody said, adding that he was initially surprised that John delivered his lines “with uncanny reserves of charisma.” Then he wondered, “What’s the surprise in this? He’d been acting his entire life.”
“All actors are hiding behind a mask,” said Katharine Hepburn, who found John’s interest in acting “perfectly logical. It’s really the perfect way to cope with celebrity, because people are only seeing you play a character. They don’t get to the real you.” (Adding to the Freudian mix, John began collecting actual masks—from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Eventually “there were scary ones and hairy ones, comical and mystical,” Robert Littell said. “The implication, in a Psych 101 way, is that John was attracted to masks because he wore one himself for so long, figuratively speaking.”)
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 23