Jackie dutifully came to nearly all of John’s openings, and was invariably caught up in the moment whenever he set foot onstage. “Her reactions were pretty intense—especially if something bad was happening to John’s character,” a fellow student said. “She’d gasp and grab Caroline’s arm. She was completely caught up in it.”
“John’s acting,” Jackie told Robert Littell at one point, “is the thing that brings me the most joy.” But when Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood offered nineteen-year-old John the chance to play his father in a feature film based on JFK’s early years—a part John desperately wanted to take—Jackie vetoed the idea.
Caroline was proving easier to handle. After graduating from Radcliffe with honors in 1980, she went to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Film and Television Department. There she met Edwin Arthur Schlossberg, founder of a small company that produced multimedia video projects for museums and businesses. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Ed Schlossberg was thirteen years Caroline’s senior and—like Maurice Tempelsman—Jewish. Soon Caroline was living in Schlossberg’s million-dollar loft, and Jackie was breathlessly introducing him to her friends as “my daughter’s new friend.”
In the meantime, Jackie had asked Tempelsman to quietly arrange for John to spend the summer of 1980 in South Africa learning the ins and outs of the diamond trade. There was always the possibility, Jackie reasoned, that John might wish to join the Tempelsman family business. “This must have been to ingratiate herself with Maurice,” Gore Vidal mused. “Yes, Jackie loved money and very rich men, but she wasn’t about to see Jack Kennedy’s son grubbing around in the jewelry business.”
John was clearly not about to follow in Tempelsman’s footsteps. But his South African sojourn did yield results of another sort. Having witnessed the evils of apartheid firsthand, he returned to Brown determined to take action. With Jackie’s blessing and financial backing from Tempelsman, John set up a campus lecture series aimed at spreading the word about the dire political situation in South Africa. His first speaker was Andrew Young, civil rights pioneer, onetime Atlanta mayor, and former ambassador to the United Nations.
His social consciousness aside, John was digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself academically. Jackie rightly feared that John might drop out of college at any moment—or, even more likely, be pushed out. He had always been a less-than-conscientious student, but throughout his time at Brown, John flirted with expulsion. John was reminded that, in his first two years at the university, he had failed to pass four courses in any given semester. “Even with our modest graduation requirements,” Professor Edward Beiser warned John, “you are skating on very thin ice.”
“Neither I nor John will fail to be galvanized by your message,” Jackie wrote back when faculty contacted her directly with the news that John was about to be expelled. Informed that her son was on academic probation, she wrote to the academic dean that the “vital lesson of how to allot every second of his time” would “sink in as he frantically tries to make up his work.” A year later, as he did extra work to make up for unfinished assignments and poor test results, Jackie sat down in Hyannis Port and dashed off a letter to John’s professor. “I look forward to hearing that he is off probation,” she wrote, “and to never getting another notice that he is on it.”
Yet John still yearned to be an actor, and sought out his ex-uncle Peter Lawford for advice. “If that’s your dream,” Lawford told him, “then do it.” Jackie was anything but pleased when she found out, and wrote Lawford telling him not to interfere. “That, of course, made Peter even more determined to support John,” said his widow, Patricia Seton Lawford, “in whatever it was he wanted to do.”
If there were underlying tensions—and there undoubtedly were—John and his mother never let on. To all outward appearances, said John’s fraternity brother Richard Wiese, theirs was a “very warm” relationship. Wiese got his first look at the Jackie-John dynamic when John had to do a last-minute errand and asked Wiese to look out for his mother. “You know what she looks like,” John said. “Dark hair, big sunglasses . . .”
“Yes, John,” Wiese interrupted, “I think I’ll recognize her.”
Later, Wiese escorted Jackie to John’s room so she could use the phone. Unfortunately, it “looked as if someone had tossed a grenade in there.” In search of the phone, Jackie waded through the sports equipment, clothes, pizza boxes, cans, papers, books, Styrofoam cups, and Coke bottles that covered the floor. Spotting a black cord, Jackie crawled through the debris until she realized it led to a stereo. “But where is the phone?” she asked, throwing up her hands. Wiese led her to the phone in his room.
John came by his sloppiness naturally. “He never hung anything up—just dropped it on the floor where he took it off,” Wiese said. His mother ran a tight ship, but when left to his own devices, John opted for squalor. The interior of his battered gray Honda Civic was strewn with bags, beer cans, and fast-food wrappers. He was an eager participant in cafeteria food fights, and at one point drove out to the country and purchased a pig—not a small potbellied pig, but a farm-bred hog—that he intended to keep at the frat house as a pet. He named the pig Litpig, after Rob Littell, and kept it in the fraternity’s basement for a week before returning it to its original owner.
John continued to smoke pot, and, perhaps driven by the need for acceptance, experimented with stronger stuff. At one party, he was present when his friends allegedly passed around a silver straw and an ashtray filled with cocaine. Each time someone took a hit, a little more of the design on the bottom of the ashtray was revealed.
Once the ashtray got to John, the face of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was staring up at them, with “1917–1963” printed below. Everyone paused. Then John, said one witness, “saw what was on the ashtray and took it anyway.”
Every single day of his life, there was something there to remind John of the father he lost. It might have just been a passing mention of the airport, or of one of the countless highways and schools named after JFK. There was an unspoken rule among John’s friends never to bring up his father’s name, and certainly never to mention the assassination. But the event was so embedded in the nation’s consciousness that it “came up all the time,” said Rob Littell. And when it did, Littell added, “he didn’t flinch.”
JFK Jr. even seemed to take some solace in cultural references to his father. A die-hard fan of the Rolling Stones, John never hesitated to sing along to his favorite Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” when it was playing on the car radio or on the stereo at Phi Psi, putting special emphasis on the lines:
I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?
When, after all, it was you and me.
Given all that was expected of him, John was keenly aware that most people felt he had fallen short. Although most reporters agreed that John had already proven himself to be the most polite and down-to-earth of the Kennedys, their stories painted a very different picture.
When he was mugged in Central Park on the way to a private tennis lesson, John was portrayed as a clueless brat who lacked the street smarts of any other New Yorker. Newspapers ran story after story about his poor academic performance, and when John was held back a year at Andover, the press seemed to confirm that he was the dimmest bulb on the Kennedy compound’s porch. The birthday party fracas that left him sprawled on the pavement didn’t help much, either. Nor did photos that ran around the world of John in the foppish period costumes he wore for student productions like The Comedy of Errors and Volpone. Even his hairstyles over the years—from Little Lord Fauntleroy bob to Prince Valiant pageboy to pre-Raphaelite curls—conveyed an unflattering image of upper-class snobbery and entitlement.
John was the first person to acknowledge that this growing perception that he was a spoiled rich kid wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “Well, aren’t I all those things?” John conceded. “Let’s be honest here. I’ve got it pretty damn good. I know that, and I’m very grateful.”
Ted Kennedy knew that his favorite nephew didn’t deserve his reputation as an aristocratic airhead. During the summer of 1981, John was earning a hundred dollars a week as an intern at former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford’s Institute for Policy Sciences and Public Affairs at Duke University. Ted begged Jackie to let her son give a press conference there. “People should see,” Senator Kennedy reasoned, “that there is a lot more to John than what they’ve been reading in the papers.”
The news conference gave everyone their first real glimpse of the media-savvy charmer John had become. One reporter couldn’t resist teasing him about the ink stain on his white shirt. “I would wear one of those plastic pocket protectors,” he shot back, “but they make you look like a Republican.” He also informed the press that he was teaching himself the guitar.
Was he thinking of a political career? one reporter asked. “I’m not really thinking about careers at the moment,” John replied offhandedly. “I’m not a big planner.”
Uncle Ted was thrilled with the outcome of John’s first press conference, and passed his feeling along to Jackie. “He is a natural,” the senator told her. “He had them eating out of the palm of his hand, just like his father.”
In his junior year, John decided to move off campus and into a house atop a cobblestone-paved hill at 155 Benefit Street. His new housemates were Rob Littell, tennis team captain John Hare, aspiring actress Christina Haag, and Christiane Amanpour—“Kissy” to her roommates—destined to become one of the most famous names in television news as a star correspondent for CNN and CBS.
By this time he had also broken up with Jenny Christian, who was at Harvard studying psychology. The two remained friends. As a matter of course, John would maintain warm and lasting friendships with all his former lovers; not a single one would go on record making even a mildly negative comment about him.
John’s new love was a comely, chestnut-haired literature and history major named Sally Munro. Born and raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Munro so closely resembled John’s sister that captions routinely misidentified Munro as Caroline. Moreover, Munro and Caroline had attended the same prep school, Concord Academy.
John’s on-again, off-again romance with Munro would stretch over five years. During this time, John explored relationships with a number of other women. “John was not a womanizer like his father,” one of his frat brothers said, “but his thing with Sally wasn’t exclusive.” As he grew to manhood, the number of women making a play for Jackie’s son had grown exponentially. “His phone was ringing off the hook from girls he knew—and some he didn’t know. Women were mailing him their panties . . . We all thought John showed remarkable restraint, considering.”
Jackie showed restraint as well, never commenting on his romantic life and always warmly welcoming his main girlfriend-of-the-moment into the Kennedy household. Over dinners at 1040 and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Munro would learn, as Jenny Christian had before her, all about her host’s little idiosyncrasies—how, for instance, Jackie picked up her fork as soon as dinner was served by her longtime butler Efigenio “Effie” Pinheiro and set it across her plate (“At the White House I learned nobody eats until the hostess picks up her fork”), how she rang a tiny silver bell to summon each course, how she moved the conversation along by deftly engaging each person at the table (managing, as one guest put it, to coax a witty remark out of the shyest person there).
John’s girlfriends would also learn that, particularly when she was relaxing at Hyannis Port or on Martha’s Vineyard, no one was to disturb Jackie between lunch and dinner. When one unlucky girl made the mistake of striking up a conversation with Jackie at 4 p.m., she was upbraided by John. “Why did you do that?” he demanded. “That is her time to be alone with her thoughts. Just don’t do it again.”
Yet such tense moments were rare. The same women who spoke so highly of John even after breaking up with him were no less in awe of what one called Jackie’s “innate generosity of spirit that instantly put you at ease.”
Not that Jackie was introduced to more than a tiny fraction of the women who drifted in and out of her son’s life. In the early 1980s, the New York disco scene was at its peak, and no VIP guest was more highly prized than JFK Jr. Many weekends, John drove down to New York to dance and drink the night away at clubs like Xenon, the China Club, and Nell’s. On Sunday night, John would drive his Honda Civic three hours north to the University of Connecticut, where he and his cousin Timmy Shriver taught English to the children of immigrants.
In keeping with family tradition, John racked up speeding tickets as he crisscrossed New York and New England—and then ignored them completely. Finally, in March 1983, Massachusetts branded him a scofflaw and suspended his license. John ignored the suspension as well, and kept right on driving. He also thought nothing of commandeering his friends’ cars; on more than one occasion he “borrowed” a buddy’s Mazda GLC or VW Rabbit, only to report the next morning that he had “crashed it.”
He was especially fond of driving in Manhattan, where nearly all John’s friends got around by cab, bus, or subway. His roommate and future girlfriend Christina Haag recalled the night they drank cheap red wine and then wound up driving from one end of Central Park to the other—three times. “My legs were bare, too close to his hand on the stick shift,” Haag recalled. “He drove fast, and I leaned back in my seat, letting my fingers trail the air outside.”
John’s wider reputation as the Hyannis Port heartthrob gained traction when tabloids began running photos of John horsing around with friends on the beach, or getting ready to scuba-dive. “You’d be standing on a street corner and he’d just whip off his shirt for no apparent reason,” one friend said. John, who then weighed 175 pounds but could bench-press 250 pounds, was “proud of the fact that he was in great shape,” Rick Guy said. “It was no good trying to meet girls when Mr. Adonis was around,” a classmate added. “They had absolutely no interest in you—unless somehow they thought you were the way to get to him.”
Closing in on graduation, John capped off his college acting career essaying the role of the heavy in Short Eyes. “The gum-chewing, tattooed Kennedy throws his bulk around the set with infinite self-assurance,” wrote campus theater critic Peter DeChiara, “and an air of stubborn defiance.”
At last, a rave that the critic didn’t retract. John decided that he wanted to go to Yale Drama School—an idea that was immediately nixed by the Big Lady. Jackie wanted him to go to law school, the logical next move in a course charted for Washington.
There were reports—all fallacious—that Jackie threatened to disinherit her son if he didn’t play along. As crestfallen as he undoubtedly was, John did not put up a fight—not this time. “He was very protective of her,” Duchin said of John’s attitude toward his mother, “and wouldn’t do anything to disappoint her—even if it meant giving up something that was important to him.” He would not be going to Yale Drama School, but he wasn’t rushing to enroll in law school quite yet, either.
On June 6, 1983, John marched onto the green at Brown University with the rest of the graduating seniors, all sweating in their polyester gowns beneath a blazing sun. John was seriously hungover from the party at his Benefit Street digs that had dragged on until seven that morning. Searching above the heads of his classmates as everyone filed to their seats, he finally spotted Jackie in the crowd and waved. “Hi, Mom!” John shouted loudly.
A cheer went up from the Kennedys, and Jackie pointed up at something in the sky. Everyone looked up to see the skywritten message she had arranged for her son—the same bungled inscription on a birthday cake that years earlier had them all howling with laughter: GOOD GLUCK JOHN.
They needed to laugh. The day before, Ted Kennedy had once again invoked JFK’s name at a Brown forum on nuclear disarmament. “I know how much my brother Jack cherished John’s future,” Ted said, his voice trembling, “and how proud he would be if he could be here today.” Later that night at a dinner held for John at Pr
ovidence’s swank Providence Biltmore hotel, it was John’s turn to get emotional when Ted presented him with a framed copy of notes scribbled by his father at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The night of his graduation, John threw a party for fifty of his Brown classmates at Hyannis Port. The swimming pool next to Grandma Rose’s house had yet to be filled for the season, so many guests, feeling the effects of alcohol and pot, simply slept on the bottom. Rose, needless to say, was not in residence at the time.
Jackie no longer worried that her son would end up a pampered weakling, that he needed more “toughening up.” Ready for any physical challenge, Jackie’s boy had proven himself over and over again to be a rugged, self-reliant outdoorsman.
That said, John was up for another summer adventure now that he had his bachelor’s degree in history. For the young man who grew up on tales of the seven seas and whose mother had an affinity for pirates, it was hard to imagine anything more exciting than what his old diving buddy Barry Clifford had to offer.
Clifford had embarked on a quest to raise the pirate ship Whydah, a square-rigged, three-masted galley that had wrecked on the shoals off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717. When it went down, the Whydah was said to have taken with it $200 million worth of purloined treasure—booty accrued by the infamous buccaneer Black Sam Bellamy.
Before he could join the crew aboard Clifford’s research vessel the Vast Explorer, John had to dispel the prevailing notion that he was just another soft, coddled neophyte. “He’s a good diver and a helluva athlete,” Clifford told the Vast Explorer’s six-foot-ten, 325-pound captain, Richard “Stretch” Gray. “You can depend on him, believe me.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 24