The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  Restored by their Indian interlude, Jackie resumed her mind-spinning social schedule in New York while John added Christina Haag to the guest list for his annual birthday bash. Within months, John and Christina began an intense affair that lasted a tempestuous five years. It was easy to see why she changed her mind. Beyond the obvious, John was an unabashed romantic. “I love your hair,” he would tell Christina, cupping her face in his hands. “I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me.”

  Yet from the very start, John also made it clear that, if Christina cheated on him, he didn’t want to know. John admitted to having a strong jealous streak, and to being unable to cope with that sort of personal betrayal.

  As time progressed, photos of street corner spats between John and his lovers would fill the tabloids, filling him with embarrassment and regret. One classmate conceded that John might “blow up and yell, or pound his fist against something—I even saw him stamp his feet like a little kid.” But “three minutes later he’d regret it and apologize.” John Perry Barlow chalked this up to John’s being “a passionate person. He had a temper, no doubt about it. But he never let it get the best of him.”

  If he was angry about his mother’s opposition to his acting, John never let on—not even to his closest friends. When Haag brought it up, he merely laughed it off and changed the subject. “Disappointed? Yes. Frustrated, certainly,” Tish Baldrige said. “But it wasn’t as if Jackie just put her foot down and threatened to cut him off. She very deftly steered him in the direction they both knew in their hearts was right for him—toward public service, toward politics.”

  Jackie was careful never to appear ham-fisted or intrusive—particularly when it came to her son’s love life. She was “strong-willed and opinionated,” Rob Littell said, but “careful not to overstep her bounds.”

  Even before their affair began in earnest, John repeatedly referred to Christina Haag as “the girl I’m going to marry.” Two years into their relationship, he called his mother to say that he had a big surprise for her and Marta and would drive out to the New Jersey house to fill them in.

  When he got there, Jackie had broken her engagement ring out of the safe and informed him the moment he walked in the door that it had taken a while, but she had finally come to terms with the idea that her son was getting married. John’s news, however, was that he had spotted an orange Karmann Ghia on the street with a “For Sale” sign in the window and purchased it on the spot.

  “Isn’t it great?” he asked his dumbfounded mother. “Don’t you just love the color?”

  “John, this is your big news? This garish old jalopy?”

  Jackie eventually saw the humor in the situation, but Marta didn’t. She had spent $l,300 on an Ungaro dress for the engagement party—a dress that could not be returned.

  John would eventually marry, of course, and the bride would not be Christina Haag. But in 1986, twenty-five-year-old JFK Jr. was focused on finding a career path now that he had put his dreams of an acting career behind him. “Jackie didn’t really have to pressure him to give all that up,” George Plimpton said. “He always knew greater things were expected of him.”

  That winter, John took part in a roller-skating party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project, set up by his uncle Bobby. He strapped on a pair of skates, grasped the hands of two neighborhood children, and took them for a spin around the rink.

  It was hard not to notice that the press was swarming all around John, the photographers recording his every move. “I think they’re waiting for me to fall,” he told his skating partners.

  “I didn’t know you were so famous,” one of the boys said, perplexed by all the attention John was getting. “What’s your name?”

  “John Kennedy.”

  “John Kennedy! He was one of our presidents,” the boy said.

  “Yeah, I know,” John replied. “He was my dad.”

  All of these people have expectations of me because of my father, but I believe he would have wanted me to do whatever the hell I wanted.

  —JOHN

  The people who came in contact with him tended to be surprised by his dignity and his quiet goodness.

  —JOHN PERRY BARLOW

  10.

  “I’m Not My Father”

  * * *

  It was the eve of Caroline’s wedding to Ed Schlossberg, and Jackie wiped away a tear as her son stood up at the rehearsal dinner to give a toast. Ed had asked John, just named “America’s Most Eligible Bachelor” by People magazine, to be his best man. It was the fourth time that summer John had served in that capacity. (“And I get better each time,” he said with a wink.) This time, John talked about how close he, his sister, and their mother had been. “All our lives, it’s just been the three of us. Now,” he said, turning to Schlossberg, “there are four.”

  Caroline’s wedding date—July 19, 1986—happened to be the groom’s forty-first birthday. It was also the seventeenth anniversary of Chappaquiddick. Paying no heed to appearances, the wedding went on as scheduled, with more than two thousand spectators—hundreds of them members of the press—jamming the streets of Hyannis Port and nearby Centerville, where the ceremony was conducted at the Church of Our Lady of Victory.

  The mother of the bride had meticulously planned every detail—except the wedding dress. “I am not going to get involved,” Jackie told the designer, her friend Carolina Herrera, “because Caroline is the one who will wear it. I want her to be the happiest girl in the world.” It was another example, Baldrige said, of Jackie’s “knowing when not to interfere, when to step back and let her children be themselves.”

  No one was more famous than Jackie for maintaining a brave façade at all costs. But this time she wept unabashedly during the wedding ceremony. As Mr. and Mrs. Ed Schlossberg departed to the cheers of the crowd, Jackie stood on the church steps, eyes red and swollen, happy tears streaming down her cheeks. Still smiling, Jackie bit her lip and rested her head on Ted Kennedy’s shoulder.

  At the reception that night, John looked on with pride as Ted wrung even more emotion out of the moment. “We’ve all thought of Jack today, and how much he loved Caroline and how much he loved Jackie . . .” Then he raised a glass to the mother of the bride—“that extraordinary woman, Jack’s only love. He would have been so proud of you today.”

  Doris Kearns Goodwin cornered Jackie later and praised her for raising two children who were so obviously devoted to each other.

  “I want that kind of closeness for my sons,” the author said.

  “It’s the best thing,” Jackie replied without hesitation, “I’ve ever done.”

  Jackie would have even more reason to be happy that fall, when John enrolled in classes at New York University School of Law. With Caroline already attending Columbia Law School, both her children were now headed toward respectable careers in the legal profession—and, she hoped, lives spent in the political arena.

  There were still a few loose ends to tie up. Over dinner in Hyannis Port, Jackie gently “suggested” to John and Rob Littell that it was time for them to “break up”—that living like frat brothers on West Eighty-sixth Street was not conducive to John’s new life as a serious law student.

  The move came none too soon, as it turned out. When they moved out of the apartment, John and Littell left the place in such a shambles that one friend of John’s told writer Michael Gross it “looked like a herd of yaks had lived there.” A neighbor claimed the carpets were so badly burned it “looked like they’d had cookouts on it,” and the floors were so damaged that “every surface had to be sanded, spackled, and patched.”

  There were also holes in the walls. Some represented moments when John, safely venting the anger he felt toward a girlfriend or his mother’s efforts to kill his acting dreams, punched a hole squarely through the plaster. Other indentations were the result, Littell later explained, of “roughhousing gone bad.”

&
nbsp; After moving alone into the Surrey, a residential hotel not far from his mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, John buckled down to his law studies. Then, at Jackie’s urging, he spent the summer of 1987 clerking for the Reagan Justice Department in Washington—a job for which he was paid $353 a week. “John actually liked Ronald Reagan,” Littell said, “and took plenty of ribbing for it from the rest of his family.”

  Jackie also knew something about the law. In addition to her legal battles with author William Manchester and photographer Ron Galella, Jackie had waged war in the courts to save Grand Central Terminal and New York’s Lever House, one of the world’s first glass-walled skyscrapers. As part of her ongoing crusade to preserve New York’s landmarks and halt overbuilding, she also blocked developers from constructing a high-rise over St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, and from throwing up two office towers at Columbus Circle that would have cast a looming shadow over the southern end of Central Park. “They’re stealing our sky!” she protested at a packed news conference. (Years later, twin towers did go up on Columbus Circle: the glass-sheathed Time Warner Center.)

  John was proud of everything his mother did, but as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker he took special pride in the fact she saved Grand Central. Eventually, a seven-foot-wide aluminum plaque went up inside the terminal. The inscription:

  JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS LED THE FIGHT TO SAVE THIS BEAUTIFUL TERMINAL. THE VICTORY WON IN THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT IN 1978 ESTABLISHED THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO PROTECT LANDMARKS IN CITIES AND TOWNS ALL OVER AMERICA.

  The year of her Supreme Court victory, Jackie made an important real estate deal of her own, quietly paying the Hornblower family of Martha’s Vineyard $1.15 million for thirty-six acres (later expanded to 474 acres) along Squibnocket Pond in the Vineyard’s Gay Head section.

  Washington architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen was hired to design nothing more daring than a nineteen-room saltbox—more like a connecting series of saltboxes—and a separate barnlike two-bedroom guesthouse. A silo-like portion of the guesthouse—they would call it “the Barn”—was built expressly for John.

  Jackie dubbed the estate Red Gate Farm—although guests would swear they never saw a red gate anywhere on the property—and moved in in the summer of 1981. The house and guesthouse boasted white oak floors. The rooms, all decorated in pastels and lined with books, looked out over the ocean through multi-paned windows made the old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs instead of nails. Not only were there heated towel racks in the bathrooms, but the toilets all flushed with hot water to prevent condensation.

  The main house had eight fireplaces, and Jackie insisted on having the one in her bedroom lit by her butler every morning—even at the height of summer. The kitchen boasted a sixteen-burner Vulcan stove, and breathtaking views of the Atlantic and Squibnocket Pond. The price tag for what Jackie called “my wonderful little house” topped $3 million.

  As a couple, Jackie and Maurice were happiest on Martha’s Vineyard. “They had an intimate, loving relationship,” said Marian Ronan, who worked as a maid at Red Gate Farm. “Maurice had his own bedroom next door to Jackie’s—but he slept with her . . . There was a big hallway door that could be closed and locked, cutting them off from the rest of the house and giving them complete privacy.”

  Jackie stuck to her strict regimen of exercise—getting up at seven each morning, she slathered her face with Ponds cold cream and swam for two hours in Squibnocket Pond. In the afternoons, she compulsively ran, swam, biked, and rowed—all the while sticking to a diet of fish and vegetables that, said Ronan, wasn’t enough to keep a sparrow alive.

  She did satisfy her appetite for gossip, however, spending part of each day in the “little kitchen” next to the main kitchen in her bathing suit, her hair up in curlers, kibitzing with the help. Nothing delighted her more than a juicy piece of gossip. The first time Jackie read about Woody Allen’s scandalous affair with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, Ronan said, “She put her hand to her mouth to try to stifle her laughter.” Later, she bombarded Mia with phone calls in an attempt to get her to tell her side of the story in a Doubleday book.

  Although she cherished her solitude, Jackie welcomed visits from John. She was less enthusiastic about his being there with friends when she was not in residence. Whenever this happened, he reverted to his old frat house habits, having as many as sixteen guests at a time. After a weekend devoted to playing drinking games, roughhousing, and smoking pot, he and his pals invariably left Jackie’s tranquil getaway looking as if it had been sacked by Genghis Khan.

  Marta Sgubin upbraided John for leaving his mother’s house a shambles. “You should have more respect,” the normally soft-spoken Sgubin shouted, “for your mother’s house!” Mortified, John limited the number of friends he invited to Red Gate Farm and admonished the ones he did invite to behave themselves. It wasn’t long, however, before he reverted to his old, messy ways.

  The staff kept a watchful eye on John whenever he visited, but they—and Jackie—were unaware that in February 1988 John had secretly begun taking flying lessons from local pilot Arthur Marx at Martha’s Vineyard Airport. “I was impressed with him immediately,” Marx said, “because he rode his bike to the airport from his mother’s house at the other end of the island and it was freezing. That’s how much he wanted to fly.”

  As a pilot, John was “full of enthusiasm,” Marx said. “He really, really dug it, and he took flying seriously.”

  Marx took several flights with John at the controls. “He was always focused in the airplane,” insisted Marx, who would take his last flight with John in 1998. “I never saw him as a pilot act in an impulsive way. In fact, John was probably better than he thought he was.”

  That June, John finally decided to tell his mother that he was taking flying lessons. He even brought Jackie to meet Marx. “This is my mother, Jacqueline Onassis,” John told his flight instructor at the time. “As if,” Marx laughed, “I wouldn’t know who she was. If she had any problem with John’s flying, I didn’t see it. She was perfectly charming.”

  If nothing else, Jackie knew how to disguise what she was really thinking. She had always encouraged John to take risks—from rebuilding homes in earthquake-ravaged Guatemala to diving for sunken treasure in the Atlantic to trekking through the wilderness in such dicey corners of the world as India and Africa.

  Yet Tempelsman confided in a friend that there was “just something about John piloting a plane that frightened her.” Now Jackie, whose dreams were haunted by the memory of Dallas for years, was having nightmares about her son perishing in a plane crash. Jackie begged John to give up this one dream. “There have been too many deaths in the family,” she told him.

  Once again, John’s devotion to his mother trumped his own desires. Not wanting to cause her any undue anxiety, he relented and put aside his dream of learning to fly—for now.

  * * *

  A COLLECTIVE SIGH went up from the delegates at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. stepped to the podium to introduce his uncle Ted. Now twenty-seven years old and heartthrob handsome, John evoked such a response that Time magazine’s Walter Isaacson worried that the roof of the Omni Coliseum might collapse “from the sudden drop in air pressure caused by the simultaneous sharp intake of so many thousand breaths.”

  What followed was the kind of reverential silence seldom accorded any speaker at a political convention. Even John’s voice—polished yet devoid of any accent or his parents’ distinctive quirks—took his countrymen by surprise; this was the first time most Americans had ever heard JFK Jr. speak.

  “Over a quarter of a century ago,” John began, “my father stood before you to accept the nomination of the presidency of the United States. So many of you came into public service because of him and in a very real sense it is because of you that he is with us today.”

  Millions were impressed with the remarkably poised young man making his debut on the national
political stage—and none more than Jackie. Having waged her war of attrition against John’s ambitions to become an actor, she was now ready to see him embrace the real-life role he was born to play.

  The timing seemed perfect. John was spending the summer earning $1,100 a week at the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg, & Phillips, and that fall he was entering his final year at NYU Law School.

  After his rousing convention speech, John returned to his summer job at Manatt, Phelps and to Christina Haag, who happened to be appearing in a play at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard. This would be an idyllic time for the couple, who shared a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court in the Venice section of Los Angeles. John, who was in the habit of bestowing nicknames on just about everyone, began calling Christina “Chief” and “Puppy.” She called him “King.”

  That summer, without telling his mother, John resumed his flying lessons—this time at nearby Santa Monica Airport. With her boyfriend flying the plane and an instructor sitting next to him, Haag tagged along on a trip to Catalina Island. Buffeted by strong winds as he descended toward a short, narrow runway, John offered words of reassurance before finally bringing the plane in safely: “Don’t worry, Puppy. Don’t worry . . .”

  Since John was so fond of monikers (he called Billy Noonan “Chopper” or “Sylvester”; nieces Rose and Tatiana were “Lola” and “Lolita”) his friends kept casting about for a nickname for JFK Jr. that would stick. Now that he had traded in his unruly locks for a sculpted, executive-boardroom-ready cut, John was continually ribbed about his perfect hair. John was dubbed “Helmut Head”—a name he rather enjoyed. Once his friend Hilary Shepard-Turner had him paged at the airport. “Mr. Head,” the announcer boomed over the loudspeaker. “Mr. Helmut Head. Please come to the courtesy telephone.” John answered the page. From then on, John signed his letters to Shepherd-Turner and other pals “H. Head.” (Another moniker would surface years later, when a particularly severe cut was described as John’s “Eddie Munster look.”)