by Megyn Kelly
My dad was an intellectual. Peter never finished high school, but has a college degree in Life. He’s a true partner to my mother. Peter is the first to go with my mom to the garage sales or grocery stores. He would happily drive down to Nana’s apartment to fix her TV or take her to the craft fair. He brushes Nana’s hair and dyes my mother’s. He and my mom laugh and fight and make fun of each other and knock things over out in public. They’re like a comedy act. They kill at the Grand Union. He is an excellent dancer and roller skater—like Deney Terrio of Dance Fever on skates. I know this because we used to go roller skating as a family, even though it was long past that sport’s heyday. Peter also happens to be a neat freak, which is good, since my mother hasn’t ironed a piece of clothing since 1980. One time they were having an argument in their upstairs bedroom. Suddenly we heard some sort of glass break. Moments later, we heard Peter’s footsteps, step-step-step-step, then the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Then the argument resumed.
Peter has always honored my father, often going to plant flowers at his grave.
“You’re just going there to complain about me,” Mom teases him.
“Yes,” says Peter without missing a beat. “And there’s usually a line when I get there.”
4
Who’s Getting Hit First?
When my mom told me she was marrying Peter, I was a sophomore in college. I loved Peter, and I was happy for her. But I also felt a renewed surge of mourning for my father. It had been four years since Dad had died, and it still felt like yesterday to me. After I’d congratulated them, I went back to my college apartment in Syracuse and wept. My boyfriend at the time, Jim, came over and held me for a very long time. I leaned a lot on Jim in those days.
College until I met Jim had been pretty predictable. I’d always known I would go to Syracuse University, though I’d never thought much about why. It just felt comfortable. My mother had gone there. My father had taught there. It had this air of home. I remembered my years in that city so fondly, and I wanted to be where my dad had been. I walked through the Syracuse Department of Education, where I taught aerobics for a time, and saw a poster for the Edward F. Kelly Evaluation Conference, an educational competition that was started the year after he died and which exists to this day. Someone there told me about how much my father had meant to him, and dug up a photo of me from a work picnic, a tomboy swinging on a tire swing, smiling, a picture that captured exactly how I felt as a kid—free, full of life, loved.
But mostly I just ambled through my days, obsessed with college boys and my weight. I skipped classes to hang out with friends. My journals are replete with messages amounting to “I don’t know why he’s not calling!” or “I have to lose these last five pounds!” How I would love to go back and talk to that girl.
Some of my apathy came from not having gotten into the journalism program. When I was accepted to Syracuse University, I applied to the famous Newhouse School of Communications, but was turned down. And so I entered the Maxwell School of Political Science instead.
I had set my sights on the news business after my sophomore year in high school, when they gave us a written aptitude test. Mine said I should be a journalist. I did a two-day internship with the Albany Times-Union. I got to follow a reporter around all day as he talked to politicians and worked his sources. I thought it was thrilling. I also took a journalism class in high school. We watched All the President’s Men, and I found it deeply inspiring. Less inspiring was the day when our teacher wrote the following on the chalkboard and told us someone had actually written it on an exam: “Pullet Surprise” (for Pulitzer Prize). (No, it wasn’t me.)
Other than that, my news experience consisted of the time my high school cheerleading squad won the Northeast Regional competition, and we stormed the studios of the local CBS station, did a cheer, and insisted that they mention our victory in the nightly newscast, which they did. It was the first, but not the last, time I would cajole a newsman into putting me on TV.
Anyway, when I started at Syracuse in political science, I figured I’d eventually transfer to journalism. But then I got sidetracked.
At a recent event, I sat next to Steven O. Newhouse of Condé Nast. I teased him about how the school named after his grandfather had turned me down.
“I read that someplace,” Steve said, “and I called up an administrator at Syracuse and asked, ‘How did that happen?’”
“That’s all I ever wanted to hear!” I told him. Vindication is sweet.
When I started college, it had been less than three years since my father’s death. I was still mired in sadness, and it influenced the way I socialized. After I left home, I noticed that it was harder for me to enjoy things on a superficial level. In college, I pledged a sorority, Tri-Delt. I fell into a group of six women—people called us the Six Pack. They were fun, kind young women, but they were also normal eighteen-year-olds. Secretly, I felt like I had nothing in common with them. I recently heard from one of them—she remembered me as “quiet” and “serious.”
It was in this mess of emotions that I met Jim. Jim had the greatest impact on me of anyone in my life at the time, outside my family. He changed me as a person in profound ways and was easily the most important thing that happened to me in college. I met him sophomore year. He was a senior. I was working as a waitress in an on-campus cocktail bar called Harry’s, where he was a bouncer. He used to walk me to my car at the end of the night after our shifts were over.
One night we kissed. He came back to my apartment, and we fooled around a bit. I fell asleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I was fully clothed, Jim was gone, and his T-shirt was in my bed. Immediately, I drove to where he lived.
“I have to talk to you!” I said.
“I’d imagine so!” he said.
“Did anything happen?”
“No, but only because I’m a nice guy!” he joked.
We hit it off instantly. I was very attracted to him. He was so strong in so many ways, but as I would later come to see, so damaged in others.
Jim was the youngest of nine. He grew up in Yorktown Heights, outside New York City. His dad was a cop, and his mom worked in a factory. Jim had eight older siblings, some of whom had severe substance abuse problems, as did his dad. His father and some of Jim’s older brothers used to get very rough with each other. They never hit Jim—they called him “the Christ child”—but as a little boy he’d have to jump out the window and go sleep on the neighbors’ couch to feel safe.
He was the first person in his family to go to college, and it came through, of all things, lacrosse, which he’d become quite good at as a kid. I came to know the lacrosse world very well. Lacrosse communities have a lot of blue-blooded kids, but they also have a fair amount of tough kids like Jim from more blue-collar areas. Jim got into Cornell and was told he could have a full athletic scholarship.
After his first year there, his brother called and said, “You have to leave.”
“Why?” Jim asked.
It turned out there was no lacrosse scholarship. Jim’s parents had been working double shifts for months to try to keep him there. Jim left Cornell the next day.
He started shopping himself around to any place that would give him a full ride. The legendary coach at Syracuse, Roy Simmons Jr., brought him on, all expenses paid. Simmons later told me that in all his years of coaching, he’d never seen all seventy guys write down the same name for captain until Jim. He was a natural leader. He was courageous. They won three Division I national championships. Jim knew a thing about grit.
Jim always said the key to winning a confrontation is for the other side to believe you’ll fight. Then you won’t have to. One time we were taking a vacation, and two punk kids were crossing in front of us in the crosswalk. One of them punched the front of Jim’s car.
Jim was out of that car in a flash. “All right,” he said matter-of-factly, “who’s getting hit first?”
They ran.
He defended my friend Marla in a bar. Some guy wante
d her to dance, but it was clear she didn’t want to. The guy wouldn’t take no for an answer, and was grabbing Marla. Jim pushed the groper against the wall. “She said she doesn’t want to, pal!”
I never saw him actually throw a punch.
He was quick to downplay his own accomplishments, which were plentiful, certainly on the athletic side. And he wasn’t afraid to show who he was and where he came from.
One year we went to a Final Four championship dinner; the teams included Yale, Loyola, UNC North Carolina, and Syracuse. Each captain gave a speech to a packed hall. The guy from Yale said, “There have been a lot of eyes on Yale this year, a lot of questions about us. People wonder why we do drills the way we do, why we warm up the way we do. . . . The way we wear our socks is very innocuous. It’s all about teamwork and brotherhood.”
Jim gets up there for the Syracuse team and says, “I can’t speak for all the teams, but we at Syracuse did not have our eyes on Yale, and we didn’t wonder about their drills or their socks. But we were wondering what the word ‘innocuous’ means.”
To this day, I admire the way Jim owned his roots. I learned from him that being self-deprecating doesn’t show weakness. It shows strength—just as those who tell you how amazing they are all the time are probably masking something absolutely not amazing. The six-foot-seven center doesn’t tell you how tall he is.
Jim made me laugh. When we met, he had a lot of acid-wash pants. It was 1989. I didn’t like them, and I made sure they went away. (This would repeat itself later with Doug.)
Then one day I came downstairs to meet Jim, wearing a black velvet bodysuit.
“What is that?” he said.
“I have to express my individuality,” I said.
“I tried to express my individuality,” he said, remembering his jeans, “and all my clothes got sold in one of your mother’s all-you-can-grab-for-a-dollar garage sales.”
(I felt his pain years later when Doug and I were going to a prom-themed party and I went looking through the basement for my prom dress. When I asked my mom what happened to it, she said apologetically, “All you can grab for a dollar.”)
Once I met Jim, all bets were off. He filled a void left by my father’s death. We were inseparable. And he gave me the first real confidence boost I’d ever had. I knew I could perform socially. I had a high EQ. But before him, I didn’t think “I can do anything!” Jim helped me focus on the importance of believing in myself. He helped me clear out the negativity and self-doubt in my mind. My journal entry from the summer after we met reflects this:
I’m young. I can do so much with my life. I can really be somebody. But not without effort. I see opportunity, but I’ve got to go seize it! I have to work twice as hard. I can succeed. I can do it. Take control, Megyn. Nothing is holding you back.
Jim used to call me “little girl,” which was ironic; his attitude was the opposite of belittling toward me. It was tongue-in-cheek, like calling a big guy Tiny. He would say, “You got this, little girl.” He was sweet, but tough—chivalrous, which is a great thing for a girl missing her father. He made me feel like no one was going to hurt me while he was around. I felt connected, believed in, and supported.
We had a lot of fun, too. I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, my junior year. I created a job for myself teaching aerobics over there. I brought my mix tapes from the States, rented a big room in an office building and a stereo system, and did it all in Italian. I figured the room could take fifty girls, and I charged each girl $100 a semester. Suddenly I had $5,000. That was a lot of money for a broke nineteen-year-old girl in 1990, and I used some of it to fly Jim over. We had a romantic week together, culminating in a trip to Elba on our last day. It was a wonderful time. If you told that girl that her future wasn’t marrying Jim and living happily ever after by his side in upstate New York, she would not have believed you. But time would prove that Jim was not the man for me. As the years went by, it became quite clear we were very different people, with divergent goals. It eventually ended with great sadness and affection.
I will always be grateful to Jim for the support he gave me. He was there for me during many dark moments of missing my father. No one else was as much of a comfort to me. I think it’s because his childhood had been rough, and so he had the wisdom and gravitas to handle my grief. When my insecurities would creep up—about school, or friends, or my future prospects—Jim would tell me, “Don’t let them get to you, little girl. You know who you are.” He believed I was strong, and helped me believe it too. Sometimes I wonder if he has seen me on TV, and whether he knows that what I’ve accomplished is in part an accomplishment of his. He gave me the confidence to do everything I’ve done. I doubt I would be here without him.
By my second year of college, I found myself thinking more and more about law school as a next step. I’d actually been considering it since my freshman year, when I had taken a class with a political science professor named Robert McClure. He was a tough, no-nonsense professor whose class I loved. I learned quite a bit from him about how to make an argument—and, more importantly, that I loved to argue.
By the time I was a junior, I had decided to become a lawyer, which was empowering as a decision. I’d been searching for what my path would be and how I’d take control of my life. Now, finally, I’d seized upon one. From my journal entry on January 26, 1991:
I am twenty years old now and have actively begun to make what I want happen. It’s a good feeling, though certainly frightening. I know who I am becoming and who I want to be. The horrifying threat of misplaced nostalgia will never affect me as I age, for—succeed or fail—I will have accomplished the satisfaction of attempting.
When I applied to law schools, initially I thought I wanted to go to Notre Dame. It was Irish and Catholic, it was in South Bend, Indiana, and I thought it might be fun to see a different part of the country. Plus, it was a great school. I was turned down by Notre Dame, but got a yes from Albany Law School (ALS), right in my hometown, so I could live at home and save some money. Besides, everyone says it’s the Notre Dame of Albany.
I would need all the confidence I got from my family and from Jim, because law school was not for the faint of heart. The work was intense and the competition fierce. However, to my mother’s delight, not only did I thrive in law school, but I paid for it myself.
My favorite class was taught by Professor Bob Tyman, a crusty old guy, good-humored but sarcastic as hell. He taught torts and contracts—or, as he put it to folks at cocktail parties: “I use a little blue book, and a little green book, and I teach people how to think like lawyers.” Tyman paced around the well of a grand amphitheater-style classroom, with about a hundred students wrapped around him, going up several levels, like a waffle cone. He, like most professors at ALS, used the Socratic method to teach—walking you through your logic until you at last realized the folly of your position, or the soundness of it. Imagine skipping the homework and then being subjected to that.
At ALS, often we were forced to make our arguments on our feet, going at it with our professors, with an audience around us. I loved every minute of it. Tyman once pulled me aside to tell me, “You really seem to be enjoying law school.” My God, I thought, I made an impression.
Not everyone was pleased with my classroom enthusiasm. I sat near a woman I will call Jane, who informed me that some had taken to referring to me as “Barbie.” Jane would often tell me the negative things people had to say about me. I was offended by the nickname, but also a little inspired by it. You think I’m a ditz? Stand by. I’ve had this feeling many times in my career. Being underestimated is a gift in many ways.
One day it dawned on me: Jane enjoyed relaying this information a little too much, and she was not my friend.
“You know what, Jane,” I said, “do me a favor—stop telling me the bad things people say about me. I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.”
“Fine!” she said indignantly. “I was only trying to help.”
I
put up with her for a long time, but by our final year of law school I’d had it.
“Hey, Jane,” I said, trying to figure out a class’s seating chart. “Do you know where we’re sitting?”
“Figure it out yourself,” she said.
To which I responded, “Shove it up your ass.”
That is the only time I have ever used that phrase in my life, mostly because once you’ve really nailed it, you should leave well enough alone.
Though Jane probably wasn’t rooting for my success, I could feel myself gaining a self-assurance that I had never felt before. I was coming alive, but it wasn’t just in my classes. As much as I loved studying and arguing and learning, the thing I was absolutely dying to do was moot court. Students were not allowed to audition for the trial team until their second year, and even then the team consisted mostly of third-year students, with only one or two second-years. So my first year, I watched with envy as the upperclassmen practiced and competed.
By the time second year rolled around, I could barely contain my anticipation. I checked the door of the coach’s office several times a day, awaiting the sign-up sheet for tryouts. I could think of nothing else. In all there were eight spots, four on the first-tier team and four on the second tier. I was determined to be first tier, and I knew in my bones I could do it.
This was not the result of some unbridled confidence in myself. I never thought I’d be a great scientist or dancer or contestant on Jeopardy! I also knew I would never be number one in our law school class (those folks seemed to have truly special brains). But I knew almost as soon as I got into law school that I could stand up and make an argument.
It’s not like I had been winning arguments my whole life. I hadn’t. But in the same way my friend Bob Clyatt picked up clay from his son’s middle school art class and suddenly knew he was meant to do something with it, and now is a successful sculptor, I saw the students on their feet making arguments during my first year and knew it in my bones: Yes, I can do this.