Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  On January 5, 1979, John applied to Brown. (He dated the application 1978, seeming to have forgotten the calendar year had changed.) He matter-of-factly listed his father as deceased, with a former occupation listed simply as “government.” He indicated on the form that he was interested chiefly in studying political science, international relations, and American civilization, and also that he had an interest in studying the dramatic arts. Without guile or irony, he wrote that his “academic interest” had always leaned toward “conceptual studies” and that science and math “have never been particularly interesting.” He wrote that his primary extracurricular activity at Andover was the theater.

  With his Brown application in, John seemed unfocused in his final months at Andover. He even lived a few months during the winter and spring at his father’s apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street in Beacon Hill. The family had been renting it since John’s father started living there as a freshman congressman in 1947. What’s not the slightest bit clear is how Andover allowed John to live at his father’s apartment while also being an enrolled student at the school. Permission to do so would have been hard to come by for a mere mortal.

  He also spent time living at the Andover home of his friend James Spader, who was a day student and had left the school before graduation to pursue what turned out to be a very successful Hollywood acting career. Spader and John would also hang out together at 1040 Fifth when John was in New York City. (Jackie had offered Spader the use of the guest room at the apartment on the weekend, when she headed out to the horse country of New Jersey.) One day, Spader recalled, he and John had had a “rather festive afternoon” together and “we found ourselves in the library in the apartment”—the same room where, during my own visit to 1040 Fifth, I had once wanted to look at a scrapbook with a huge presidential seal embossed on it. It was late afternoon and John turned on the television to a sporting event of some sort. “He was on the floor on pillows,” Spader recalled, “and I was sitting on the couch just sort of spaced out, and they always had this big bowl of pistachios on the coffee table in front of the couch. Well, things being festive and all, I started eating the pistachios and sort of thumbing through books and things, and magazines that were on the coffee table, and I was just sort of sitting there eating the pistachios. Well, I finished the entire bowl of pistachios,” which may very well have been in that bowl for more than a decade. He found himself surrounded by three hundred or so empty pistachio shells.

  Soon enough, it was dinnertime and he and John joined Jackie, Caroline, and their cousin Anthony Radziwill at the dining room table. They were chatting away. Out came the first course from the kitchen. “We’re sitting there and eating away and chatting about this and that,” Spader continued. “And I started to feel really hot all of a sudden. But I figured it was winter and their heat registers just sort of converged right in that corner, and so I figured it was just sort of that I need a little air in here. Jackie was very slim so she kept the apartment warm. But I started getting hotter and hotter and eventually sort of a cold sweat, and really started to get that feeling that Wow, this isn’t right. Something’s not right, and really like a flop sweat. But you know the conversation is going well and it’s a great dinner, and I’m still continuing on with the eating. So I sort of slow down a little bit and all of a sudden I start to feel like Wow, I think I’m feeling a little nauseous. This isn’t great. I’m just about to get up to say You know, excuse me, I think I’m going to go to the bathroom for a second, and I threw up on my plate. At which point, Jackie without missing a beat said, ‘Good shot, Jim!’ And of course John is across the table from me now hysterical. He thinks it’s just the funniest thing in the world. And I said, ‘Excuse me.’ I put my napkin over my plate, and I went down to John’s room and I sort of washed up. I came out and by the time I came out they’d moved on to dessert. They said, ‘Are you all right?’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m fine. Really. I think I ate something’—clearly probably a dozen of the pistachios were rotten or something—I said, ‘No I’m fine,’ and John was hysterical still across the table from me, and he kept leaning back in his chair. And Jackie turned around and said, ‘John, stop leaning back in your chair, these are nice chairs and please stop leaning back in them.’ And he just kept laughing and looking at me, and he leaned back again and the chair crumbled underneath him. He completely collapsed, he completely collapsed and he disappeared from view behind the table, and all you could hear was this sort of giggling below the table, okay? And at this point Jackie turns and says, ‘Dammit, John, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a dozen times, do not lean back in those chairs and now see what’s happened! Look what you’ve done, it’s just so rude,’ and he bounced up above the table with this huge grin on his face and says, ‘Jimmy just threw up at the table!’”

  * * *

  JOHN WAS ADMITTED TO BROWN and to Harvard, and chose Brown. He became one of the few members of the Kennedy family to explicitly reject Harvard. This was national news. Some members of the Kennedy clan were upset by John’s decision, but his mother thought it was great. “He went to Brown because he wouldn’t go to Harvard,” Ed Hill said. “He wasn’t going to do that. He knew he was going to probably do crappy. I mean he was not a good student. Brown was a conscious choice, to not insult everyone else’s intelligence by going to Harvard.”

  On June 7, 1979, John graduated from Andover. Celebrating with him on campus were his mother, his sister, and his uncle Teddy. That summer, in keeping with his mother’s insistence that he get the best experiences, John was off to a seventy-day National Outdoor Leadership School course in Kenya. NOLS was Outward Bound on steroids—and the expedition through the Masai Mara game park nearly ended in disaster. The story was of course reported in the National Enquirer.

  Toward the end of each NOLS trip, the students, supposedly fully battle-tested, are given a topographic map, a compass, and some food and told to get from point A to point B using only the tools provided. The leaders leave the students to fend for themselves, making the assumption that the survival skills imparted in the previous weeks of the trip would serve them well during the final test. Usually, that works out perfectly well. But not always. (I went on a NOLS trip to Glacier Peak in the Pacific Northwest that worked out just fine.) For their final NOLS expedition, the seven teenagers of John’s group were sent on a sixty-two-mile, eight-day hike through the dense Kenyan jungle. They had dehydrated food, some flour and cheese. “But they only had a sketchy map of their route,” the paper reported, “and after seven days found themselves lost in the forbidding jungle, which is crawling with deadly cobras and mambas and is almost impenetrable in places.” The trees were 120 feet high and the undergrowth was said to be more than six feet high. “The group pushed forward,” the Enquirer continued, “desperately hoping to find their way out.” John later told friends in Nairobi, “We just followed the instructions we’d been given, set our course by the sun and our compasses and kept as calm as possible.” But they were lost in the jungle. They didn’t eat for a couple of days. At one point, John was leading the group when he saw a rhino, weighing several tons, fifteen feet ahead of them on the path. He was getting ready to do what he’d been told to do under such circumstances—drop his pack and climb up the nearest tree—when the animal lumbered away into the bush. (A few months before, a charging rhino had trampled another NOLS student.) When John and his six colleagues didn’t show up at the appointed spot after eight days, the NOLS team grew concerned. They dispatched an airplane, locals, and a group of volunteers to try to find the missing teens. A Masai tracker finally found them.

  * * *

  THE CONSENSUS AMONG THE PEOPLE WHO KNEW JOHN best was that he was by now a fully formed, thrill-seeking adrenaline addict. Barlow said he talked to John about his close call on the NOLS trip but that it didn’t affect him that much. “His desire to do things a little edgy was never slaked in the slightest,” he said. Ed Hill recalled how he and John jumped off eighty-foot-high cliffs, how they went skyd
iving in New Jersey. “I did it twice,” Hill said, “and after the second time I just said ‘No more.’ The first time I was so nervous about it and he gave me so much shit that I felt I needed to vindicate myself by doing it a second time, but after the second time I said, ‘I was right in the first place, fucking stupid.’” He remembered driving back from Conway, New Hampshire, with John after a day of ice climbing. They had rented a Cadillac. John was driving. “It was the dead of winter and the roads were terribly icy, and at one point we passed a horrific automobile accident, but he didn’t convince himself, nor did I convince him, to drive more carefully,” he said. He told the story of a little-known incident when John went kayaking by himself to Great Island, off the coast of Hyannis. “He set out in terrible weather,” he said. “It was a miracle that he made it. He capsized, I think. But anyway, he made it to Great Island and then he had to break into someone’s house. He was so hypothermic that he had to break into someone’s house and get in the bathtub. He did that alone. That was typically the sort of thing that you’d expect him to do with someone else.” John left a note for the homeowners and signed it. “They got back to him,” Hill said. “They were very nice about it: ‘Glad to be of assistance, John.’”

  Chermayeff said John’s compulsive desire for physical risk-taking was an essential part of his being. “He was always looking for that,” she said. “He really was looking for some kind of depth so that he could really feel like a human being on the planet, in this life. He wasn’t religious. I don’t think he believed in God or heaven or hell, or an afterlife. He might have had his background, but he felt everything had to be realized in this life and the ante was always up. I don’t know, that’s a guy, male explorer thing. Look at all the people, they all end up dead.”

  * * *

  MARK THREE STARS’S FAMILY was from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. When he showed up at freshman year at Brown, he had never been east of the Rio Grande before. Move-in day “was just a madhouse of cars and parents,” he said. He was hot and sweaty. “There’s people coming and going, and I saw this woman,” he said. “She was carrying this box of albums, you know, vinyl. She had a box of vinyl in her hands, in her arms. I’m coming up the stairs and she was next to the railing and I kind of went past her very quickly so I could open the door at the top of the stairs. So I got in front of her and opened the door. It was one of those heavy fire doors, and she looks up and she goes, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much,’ and it was his mom, Jackie. My mouth kind of flopped open a little bit and I was like, ‘Ah, you’re welcome.’ She was having the whole moving my son into college experience. Then I quickly realized there was this whole group of guys in suits who were also there.”

  At first, he wasn’t sure how to process the fact that John F. Kennedy Jr. was living across the hall from him. Like John, Mark was raised by a single mother. Beyond that connection, though, it was clear that John existed in a rarefied “other world” that would be nearly impossible for Mark—or nearly anyone, really—to penetrate. “He was a very handsome guy and he was also very charming and affable,” Mark said. He wasn’t sure if John just wanted to be left alone. “I’m not going to be one of those crazy people that’s fawning all over him,” he thought to himself. “How annoying would that be?” By the end of the year, he ended up being somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance of John’s. “He wanted to be one of the regular guys,” Mark said, “but he wanted to be one of the regular guys who went to a very prestigious prep school who was really wealthy. He didn’t want to be one of the regular guys like I knew regular guys.” He said that a cadre of “prep school friends” surrounded John, making it difficult for him to get to know John well. “I never felt like I was going to break into that sort of circle of friends.” He remembered playing Frisbee with John for a long time at a freshman-class party. “Really just having a great time,” he said. “It was a very physical kind of experience, you know, chasing and running around and stuff like that. We had this funny physical bonding, no words were really spoken or great catch or whatever, and then we leave.”

  John’s prep school friends “formed this, like, phalanx around him,” Mark said, “and I kind of saw his demeanor change, and I thought a lot about it afterward and then it was sort of like this banter that was inaccessible to me. And then I realized: He has to take on this demeanor whenever he’s out in public. He’s kind of steeling himself. He walked differently. He just looked different.… It was interesting to see him change. Then we got up to the dorm and it was like we’re in the room and it was all very relaxed.”

  His same personality quirks once again manifested themselves at Brown. Among these, of course, were John’s bad habits of borrowing money and of losing his wallet, which occasionally had some borrowed money in it. Mark remembered that when John came back from Christmas vacation he had a new “biker” wallet, one of those wallets with a thick chain attached to it that could be clipped onto your pants, making it theoretically difficult to lose. “His mother was so angry with him because he’d lost his wallet like four or five times in the first semester,” he said. A few weeks later, he said, John came into Mark’s room, dressed only in his boxers. “He goes, ‘Have you seen my khaki pants?’ And I’m like, ‘Jesus man, it’s like put some clothes on. Why would your khaki pants be in here?’ And he was like, ‘Oh God, I lost my khaki pants,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t you have other pants to wear?’ and he goes, ‘Oh, my wallet’s attached to my khaki pants.’ So he lost his pants and his wallet. He was like, ‘Oh God, my mom is going to be so pissed.’”

  Gary Ginsberg met John in their intellectual history class at Brown. They sat together in the back of the room. Ginsberg remembered being struck by how Mary Gluck, the professor, “doted” on John. He gave John grief about it for the next twenty years. “He could say things that were utterly incomprehensible and the professor would walk toward him as he spoke,” Ginsberg said. “She didn’t walk toward anybody else when they spoke but she would walk close to him, nod her head vigorously, and opine about how insightful and brilliant his observations were. And I was just looking at him, shaking my head, and say[ing], ‘That was really nonsensical.’ I guess there was a certain irreverence in our relationship from the get-go.” John did receive an academic wake-up call early on at Brown. Ed Beiser, a political science professor, gave him a failing grade on a paper. “He was really shaken,” Beiser remembered. “He said, ‘What am I going to tell my mother?’ ‘You don’t have to tell her anything,’ I said. ‘You just have to write another paper for me.’”

  John’s first-year academic struggles at Brown were real, and he was placed on academic probation. Once again, his mother had to deal with the situation. On July 2, 1980, Jackie replied to a letter she had received from Brown academic dean Karen Romer about John’s failure to complete two courses. “Living up to academic responsibilities has always been of first importance in our house, so neither John nor I will fail to be galvanized by your message,” she wrote. “I have never asked for special consideration for my children because I feel that is harmful to them but there is an extra burden that John carried this year that other students did not—and I would like to mention it. He was asked to campaign almost every weekend for his uncle.” Jackie wrote to Romer that she would try to get in touch with John, who was again in Africa, and get him to come home earlier than expected in order to complete the classes by September 15 that he had failed to complete the previous academic year.

  John and Rob Littell, a Lawrenceville graduate from New Jersey, met at the beach in Newport, Rhode Island, during Brown’s freshman orientation week. Littell played lacrosse at Lawrenceville and was recruited to play lacrosse at Brown. He and John hit it off quickly, and ended up rooming together their sophomore year, in the Phi Psi house.

  Much of their social life during their first two years at Brown together centered on Phi Psi, which was once a fraternity but had become a fun, raucous dorm without the official fraternal affiliati
on. There was plenty of alcohol and drugs, especially cocaine. Sasha Chermayeff said that Littell and John “snorted coke all the way through college.” (As for her own use of cocaine, she said, “I always prided myself in saying the only time I snorted coke was when I was with John Kennedy.”) Sasha recalled how when John was younger and he had to fulfill a family obligation by giving a speech or making some comments, he would reward himself with a cup of ginger ale, “which he really wanted.” As he got older, the rewards changed. “He worked hard all day,” she recalled, “and he’d smoke this pot and then he’s going to maybe have a glass of wine, or maybe I’ll do a line [of cocaine], maybe he’ll smoke a cigarette. He was like, ‘This is my cup of ginger ale.’”

  There were other rewards for John, too. One night a group of freshmen, including John and Rob, were hanging out together in the Phi Psi television room when along came Billy Way, who had gone to Andover, too, followed by a group of six “attractive and evidently inebriated” co-eds from Providence College, according to Littell. With yellow eyes and a mane of flowing hair, Way, from Bermuda, was on both the Andover and Brown tennis teams, and supposedly was a legendary Lothario. “He had made love to more girls by his eighteenth birthday than most guys fantasize about in their whole lifetime,” Littell explained. Way brought the “cutest girl” over to meet John. At first, there was no “spark” between them, he continued, but then Way told the woman she was talking to John, the president’s son. “She lit up like a Christmas tree,” Littell wrote, “as if this news changed everything.” She asked John to “prove it,” causing him to show her his New York State driver’s license. “The girl, all business at that point, reviewed the license for a moment and then, with a Cheshire kitten’s grin, stuffed her right hand down the front of John’s pants and led him out of the room.”