Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Back in Manhattan, her doctor discovered enlarged lymph nodes in her neck and armpit. A CAT scan revealed swollen lymph nodes in her chest and deep in her abdomen. A biopsy of one the lymph nodes in her neck showed that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In early January, she began a standard course of four treatments for the disease that led to an “apparent remission,” the Times reported. In February, she signed a living will, making clear she did not want to receive aggressive medical treatment for a “grave illness.” In March, Jackie developed “weakness,” according to the Times, “became confused,” and had pain in her legs. An MRI showed that the lymphoma had disappeared from her neck, chest, and abdomen but had spread to the membranes surrounding her brain and spinal cord. For the next month, at 1040 Fifth, she received radiation therapy in her brain as well as in her lower spinal cord. She gained strength but still had trouble walking except for short spurts and still had pain in her neck, for which she received painkillers. On April 14, she was admitted to New York Hospital after she developed a perforated ulcer in her stomach, a normal consequence of the steroid treatment she had been prescribed. The doctors sewed up the hole in her stomach that day. But the cancer in her brain and spinal cord was nearly relentless and responded poorly to treatment. Needless to say, John was deeply upset by his mother’s life-threatening illness.

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  IN THE FALL OF 1993, John and his friend Michael Berman decided to revive Random Ventures in order to start what they were soon describing as a “post-partisan” political magazine. Its slogan was “Not just politics as usual.” In coming up with the idea for the magazine, they were inspired by the hipness of the recently inaugurated president, Bill Clinton, who seemed to attract a new generation of Americans to his young, cool affect. Anyone who saw Clinton play saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show appreciated John’s desire to try to make politics as entertaining as Hollywood and celebrity. Over time, John and Berman discussed the idea for the magazine and how they might capture the excitement that Clinton’s election had seemed to generate. (It was difficult not to make the obvious comparison to the enthusiasm his father’s election had ignited thirty-two years earlier.)

  They quickly landed on the idea of starting a flashy political magazine. Early on, Berman explained to the Los Angeles Times their vision for George: “People talk about politics the same way they talk about film or fashion or business. And if you can make those industries exciting, you can certainly make the political world exciting. You stand at a movie theater these days and hear 16-year-old kids talk about last week’s gross and who the original director was supposed to be—that was trade information before the advent of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere. Now, all of a sudden, it’s consumer information. And that’s what this is, too.” For John, it was also a way to enter politics, to honor the family legacy and to effect change but to do it his way.

  John and Berman were an odd match. John had the killer looks, political connections, and extraordinary access; Berman, with little interest in wonky politics, was a marketing and advertising whiz. Neither man, though, had much of a publishing background, let alone an MBA. What they lacked in publishing acumen, they made up for in energy and enthusiasm. At the start, they were intent on blurring the lines between what it meant to be a magazine editor and what it meant to be a magazine publisher. For a while, they each did a little bit of everything. Being John’s business partner, though, Berman once said, was “like being Dolly Parton’s feet. I am sure they are nice, but they are overshadowed by other features.”

  After Jackie had arranged for John to meet Joe Armstrong, he, John, and Berman met regularly to discuss what the concept for George should be. “When they began, they didn’t know anything about publishing,” Armstrong said. “They didn’t have any idea they were doing the absolutely hardest thing in publishing, to start a magazine from scratch. But John wasn’t intimidated by what he didn’t know.” Armstrong worked with John and Berman on the basics—editorial structure, design, circulation, direct mail, advertising, creating a business plan. John “read other magazines and looked for the kinds of stories he wanted in George, the kinds of writers,” Armstrong said.

  John had stayed in touch with Gary Ginsberg. By then, Ginsberg had graduated from Columbia Law School and spent a few years at Simpson Thacher, the big New York law firm; then—at John’s urging—he took a leave of absence to go down to Little Rock, Arkansas, and join the Clinton presidential campaign. After Clinton was elected, Ginsberg worked in the White House as a lawyer and then in the Justice Department. John was fascinated by how the drama of the 1992 election had transformed politics in a fundamental way. George Stephanopoulos interested John particularly, and the way he transcended the role of a typical presidential adviser to become a national celebrity. “He was witnessing something that he hadn’t seen before and it really interested him and it gave him kind of the kernels for what later became George,” Ginsberg said. “Because he saw the intersection of popular culture and politics through the 1992 campaign.” Ginsberg, among others, started working with John and Berman on a business plan for George. They would get together on the weekends and scope it out.

  On May 17, 1994, Jackie developed “shaking chills” and became “disoriented,” according to the New York Times. Maurice Tempelsman and a nurse took her back to New York Hospital. She was diagnosed with pneumonia and administered antibiotics by injection. At first, she “rallied,” according to the paper, but the next day took another turn for the worse. On Wednesday, a CAT scan showed that the cancer had invaded her liver “in huge amounts.” The doctors told her there was nothing medicine could do for her at that point. She asked to go home to her apartment, on Fifth Avenue. Christiane Amanpour, John’s old Providence housemate, had stayed close to him during her career as CNN’s chief international correspondent. “John called me,” Amanpour remembered, “and said, ‘Mommy’s coming home. She wants to be at home, and there’s nothing more to be done.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m coming. I’m coming.’ So I got on a plane and I came to New York.” She continued, “On a human level, there’s nothing else to say. It was a very big tragedy, a personal tragedy. Somebody’s mom was dying.” She declined to speak about what it was like being by Jackie’s side as she lay dying. “It’s private,” she said, “but just to say that she was surrounded by her family, her friends, and a huge amount of love.”

  At 10:15 p.m. on May 19, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. John, Caroline, and Maurice Tempelsman were with her. She was sixty-four years old. The next morning, it was John who came out to speak with the throngs of reporters. He was dressed impeccably in a navy-blue suit. “She was surrounded by her friends and family and the books and the people and the things that she loved,” he said. “She did it in her own way, on her terms and we all feel lucky for that. And now she’s in God’s hands. There’s been an enormous outpouring of good wishes from everyone both in New York and beyond. I speak for all of our family when I say we are extremely grateful. Everyone’s been very generous and I hope now we can just have these next couple of days in relative peace. Thank you very much.” Chris Cuomo, for one, found John to be incredibly brave at this particular moment. “Losing his mother was intensely personal for him, but, again, with everything else in his life, there were these added layers of significance to it,” he said. “Jackie O was sick and that meant something in American culture. He had to process all that.”

  On May 23, Jackie was buried next to her husband in Arlington National Cemetery. Some one hundred family and friends attended her burial, each of whom kissed her mahogany casket to say their goodbyes. John also leaned down to touch his father’s gravestone. At the funeral mass, John read passages from his mother’s favorite poem, “Memory of Cape Cod,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. John said the reading was chosen in order to evoke his mother’s “essence” and her “love of words, the bonds of home and family and her spirit of adventure.” In her thirty-six-page will, signed March 22, she left the bulk of her estate—estimated to be between $100
million and $200 million—to John and to Caroline. They would also share equally in the ownership of her 1040 Fifth Avenue apartment and her estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

  “That was rough,” Sasha Chermayeff said. “His mother’s death was very, very painful for him.… [He said] things like ‘Until both of your parents are dead, you don’t really know how alone you are.’” Amanpour said, “I remember one day going with him, to the house. You know, knock, knock, knock, on the door. His mom answered the door and I remember her saying, ‘Oh, angel.’ She called him ‘angel’ sometimes, and it was just so from the heart. She loved him to bits.” Added Chris Cuomo, John “was one of the few adult males who was still very much attentive to his mother’s expectations. It mattered to him to make his mother proud.”

  Ginsberg said he thought John handled death better than anyone he knew. “He lost cousins, he lost parents, and he was incredibly unemotional,” he said. “Not that he didn’t feel it, but externally was able to hold it together better than anybody I knew. I remember saying, ‘John, how the hell do you do it?’ And he said, ‘You know, I just learned from my family. You just don’t wallow in death. You move on. You hold it inside.’” A few days before Jackie died she wrote a letter to John, to be opened only after her death. Many interpreted her message as urging him to grab hold of the Camelot legacy and fulfill his destiny in politics. “I understand the pressure you’ll forever have to endure as a Kennedy, even though we brought you into this world as an innocent,” she wrote. “You, especially, have a place in history. No matter what course in life you choose, all I can ask is that you and Caroline continue to make me, the Kennedy family and yourself proud.” Doug Wead, a historian who has written about the Kennedys, interpreted Jackie’s deathbed letter to John as permission to enter the family business. “This was a real departure for her, putting any kind of pressure on him at all, which she avoided—she studiously avoided,” he said. “She knew in her heart that someday the stars are going to line up and he’s going to be president. The money will be there. The mood of the nation will be there. The polls will be there. The country will be ready for it, and he will be president.” Chermayeff said Jackie’s death and the deathbed letter further ratcheted up the pressure on John. “It’s a complex thing, right?” she said. “You have this legacy. It’s clear. You can’t ignore it. It has great privileges that come along with it. It has very difficult things that come along with it. There’s a lot of pressure. And yet he had enough confidence to sort of want to live out his own life, but he didn’t want to let anybody down. It was a complicated thing just to be that son of that fallen idol.”

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  IF JOHN WAS FEELING any new pressure after his mother’s untimely death, it was likely immediately only to somehow figure out what he and Michael Berman wanted George to be and to get someone to back it financially. On the morning after his mother’s burial, John was back at his desk. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done,” a friend told Esquire. “He went back to work.” But finding investors for George was proving to be more difficult than either he or Berman expected, despite John’s unparalleled access to nearly everyone. Susanna Howe, a recent graduate of Barnard College, was George’s first hire that summer. They spent five months in a conference room “trying to figure out the magazine,” she recalled. “John and I had lunches with the most amazing array of media people. He brought me along because he didn’t want to go alone. We would just go and have all these ‘advice lunches,’ where people would pontificate on their luminous career in publishing and tell John how hard they worked.” Thanks to John’s celebrity, they met with everyone from David Koch to Ron Perelman. By the fall of 1994, they had commitments for something like $7 million from around fifteen different people, but it wasn’t enough. No one individual had enough skin in the game to help them achieve their ambitions. Berman later told the Los Angeles Times he found fund-raising to be “demoralizing, humiliating and, after a while, boring.”

  They changed tacks. Berman leaked the previously confidential news of the magazine to Page Six. They heard from hundreds of people. Out of their own pockets—costing hundreds of thousands of dollars—they paid for a direct-mail survey to a list of 150,000 other magazine subscribers asking them, without a commitment, if they would consider subscribing to George, which they described by comparing it to other established magazines. “George is to politics what Rolling Stone is to music. Forbes is to business. Allure is to beauty. Premiere is to films,” the mailing said. And added that the magazine would answer the questions: “Who’s under the covers. Who’s under indictment. Who’s running the country. And who’s running them.” By direct-mail standards, the response encouraged the two men, with around 5 percent of the people who received the mailing saying they would subscribe to such a magazine. They kept fighting to find a financial backer who would give John and Berman a meaningful share of the equity while putting up most, if not all, of the money. It was not an easy task. “Sensing, finally, that something might happen with their project, Kennedy and Berman also began changing,” Michael Gross wrote. “The high-mindedness with which they’d originally approached the venture began slowly giving way to a desire to succeed, whatever changes in tone, look, or content that required.”

  Their luck began to change when they decided finally to meet with the now infamous David Pecker, then the CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media, the US magazine division of Hachette, a big French conglomerate. They had decided they needed a deep-pocketed partner who could provide George with distribution and printing, with a keen focus on the bottom line. They met over lunch in December 1994 at an Italian restaurant on East 60th Street. John arrived by bike, with his briefcase slung over his shoulder. John told Pecker he wanted George to “combine politics and pop culture” and to be “prime time for public life.” Pecker said he was “skeptical” and magazines “about politics and religion don’t sell.” He asked John why Hachette should invest the money in George. “He said he’d put celebrities on the cover—commercialize the covers,” Pecker said. John shared with Pecker the encouraging results of his direct-mail campaign. “It was reassuring to me that he was willing to put his own money at risk,” Pecker said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of dollars John and Berman spent from their own pockets getting the advice of consultants and magazine professionals to guide them. John also reassured Pecker about the central contradiction of George: that the magnetic scion of the same family that did its best to keep the media at bay as an understandable matter of course was now wanting to publish a splashy, gossipy glossy magazine about the celebrity of politics. It seemed like an irreconcilable conflict. But if it was, John had made his peace. He told Pecker that after his father got out of the White House, “he had planned to be a reporter or an editor for a newspaper, and his mother worked for Doubleday, so publishing was in his blood. He could make a career for himself.” Added Amanpour, “George was John’s soft entrée into politics, in his own way, where he fused celebrity, politics, and real issues, which is what we’re all doing today, right. I mean that’s what’s happened. It’s all sort of fusion.”

  Pecker was sold. He dug into the business plan. He asked the car advertisers in Detroit if they would be interested in supporting the magazine. There were lunches with the Hachette editorial director and with Daniel Filipacchi at Le Bernardin. In February 1995, John and Michael signed a deal with Pecker that would give Hachette a 50 percent stake in George and Random Ventures a 50 percent stake, with John and Michael each having a 25 percent stake in the magazine. John and Michael would have editorial control over the publication, but since Hachette had put up the money, at the end of the day it would have the final say over the magazine. They celebrated the signing of the deal over dinner at Rao’s, the famous Italian restaurant on 114th Street in East Harlem. “After dinner,” Pecker recalled about John, “he just walked over to his bicycle and put his cap on. As he was going down 114th Street in the middle of the night, the photographers were all chasing him.”

&
nbsp; Berman became George’s executive publisher; John became editor in chief. Neither man had much of a clue about how to do either job but they were motivated, ambitious, and excited to succeed. They moved into a conference room at Hachette, on the same floor with Elle magazine, Elle Decor, Family Life, and Metropolitan Home. John asked Roger Black to design a prototype of the magazine. Black admired the way John went about his work. “He wasn’t acting the part,” he said. “He admitted that he was a complete amateur and said that he didn’t know anything—but let’s go from there. Of course, he got everyone to work for him for nothing. The fact that it leaked to Page Six that he was hanging around my offices was payment enough for me.” Maryjane Fahey was Black’s art director. She remembered what would happen when John came into the office. “Every woman and gay guy would immediately have to show me the layouts for Esquire Gentleman or some other project,” she said. “One time John asked to see some of our other work, so I tried to find a copy of Out, which we had designed. I couldn’t find it, so I said, ‘Well, you can certainly get a copy on the newsstand.’ And he laughed and said, ‘Can you imagine what would happen if I bought a copy of Out on the newsstand?’”

  The editorial battles began almost immediately. Pecker and Hachette, which at first agreed to produce two issues of George and committed to the magazine as much as $20 million if things went well, were not fooling around. Pecker wanted a return on his investment. “Suddenly, the struggle over the direction of the magazine is very serious,” a George insider told Gross, at Esquire. “There are different conceptions. John is smart, but he lacks an edge. He’s one of the least assertive people you’ll ever meet; he’s never had to assert himself—he’s John Kennedy! Now, suddenly, he’s in a huge corporation. He wants a magazine of ideas with a sugar coating. They want a political People.” One Hachette executive suggested changing the name to Criss-Cross, from George, to better capture the idea that the magazine wanted to position itself at the nexus of power, celebrity, and money. They also considered the name GW. “Maybe we’ll change it to John someday,” Berman joked to People.