John’s summer in South Africa had been spent working for the diamond company owned by Jackie’s companion, Maurice Tempelsman. The trip marked his first exposure to the injustices of apartheid. Returning to campus in the fall, he asked his friend Randall Poster, “I’ve got all this knowledge. Now what do I do with it?” The two decided to create a new campus organization, South African Group for Education, that would be funded by Tempelsman and designed to educate students about the wrongs of apartheid. John used his connections to bring notable speakers to campus, including Andrew Young, an African American civil rights leader who had served as President Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations.
* * *
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In his freshman year, John lived with other first-year students in Brown’s West Quad. During his first week, he spotted Pasquale “Pat” Manocchia, a tough, muscular hockey player from a working-class family in Providence, at the other end of the hallway. “Hey, meathead!” John shouted and tossed a Frisbee in his direction. The Frisbee bounced off the wall and landed on the floor a few feet from its intended target. “First of all,” Pat told him, “if you’re going to throw it at me, at least get it to me.” Afterward, they hopped on a bus and struck up a conversation during a field trip to Newport, Rhode Island.
The two men spent plenty of time together and decided, along with a few others, to pledge the Phi Psi fraternity. Like everything else he touched, John transformed a sleepy, low-key fraternity house full of science geeks and a smattering of soccer players into the campus social hotspot. Almost overnight, the fraternity gained a reputation for being home to the beautiful people. On Saturday nights, after a home football game, the frats competed against one another to attract the most students to their parties. “There was a sense of prestige about having more people come to your party,” recalled Richard Wiese, president of Phi Psi. “As soon as John joined and his friends joined, not only did we not have to advertise—we had lines outside the door.”
Before John moved into the fraternity house, he had to undergo the ritual of hazing, which consisted of pranks and humiliation. John not only participated in the usual hijinks but also seemed to enjoy them. In keeping with tradition, Wiese, who served as John’s “big brother” throughout the spring semester of his first year, ordered John to fetch him food and drinks and to do his laundry. John even made Richard a paddle with a mirror and unlit stage lights around it. At one point, four fraternity brothers tried to kidnap John in the middle of a shower, but he managed to overpower them and escape. John took it all in stride, Wiese reflected. “He liked to be the butt of a joke, and he possessed a good, self-deprecating sense of humor.”
Hazing ended in a ritual called “hell night.” The brothers locked the twenty pledges in a room with two kegs of beer and five bottles of tequila. They then took them out one at a time and dragged them through an obstacle course in the house. Blindfolded and wearing only underwear, John was forced to drink large quantities of alcohol and swallow a live goldfish.
“Crawl, you slime!”
John slithered around on the floor, which had been littered with fish guts and dog food.
Then he moved on to another room, where he was forced to put his hand into a toilet bowl.
“Run your hand through the toilet water and grab what you find there,” he was told. When he reached down, he grabbed a peeled banana.
“Thank you, sirs,” John said. “That was nice.”
In the last test of the night, John was placed in a room that contained an olive atop a large block of ice. “You had to pick up the olive with your ass and walk it over and drop it into a bottle,” Pat recalled. “If you dropped it, you had to eat it.”
After the hazing, the brothers met to vote on whom to select. As John’s big brother, Richard informed him of his acceptance into the fraternity. At the time, John was in a makeup room preparing for a play. Wiese thought, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that we just accepted a guy who’s got a face full of pancake makeup.”
In the fall of his second year, John moved into room 210 with Rob Littell, who shared his sense of adventure and mischief but who had not fully anticipated the challenges of living with John. The first thing they did was to create two sleeping lofts to free up space for their desks. Right away, issues emerged. As usual, John was rambunctious and absentminded. There were no maids to pick up after him or to make sure his clothes were washed and properly folded. Although he was always fun, he could also be the roommate from hell.
Every morning, John would jump out of bed, landing roughly on an old sofa that Rob’s mother had given him. After a few weeks of what Littell described as “Tarzan-like behavior,” the couch started to tear. Rob would yell at him every morning, “Hey, do you do that at home?” At another point, John decided that he wanted a pet, and not just a dog or cat, but a pig, which he purchased from a local farm. As Littell recalled, the pig “was not a cuddly, potbellied Vietnamese pet, but a fast-growing, sty-loving farm animal.” John thought the pig could live with them, but Littell banished it to the basement, where it pooped everywhere. After a week, John drove the pig back to the farm.
John also showed little regard for Rob’s belongings, especially his new Mazda GLC, using it to transport the pig back and forth from the farm. But that was only the beginning. He borrowed the sedan to go to Boston to visit his girlfriend Jenny. According to John, Jenny lost the keys to Rob’s car. So the Mazda sat on the street in Boston for more than a week before it was eventually stolen. In a letter to his friend Sasha, John wrote, “[T]o say that I was filled with murderous rage is a gargantuan understatement.” But even after Littell’s car had been found and returned, John ended up totaling it in a rainstorm, though he insisted that the accident had not been his fault. All these problems, however, did little to dampen their friendship, which, in fact, would only deepen over the years and endure until the end.
John’s recklessness with cars also meant that he became an avid collector of speeding tickets during his four years at Brown. In September 1981 he avoided arrest by going to a municipal court and paying $108 in overdue fines and traffic violations. The local police chief had said that law enforcement planned to fan out the next morning with a hundred arrest warrants for people who had ten or more unpaid traffic or parking tickets. In January 1983 John failed to appear at a hearing on a speeding summons, and his Massachusetts driver’s license was suspended. He had been caught in Westport, Connecticut, driving eighty-one miles per hour in a fifty-five zone on the Connecticut Turnpike. The Kennedy family lawyer who represented him in court explained that John missed the hearing because he had been traveling to Brown and most likely “became immersed in exams and just forgot the date of the hearing.”
On several occasions, John’s famous mom would show up at the fraternity house wanting to see him. Wiese recalled one encounter when John had to leave for a few minutes and designated him to stand watch. “I’ve got to drop off a paper at a professor’s house,” John said. “But my mother is supposed to come and meet me here. If you see her, please tell her I’ll be back in a minute. You know what she looks like. Black hair, black glasses.” Richard found it amusing that John felt he needed to describe his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “I’ll figure it out,” Wiese replied.
When Jackie arrived, she asked Richard if she could use the phone. But there were two complications. They had thrown a party the night before, so the floors were still coated in spilled beer. “I will never forget her patent leather shoes sticking to the floor as she walked,” Wiese said. The bigger problem, though, was that John and Rob were notorious for having the dirtiest, foulest-smelling room in the house. Richard was reluctant to show her the room, but she insisted. It was, he recalled, “a disaster. You could not even see the floor.” Mrs. Onassis scanned the mess, trying to find the phone. Finally, she located a wire, got down on her hands and knees, and followed it. But it ended up leading to a stereo. At this point, Richard d
ecided to rescue her by inviting her to use the phone in his room.
Perhaps it comes as little surprise that John earned a reputation for borrowing clothes and money from his housemates and never returning anything. At one dinner, John asked Richard if he could borrow a blue blazer. Wiese resisted, knowing he would never see it again. But John reassured him. “You can sit right next to me. I’ll give it to you right after the dinner.” By the end of the meal, the jacket sported a large spaghetti sauce stain. “Don’t worry,” John said. “I’ll get it dry cleaned.” A month later, Richard went searching for the jacket in John’s room and found it crumpled in a ball behind the sofa. Wiese admitted that had the situation involved anyone else, he would have been mad. “It was funny because it was John,” he recalled. “He could do whatever he wanted, and people still accepted him.” They did so in part because he was famous, but also because he possessed genuine warmth and kindheartedness.
Pat Manocchia, who lived next door to John, had similar experiences but was less forgiving. “He would always come borrow stuff,” Pat recalled. “It was so annoying.” One morning John walked into Pat’s room and asked to borrow a towel. “I’ll get it back to you,” he promised. Two days later Manocchia asked for the towel, but John said he had lost it. Pat promptly marched into John’s room, took a stack of his albums hostage, and drove them to his family’s house in Providence.
On another day, John knocked again on Pat’s door. “Hey, man, do you have twenty bucks?” Manocchia was shocked. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You’re asking me to lend you twenty dollars?” John offered to write Pat a check. “Okay, write me a check,” Pat responded flatly. He then turned around and sold the check for $50 to a starstruck girl who wanted the signature, not the money. Afterward, Pat told John, “Hey, big boy, if you want to write any more checks, I’m happy to take them.”
“What do you mean?” John asked, puzzled. When Pat revealed what he had done, John erupted, “You fucking asshole!” Manocchia responded that there was a simple solution to this problem: “Get your own money.”
Despite these spats, John tried to attend all of Pat’s home hockey games, sometimes acting like an overly enthusiastic fan. Once, as the Brown team lined up to face off in a tough game against Harvard, Pat noticed John standing behind the visiting team’s goalie, screaming like a maniac. “Kick their ass! Kick their ass!” Pat just shook his head. The center forward for Harvard looked back over his shoulder at Pat. “What’s up with that guy?” he asked, clearly not knowing who “that guy” was. In another game against Boston University, Pat found himself sentenced to the penalty box. He came home to the frat house to find a message from John: “Stop picking your nose in the penalty box.” John told him that he had been with a girl from Harvard when they turned on the television, and “there you were in the penalty box, picking your nose.”
While John could be annoying, he was also capable of acts of empathy and kindness. Pat’s father died during his sophomore year, so he left campus for a week. On his drive back, he faced a snowstorm. As his car inched its way down Thayer Street, he saw someone running toward the front of his car. He slammed on the brakes, but the car slid, and the person bounced off the hood and fell to the side. Pat was terrified, but before he could turn the car to see what had happened, John’s head popped up outside the window. “You’re a shitty driver,” John said. Pat started screaming at him, “I’m going to kick your ass!” John opened the door and jumped in the backseat. Pat, who was still angry, shouted, “You dented my car!” John then reached over the front seat, gave Pat a hug, and kissed him on the head. “I’m so sorry about your dad.” Pat found the gesture very sincere—almost, he reflected, “like a dog would do it.” John, he described, “had that Labrador quality to him.”
For the most part, John felt safe while living on campus. Numerous girls would stop by the fraternity house unannounced to catch a glimpse of him, but their curiosity was harmless. A few security scares did happen, however, when John’s housemates received phone calls from people claiming they would kidnap John. He took all this odd behavior in stride.
There were a few more lighthearted moments as well. For quite some time, a strawberry blonde kept sending him elaborate collages of photos of John in the mail. One Wednesday afternoon, near the end of the school year, she showed up at his room holding a pink suitcase and a stack of collages. John wasn’t around, and Rob Littell did not find her threatening, so he sat down and talked to her. She showed Rob the many pictures of John she had cut from magazines and told him detailed stories of the times they had shared together. As she was explaining that she was John’s girlfriend, John walked in, and Rob introduced the two. John pulled Rob aside. “Who the hell is that?” he whispered. John went to find campus security, while Rob entertained “Miss Crazy.” Once security arrived, they escorted her out of the building and to the local bus station.
Four hours later, however, she was back. With the door unlocked and the room empty, she let herself in, took all of Rob’s clothes out of the closet and dresser drawers, and stacked them in piles on the landing. When Rob returned, he found that she had showered and was in her pajamas waiting for John. Rob recalled that she looked at him as if he were the crazy one and proceeded to tell him that she was John’s roommate. Rob slowly backed out of the room and waited for John. Once more, they called Brown security, which apologized and promised it would not happen again.
But early the next morning, they heard banging on their door, which they had finally decided to lock for the first time that year. Security, understandably fed up, threatened to escort her to the Providence police station, where she would be arrested for trespassing. The thought of her being hauled away proved too much for John and Rob. They asked the guards to leave her alone, and John called a friend, asking if he would keep her occupied. She never showed up again.
At the end of his sophomore year, John moved to Washington, DC, to work as an intern for $100 per week at the Center for Democratic Policy, a group assembled to explore the reasons for the Democratic Party’s defeat the previous November. In August 1981, when the internship ended, Senator Kennedy pleaded with John to hold a press conference to let people know what he had been doing over the summer. John disliked talking to the press because he could predict exactly which questions they would ask, but he acquiesced to his uncle’s request. In a packed conference, he informed reporters that he “was basically just a normal intern. I’ve done everything from research to stuffing envelopes.” But they pressed him to reveal whether his return to Washington had some larger meaning. Was it a first step toward a political career? As usual, John deflected the question, confessing, “I haven’t really thought about it. I’m not really thinking about careers at the moment. . . . I’m not a big planner. Things always sort of surprised me. I have two years of college left, so I’m fortunate enough to be able to see employment in terms of summers.”
John managed to politely answer questions without divulging much about himself. In one interesting exchange, reporters asked him what it was like to be in Washington, an indirect reference to the Kennedy legacy. John responded, “I’ve never been here before.” He quickly corrected himself, clarifying that he had no memories of living in the White House. At another point during the conference, the twenty-year-old started fiddling with his tie. “Yeah, it’s pretty wrinkled,” he said. “Shows I’m doing my own laundry.” He then looked at the ink that stained his white shirt. “I would wear one of those plastic pocket protectors,” he quipped, “but they make you look like a Republican.” He then told reporters that he was staying with Sargent and Eunice Shriver and spent most of his evenings teaching himself how to play the guitar. “I don’t really go out a lot,” he claimed.
In his junior year, John moved off campus to a house on picturesque Benefit Street, sharing lodging with Rob Littell, Christina Haag, Chris Overbeck, Lynne Weinstein, Cordelia “Dee” Richards, John Hare, and Christiane “Kissy” Amanpour, a British-b
orn student of Iranian descent who was enrolled at the University of Rhode Island. John’s bedroom was the smallest and sat on the top floor of the three-story house. Kissy established the rules: they each had to shop and cook once a week and were designated areas of the house to clean. For the most part, John abided by the rules and even earned the prize for the most improved cook, but he did have a major blowup with Haag one time when he and Overbeck failed to buy the proper items for dinner. Also, since he was constantly losing his key, he often entered the house by climbing up the fire escape and crawling in through a second-floor window.
* * *
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Among his many activities at Brown, John especially enjoyed being onstage and proved to be a talented actor. He told director John Emigh that one of the reasons he loved acting was that he believed people would cast him not because of his family background but because he fit the role best. Jim Barnhill, who taught John in a small scene study class in his sophomore year, described John as “among the best and most talented students” he ever encountered. He thought that John could have been accepted into Juilliard School or the Yale School of Drama. Don Wilmeth, the head of Brown’s theater department, agreed that John was skilled but observed that he could also be unfocused. “He had great instincts and did not require a lot of direction. But he was also undisciplined,” Wilmeth recalled. Rehearsing demanded an enormous time drain. Actors would spend five or six weeks preparing for a play, and rehearsals were usually scheduled in the evenings and could last up to three hours. “He did what he was supposed to do,” Wilmeth said, “but often he was late to rehearsals, and on weekends he would go off to New York.”
In the spring of his freshman year, John starred in an Elizabethan comedy titled Volpone. He played its hero, Bonario, a dashing professional soldier. “There was an open call for students to appear in the play,” recalled Emigh. “John showed up and did the best reading for the part.” Perhaps the director spoke truthfully, but it was probably no coincidence that John was an unmasked character in a play in which mostly everyone else wore masks. Surely Emigh understood the attention his play would garner by casting John and keeping him recognizable. However, The Brown Daily Herald critic gave John a gushing review: “As Bonario, John Kennedy has certainly secured for himself a firm footing in Brown theater, and to the greater extent deservedly so. Cutting a handsome figure onstage with pencil mustache and rouged cheeks, Kennedy need only loosen up a bit in his dialogue.” Emigh agreed, saying, “John was wonderful.”
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