The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Strapped in and ready, I gunned the throttle. John stood about thirty yards ahead, at the point where I was supposed to pull back on the yoke and attempt to gain air. Shuddering in the sand at first, the Buckeye began to roll, picking up enough speed by John’s position that he gave me the high sign, and I pulled back on the stick. The machine popped up like a champagne cork. In what seemed the blink of an eye, I was at an altitude of four hundred feet and heading east, to Paris! I looked down and back and saw John jumping up and down, smiling. As we’d planned, I nudged the stick to the right and the Buckeye began a nice 180-degree turn out over the Atlantic, back west toward the makeshift airstrip. It was really cool for about seven seconds, until I began to execute step two of the flight program: landing. I moved the yoke to the right again and completed my oval flight pattern, heading back over the beach, into the wind now. I was descending at a reasonable angle, going through the landing checklist in my head, when a gust blew from the south and forced the Buckeye thirty yards to the left. I was now in the most beautiful section of the whole estate, the large and majestic sand dunes. This was not good, because fifteen yards dead ahead and above me was a big, thick dune. My descent had taken me below their peaks, and while the beach was still thirty feet below, the dune was looming, well, dead ahead. In a moment of inspiration, I reached back to a favorite old Bugs Bunny cartoon, the one where Bugs freezes his plummeting plane in midair by pulling back on the joystick moments before it hits the ground. “Thank goodness for air brakes,” he exclaims. I yanked on that yoke with all I had, and in the next instant, despite a small sandstorm and a lost wheel, I was still flying. Somehow I clipped the dune again, hard, but managed to get the Buckeye on the ground. I was alive! Unbuckling the harness, I dove out and kissed the sand. Jumping up, I started running toward John, who was running along a tire track to me. We collapsed in the sand and started laughing. John sputtered, “Why’d you land so quickly?”

  “A [large] man can’t just sit around.” I contemplate the laws of physics while sitting in the Buckeye on the front lawn of Red Gate on Martha’s Vineyard. (Courtesy of Sasha Chermayeff)

  I answered, “Because my entire being was focused on one thing. Landing.”

  He asked, “Why did you ram the dune?”

  “Because it was there? How the hell do I know?”

  We wrestled the Buckeye back into the trailer just in time for the tide to come up and swamp the back wheels. We couldn’t budge it and resignedly radioed Bert, who hauled out the big tractor and pulled the wounded Buckeye out and home. My wife was angry. She’d seen me in the air from the upstairs bedroom window—she said it was like watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But she forgave me by dinner—we’re both of the you-could-be-hit-by-a-bus-any-day-so-live-life-to-the-fullest school—and smiled when John toasted “his brave friend” at dinner.

  Eleven

  MATTERS OF THE HEART

  IN THE SUMMER of 1988, following his internship at the law firm Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, John flew home from Los Angeles to New York. He arrived at the landmark Delta terminal at JFK, picked up his luggage, and proceeded to the car service pickup area. Hearing his name called out, he walked toward the limousine the voice had come from. The back door opened and out popped a young lady he’d been dating when he left New York. It was Sarah Jessica Parker, in a mink coat and nothing else. Not a bad greeting. The lovely Ashley Richardson, a model and actress who rocked the dance floors of lower Manhattan for a few years, once visited our Eighty-sixth Street apartment wearing similar attire: an ensemble of mink and Prada booties.

  This was not the norm, though. When he had a serious girlfriend, John was surprisingly self-disciplined and faithful. “Surprising” because women constantly threw themselves in his path. But he enjoyed serious relationships and was, in my opinion, always looking for someone to marry.

  The first girlfriend I knew well was Sally Munro, whom John went out with at Brown and for several years afterward. They were great friends as well as lovers, and Sally was never impressed by the trappings of John’s celebrity. She was a keen observer rather than an active participant in John’s public life. Her grounded sensibility was just what he needed during his first years as an adult. As for why they broke up, it seemed to me that they just reached an impasse. There was nothing more to learn from each other. In 1983, after working for Barry Clifford salvaging the Whydah, John went to India. He studied at the University of New Delhi and even met Mother Teresa. Sally went with him, and their relationship was pretty much over by the time they got back. They’d gone out for a long time, almost six years. It wasn’t a wrenching, turbulent breakup from what I could see. In fact, I’d use the word amicable.

  We were living on Eighty-sixth Street when John got a phone call that sent him headlong into his next serious romance. It was 1985 and the call was from the sculptor Darrell Petit, a friend of John’s and a hockey-playing hunk who’d gone to Brown. In the course of their conversation, Darrell told John that he’d recently broken up with Christina Haag, an actress and Brown graduate who’d been one of John’s housemates the year I lived in Boston. I could tell something was up because John’s voice rose two or three octaves in the middle of the call and he started to pace back and forth in the kitchen like a caged cheetah. He soon got off the phone and, with the look of an eight-year-old who’s just won a lifetime pass to Hersheypark, ran over to the window (with an alley view) and shouted to the assembled bricks, “Christina’s free!”

  And then turning to me, with meaning: “The girl I’m gonna marry!”

  I was surprised. I didn’t know he was so interested. I suppose he didn’t pursue Christina earlier out of respect for Darrell. Christina has a kind of Greta Garbo quality to her. She’s a raven-haired beauty, deliberately mysterious and wickedly sexy. Wake-up sexy. Those two spoke expertly of Tantrism before I knew how to spell it. They went out for years and seemed to get along perfectly. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d decided to get married. They were both working hard on their careers, though—Christina as an actress and John in law school—so maybe everything came to seem like too much effort. And John continued to be the proverbial brass ring for a large part of the female population. He was pursued continually by women, often beautiful ones—that’s gotta be hard on a relationship. In any case, they broke up. I honestly don’t know why. And by the time John met Daryl Hannah, another actress, he and Christina were done.

  John told me that he was first set up with Daryl by his uncle Teddy Kennedy, who was friendly with her wealthy stepfather, a generous contributor to the Massachusetts Democratic Party. The two power brokers figured that Daryl and John might make a good match. They dated on and off for years, living together for a time at her Upper West Side apartment. I had a great time with Daryl. I found her smart and somehow innocent. And as beautiful as a sunrise, although the ex-mermaid always wore pants at the beach. She’s posing for Playboy now, but back then she went around covered up from head to toe. She and I would discuss our favorite cereals and cartoons at length, specifically Cap’n Crunch and the Looney Tunes’ Road Runner. She seemed a kid at heart, like me, though the type who was always trying to help the baby bird that had fallen out of the tree.

  That’s not to say that she was in any way ditzy. Daryl is as sharp as a tack, and some people found the childlike air insincere. I noticed that Mrs. O made herself scarce at the Vineyard when we were there with Daryl. I once asked John where his mom had disappeared to after dinner one Saturday. She didn’t join us in the living room for tea and talk. He just laughed, in that “Don’t ask” way. We ate in the barn the next night. Maybe the mother hen in her didn’t think that celebrity matchups were a good idea. John apparently didn’t agree—he and Daryl went out for five years.

  Daryl had a theory, one that she told us one weekend at the Vineyard, that in every successful relationship there is a flower and a gardener: one person who needs to be tended and one who loves to nurture and support. Or maybe it was a joke, because we all la
ughed as we dissected our relationships into flowers and gardeners. The problem was that Daryl and John were both clearly, and admittedly, flowers. The joke eventually hardened into reality. They broke up in a huff following a fight at the airport in 1994. John moved out of her apartment and into the New York Athletic Club for a while until he found a place on Hudson Street. Somehow they just never spoke again. I was upset at John for their awkward parting. I thought he owed her a call. But really, I never figured them as marriage material anyway. I’d already concluded that I got along better with Daryl than John did. They were very thin-skinned around each other. Lots of tiffs and small skirmishes. John was worn out by the battling. As two actors, I guess they felt their last row was the perfect denouement. A Hollywood ending in reverse: two lovers stomping off at the airport. Cut! Print it! Move on.

  In one of the off moments in his long on-and-off relationship with Daryl, John had a fling with Madonna. Not a real fling, actually, more of a curiosity encounter between the Material Girl and the Hunk. They were like two big media ships passing in the night, a night that ended without fireworks. John gave a funny account of himself and Madonna in a hotel room in Chicago, stuck without contraception. While they managed to entertain themselves, they never achieved what would have been the definitive celebrity coupling.

  Daryl Hannah and John were a tabloid dream come true, but they worked to keep their romance real. (Mitchell Gerber/Corbis)

  John was between serious girlfriends when he had an unfortunate experience involving a telephone. It may be the funniest story he ever told me. He was at home, in bed with a woman he was dating at the time, when the phone rang. And rang and rang. The caller would hang up, the ringing would stop, then a few seconds later the phone would start up again. To put an end to the annoyance, John waited until it stopped ringing, took the receiver off the hook, and set it down on the table next to the bed. Then he got back to business, apparently in dramatic, noisy fashion. Unbeknownst to him, he’d lifted the phone off the hook a fraction of a second before it rang—in effect, answering the call. His caller, another woman he was dating, listened in unhappily on John’s romp for the next half an hour. And she didn’t just listen, she screamed in fury into the phone. John knew she was screaming because when all was said and done and he’d rolled back over to the side of the bed, she was still going ballistic, a bit hoarse for the effort. He slammed the receiver down in an instant. But as good as this story is, it even has a happy ending: She forgave him. Charming bastard, huh?

  Not long after, I began hearing the name of a young fashion model a lot. John mentioned her first, in glowing terms, and then I heard her name again from a coworker of mine. He told me how he’d driven to Avalon, New Jersey, that weekend just to be near this girl, Julie Baker, who he said was from Pennsylvania and looked just like Jackie Kennedy. (Too bad Sigmund Freud passed away years ago, because I’m way out of my league dealing with these looks-like-family issues.) Julie Baker was the hottest girl on the big island of Manhattan for a time, gorgeous but also sweet to the core. John fell hard. She was glamorous, athletic, and fun. They went out, off and on, for several years. I know they were physically compatible because when I made the standard locker-room query about sex, John groaned blissfully, “Oh, my God,” and closed his eyes.

  John met Carolyn Bessette in late 1994. Their attraction was instant and mutual. They began to date, secretly at first, I think because they both enjoyed the mystery. Carolyn, a blue-eyed public-school graduate from Greenwich, Connecticut, was working for Calvin Klein at the time as a publicist and, because of her extraordinary style, muse. John first saw her while shopping for suits. He asked someone who she was, got her phone number, and went out on a first date deep in Tribeca. You had to meet Carolyn only for an instant to understand why she captivated John: She was almost preternaturally intense, with an electricity about her that nearly, though not quite, distracted you from her physical beauty. The qualities that John always liked in women—irreverence, mystery, drama, and beauty—she had in abundance. John knew he’d hooked the big one right away, though she put up a sporting fight.

  I met Carolyn for the first time at John’s apartment when they had just begun to get serious. John and I had gone kayaking and I’d stopped in to have a beer before heading home. John didn’t want me to go yet, though. He kept telling me that I should stay another minute because he had a surprise. The minute turned into an hour, but finally the buzzer rang. John became uncharacteristically jumpy. Bam! In walks the hottest girl I’d ever seen in my life. Tall, bright blond, in loose-fitting jeans and a big blue shirt, she literally glowed. She said hello and turned to John. From somewhere, he pulled out a cigarette—a sure sign he was a wreck because he rarely smoked. Carolyn whipped out her lighter, a Zippo with the words BLUE EYES engraved on it, and lit John’s cigarette. She told us she’d gotten the lighter from an old boyfriend, which made me think of roadkill. I asked her, pretending fear, “What happened to him?” She laughed sweetly. I learned later that Carolyn was completely aware of the effect she had on people and chose to disarm or disturb them as she saw fit. That night she chose to leave me hanging. I had trouble looking her in the eye.

  My first call the next day was to John, a debriefing of sorts. I said to him, with maybe a hint of envy, “I feel bad for the dudes that got blinded by her light! Wow … what was that?”

  He replied, “Pretty wild, huh? That’s why I had you stay over. I wanted you to meet her.”

  “Meet her? I could barely look at her!”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Never seen you do that. Whaddya think?”

  I’d spoken with Carolyn for only ten minutes, but that was enough. It was obvious that she was as bright a star as John. And it wasn’t just because of her fierce, compelling beauty. It was because she seemed to look right into your soul, and then wink. I can only wonder what she might have become.

  Twelve

  MANHATTAN IS AN ISLAND

  WHEN HE WAS in the city, John worked a lot and worked out a lot. His discipline was remarkable, though it was probably not as much of a sacrifice as it looked since he truly enjoyed physical exertion—to say nothing of his enjoyment in looking good. He drank in moderation, didn’t smoke (except when rendered jelly by a woman), ate vast quantities of healthy food, and maintained a large number of athletic-club memberships. He belonged to La Palestra, the superluxe buffing center owned by John’s good friend Pat Mannochia, as well as the New York Athletic Club, the Downtown Athletic Club, Equinox, Radu’s Physical Culture Studio, and the Downtown Boat House. This meant he had a gym in practically every zip code and a well-developed set of pecs. But he had a special affection for the Downtown Athletic Club because of its stuck-in-time, old Wall Street charm. The DAC was where we continued the racquetball competition we’d begun in college. John loved to swim there, take long steams, get massages, and chill out in the TV room. Sometimes we watched the start of a Knicks game before heading down to the Mowbray Room on the third floor for the absolute best worst food in Manhattan. He was on friendly terms with everybody in the building, particularly a good-natured waiter named Victor who had the unenviable task of delivering the barely edible food to John’s table. Without a two-hour dehydrating workout beforehand, even the bottled water tasted bad. But the Downtown Athletic Club had more charm than any other gym in the city. It was chronically failing, the bulletin boards either empty or calling for an assessment from the members. In an attempt to modernize, the club refurbished the gym but still booked a singer every Friday night in the piano lounge. It was a time capsule, circa 1953, so old-fashioned that it might have become cool again had the cataclysm of 9/11 not shut it down.

  Up the road about half a mile was the Downtown Boat House, a nondescript pile of cinder blocks where John kept two kayaks. The club housed about seventy-five canoes and other vessels, all stored on a big wooden rack, and catered to middle-aged outdoorspeople with hippie roots. The club has upgraded recently, installing a ramp and two large floating docks, but ten years ago, yo
u had to lower your kayak over the city’s bulwark, dropping it right into the choppy water, and then scramble down a makeshift ladder onto a tiny, bucking dock. If you could get your kayak in without swamping it, the river became your playground. John introduced me to kayaking on Martha’s Vineyard, and I loved it from the start. I bought my own boat in 1999, the month after John died. In his, we made a number of island tours over the years. Once, we headed north up the Hudson, cleaned and conserved thanks to the efforts of John’s cousin Bobby and his organization, Riverkeeper. We stayed close to the Manhattan shoreline until reaching the Intrepid aircraft carrier and museum, which is docked at Forty-fourth Street and the West Side Highway. It’s a rush to kayak up to an aircraft carrier, and we slipped happily about the area, also home to a destroyer and a submarine, while the sun set behind us. John wanted to stand up and stretch a little, so he paddled over to a little dock in front of the submarine. Despite the valiant efforts of Riverkeeper, this dock was essentially floating in chum, a thick soup of stench-ridden garbage. John slipped while climbing out of his kayak, fell backward, and landed with a loud splash in the gunk. He let loose a scream of disgusted fear. Moving fast, he was up on the dock before I could start laughing. And there, looming above him on top of a high bulwark that keeps the West Side from falling into the river, was a U.S. military policeman. The MP looked confused and yelled at John, seeming not to recognize the son of a U.S. naval hero, “You can’t be here, this is government property! What are you doing here? How did you get here? You can’t be here!”