The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Late that afternoon, John called a bunch of guys into his suite and gave us a wedding party gift. It was not the traditional cummerbund or cuff links. Instead, John gave us all navy blue silk boxer shorts, with his initials embroidered on the right leg and our own on the left. I can only imagine that he was pleased as punch thinking that we’d all be wearing his initials the next time we bedded down with our mates. The shorts all appeared to be his size, too. I held the wee thing up to my large lower torso and said, “Huuuh?”

  John responded with a devilish grin: “Wear them well, my friends.” And then, chortling, “Think of me when you wear them.”

  Each set of boxers was packaged in a little wooden box. Mine still sits in my closet, awaiting the next time I’m eighteen years old.

  The wedding ceremony was scheduled for dusk on Saturday. With great expectations, the group of about forty people piled into a convoy of old four-wheel-drive vehicles and bounced our way along a dirt road through the woods. The trip was fourteen miles and took a long time. Finally we reached a clearing in which stood a tiny white clapboard church. The First African Baptist Church had been built by freed slaves many years before, and Efigenio had spent the day decorating it with flowers. We’d worried about being late, but the wedding didn’t start for more than an hour. It turned out Narciso had to make some last-minute alterations to Carolyn’s dress because of all the weight she’d lost. So we kicked rocks around the chapel for a while and laughed at Bobby, who was improbably chasing an armadillo through the woods. We heard about several photographers, intrepid celebrity-wedding specialists, who’d made their way to the island and been found by the security men John had hired. In the version I heard, the photographers begged to be taken away from the mosquito-filled scrub surrounding the church. We were in the middle of nowhere, but to judge from the buzz and our nerves, we were at the center of the universe. At one point a security guard yelled, “They’re coming!” referring to the paparazzi. We all jumped, but it was just one of Bobby’s armadillos, crashing through the brush.

  At last Carolyn arrived in a burst of energy and beauty. Have I mentioned how beautiful she was? I’ll say it again—you couldn’t look away from her. And on that night, in her simple and flawless wedding gown, with her hair swept back and a smile on her face, we were all dazzled. So, with the night fast approaching and no electricity, we filed into the tiny candlelit chapel. I think there were maybe eight pews. Anthony Radziwill served as John’s best man, Caroline was the matron of honor, and Carolyn’s stepfather, Richard Freeman, gave her away. Father Charles O’Byrne, a family friend of the Kennedys’ who’d presided over John’s mother’s funeral (and would preside over his), performed the ceremony. It was emotional, exciting, and a little surreal. When Father O’Byrne pronounced them man and wife, we all cheered.

  Back in the vintage transports, the troupe wheeled merrily through the dark woods to the inn. Dinner was a seated affair held on the second-floor porch that fronted the length of the inn, with two tents set up near a giant mangrove tree for the DJ, dance floor, and bar. I can’t comment on the food because there were no burgers—I lived on Orangina the entire weekend. (Carolyn had warned me beforehand that they hadn’t been able to arrange for any “Robbie food” and that I might want to bulk up for the event.) The toasts and tributes began early and went late, many made by masters of the form. Senator Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Timmy Shriver, and Willie Smith all made eloquent remarks. My own toast was unremarkable, though it did contain the image, which John and Carolyn got a kick out of, of two folks heading off into the sunrise on a steamroller named Love.

  During dinner, John’s friend John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, became increasingly drunk. Not that anyone disapproved; most of us didn’t even notice. But Barlow, as everyone called him, had recently suffered the sudden death of his fiancée, and John was acutely aware of his suffering. John took Barlow inside to talk to him. After a bit they came back out to the porch, and moments later Barlow stood up and gave the kindest, most articulate toast I’ve ever heard, a nuptial stem-winder that received an ovation. This from a guy who had almost nodded off in his soup two minutes before. (Barlow was occasionally in Carolyn’s doghouse for his loquaciousness with the press, but his quirky brilliance, coupled with a genuine sweetness, sprung him every time.)

  Another poignant memory I have from that evening is of Senator Kennedy and his wife, Victoria. I hadn’t seen the senator in years, maybe not since that night on the widow’s walk in Hyannis Port, when he regaled us with bawdy tales and flawless mimicry. I’d always liked him a lot, even back when our politics didn’t agree. (I’ve moved in his direction over the years.) But I also thought he was surprisingly rowdy for “the senior senator from Massachusetts.” John loved Teddy, revering him for both his political skill and the personal strength that had helped his family so much. But he worried about his uncle, and I’d seen him wince when someone told an unflattering tale about Teddy. So it was a pleasure, that night on the porch, to see how calm and relaxed Teddy had become. He was serene, gracious, and, if anything, younger-looking than before. He was beaming with happiness for John, whom he loved dearly. It gave John great happiness to have the family patriarch so strong and at ease.

  We segued from the porch to the dance floor smoothly, no broken Blahniks reported. The DJ cranked out everybody’s favorites while the guests danced and moved from table to table, hoping the evening would never end. Prince (as I think he was still known then) was the bride and groom’s choice of music, and every other song was from 1999 or Dirty Mind. We danced for hours, until, sadly, the last song was played and the evening was over. We all floated back to our rooms, drunk on the magic of the day.

  Early Sunday afternoon we piled back onto the fishing-boat ferry, then into the old Buick, and finally onto the Learjet for a luxe sprint back to Teterboro. Everyone was punchy from the (mostly sleepless) weekend, John and Carolyn sitting in the backseat of the plane, cooing. They’d look up once in a while, seemingly surprised that we were all there. As soon as the plane taxied up in front of the hangar, three limousines roared up, another thoughtful gesture arranged by the happy bride and groom. John and Carolyn clambered into one limo, heading home and then on to their honeymoon in Turkey. Billy and Kathleen Noonan, the Bostonians, climbed into theirs and drove off to catch a flight to Boston. Frannie and I hopped into our limo and instructed the driver to whisk us over to our station wagon, about 120 yards away. I gave the driver a big tip, and we puttered home to the East Village.

  Sixteen

  SETTING UP HOUSE

  BACK FROM THEIR honeymoon, John and Carolyn played the age-old game of figuring out which toothbrush slot belongs to whom. You know, the marriage thing, that series of compromises you make in the quest for fisticuffs-free living. By the time John got married, he was living in an apartment on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It was a beautiful place, though modest relative to his means. John had bought the apartment before he got engaged to Carolyn, and he’d had it completely redone, with all the headaches, delays, and cost overruns inherent to New York City construction jobs. The apartment was on the top floor of a six-story building, reached by a vast elevator that opened onto a rather dumpy gray hallway. You entered the apartment, a long, open loft, by a door on the right of the hall. Front and center as you walked in was an enormous photograph of two young black men boxing barefisted in a makeshift outdoor ring. The picture probably dated from the 1940s; I don’t know the photographer. It was a great photograph, a picture of hardship and struggle and also spirit and grace. To the right of the picture was a small library filled with books and a big framed box that held JFK Sr.’s scrimshaw collection. This was one of John’s proudest possessions, and the only object that he mentioned in his will: he left it to Jack Kennedy Schlossberg, his nephew. Beyond the library sat John’s desk, a utilitarian wooden desktop set on two sawhorses, accompanied, of course, by a lightly stained wood-and-wicker chair of
presidential style (it’s the one pictured on the cover of the 2003 JFK biography An Unfinished Life). Having sat in at least three different models over the years—leather, upholstered, and now this wicker rocker—I once asked John whether IKEA had a presidential chair section. John thought about it for a second, knew where I was going, and said, “What a great idea!”

  Then, more seriously, he added, “There are a lot of them, aren’t there? Weird.”

  To the left of the desk, which faced a set of windows with uptown views, sat a shabby but chic off-white couch covered with little pillows. The study had a full bathroom, designated as John’s, and a backup closet for his business-suit overflow. The primary difference between the main bath and John’s was the size of the Kiehl’s bottles. John appeared to have faith that Kiehl’s, the cult apothecary, would stay in business. On his shelves were normal-size bottles of maybe eight to ten products, things like shampoo, conditioner, and various scrubs. Carolyn, however, must have feared for Kiehl’s survival, because her bathroom was filled with industrial-size containers of its pricey gloop. I pointed this out to John once and he groaned good-naturedly. And then, he added quietly, “Carolyn’s spending is cutting into my Prada budget. I don’t know what to do!”

  This was a joke. She certainly liked to shop, but she could and did get clothes for free from the finest labels in the land. Not only was Carolyn beautiful and constantly being photographed, but she had exquisite taste and a fashion radar permanently set on high. Or maybe I should say “overheat,” since she bought into some of the more dubious practices of the fashion world. For example, she hated to be photographed in the same outfit twice. The horror! I can only imagine that in the realm of the world’s best-dressed women, where Carolyn dwelled, having your picture taken in the same outfit at two different events was like losing a seventh-game playoff. Hard to shake off. While I teased her about this, it ultimately worked out well for everyone, because she shared her castoffs with her friends. In Frannie’s closet, next to the Old Navy and the Levi’s, hang some lovely pieces from Yohji Yamamoto, Calvin Klein, and, of course, Prada.

  Two months after John and Carolyn got married, my son, Tate, was born. A blue box from Tiffany’s arrived for him from the newlyweds. Inside was a sterling-silver pig, the quintessential piggy bank, with my son’s initials engraved on the round behind, just below the tail. A true heirloom. John once sparked a chain reaction of gift giving that ended up in my kitchen. The story, as I heard it later, began when he was walking by Bloomingdale’s one spring morning after a business meeting. He stopped to admire a George Foreman grill—they’d just come out—in the store window. He knew that I needed something like that because Frannie, contrary to the spirit of the vows she’d made at the altar, had banned all burgers from our kitchen. She did so because of my unusual cooking methods: I cook my burgers until they reach a state of almost pure carbon, sometimes adding vegetable oil to the madly splattering pan to ensure a perfectly crispy outside. Even I admit that it’s a messy process. Hence the ban.

  The gods must have been playing Aaron Copeland’s “Rodeo” (aka “The Beef Song”) that day, because someone at Bloomingdale’s noticed John staring at the grill in the window. It arrived at his office before noon, wrapped and tied with a bow. A little note inside said that they’d seen him admiring it in the window and wanted him to have one. Even John was surprised at this oddball example of his influence. But he was psyched! He immediately had the grill delivered to my apartment. He came over that night, and we celebrated my liberation from burger purgatory together.

  No George Foreman grill ever worked as hard as mine did. Eventually, maybe a year or so after John died, it started to fall apart. But I couldn’t part with it. Every month or so, I’d open it up and try to repair what was frayed or loose, certain I could keep it going forever. It was probably getting a little dangerous. One day Frannie came home with a new one and told me I had to let the old one go. I did, but it hurt.

  Meals at North Moore Street were a more elaborate affair, at least at the beginning. When John moved in, Efigenio took an apartment nearby and assumed responsibility as John’s butler/man-who-takes-care-of-everything. Dinners were dazzling. Effy had been a part of John’s life for decades, and this arrangement seemed to make both logistical and emotional sense. At first. But the apartment wasn’t huge, and John and Carolyn had no need for full-time help, so it began to feel a little claustrophobic after a while. Also, Carolyn—who hadn’t grown up with butlers and governesses—wasn’t entirely comfortable with the system. She worried so much about the happiness of whoever was working in her house that she made it hard for them to do their job. I don’t know if that’s why Effy left, but leave he did, moving back to his native Portugal in 1998. It was a parting on the best of terms, though, and he returned each summer to work for John and Carolyn at the Vineyard. This left the newlyweds in need of a housekeeper, so they hired Grassa. Grassa was not as adept in the kitchen as Effy, but she was a lovely, caring woman, and Carolyn immediately assumed responsibility for her well-being. Which was maybe lucky, because John, taking a page out of my culinary playbook, ate mostly burgers for a period. He didn’t dare complain too much, because Carolyn would pounce on him like a cat. It was a funny dynamic to watch, though probably not as funny to live with day in, day out.

  I loved the kitchen of their apartment. It was always my first stop. The fridge was usually stocked with fresh fruit, a case of ginseng, and some dark Beck’s beer, frosty mugs in the freezer. I’d get myself a beer and head past the living room to the den. The living room had a huge sofa upholstered with a richly textured Indian design and some traditional cushioned chairs with flower-print slipcovers. John had his mom’s old coffee table, with a bunch of her more impressive-looking art books arranged on the top along with an array of candles. Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth was there, as well as the beautiful black-and-gold, jewel-encrusted dagger. The stereo and their huge collection of CD’s dominated the far wall, behind which was the master bedroom, accessible from a door on either side of the bookshelves. Flanking the Klipsch speakers on the wall, and sprinkled about the apartment’s white walls in general, was John’s mask collection. He loved masks and had been collecting them since before I met him in 1979. There were scary ones and hairy ones, comical and mystical, from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. The implication, in a Psych 101 way, is that John was attracted to masks because he wore one himself for so long, figuratively speaking. It makes sense to me, although he would have been pissed-off at being so predictable.

  Anyway, though the living room was nice, the den was where the TV was. When John and Carolyn had friends over to watch football games, we hung out in the den. There was a comfy couch there and a big-screen television. In my experience, there wasn’t a game viewed without Gary Ginsberg, John’s unofficial consigliore and Old Brown buddy, so I picture him when I see the couch. An old draftsman’s desk that had belonged to Mrs. Onassis sat next to the door to the bedroom. A passel of pillows softened the corners of the trunk coffee table during viewing times.

  It took Carolyn about a year, but she eventually began to add decorative touches of her own to the apartment, starting with about two dozen silver frames of varying sizes, placed wherever she could find space. John joked that she was taking over the apartment with her “frame obsession, and we don’t even have any pictures!” Which was true. While Mrs. Onassis had thousands of pictures on the walls of her homes, John and Carolyn didn’t own a camera as far as I know. Picture taking had always been handled by professionals. Why invest in a camera when you’re regularly getting chased down the street for a close-up? I rarely took pictures of John. It’s kind of sad now, since I love pictures and would cherish photos of the two of us together, or him with my kids. But he wasn’t comfortable being photographed by his pals, despite the mutual love affair between him and the lens. In the video of my wedding rehearsal dinner, who do you think is in it the most? Frannie? She hates being photographed. Me? Should be, but no—John has
the starring role. And every time the camera looked his way, he’d lower his head ever so slightly, as if nodding to acknowledge its presence. So when it came to filling her frames, Carolyn didn’t have much to choose from except photos of Sasha Chermayeff’s kids and mine, which we mailed over after each visit to the Vineyard. I thought this was great, but John would lament, “We don’t have any pictures, except of your rude brood.”

  I’d love to have seen the two of them with a camera and some kids. Someone would have to say, “Uh, John, take your finger off the viewfinder.” He’d stare at the contraption for a moment, calling out plaintively to Carolyn, “Mousie, which of these buttons should I push?”

  The Kodak would probably wind up in the trash, because John was no technophile. He actually took typing lessons when he was in law school, no doubt to prepare himself for the computer age. It was hilarious to see him with his portable “qwerty” board and lesson book—like watching Bill Gates take football lessons. Still, it took him more time to set up the laptop he’d haul to the Vineyard each weekend than it did to write his Letter from the Editor.

  I sometimes think about what John’s kids would have been like, besides gorgeous. He liked children, was easy around them, and included his friends’ children in many of the activities he planned. He was ready and eager to start a family when he met Carolyn. She wasn’t ready, though, and her early troubles in their marriage delayed the decision. I think she would have been a cool mother, protective and empathetic. When we would all go to the Vineyard, whatever assorted children were there would naturally gravitate toward her. She was unaffected and lively, and they could sense her energy. I remember her chasing Colette around the lawn, singing,