The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  And then, to my surprise, we had a great time. Dinner was fun and easy, and by the end of it, Carolyn was her funny, smart-ass self, riffing about an encounter she’d had with Donald Trump’s eyebrows. Carolyn seemed as surprised as we were that she’d had so much fun, but I think she just hadn’t figured out what her new norm was yet. As we walked back to the limo, I pointed out the glass-half-full thing to her. She dismissed me with a smile and a roll of her eyes, saying how much she hated that there were photographers outside their apartment. I tried to downplay it, suggesting that it was no big deal and that she was “feeding the beast” with her preoccupation. But she was obsessed. “No, listen, Rob,” she said vehemently. “They’re out there every day. It’s horrible.” She seemed so tired. Tired of having to be “on” all the time. I don’t know that she hated being famous (although maybe she did), but I know that it taxed her. She cared a lot. I think it was exhausting having to be ebullient and beautiful twenty-four hours a day. She’d gone from hanging out in their little pre-wedding sandbox to having to play in front of stadium-size crowds. Maybe they should have had a more public wedding; it might have prepared her for the circus.

  But the two of them had many good times during their few years together, skiing in Sun Valley at Christmas, traveling to Europe to woo advertisers for George, and managing the menagerie of animals they kept in their apartment. In December 1997 they spent four weeks together in Vero Beach, Florida, just hanging out in the sun while John got intensive flight training. John told me it was a particularly special time for them, a great time that allowed them to catch up and find a common wavelength. Tragedy struck near the end of their stay there, when Michael Kennedy was killed on New Year’s Eve day while chasing a football on the ski slopes at Aspen. John, who’d spent many a Christmas with his clan in Aspen, was shocked and sad. But it was the first time in his life that he had his wife to stand by him during a dark period, and this gave their relationship new strength.

  As 1998 progressed, John grew more frustrated with Carolyn’s troubled transition, but he also felt an enormous responsibility for her happiness. They lived out a complicated dynamic, resenting the demands each placed on the other while at the same time empathizing with the other’s frustrations. John felt hog-tied by not being able to solve Carolyn’s problems, though he had to live with them. We talked a lot about this during the second year of their marriage. He hated the illogic of the whole thing: in his mind, they had so much. There were so many reasons to be happy. But he also knew that Carolyn’s coping mechanisms had been overwhelmed. I listened and felt bad for both of them, but I told him it would get better. Frannie had suffered a bout of depression in the early nineties, after quitting smoking, and she’d barely left the apartment for a year. I was confident that they’d come out the other side of this dark cloud, and John believed so, too, despite his frustration.

  We had the two of them over to watch an NFL playoff game in 1999, and while John and I screamed at the TV, Carolyn played with Coco and Tate and eventually fell asleep on the couch. She awoke as the final whistle blew. John started needling her before she could rub her eyes. “Yo, Carolyn, honey, you were snoring. What kind of person falls asleep at a football party?” He then jokingly apologized to Frannie for his wife’s less-than-scintillating presence, attempting to get a rise out of Carolyn. She countered by thanking us for making her feel so comfortable that she could just fall asleep. And apologized for her husband’s inability to recognize true hospitality when he saw it. We all laughed, and the two lovers soon went arm in arm into the night.

  The stories of Carolyn’s drug use are widely exaggerated. She definitely partied, sharing a joint and doing the occasional line of cocaine, but I saw no evidence that she had an addiction. I can’t say if she took antidepressants, though it’s possible. They help a lot of people. She rarely drank, I never saw her incapacitated, and I believe John would have told me if his wife was doing heroin or crack or Ecstasy. He was committed to a very health-conscious physical regimen by then, and Carolyn shared his devotion to the gym. She worked out ferociously, especially during the last year of her life, and seemed to be in top physical condition.

  About two years into their marriage, Carolyn seemed to be regaining her balance. Which isn’t to say all was rosy—in fact, the two of them spent a fair amount of time locking horns. John was eager to start a family. Carolyn wasn’t ready yet. She would, with a bit of bluster, say that she could never subject a baby to the weird, public spectacle of their life. She told me, “Can you see me trying to push a carriage down the street? With all of them running behind me?” But really I think she was frightened that she wouldn’t be a good mother, that she wasn’t strong enough to care for another human being. Which maybe was true at the time. Somehow, though, Carolyn seemed more lively, more engaged. I think she was literally fighting her way out of her depression. She often went to La Palestra, the gym owned by John’s friend Pat Mannochia, spent time with her friends, and started to carve out her own space in the marriage. And, yes, as widely reported, John stayed at the Stanhope several nights over their years of marriage, including during that fateful week in July 1999. I’ve spent a night or two out of the house in anger, too. The thing that’s most poignant to me is John’s choice of the Stanhope, located quite near the apartment he grew up in. It’s as if he tried to go “home” in his darker moments.

  Which makes me wonder what those first years would have been like if Mrs. Onassis were alive. Of course, the mother-in-law thing is dicey, and it’s possible that two such strong-willed, passionate women would have tortured each other. But it’s also possible that Mrs. O might have been able to offer Carolyn some kind of rare, expert guidance on how to handle being catapulted to international fame. She had dealt with the same issues. And while I’m what-ifing, I’ll also say that I think her children were what pulled Mrs. O out of her dark depths. She found a way to be strong and happy and also famous and private because she wanted to raise her children well. Carolyn, who always rose to the occasion when needed, would have been the same kind of mother.

  There’s another aspect of Mrs. Onassis’s legacy that’s relevant here. John was determined not to publicly humiliate his wife as his mother had been by revelations of JFK Sr.’s infidelities. Over the years, John and I had many discussions, usually while kayaking up at the Vineyard, about the merits and difficulties of fidelity, and we both used our mothers as reasons to stay true. Intellectually, he chose fidelity, but he’d often wonder, in our younger years, how anyone could be with just one woman for a lifetime. While John mused over managing his carnal urges, I’d repeat my rap that a man was the sum of his decisions. You were defined by how well you lived with your decisions, or how fast you abandoned them. He seemed to like hearing that. It was a pep talk, words that confirmed the value of the course he preferred.

  Nineteen

  AS GOOD AS IT GETS

  JOHN HAD A religious side, a spiritual life that was quiet, flexible, tolerant, and rooted in Catholicism. He spoke of religion as a “personal thing,” an issue that he thought was important but private. His outward faith was in the human spirit, of which he took an optimistic view.

  Our last visits to the Vineyard were filled with discussions of philosophy and religion, in part because I’d given John and Carolyn a late wedding present of a set of fifteen books, the “Philosophers in 90 Minutes” collection by Paul Strathern. John teased me for believing that anyone could grasp Aristotle in an hour and a half, then proceeded to read the books nonstop. Our conversations became more introspective again, just like when we were in our teens, except now we had midlife crises on the horizon. With more experience to work with this go-round, John and I agreed that the human race’s most important asset was one another. We talked about the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven might be on earth. I recall looking with him at a poem by the ancient Persian poet Rumi:

  I have lived on the lip of insanity,

  wanting to know reasons,

  knocking on a door. I
t opens.

  I have been knocking from the inside.

  We both loved the idea that we all spend so much of our lives in a mad rush, trying to get to some promised land, when, in fact, we’re already there.

  I have a particularly vivid recollection of John sitting in the breakfast nook at the Vineyard in 1999. He’d just woken up and was looking solid as usual, reading the paper and scooping eggs and bran cereal into his mouth. I was sitting across from him at the table, eating bacon and English muffins. John held up that day’s New York Post, showing me the headline that Hillary Clinton had announced her decision to run for Daniel Moynihan’s open Senate seat in New York. He pointed to the article, swiped a few strips of bacon off my plate, and exclaimed with mock indignation, “Can you believe this? What, am I supposed to move to Arkansas?”

  I looked up, reclaimed my bacon, and responded, “Gives ya more time to get this place painted.”

  John chuckled and shot back, “And you more time to learn Hindi!”

  John had in fact considered running for that seat himself, even going so far as to meet with Jeffrey D. Sachs, the political adviser he knew from Reaching Up, to map out a preliminary game plan. I think he was relieved that Hillary decided to run. It gave him more time to prepare; Carolyn wasn’t prepared to go political yet, anyway. John liked the Clintons, who spent time with him and Carolyn on the Vineyard, and my guess is that he saw them as a potential asset down the line. (Judging from the quotations she left in the guest book at Red Gate, Hillary could play a fine game of Bartlett’s.)

  Our political and metaphysical ramblings were interrupted that afternoon when John accidentally grounded himself. It was the Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend 1999, and I was watching the fourth quarter of a Knicks game. John had decided to take the Buckeye up for a sunset spin. I helped him pull out the machine and spread the chute on the lawn to the left of the main house. That was where John usually took off from, though it wasn’t a large enough spot for a landing. I was thinking of taking a little flight myself and planned to drive to the beach to meet John and, hopefully, evade the wife’s scrutiny.

  Everything was in order. John checked the wind, gunned the engine, and began to accelerate across the lawn toward an incline in the terrain, just past where his wheels would leave the ground. His chute filled properly and up he went. I’d seen this countless times before and didn’t think much about it until a big gust of wind blew the Buckeye a good fifteen feet to the right and into a gnarly-looking shrub. I was on the other side of the house and heard a crash. I ran to see if John was all right and found that my daughter, Colette, had gotten there first. John was slumped in the seat’s harness, but he looked up when he heard Colette’s little voice yelling, “John got hurt!”

  He smiled, obviously not wanting to scare her, and said, “Hey, Coco! I’m fine! Just a little accident. Nothing to worry about.”

  In fact, his ankle was crushed and his head was throbbing from the crash. He wrestled off his helmet, joking with the now-assembled crowd of children that he needed a smaller head. Carolyn and I took him to the emergency room, where Linda, the wife of caretaker Bert Fisher, was the nurse on duty. The doctors determined that John needed surgery, which took place in New York the following week.

  Heading back home from the hospital, John was in a particularly bad mood. An intensely physical person, he hated being incapacitated in any way. No doubt, he was thinking about all the things he wouldn’t be able to do for the next few weeks. On the drive back, I suggested that maybe he should take this as a chance to slow down, to cut back on some of the many demands on his time. I told him he should try sitting on the couch for a few weeks, as I often did—he had no idea how satisfying it could be. I worried that he was under a lot of stress, especially with the future of George up in the air. John suffered from Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, for which he took iodine supplements and ginseng. He’d hurt his hand on a broken champagne flute in the sink the previous winter. Now this. I told him he was pushing himself too hard. “No shit,” he muttered.

  Effy held dinner that night until we got home from the hospital. While his friends felt sympathy for John, we were also happy to be sitting around our favorite table, awaiting another of Effy’s dinners—this time, swordfish. John was quiet, but the rest of us chattered noisily. I was served my usual big, luscious burned burger and noticed Carolyn, who was sitting to my right, eyeing it greedily. I moved it to the left side of my plate. But as soon as I looked away, she grabbed it and took a huge bite. Secretly pleased to have another culinary misfit on the island, I offered her the rest. But no, she handed it back to me and called out politely to Efigenio. I rarely saw Carolyn ask anything of Effy, but that night she said, “Effy, would you mind making me one of those delicious hamburgers?”

  Efigenio, surprised but amused, replied, “Of course not, how would you like it?”

  “Rare. Bloody. Please.”

  I’m proud to say that on our next visit, a month later, Carolyn had dispensed with the gourmet menu entirely and was subsisting on pink burgers each night. She wolfed them down with the appetite of a linebacker.

  That summer we spent both Memorial Day and the Fourth of July on the Vineyard with John and Carolyn, flying up in John’s shiny new red Piper Saratoga. There was a flight instructor on board both times, but John was at the controls the whole time. His landings were barely noticeable, something he took pride in. None of us felt nervous about flying with John—he was the opposite of reckless, with the attitude of a cautious and serious pilot. Although he mentioned that his new plane was more aerodynamically sensitive than his previous Cessna— “squirrelly” was his word—our four flights that summer were perfect.

  The Fourth of July visit was an unexpected one, a last-minute invitation that came about because Carolyn told John she’d had so much fun on Memorial Day that she wanted to do it again. We usually spent the holiday at the beach in New Jersey, but our rental started later that year and we gladly accepted their invitation. I am forever grateful to Carolyn for that last visit. It was a gorgeous and fun-filled weekend, everyone relaxed and happy to be together. When it was over, on Monday night, we said good-bye to Carolyn, who was staying to help Anthony move to Red Gate for the rest of the month. John flew us back to the airport in Caldwell, New Jersey. That’s where we last saw each other. He had to stay to fill out some paperwork and clean and put the plane away, so we said our good-byes standing behind the right wing on the tarmac. Filled with memories of the wonderful weekend we’d just had, we leaned into each other and shared a hug and a handshake. I said, stating the obvious, “That worked out nicely.”

  John responded, “As good as it gets.”

  Two weeks later, my wingman left my side forever. My silver lining, though inadequate, is that at least we went out on top.

  Twenty

  SAD DAY

  ON THE NIGHT of July 16, 1999, John’s plane crashed into the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren were killed. I was at a family reunion in New Jersey that weekend, staying at a small resort with my stepfather, David Katz, and his children. David, an early riser, literally ran into the condominium where we were staying and told Frannie what he’d just seen on television. She woke me with the news that John’s plane was “missing,” as it was being reported at the time. My first reaction was to curl up in a ball, as tightly as possible, and just not be. I stayed like that, clenched like a fist, for a while. Then I jumped out of bed, unsure what to do but desperate to move.

  Although the news reporters were saying that the plane had disappeared from radar over the Atlantic Ocean, I had no hope. None. I struggled to block out the horrible images that were flooding my mind. But there were no generalities to hide in: I knew the inside of the plane, I knew the route, I knew John so well that I could barely breathe at the thought of what had happened. I stumbled out into the living room and my mom jumped up to turn off the TV. My kids, five and almost three years old then, unders
tood that something terrible was happening. I walked over and hugged both of them before standing with my arms around Frannie for a moment, silent but sharing our sadness.

  I remember thinking that grief was directly related to love and friendship, that it’s a twisted irony that two of life’s greatest pleasures have such a cost. I was angry at John for leaving me. And I felt diminished, smaller than I’d been the day before. I love to connect to people, maybe above all else, and the man I’d gotten closer to than anyone had been ripped away. John was my biggest fan, my ally in the war of life. He was a great strength to me, and I to him. And though we’d joked for twenty years about who would outlive the other, we never planned on dying young.