“Death and tragedy seemed to touch everyone she touched,” Papadimitriou continued, “and he began to wonder if in some way he was being punished for marrying her.” For years, Onassis had called Jackie “the Widow,” but, said Ari’s lawyer, “we called her ‘the Black Widow.’ ”
Ari’s rapidly deteriorating mental state aside, the stress also seemed to be taking a toll on him physically. He was losing weight. He suffered from debilitating headaches and fatigue, and for some odd reason his right eyelid drooped. In December 1973, Onassis checked into New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital under the name “Philipps” and after a week of tests was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare, incurable muscular disease.
It would have taken a few minutes for Jackie to walk from her apartment to the hospital, but Ari had so alienated her that she refused to visit him. Christina rushed to his side from Paris, and would soon relocate to New York full-time so she could familiarize herself with the inner workings of Daddy’s global empire.
Onassis kept the diagnosis to himself, but when he appeared in public with his right eye completely shut, the press speculated that he had suffered a stroke. Christina didn’t help matters when she merely used white adhesive strips to tape Ari’s eyelid to his forehead. The macabre result was soon featured on front pages everywhere, ramping up speculation that Onassis was grievously ill.
Jackie urged Ari to accompany her on a vacation trip to Acapulco, but when they arrived he realized the real purpose of their visit: to purchase a villa near the one where she and Jack had honeymooned two decades earlier. For Ari, this was the final slap in the face. He refused, and on the flight back to New York a shouting match ensued. Having put up with years of abuse from Onassis, Jackie now let loose with a torrent of insults. “Jackie could be understanding,” Baldrige said, “only up to a point.”
According to Johnny Meyer, Jackie took this opportunity to light into Ari for his “every lapse of taste and style,” including what she called his “horrendous” table manners—“slurping soup, making animal noises while you chew, it’s disgusting,” Jackie told her husband. She did not spare Christina, either. “No man finds a fat girl with food on her chin attractive,” Jackie said on the flight, “no matter how rich she is.”
None of this came as a surprise to Jamie Auchincloss, who described his sister as “ferocious, once she was crossed.” Agreed Gore Vidal: “She had a very sharp tongue indeed, and knew when to go for the jugular.”
Christina was so incensed about “the Black Widow” that “the Singer” suddenly didn’t seem so bad. Making a rare television appearance on the Today show in April 1974, Callas described Onassis as “the big love of my life.” Did she resent Jackie Kennedy for marrying him? interviewer Barbara Walters asked. “Why should I?” she answered with a shrug. “Of course, if she treats Mr. Onassis very badly, I might be very angry.”
While the press was filled with speculation about Ari’s mysterious illness—his speech was now slurred, he could barely hold his head up—tensions in the marriage, and the Jackie–Ari–Maria Callas love triangle, Onassis was plotting his revenge behind the scenes. In a new will, he left Jackie just $200,000 a year, and the children $25,000 each annually until they turned twenty-one. If they contested the will, neither Jackie nor Caroline and John would get a penny. He also named his ex-wife, Tina, the executrix of his will, leaving control of his empire and the vast bulk of his estate to Christina.
Ari went a step further, summoning journalist Jack Anderson to New York and asking him to unmask her profligate spending habits. Over lunch at New York’s La Caravelle restaurant, which had been a favorite haunt of JFK and his father, Joe, Onassis “accused Jackie of embezzling millions from him. He explained the whole scheme in detail,” Anderson said, “how she paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes that she then secretly resold to used clothing stores in New York, pocketing the cash.”
Anderson was told in no uncertain terms that Ari was about to file for divorce. “Once he had exposed her as this very greedy, voracious person,” Anderson said, “he felt she’d be in no position to demand more millions in a divorce settlement.”
* * *
NOT ALL THE salient details made it into the papers, but what did was enough to have an impact on John. “Caroline was away at school leading this protected life,” Jackie’s friend Cleveland Amory said. “But John was in the thick of it in New York. Jackie and Ari were in the papers every day, nonstop. It was the biggest story out there, and John couldn’t get away from it if he tried.”
Try to get away John did, taking every opportunity to break from the Secret Service detail that continued to shadow his every move. It was not uncommon for “Lark”—he was still known by his White House Secret Service code name—to be calmly pedaling through Central Park on his Italian ten-speed and then suddenly take off, leaving forty-something-year-old agents straining to keep up with him.
That April, while the world buzzed about Ari and Jackie, John slipped away from his bodyguards and, with two pals from Collegiate, sneaked into the Trans-Lux Theater on Broadway to see Mel Brooks’s Western spoof, Blazing Saddles. Once again, headquarters in Washington was alerted to John’s disappearance, every agency from local police to the FBI was notified, and for two tense hours Secret Service agents worked frantically to track JFK’s son down.
They finally located John at the theater, catching up with him just as he and his friends came out, squinting in the bright light of midday. “A great movie!” John announced to the relieved agents. “Then,” said the manager of the theater, “John seemed to take pleasure in telling the Secret Service guys about the film’s famous campfire scene while his buddies collapsed with laughter.”
A few weeks later, John vanished again. This time it was nearly three hours before agents found him, working on his serve at the Central Park tennis courts. Jackie was partly to blame for setting a poor example. Despite repeated pleas from friends like Nancy Tuckerman and Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie thought nothing of ditching her Secret Service detail at sunset and heading out to take a jog around the park reservoir alone. Tuckerman would “warn her of all the terrible things that could happen to her and, true to form, she never paid any attention. By nature,” Tuckerman said, “she was fearless.”
It was a trait both she and the notoriously reckless Jack passed on to their son. Even as an awkward adolescent in braces, John pushed everything to the limit—and sometimes beyond. “Everything with him,” John’s friend Billy Noonan said, “was an adventure, with an edge of danger thrown in.”
When he was at Skorpios, John and his cousin Timothy Shriver would put on scuba gear and explore the coral reefs that ringed the island; defying orders to stay away from one particularly hazardous reef, the two cousins got stuck but managed to pull themselves free at the last minute. On Cape Cod, John liked to jump on his twelve-foot Sunfish with a couple of friends and play chicken with the ferries carrying a hundred or more tourists to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. John and his pals would see “how close we could get before we’d jump off, capsize, and save ourselves from bouncing off the ferry’s steel hull,” Noonan recalled. “John, inevitably, would be the last off the boat.”
Jackie’s seesawing love-hate relationship with publicity and the press that supplied it had dominated much of John’s young life. “He had every right to be confused,” Amory said, pointing to the fact that Jackie had actually met JFK when he was a U.S. senator and she was working as the Washington Times-Herald’s intrepid “Inquiring Camera Girl.” Amory was just one of many writers Jackie called friends, and even Jack briefly worked as a journalist before entering politics. “She loved literature and gossip equally,” Amory said, “and in the White House and afterward, she played the press like a Stradivarius. John saw all this.”
So perhaps it shouldn’t have been that surprising when he shared his career plans with journalist Beverly Williston. Williston was spending a weekend in New Jersey horse country when she bumped into Jackie and the kids.
“So,” Williston said, “what do you want to be—president?”
John’s answer was immediate. “Nah! I want to write about politics. Everyone wants me to be a lawyer, but I want to be a reporter.”
“That’s what I do,” Williston replied, taken aback by his answer.
“Do you get to travel a lot?” he asked. “Do you get to meet singers and actors?”
“Sometimes. It’s a fun job,” she went on. “You get to meet all kinds of people.”
It soon became clear what John found most attractive about journalism. “So you don’t have to go to college to be a reporter, right?” he asked.
John’s shoulders slumped when Williston told him the horrible truth—that, yes, most journalists were college-educated. It was clearly not the answer he had hoped to hear.
With his pedigree, there seemed little doubt that John would wind up at an Ivy League school—although one would have never guessed it judging by his lackluster grades. Always a blur of nervous energy, he seemed more congenitally incapable of sitting still or concentrating than ever. Jackie wondered if all the stories about her imploding marriage were taking their toll on her son.
She also worried about substance abuse. When he was twelve, John and his Collegiate buddy Wilson McCray were caught swigging Johnnie Walker Black Label straight from the bottle while watching a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. Perhaps it was significant that Johnnie Walker Black Label had always been Ari’s drink of choice. It was also during this period that John developed a taste for red wine and strong Greek cigarettes.
Jackie might have done well to focus on John’s growing fondness for alcohol and other unhealthy substances. Right now, she just wanted to know why her son wasn’t the stellar student she and his sister had been—and what could be done to turn his academic career around.
John’s mother sent him to a psychiatrist, Dr. Ted Becker, to see if there weren’t psychological obstacles to his focusing and becoming a better student. “John is like a live wire, always in motion,” Jackie told Salinger. “Maybe he can’t calm down and focus on his schoolwork because of all the stress these horrible stories put him through.” Jackie was concerned that it was garden-variety anxiety that kept John from earning better grades. If that was the case, she said, “I hope there’s a pill for it.”
For the time being, the consensus was that John was a normal adolescent male living under highly abnormal circumstances. Aside from his mediocre academic performance and an energy level that kept him more or less in constant motion—John was a world-class daydreamer and fidgeter—he seemed remarkably well adjusted and, for want of a more clinical term, happy. In the meantime, Jackie insisted that, during the summer months, John spend at least one hour each morning with his math tutor. “I was always terrible at math too,” Jackie told Plimpton. “But,” she added, betraying her decidedly traditional view of gender roles, “I don’t think in today’s world a man can afford to be.”
In one area in particular, John showed a remarkable degree of maturity. Perhaps because he had already witnessed so much anguish, John was keenly attuned to the feelings of others. When Ari’s assistant Kiki Moutsatsos was mugged outside Alexander’s Department Store in midtown Manhattan, Jackie insisted that she recuperate at 1040. John’s sister was away in Hyannis Port at the time, but he was there and promptly took over responsibility for nursing Kiki back to health. John, Moutsatos remembered, “was every bit as kind to me as his mother was”—maybe more so. It’s doubtful whether Jackie would have cut strawberries up in the kitchen and fed them to Moutsatsos by hand.
At Collegiate, John no longer tussled with other students. One of the school’s most-liked students, he crafted a persona that was part approachable, down-to-earth “regular guy” and part megacelebrity.
Anyone who was lucky enough to be invited to 1040—John’s shorthand for home—was reminded of John’s unique place in history the moment they walked into his large, Kennedy memorabilia-filled bedroom at the rear of the apartment. Models of Air Force One and PT-109 dangled from the ceiling, and framed photos covered every available surface—pictures of John hiding under JFK’s Oval Office desk, mugging with President Kennedy and German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, sitting on his father’s lap aboard the yacht Honey Fitz.
Then there was the president’s extensive scrimshaw collection, and, propped up in one corner, the eight-foot-long bill of a rare narwhal. “Just a typical fifteen-year-old’s bedroom,” said his friend Billy Noonan.
Of course, John was anything but typical. The mindless teasing he had endured had made him far more empathetic than most self-absorbed teens. At Collegiate, he was widely regarded as a champion of the underdog. “If there was a new kid, John was the one who took him under his wing and introduced him around,” a classmate said. “He knew what it was like to feel like an outsider, I think, so he recognized that in others.”
Sadly, not everyone was so considerate. Shortly after 5 p.m. on May 14, 1974, John cruised into Central Park on his bike—unaware that a nineteen-year-old junkie named Robert Lopez was hunkered down in the bushes, waiting to pounce.
“Get the hell off the bike!” Lopez hollered as he lunged toward John. He was waving a stick at the boy. “Get off the bike or I’ll kill you!”
John jumped off, but not quickly enough for Lopez, who shoved him to the ground anyway.
Grabbing John’s tennis racket, Lopez hopped on the bike and rode north. He sold the racket and John’s bike, then used the money to purchase cocaine.
The mugging of JFK Jr. was big news, and local TV anchors breathlessly reported that the police were searching for John’s assailant. No one was more surprised than Lopez, who learned the identity of his victim while watching television with his pregnant wife, Miriam. “Oh my God!” Lopez yelled, leaping off the sofa and pointing at the screen. “That was me!” Police officials, under pressure in the 1970s to do something about the city’s skyrocketing crime rate, were not exactly thrilled. “Six million people in the park that year,” said one, “and they had to pick him.”
It would be several months before Lopez confessed to John’s mugging—and then only after he was arrested for another robbery. Lopez told his arresting officer, New York City detective Richard Buggy, that he targeted John not because he was a Kennedy—“Are you kidding? I had no idea who he was at the time”—but because John was simply “an easy hit.” (More than two decades later, the lives of John and his mugger would intersect again, when Lopez signed up with a work program sponsored by the Robin Hood Foundation. By then, John was on the foundation’s board of directors.)
Since Jackie herself had always been philosophical about the dangers lurking in Central Park, she preferred to look at John’s mugging as a “blessing in disguise.” Secret Service agent John Walsh wrote in a confidential report to his superiors that Jackie was “pleased that this had happened to John, in that he must be allowed to experience life.” Walsh relayed Jackie’s conviction that John “is oversheltered now with all the agents and unless he is allowed freedom he’ll be a vegetable at the age of sixteen when we leave him.”
Once again, Jackie spelled out precisely what she expected from Walsh and his colleagues. “She does not want us to inquire of the governess when John is going, or how he is getting there. We should be prepared for him to go in any one of a number of ways.”
At the same time, Jackie insisted that the agents not crowd her son. “I don’t want you on his heels,” she said, repeating what had become a familiar refrain. “Secret Service agents are told to follow counterfeiters all over the place without them knowing they’re being followed. Why can’t you do it with John?”
While characterizing the Central Park assault as a much-needed wake-up call, Jackie was “displeased about all the publicity” because “people will think he isn’t being accompanied by anyone and there is a danger in that.”
So what was the solution? Walsh asked. Did Jackie want heightened security for her son, at least for the time being?
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p; Absolutely not, Jackie replied. “No agent is to be in John’s pocket,” she ordered Walsh. “John is not to get in an agent’s car and the agents are not to walk with him. They must follow him, hiding behind cars and bushes—whatever they need to do so he never sees them.”
Not that she didn’t want agents to be there if John needed them. “I want him followed,” she explained, “but I don’t want him to feel like he’s constantly being guarded. It’s not healthy.”
At the same time, Jackie made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t about to tolerate any more slipups. “If anything happens to John,” she warned Walsh in a chilling reference to Dallas, “I will not be as easy with the Secret Service as I was the first time.”
Jackie brought him up to be his own person, not part of the Kennedys’ tribal connection.
—FRANK MANKIEWICZ, LONGTIME KENNEDY FAMILY FRIEND
Jackie’s mothering of John was complex. She had an innate sense . . . of how to walk the line between protecting him and giving him the freedom to figure out his own way.
—BILLY NOONAN, JOHN’S FRIEND
John was simply not suited to lead the intellectual life. He was always outside, always in motion. He did things.
—ALEXANDER THEROUX, JOHN’S TEACHER AT ANDOVER
7.
The Crown Prince
* * *
They were scuba diving forty feet below the surface of the Aegean, and Peter Duchin could see his diving buddy was in trouble. For some reason, John wasn’t getting enough air; Duchin watched as John struggled with his face mask, then pointed to his oxygen hose. “By then,” Duchin recalled, “John was a strapping teenager” of fourteen, but all Duchin could see was the toddler saluting his father’s casket. An experienced diver, Duchin swam over and shared his mouthpiece with John while they swam slowly to the surface. John never panicked. In fact, Duchin said, he showed “amazing cool” even as he faced the very distinct possibility of drowning. Duchin, however, was anything but calm. “I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got the son of the president of the United States here!’ ” Duchin said. “Jackie was very grateful, as you can imagine.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 19
