The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  In truth, the other Kennedys did view John differently—especially in the immediate aftermath of Aristotle Onassis’s death, when it was falsely rumored that Jackie had been left up to $100 million. He and his sister “were already the stars—overshadowing everybody else,” a former Hyannis Port household staff member said. There was a feeling among the Kennedys that John was “the crown prince of the family—and that somehow he didn’t deserve it.”

  “John took the most heat because of the position he held in the family,” his friend Rob Littell said. “He was something of an outsider . . . he had a slightly strained relationship with the tight-knit crew as a whole.” According to his friend, these internecine resentments could be traced to a single emotion: envy. “This didn’t bother him a bit,” Littell went on. “He had the best of many worlds and he knew it.”

  * * *

  WITH CAROLINE ALREADY looking at colleges and John headed for prep school, Jackie was about to become an empty-nester at forty-six. Viking Press was Tish Baldrige’s publisher at the time, and Baldrige suggested that the former Washington Times-Herald Inquiring Camera Girl consider going back to work—this time as a book editor. Over lunch at Manhattan’s Le Périgord Park restaurant, Jackie broached the idea with Viking’s publisher Tom Guinzburg, an old friend.

  In September 1975, Jackie started her new job and was instantly dismissed by many as a bored socialite seeking a new diversion—a rank amateur with no particular qualifications for the job.

  “I’m not the worst choice for this position,” she fired back at her critics. “It’s not as if I’ve never done anything interesting.”

  The first thing she had to do was convince her colleagues that she belonged there. Viking’s editorial staff was “stunned by the news” that Jackie would be joining them as a junior editor, Guinzburg recalled. “Everybody wondered, ‘What’s this giant celebrity doing in our midst?’ ”

  Ironically, the world’s most sought-after personage was given the task of luring big-name celebrities to Viking. In her own case, Jackie voraciously devoured every syllable that was written about her, going so far as to instruct her maid Provi to purchase tabloids like the Star and the National Enquirer so that she could peruse them. Jackie circled all mentions of her name in red, and at times scrawled her own editorial comments—usually “HA!” and “REALLY?”—in the margins. Her secretary was then instructed to file the clips away.

  At the same time, she harbored a fascination with the rich and famous that rivaled that of any schoolgirl. “She was always sidling up to you and asking ‘What is Liz Taylor really like?’ or ‘Is it true that so-and-so is having an affair?’ ” Capote said. “Gossip was Jackie’s drug of choice.”

  Within a few months of joining Viking, she tried and failed to land the authors whose memoirs would have put all those rumors about her being an amateur to rest: Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Margaret, and her old friend Frank Sinatra all turned her down. The Duchess of Windsor was particularly cutting in her reply. A member of her staff wrote to Jackie stating flatly that the Duchess was not about to discuss her life story with any “publisher’s assistant.”

  Eventually, Jackie gravitated to Viking’s Studio Books division, focusing her attention on editing lavishly illustrated coffee table volumes. One, about fireworks, was by her old pal George Plimpton. “She was a wonderful editor—very meticulous,” said Plimpton, who marveled at how the job seemed to have infused Jackie with a new sense of purpose. “It must have been an extraordinary thing for her to be on her own,” he said. “She was always somewhat diminished by the men around her.” Now, Plimpton added, Jackie was “much more like the girl I first knew who had a sense of fun and enthusiasm.”

  Jackie still fretted about John’s poor academic performance, and nagged Caroline incessantly about her weight. In fact, Jackie held both of her children to the same exacting standards. “Everyone knew the pressure on John to become a great man was tremendous,” a prep school classmate said. “But he used to say he felt sorry for Caroline because to a certain extent people expected him to screw up along the way, while she was expected to be perfect—all the time.”

  Things nearly took another tragic turn for the Kennedys that October in 1975, when Caroline graduated from Concord Academy and began a yearlong internship with Sotheby’s auction house in London. While she searched for her own apartment, Caroline stayed as a guest in the home of Conservative member of Parliament Hugh Fraser, JFK’s longtime friend and a vocal critic of the Irish Republican Army.

  Each weekday morning, Fraser drove Caroline to her work-study program at Sotheby’s in his red Jaguar sedan. They were heading out the door on the morning of October 23 when Fraser’s phone rang and he went back inside with Caroline to take the call. At 8:53 a.m., a bomb detonated beneath Fraser’s car, flipping it on its roof before it exploded in flames. The eminent cancer research specialist Gordon Hamilton Fairley just happened to be walking by with his dog at the moment the bomb went off. The married father of four and his dog were killed instantly; Fairley’s legs were blown off and his torso flung into Fraser’s garden. Fraser was cut by flying glass from shattered windows and Caroline was thrown to the floor, but neither was seriously injured.

  “That call saved my life—and Caroline’s,” Fraser said of his last-minute decision to return to the house and answer the ringing phone. “Thank God for the telephone. Had it not been for that call, we would all have died.”

  Jackie was awakened in New York at 7 a.m. by a call from the U.S. Embassy in London informing her of the IRA bombing and assuring her that Caroline was safe and unharmed. Not wanting John to wake up to televised footage of the carnage outside Fraser’s London home, Jackie went into his room and told him what had happened.

  “Mummy was shaking when she told me,” John later recalled. The fact that the IRA had come so close to killing one of the world’s most famous Irish-Americans, the only daughter of a man revered by all the world’s Irish, struck John as “totally insane. It was so crazy. We were in complete shock.”

  Jackie called Caroline and urged her to consider coming home. John telephoned his sister as well, and told her that he was concerned about her safety. In the end Caroline decided to stick it out “like I knew she would,” John said. “Nothing rattles her.”

  From this point on, John brooked no defense of the IRA or its terrorist tactics. When his pal Billy Noonan defended the IRA during one of their many political debates, John shot back, “Hey, your boys almost blew up my sister!”

  There were other safety issues that concerned Jackie—the kinds that face most parents of hormone-driven teenage boys. After Ari’s death, John had somehow managed to have Alexander Onassis’s motorcycle shipped to the United States and stowed away in a friend’s garage. John took the motorcycle out on remote roads where he wouldn’t be spotted, but it wasn’t long before Jackie learned about his new toy and confiscated it.

  Aware of John’s appetite for speed and his passion for taking risks—she admonished him for playing chicken with the Nantucket ferry, although he never stopped—Jackie held off on getting him his own car. Instead, she encouraged his older friends to do the driving, and at times even lent them one of her top-of-the-line, high-performance BMW sedans.

  In New York, Jackie was ferried about town in limousines or, just as frequently, grabbed a cab. Upper East Siders were accustomed to the sight of “Jackie O” stepping off the curb and thrusting out her arm to hail a taxi like any other New Yorker. But outside the city, she drove herself everywhere. “She loved to drive,” Dave Powers said, “just like Jack.” There was one important difference. “Jackie was a terrific driver,” Spalding said. “She knew how to handle a car, she didn’t take chances. Jack was a madman behind the wheel—all the Kennedy men were.”

  Still, Jackie occasionally had her brushes with the law. Although Jackie was stopped a few times for exceeding the speed limit, no policeman or state trooper ever dared give her a ticket. John thoroughly enjoyed s
uch moments, watching the reaction on each cop’s face as he looked at Jackie’s license, then bent down to stare squarely into the eyes of the world’s most famous woman. Once when this happened, Tony Radziwill and Billy Noonan were along for the ride. After she received the usual warning and pulled cautiously back onto the road, her passengers roared with laughter. “Okay,” Jackie said with a smile, “enough, you guys.”

  It was around this time that John and his friends found a new nickname for John’s mother—a code word that was suitable but known only to a select few. For a time, Jackie employed an irascible Chinese butler who insisted on referring to her as “Big Lady” even when he was having a temper tantrum. Jackie assumed he was being deferential—until the undecipherable word he was muttering before Big Lady became painfully clear. “Fucking Big Lady” was not what she wanted to hear from a servant, and the butler was promptly sacked. From then on, whenever John spoke of “Big Lady,” his inner circle knew precisely who he was talking about.

  It was September 1976—the year of America’s Bicentennial—and John was finally leaving home. Just as important, he would be turning sixteen in just three months, and that meant he could finally jettison the Secret Service detail that had hovered over him his entire life. “Free at last!” John shouted, pumping his fist as he strode onto the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. “Free at last!”

  * * *

  PART TWO

  John on His Own

  * * *

  8.

  Just One of the Guys

  * * *

  If her son was no longer going to be under the protection of the U.S. government, Jackie could take solace that he was firmly ensconced behind the ivy-covered walls of America’s oldest and most prestigious prep school. Comprising 170 buildings covering 450 acres, coeducational Andover (as Phillips Academy is more commonly called) counted among its distinguished alumni the diverse likes of Samuel Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jack Lemmon.

  Rooming with twenty-one other boys at Stearns West Hall dormitory, John took pains to prove he was, as Wilson McCray put, it “just one of the guys.” Dominating one corner of his dorm room was a ship’s carved figurehead—a life-size, bare-breasted mermaid. Strewn about the room were the usual talismans of prep school life: Frisbees, sweatclothes, empty pizza boxes.

  Other items tipped off visitors to the fact that this particular room was not occupied by just another Andover freshman: a silk-screen portrait of Chairman Mao inscribed to “John Kennedy Jr.” by the artist Andy Warhol; a silk boxing robe from a heavyweight title bout, with “Muhammad Ali” sewn on the back; a framed portrait of JFK hanging directly above his desk.

  Yet, in his torn jeans, sweatshirt, and Docksiders, John did look like any other preppy headed for class. At sixteen, he now had a girlfriend—a pretty, curly-haired senior named Meg Azzoni. Since Azzoni was two years older than John, friends like Billy Noonan viewed this as “a real coup . . . She had a raspy voice she used for comic effect . . . I liked her immediately.”

  For obvious reasons, Azzoni was the envy of every female student—and not a few faculty members—at Andover. A natural athlete with a taste for mischief and off-color humor of the “There was a young man from Nantucket” variety, John was also popular among the men on campus. “You couldn’t help but like him,” one said. “He had this aura of quiet confidence, but was never arrogant or self-important. He was just an easygoing kid who wanted to get a little fun out of life like everybody else.”

  Unlike most of his fellow students at a time when the legal drinking age was eighteen, John rarely drank to excess. “He couldn’t really hold his liquor,” an Andover dorm mate said. “Two drinks and he was wasted, and he told me the hangovers were terrible.” Whenever he went out for drinks with his buddies, John, armed with a fake ID (at this point in his life he could easily go unrecognized), usually ordered a beer and then followed it with a ginger ale or a Sprite.

  Marijuana was an entirely different matter. “John smoked grass,” said Holly Owen, the head of Andover’s drama department, “but it didn’t appear to affect him.” Owen, who doubled as John’s soccer coach, concluded John’s “drug escapade was part of the rite of passage.”

  There would be countless close calls and embarrassing moments, like the time he intended to plant his own crop at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port—this time in Rose’s cutting garden—and stuffed the coat pockets of his blazer with cannabis seeds. When he left the blazer at the home of Billy Noonan’s mother, she called to tease him about finding “something” in the pockets. “She is so fucking funny, Billy,” John said. “So fucking funny, your mother.”

  Where John’s Secret Service agents and the parents of his friends chose to overlook his drug use, Andover’s campus police were less accommodating. Late one night a security guard followed the unmistakable odor of marijuana to a party where John and several rugby teammates were celebrating that day’s victory. The guard’s knock on the door triggered a mad dash to flush the evidence, but John made no excuses.

  Andover followed its normal practice and called John’s mother with the news that her son had been caught smoking pot. No action would be taken this time, but a second such incident might lead to a suspension or even expulsion. John was surprised by his mother’s low-key response. “I said I was sorry and then waited for Mummy to tear me up,” he said. “But instead she was very calm and accepted my apology and told me not to do it again.”

  Jackie’s rationale was simple. “He wants to fit in and for obvious reasons it’s harder for him,” she told Spalding. “If it becomes a problem, then I’ll come down hard on him. But I don’t think it will.” Holly Owen, who doubled as John’s soccer coach, agreed. “When John experimented with drugs,” she said, “it was only to be one of the boys, not because he was out of control. That makes a huge difference.”

  John had already impressed Jackie with his strength of character. In July 1976, just two months before registering at Andover, he joined his cousin Timothy Shriver and seven other Peace Corps volunteers working to rebuild homes in earthquake-ravaged Rainal, Guatemala.

  Sleeping on the earthen floor of a tent barracks and surviving on a diet of tortillas and black beans, John “wanted to be treated just like one of us,” said Tom Doyle, a fellow volunteer. Toward that end, John built outhouses, hauled sand for bricks, and dug trenches in the stifling tropical heat.

  Unlike his mother, John was not particularly proficient in languages. Still, his earnest attempt at speaking Spanish charmed his hosts. So did his determination not to be shown any special treatment—this despite the fact that, even here, two Secret Service agents were watching over him at all times.

  Midway through his stay in Guatemala, John suddenly doubled over with sharp, stabbing pains in his abdomen. Soon he was shaking and sweating profusely—all symptoms of dysentery. His Secret Service detail insisted on driving him to Guatemala City so he could be treated by a specialist, but John told project director Luis de Celis that he wanted to stay. “He was a very strong-willed and dedicated young man,” De Celis said. “He didn’t want people to think of him as special or pampered. Everybody was impressed with how down-to-earth he was, and I have never seen anyone work harder than John Kennedy did.”

  During this time, Jackie was also striving to prove that she, too, had value in the workplace. In this, she seemed to be making considerable progress. “She’s become more independent,” Tish Baldrige said. “Now she realizes she doesn’t need a dominating man to lean on. Jackie is looking radiant. Work is good therapy for anybody.”

  Her celebrity still got in the way. In early 1977, for example, she had her hands full trying to debunk rumors that newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter was about to appoint her Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. “Every time someone is hard up for news they throw in my name as ambassador to some place or other,” she said. “And then my phone rings all day.” Now she picked up the phone and answered, “Me
esus Onassis no está aqui.” Jackie told Rose Kennedy’s personal secretary, Barbara Gibson, that she had to “do that to get rid of people.”

  Around the same time, Jackie had to deal with Viking’s decision to publish Shall We Tell the President?, a suspense novel by British author Jeffrey Archer (later Lord Archer) about an imaginary plot to assassinate Jackie’s brother-in-law Ted Kennedy after he is sworn in as president in 1981. Jackie was widely criticized for continuing to work at a company that would publish such a book, and when it was published in the United States in July 1977, Shall We Tell the President? was panned by the critics. In a sly reference to Jackie, John Leonard of the New York Times wrote, “Anyone associated with the publication of this book should be ashamed of herself.”

  Stung by such criticism, Jackie abruptly quit Viking and headed over to rival Doubleday. Once there, she had to win the respect of her skeptical coworkers all over again. Doubleday’s chief, John Sargent, had been a friend of Jackie’s for twenty-five years. He hesitated to tell her that she would have to work out of a tiny, windowless cubicle. “Oh, that’s all right, John,” she replied, taping a ballet poster on the wall to brighten things up. “I’ve lots of windows in my home.”

  Words like clueless and dilettante swirled around her at Doubleday, but Jackie pretended to be blissfully unaware of any nasty watercooler gossip among her envious coworkers. “No, I’ve never felt that kind of resentment,” Jackie told Sargent when he asked if all the carping was getting to her. “Perhaps it’s just that the people who resent my working say it to everyone else—but not to me.”