Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  During Will’s wanderlust year, his parents did not know how to reach him. Will’s Yale friend Marc Wallis remembered that he and Will agreed to room together in an apartment on Elm Street, across the street from Rudy’s, when Will returned to Yale from his walkabout in the fall of 1979. Marc received a letter from Will’s father, dated September 11, 1979: “Dear Marc. We do not seem to have an address or telephone number for William. If you see him, please ask him to telephone. Sincerely, Clifton Daniel.” “That short note speaks volumes,” Wallis said.

  Sharing an apartment with Will, Wallis learned about his idiosyncrasies. Will loved the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers. Like his grandfather he loved to drink bourbon. He loved to procrastinate. On the other hand, when it was time to get things done, Wallis said Will knew how to buckle down. He used to sit in “this big easy chair” in the living room and place a two-by-ten board across the chair’s flat arms. “And voilà,” Marc said, “there was a desk and that’s where he would read and where he would write.” All the furniture in the apartment was secondhand, stuff they picked up at Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Will also hated overhead lighting. He only liked indirect lighting. “He hung these tapestries up over the ceiling to block the ceiling light,” Wallis said. He was neat without being obsessive. And Will liked to keep himself in good shape. He had a chin-up bar in the doorway to his bedroom and no matter how much he smoked or drank, with a preference for Wild Turkey, he somehow managed to get up the next morning and go for a five-mile run.

  Will loved his brother Harrison, who was four years younger and born with developmental difficulties. “He absolutely adored Harrison and so when he would come home from breaks he would arrange it or ask someone to arrange for Harrison to be home, too,” said Cha Cha Hartwell. Harrison had been sent away to boarding school but not to Andover or Milton. He went to a school for learning disabled kids until he was nineteen and aged out. “It was never the same for him after that,” Clif said. After a few unsatisfactory stops in between, Harrison ended up at a facility in Pennsylvania. “Will went to visit him,” he explained. “Will took it upon himself to care about Harrison, to go and see him. And didn’t like what he saw, didn’t like the way they were taking care of Harrison. He didn’t like the facility. He didn’t like the people. He didn’t like mainly the fact that they were giving Harrison a cocktail of drugs meant to manage people with serious psychoses.”

  Clif explained that Harrison did not have “serious mental issues.” He did have “anger management problems,” but these stemmed mostly from not fully understanding why he was being separated from his family. In the proper doses, the medicine “calms you down and evens you out,” Clif continued. But Will examined the drugs, and the amounts, that the Pennsylvania facility was administering to Harrison. He was infuriated and became a forceful advocate for moving his brother to New York State, into a better program, closer to home. “Dad got his back up,” Clif said. “This was his responsibility. He was the father. And so for several years, he and Will argued and fought over Harrison’s care. And Will wound up being able to educate Dad.” In the end, Will prevailed and the Daniels moved Harrison to a group home in northern Westchester, where he remains and has been much happier than he had been previously. But a tension remained between Will and his parents.

  The writer Melissa Bank and Will dated for about four years in the early 1990s. She and Will always had a birthday party for Harrison, and often Will’s parents would be there. She got to know them pretty well. She knew that Will was somewhat estranged from his parents but got along better with his mother than with his father. She preferred his father. “His father was really charming and elegant, smart and interesting, and I think he was, in his own way, devoted to Harrison,” she said. “His mother just gave off this vibe that was Get away from me. That was her primary mode.” Bank said Margaret Truman struck her as “kind of like a little girl in a way,” and she wondered if that was because her father had been president of the United States. Fathers of all stripes are important to their children. “But what if the world corroborated your feeling about your father being the most important person in the world?” She said that might make your head spin and account for a certain amount of aloofness. “To me,” she continued, “it seemed at once that she was sort of needy and also really standoffish, which is a terrible combination to be around to tell you the truth.”

  * * *

  AFTER WILL’S YEAR AWAY FROM YALE, he returned to the apartment on Elm Street where he lived with Marc and another Yale student, Bill Parker. Will and Bill did not get along. Their dislike for each other was so intense that Will decided to move to another apartment across the street to get away. Will moved in with Mike Boschelli, who had rented an apartment next to Rudy’s. He knew nothing about Will’s lineage. “I had no frickin’ clue and I didn’t for a couple years,” he said. “He was just a guy I hung out with. I never asked any questions. He never told me anything. I didn’t have a clue. Finally, somebody told me. I think I was a sophomore. But he never talked about it.”

  One weekend that year, Will invited Boschelli to New York City. He didn’t tell him where he lived. They took the train down to Penn Station, then took a cab to 830 Park Avenue. Will showed Boschelli around. He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “a big, huge place with a grand staircase.” They had dinner with Will’s parents, who were apologizing profusely that they had to order in because it was the cook’s night off. “I think I’ll be all right,” he told the Daniels. Boschelli liked to read mystery novels, and they started talking about books they liked. He said he was then reading Murder in the White House, which had recently been published. Will’s mother turned to Boschelli and said, “I wrote that book.” He thought she was kidding. “I never put it together,” he said. “I guess I didn’t know too much about the history of the family.… The dad really was having a good time laughing at me because I was sort of surprised by some of the things that they were telling me. I was like, ‘Wow. This is cool.’” He learned a lot, met Will’s brothers, drank, and had a good time in New York City. “It was a surprising weekend for me,” he recalled. He always admired Will. “He was truthful,” he said. “He said what he meant. He meant what he said. He was forthright. I enjoy that in a person. Given my choice, those are the kind of people I hang out with. He was that guy. That’s all, nothing else, nothing more spectacular than that. He had the right stuff.”

  * * *

  WILL HAD DIFFICULTY PICKING A MAJOR at Yale. Although he ended up majoring in sociology, he took a lot of different courses—history, philosophy, literature, cultural anthropology, and art history. Yale allowed for some curricular freedom at that time, and Will indulged himself. His bigger problem, by far, was his ongoing inability to finish his Yale thesis, then a graduation requirement. Boschelli said that Will just didn’t want to do it. “It’s not that he couldn’t do it,” he said. “He could do it in a minute, but he just didn’t want to do it.” Will was stubborn. “If he had something in his mind, he did it,” he continued. And vice versa. “At that point I assumed he was going to go back and get it, but I didn’t really follow up.” Eventually, Will put something together on his thesis but not remotely in a timely way. “It was one hundred pages of great prose,” Cytryn remembered, although she could not recall what it was about. Melissa Bank seemed to remember it being about homeless voters but she wasn’t certain. Neither of Will’s two brothers, Clif and Thomas, could remember what it was about, either. All anybody could remember about Will and his Yale thesis was that his inability to finish it meant that he could not graduate in 1981 from Yale, along with the rest of his classmates. “I think it probably was not a good moment,” Cytryn said.

  The unfinished thesis loomed for years. Clif remembered one hot summer day, after he left UNC, when he was living back home at 830 Park Avenue and Will came home from Yale. “He had papers spread all over our bedroom trying to get that thing squared away,” he said.

  In 1980, Mark Bodden
was a young administrative assistant to longtime New York congressman Charles Rangel, in Washington, when he met Will. This was on another of Will’s breaks from Yale. He was working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, in Washington. Bodden and his partner at the time had bought a house together on Capitol Hill and rented out the room on the top floor to Will for $200 a month. Sometimes Bodden would run with Will. But that was rare. “He ran a lot farther than I would run,” he said. Bodden recalled one encounter with Will in particular from their time together in Washington. Bodden was getting ready to go to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was getting dressed up, suit and black tie, the required uniform. Will came downstairs and asked where Bodden was going. He told Will. “You may see my mom,” Will said. Bodden thought nothing of the odd-seeming remark. He had not the slightest clue about Will, or to whom he was related, because of course Will had revealed nothing. But when he thought about it, later, he couldn’t quite fathom how the grandson of Harry Truman could have lived in Washington without anyone having the slightest idea.

  A year or so later, both Will and Bodden were living in New York City. Bodden was working for the state of New York as the assistant commissioner of housing. Will lived in Manhattan, on East 96th Street, with some Andover friends. They played squash together and would go to Mets games. Bodden remembered Will once ran from Manhattan to Shea Stadium, near LaGuardia Airport. Bodden visited the Daniel house in Point o’ Woods, even though it was not a particularly welcoming environment for a black gay man. He remembered one time at dinner, Clifton Daniel was pontificating on some subject involving the state government. Will cut his father off. “Mark is currently in government,” he said. “Let him speak.”

  Every spring, in March, for about five years in a row, Will and Bodden would spend a week together in Florida for spring training. They would go to one or two games a day, go for a run—Bodden would have to turn around and meet Will later because Will would run for more than ninety minutes—and then they’d go to dinner, drink, smoke cigarettes, and drive around town. They each brought their cameras to Florida and took photographs of the players. Once, when they were back in New York, they went to dinner together at a Tex-Mex restaurant on Third Avenue. “I remember it vividly,” Bodden said. They were sharing pictures from their most recent trip to Florida. They were talking about the friendship Bodden had with Charlie, a high school friend that Will knew.

  “You two are gay, aren’t you?” Will asked.

  “No,” Bodden replied. “Charlie and I have known each other since high school and we’ve done everything together but he’s not gay.”

  “Why have you never said anything about [being gay]?” Will asked his friend. Bodden explained to Will that he was a “private person” and that there was no need to broadcast his sexual preference. At that point, Bodden remembered, Will stood up from the table and came over to him and said, “You know, if you tell people, they still love you anyway.” Will’s comment stayed with Bodden. “He knew,” he said, “but he made a point of just letting me know that it didn’t make any difference to him.”

  One of the people Will was in touch with when he was living on East 96th Street was his old friend Richard Riker. In the summer of 1982, Will wanted to go skydiving. Riker was living for the summer at his family’s estate in Rumson, New Jersey. Rumson was near Lakehurst, where there is a small—but infamous—airport, from which people can go skydiving. (It is where the Hindenburg blew up in 1937.) Will took the train down to Rumson, spent the night at the Riker house, and went out drinking with Richard. Riker was understandably nervous. He had never skydived before. Will had been skydiving once. He was gung ho. Richard was not. Plus, at around $300, it was expensive. “Which probably seemed like $1,000 at the time because I wasn’t working,” Riker said. “I just got out of college. I had no fucking money.” But Will was determined. “It’s the greatest fuckin’ thing,” Will told him. They drove together the next morning to Lakehurst in Riker’s car.

  They paid and then had a three-hour training session. “I remember all the things they teach you,” Riker said. “Actually the way you do it, you don’t get to jump out of the plane, you actually have to stand. You have to climb out on a wing and you hold on while the fucking plane is going and then you let go. I’ll never forget this. They teach you this technique.” He was especially nervous about what is called ground rush, where it’s very difficult to judge when you’re going to hit the ground. It turns out that with an open parachute a skydiver accelerates at a constant rate, not an increasing rate. People often tense their legs too early, and lots of legs get broken as a result. Riker didn’t want that to happen to him. “All of a sudden it’s like the ground hits you, which is actually what it felt like,” he said. He was very focused during the training session. “I don’t wanna fuckin’ die,” he said. “Will was focused, too, ’cause you can’t fuck around with this. We’re gonna jump out of a plane.”

  They got on a little Cessna, with the seats removed. The plane itself further rattled Riker. “I’m thinking to myself, Forget about it,” he said. “All I wanna do when I get in that plane is get out of that plane. That plane looks so dangerous. That looks like more of a death trap even than jumping out of it. I actually was happy to get out.” Back then, first-timers jumped alone, without being attached to an instructor. They each had two parachutes, in case one failed to open. Up they went to four thousand feet. “It’s a short ride,” he said. “They don’t take you super high, but it’s still getting out of a fuckin’ plane.” He wore a headset so that the instructor could talk him through what he needed to do, from jumping out of the plane itself to trying to steer himself on the way so that he landed in the big sand pit, instead of the hard ground. The plane was shaking around. Riker jumped out. “All I remember is my mind went blank,” he said. “I remember seeing the tail go by. The next thing you know is you get that huge yank. Then it’s like ‘Whoa, this is fuckin’ great.’ So afterward, of course, we probably went back and had a bunch of drinks and talked about how cool it was. I have to say it’s the only time I’ve ever skydived, but it’s thanks to Will Daniel that I went. My one and only skydiving and it was because he said, ‘I wanna do this again.’”

  Cocktail hour on East 96th would last for hours, often into the wee hours of the morning. Everyone was drinking wine or beer. But not Will. “Will, you really love Jack Daniel’s, I notice,” our friend Phil Balshi said to him once. Will replied, “In the grand tradition, my grandfather was a bourbon man, and it just so happens that this has my name on it.” One drunken night at the apartment, Balshi remembered, was particularly amusing because Will had brought home a young woman and they were together in Will’s small room, off the kitchen. Eben Keyes, an Andover graduate who rented out the rooms in the apartment to other Andover grads, “was in his cups,” Balshi said, and at around one in the morning decided to clean up the dinner dishes that had been deposited in the sink. “He’s trying to make love to this woman,” Balshi continued. “And in the meantime, Eben’s on the other side of the door, and he’s cleaning up, banging pots all around, drunk as could be. And Will’s in there, in the other room. And all of a sudden, the door opens, and Will walks out, half a wreck, and says, ‘Eben, excuse me. Could you keep it down? I’m trying to, you know, make love in the other room.’ And Eben turns to Will and said, ‘Well, Will, I’m sorry. But to quote your grandfather, the fuck stops here.’”

  * * *

  IN 1985, BODDEN ASKED WILL if he wanted to help him run the political campaign of Tom Webber, who was running a long-shot campaign for a seat on the New York City Council from a district in East Harlem. Will took the job and got paid a small amount. It was his first paid job since he had left Yale without his degree. “He didn’t need the money, but I wanted to pay him because that was what I felt we needed to do,” Bodden said. Will worked in the office while Bodden was at Webber’s side, campaigning in the district. He arranged for a group of volunteers to join Webber’s team. “He worked his but
t off for change,” Bodden said, “but did a great job.” Webber came in fourth.

  In 1987, Bodden said, “continuing his pursuit of adventures that his parents would not be happy about,” Will tried out for a spot on a AAA baseball team as an infielder. This ambition seemed to come out of left field, so to speak, and was further evidence of Will’s contrarian nature. He had not been on the baseball team at either Andover or Yale but did love playing pickup softball. Bodden drove Will to the tryout, in Connecticut. But it didn’t work out. “He wasn’t happy with his performance,” he said. “He was his toughest critic in terms of life, at least in my experience with him. He would always say he could be doing more. He could be doing better.” Bodden thought that what Will really wanted to do was not to play baseball but rather to become a writer, or a journalist. He said Will was “a brilliant writer,” who would have pursued that but for his father having been the former managing editor of the New York Times. “Other kids would say my father is the editor of the New York Times so I’m going to get a job at the New York Times,” Bodden said. “But he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to use any of those connections. He fought that. I give him credit for that because other young people in that situation would have used that, but he pushed back.” On several occasions over meals with the Daniel family in both New York City and Fire Island, Bodden listened as they discussed the subject of Will’s professional future. It was clear that Clifton Daniel did not appreciate his son’s intransigence. He said that Will “not only refused” to use his family connections to advance his career prospects “but held on to it and fought it.” Recalled Bodden, “It was something about him, in his personality, that whatever he did he wanted to do on his own and he didn’t want it to be perceived that he was becoming a writer or whatever it was by virtue of the connection to his family.”