John spent most of the summer of 1972 with his mother, sister, and stepfather on Skorpios, in the Greek islands, although on June 4, before heading there, he and a friend went to the Mets game and sat in the dugout with Willie Mays. At one point, while they were all cruising around on the Christina, the military-backed government of Greece announced on July 15 that it had foiled a plot by eight Greeks, “mostly laborers,” to kidnap John, among others. Their targets, the government alleged, were the Greek minister of labor; the chief of the armed forces; Thomas Pappas, a wealthy Greek American businessman; and John. The alleged kidnappers were arrested, indicted, and put on trial. One of the alleged kidnappers denied that John was a target of their plot.
His school friend Peter Blauner recalled John inviting him to dinner at 1040 Fifth. “I remember [Jackie] playing the cast album from 1776 over and over and over again … It wasn’t Camelot,” he said. “It was that record. I remember them playing it. I remember thinking, This is what the world would be like if there were no blacks or Jewish people around.” He remembered seeing John’s mother in her sunglasses and thinking, “The face would strike you as being mask-like, but then she would smile at you and she would speak to you in a way that seemed genuinely warm and interested.” He also recalled another time when John was put in an awkward position at a father-son event in the Collegiate gymnasium. Instead of his father, John brought as a surrogate father Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, the former NFL football player who had tackled Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy’s killer, on the night of his assassination at a Los Angeles hotel. “At one point,” Blauner recalled, “the exercises involved the fathers and sons standing in a circle and throwing a medicine ball back and forth to each other. Roosevelt Grier actually was throwing the medicine ball back and forth with the other parents and the kids. There’s probably a few people that still have EVERLAST backward on their chest.”
As John moved into adolescence, he developed a taste for experimentation. In the summer of 1971, he spent two weeks on an island off the coast of Wales sailing, canoeing, camping, and rock climbing. After Aristotle Onassis died outside Paris, in March 1975, John spent the following summer on Skorpios with his mother. He palled around with Christos Kartanos, a local resident whom John had befriended years earlier. They took speedboats around the island. Kartanos said that John loved his scotch. “Whenever I went to see him,” he said, “I carried the scotch in a cloth shoulder bag. We used to swig it straight from the bottle. John said it made him feel good. But we never got drunk. I think that all the things that John did—like drinking wine and whiskey and smoking Greek cigarettes—were his way of showing off. It’s as if he were saying, Look, I’m not a kid anymore.”
In the late afternoon of May 14, 1974, around 5 p.m., while John was riding his bike into Central Park for a tennis lesson, Robert Lopez, then twenty, mugged John, who was then thirteen. “Get off that bike or I will kill you,” Lopez told John. Lopez took John’s tennis racket and his bike and rode off with them both into Central Park. Lopez, who later told police he sold John’s bike in order to buy two bags of cocaine, approached John with a tree branch in his hand and told him to “get out of here.” He said John was “an easy hit.” John reported the theft to the police who then took him in a patrol car around Central Park, looking for the assailant and his bike. But he did not find them. Two months later, the police arrested Lopez, who was unemployed and lived with his wife and two-month-old child on Second Avenue, after he surrendered to a police precinct on East 102nd Street. Lopez helped the police recover John’s tennis racket, but the $145 ten-speed bike was not recovered. Lopez pleaded not guilty to the crime but was later convicted of it and sentenced to two years in prison.
* * *
BACK AT COLLEGIATE, JOHN HAD BECOME close friends with Wilson McCray, whom he dubbed his “partner in crime.” Said McCray, “We were bad little boys.” As fourteen-year-olds, they would evade the Secret Service and head into Central Park to play Frisbee. They also got high together. “At school we were always getting caught for getting stoned,” he said.
It is not exactly clear to anybody why after he returned from a three-week service trip to Guatemala, John left Collegiate at the end of tenth grade to go to Andover as an Upper. Some thought he left Collegiate because he was getting into too much trouble. Some thought he wasn’t distinguishing himself enough academically and needed a fresh start at a new school. Some thought he wanted to follow McCray to Andover. At any rate, John’s arrival at Andover necessitated a healthy combination of drama and nonchalance. On the one hand, he was JFK Jr., the only son of the glamorous assassinated former president of the United States. He was a favorite son of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, Andover’s home state, and given Andover’s illustrious history, it certainly seemed appropriate that John would want to come to Andover and that Andover could handle the hoopla and attention that his arrival would merit. On the other hand, Andover is known for its discretion generally and especially so when accommodating the children of the rich and famous. After all, there was barely a ripple when Will Daniel entered three years earlier. In John’s case, the campus was abuzz with the news that he would be enrolling, but it was also clear that there would be a minimal amount of special treatment for him and that he would have to (mostly) play by the rules. He would also have to (mostly) meet the same academic requirements as the other twelve hundred students on campus.
What added to my excitement when I first heard the news was that John would be living down the hall from me in Stearns House West. The Secret Service had insisted that John be placed in the dormitory that was closest to the Andover Inn, where they were holed up and at his beck and call. One week before school started in September 1976, the Secret Service met with the dorm master, Meredith Price, and his wife, Nancy. “They all, of course, had hats on and suits and they came over and they gave me what I guess would be called an alarm,” Price recalled. “And they said ‘See this, well, we’ll run this right through walls and windows if you press this and you think that John is in some kind of danger.’” Of course, the alarm went off by mistake six times the first day that John was in the dorm. “They gave up and then they just came over and washed their cars with our hose,” he said.
The day we returned to school for Upper year, I remember being in my friend Mike Somers’s room, across the hall from mine, and looking out his windows as Jackie and John came down the path to the front door of the dorm. It was surreal, and it was really happening. What were these two incredibly famous people doing at our school, in my dorm? All I could think of was how excited my mother would have been to see Jackie O entering our dorm. And of course she was an amazing sight, although I noticed then and later that she never looked quite as beautiful and glamorous as she did in pictures. She was that rare human being who looked better in photographs than she did in person, where her wide face and deeply separated eyes made her look more striking than stunning.
When Jackie and John arrived, they knocked on Meredith Price’s door. His daughter, Amy, was in awe. Price was just slightly rattled with the arrival of the famous guests, and as he went to open the door to the apartment, he hit his head on one of the metal posts that was holding up the roof. “I opened the door and there’s a bump forming on my forehead,” he said, “and there’s Jackie O, and honest to God, she sounds just the way she sounded like, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to see you…’” She and John sat down on the couch in his study. They made small talk. “When she left Amy went over and patted the sofa on which Jackie O had sat,” her father said.
One of Price’s responsibilities was to do occasional room checks. “And make sure kids’ rooms were not hovels and shouldn’t be immediately fumigated,” he said. When he went to John’s room, which he shared with Robert Van Cleve, an Upper (and a legacy) from St. Louis, Missouri, Price would have been confronted by a life-sized, carved-wood, bare-breasted mermaid, the kind of sculpture that might be seen on the prow of a ship, not in a prep school dorm room. There were plenty of fake reports a
bout how John was living at Andover. One account included the fiction that he had in his dorm room a signed silkscreen print of Chairman Mao from Andy Warhol—to “John F. Kennedy Jr.”—as well as a silk boxing robe with MUHAMMAD ALI sewn in stitching on the back. (For what it’s worth, I was in John’s room hundreds of times and never saw either of these items.) There was a framed photograph of his father hanging above his desk. “It could take you aback,” Price said when he saw the photograph.
Like John, Sasha Chermayeff was from New York City and went to Andover as an Upper, making them a bit of an anomaly in the Andover firmament—coming to the school one or two years after everyone else. They became best friends. Chermayeff, the daughter of the famous graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff (Andover Class of 1950), first met John briefly at a party in New York City the previous year. Her first reaction to him was “Oh, so what. Big deal.” She didn’t find him particularly handsome, either. “He wasn’t like this dream,” she said. At Andover, though, they became fast—and lifelong—friends. They had three classes together that first year. They talked about their families. They clicked. She recalled how they were once dancing around in the dorm and he started talking about how uninformed women seemed to be about their sexual power over men. “He said, ‘God, women have no clue that you’re driving men completely crazy, being like super sexual and stuff like that,’” she said. She remembered that John was getting “pissed” at her for being so naïve about how her innocent-seeming flirting was affecting the teenage boys at Andover. He was being protective the way an older brother would be to a younger sister. “I remember being so shocked that he was saying, ‘You don’t see what you’re doing?’” she said. “‘Why don’t you see what you’re doing?’ And I’d be like, ‘Because I’m sixteen!’” Sasha laughed. “But he was like, ‘No, it’s not right, you can’t do that. This is what’s happening. This is what the guy is thinking.’ And I was like ‘Really?’”
She and John were never a couple. There was one moment, during the fall of their first semester at Andover, when it might have happened. They were in the old part of the stately Oliver Wendell Holmes Library in an area where books had been removed from the shelves. They decided to climb onto the shelving and lie down. They started making out a little bit. The next day, Sasha remembered, they got into “kind of an argument” about what had happened “and then we were both like, ‘Okay fine, we would just go back to where we were before, it’s okay,’ and we were and we just stayed there.”
John “was the shit,” said Ed Hill, one of John’s closest friends from Andover. Hill, a legacy, came to Andover from Yonkers, where his mother was the headmaster of a Catholic school in the Bronx that Hill attended. They met playing Frisbee inside the dining hall. Hill’s overriding impression of John at Andover was of a kid who “was all wound up with nowhere to go.” He never discussed with John whether he suffered from dyslexia or ADHD, or was taking Ritalin, as rumor had it. “But it had filtered through to me over time that his eggs were scrambled in some way,” he said. “He certainly behaved in a manner consistent with ADD/ADHD.” John had a lot of nervous energy. “He had as much energy as anyone I’ve ever known,” Hill said. “He was a bit klutzy. He looked like the most athletic individual you’d ever know and he had the stamina of a great athlete, but he didn’t have the coordination.” Ed was the captain of the cross-country team and the captain of the spring track team. He was also for a period of time—before he was kicked out of Andover over the summer before his senior year—the school president. “One of my impressions of John was that he was drawn to people who he perceived were better than him in various categories,” he said. “John in a million years would not have been the captain of any team.” Hill also remembered John’s curiosity. “I used to joke that you had to be very careful if you were pontificating in front of John, because the two most common words in his vocabulary were Really? and Why? He’d fuck you because you’d run off on some rant. He’d hear you out and then say, ‘Why?’ and you’d realize that the only answer was, ‘Well, actually because I’m ill-tempered and full of shit.’”
Ed, Sasha, and John all ended up in remedial Math 30 class. “One of the things we always tried to do together is study math, and we were both so hopeless,” Sasha said. “It was just so not going to happen.”
I remember once John asked me to teach him how to divide. I was enough of a diligent math student that I consistently got 6s—As—in just about every math class I took at Andover. I am not sure how John discovered that or why he felt comfortable asking me for help in teaching him how to divide. Maybe he just intuited that the son of an accountant would have an aptitude for math. Anyway, by the time I got done with him on that particular day, I felt certain he knew how to divide. But it didn’t take.
I’m not exactly sure why John and I became friends. Ned Andrews—my roommate during senior year—and I were asked to help John navigate Andover in his first few months at the school, and the friendship just developed. We lived down the hall from each other. I was a senior and he was an Upper, trying to figure out what Andover was all about. We both liked to have fun, although I suspect John had far more fun than I did.
I remember the time John was hungry at ten o’clock at night and decided to enlist the Secret Service to take us to Bishop’s, an eastern Mediterranean restaurant in Lawrence, Massachusetts, about a ten-minute drive away. “That’s where all the fat people in the area went,” explained Meredith Price, our dorm counselor. Of course, this was completely against the rules, which required us all to be signed in to the dorm by ten o’clock at night, not driving around northern Massachusetts in search of food courtesy of the US Secret Service. But the Secret Service obliged, no questions asked, and we enjoyed a late-night snack of homemade pita and hummus.
Another time, John got a call from his sister, who had been driving up to Andover in her car from Harvard to visit John. It seemed that Caroline’s car had suffered a flat tire about a mile or so from the Andover campus. Could John come help her fix the tire? John asked me to go along with him to help, as the two Kennedy children had aged out of Secret Service protection by that time. In any event, off John and I went, heading south on Route 28, which bifurcated the campus, in the direction of Boston. After a walk of twenty minutes or so, we found Caroline and her wounded car. It quickly became apparent that neither Caroline nor John knew the first thing about changing a flat tire. I didn’t know much about it, either, but the job fell to me, and John and Caroline were only too happy to cede responsibility for the whole operation. Soon enough, the tire was fixed and we were all on our way back to campus.
One of the more curious facts about John at Andover was that he never seemed to have any money in his wallet (assuming he could even find his wallet, which eventually he had to chain to his pants so as not to lose it). There weren’t many things to buy at Andover, since food, shelter, and tuition were paid up in advance. There was a small store on campus with candy and sundries. There was also the small pub in the Andover Inn, where eighteen-year-olds could drink alcohol legally as well as within the parameters of the Andover rule book. (But neither John nor I was eighteen.) For John, the chief reason he seemed to want, or need, money was to buy extracurricular substances, such as marijuana or cocaine. He seemed always to have these items in stock. How he got them I have no idea, but he did seem to have his ways. Occasionally, he would ask me—the accountant’s son from Worcester—if he could borrow some money without making clear what he needed it for. I was always pretty sure he was using it to augment his drug inventory.
Frankly, it didn’t matter to me what he was using the money for; all I cared about was that he pay me back. But over time, that increasingly began to seem like a very tall order indeed. I don’t think John was trying to stiff me. It just seemed that he was operating a kind of Ponzi scheme, borrowing from one person to pay another, not out of any particular maliciousness but rather because he never seemed to have any money of his own. He did this with lots of people, not just me. It di
d always strike me as a bit ironic.
One day, during the spring of 1977, John invited me down to 1040 Fifth Avenue, in New York City, for a visit. By that point in my life, I had been to New York a few times, but I had never been to an apartment on Fifth Avenue before, let alone the penthouse apartment of one of the most famous families in the world. Needless to say, my visit was big news around my house, at 11 Old English Road in Worcester.
After the extremely discreet doorman at 1040 Fifth ushered me into the lobby of the building and then up into the family’s fifteenth-floor penthouse apartment, I remember being overwhelmed by the splendor of the place. Of course, I had never seen anything like this apartment before. There was a marble foyer dotted with Greek and Roman statues and busts. There was a small den, off the foyer, crammed full of books around a coffee table. I remember desperately wanting to look at one of the books, a large leather-bound tome with a gigantic embossed seal of the president of the United States on it, but of course doing so would have been totally uncool. At one point, John and I went into his bedroom. I recall that John took a few hits off his bong and then poured the used bong water out of his bathroom window onto Fifth Avenue, fifteen stories below. For some reason, I figured this would be as good a chance as any to get John to repay me the money he owed, which at that point totaled $40, a not-insignificant sum for a high school student in the mid-1970s. I asked John for the money. Without protest, he left his room and went to find his mother. I’m still not sure whether he felt emboldened to ask her in the wake of his bong hits. In any event, just outside the door to his room, I overheard him explaining to his mother how he owed this guy—me—$40 and that it was a long-overdue debt. Without missing a beat, she gave John two $20 bills and then said to him, in her best Jackie O voice, “John, tomorrow we talk about money.”
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