Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Unlike at Andover, where everyone was younger and less experienced sexually, Brown seemed more like a sexual free-for-all, and no one benefited from that more thoroughly in his way than John. Women were literally throwing themselves at him. Mark Three Stars recalled how on “more than one occasion,” he would open the door of his room to find a young woman standing in front of John’s door in her underwear. When the question was posed what exactly she was doing at John’s door in her underwear, she said, “I’m supposed to meet John here.” Remembered Mark: “It was such bullshit, and I said, ‘Well, you know he’s out for a while but you can come wait in here.’ So she went in our room for I don’t know, maybe about ten minutes, and then took off.” The dorm resident advisers quickly got wind of the practice and put an end to it by more closely monitoring who was going to John’s room. “I never have seen anyone get reactions the way he did,” said Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor and a friend of John’s. “Not the biggest rock star, not the biggest movie star, because he wasn’t an entertainer. He was the real deal. He was the living legacy of the closest thing to greatness a big slice of this country thought that we had ever experienced in a leader. That’s what Kennedy was.” Added Cuomo’s CNN colleague, Christiane “Kissy” Amanpour, who shared a house with John during his junior year at Brown (she went to the University of Rhode Island), “I remember watching in sort of a combination of horror and awe, the way men and women threw themselves at him, of all ages. Even if they physically weren’t throwing themselves at him, they were emotionally throwing themselves at him.” John Perry Barlow had noticed the phenomenon, too. “People would come up to him and you could see them just shedding IQ points as they approached,” he recalled. “I mean the closer they got, the dumber they were. You knew that they’d been pretty bright over here someplace, but by the time they got there they were just dumb as bait.”

  The summer after his freshman year at Brown—while his mother was handling his academic problems—John spent part of July in Johannesburg, South Africa, visiting the diamond company run by Maurice Tempelsman, his mother’s new boyfriend, and part of the month in Zimbabwe visiting with student and government leaders. John seemed quite moved by what he witnessed in South Africa, and seemed determined to do something about it. After his sophomore year, John spent the summer in Washington, working at the Center for Democratic Policy, a liberal think tank. While he was in Washington, he lived with his aunt and uncle, the Shrivers, and their son Tim (his good friend). He spent time on the weekends exploring—“I wanted to come to Washington because I’ve never been here before,” he told the New York Times, in a piece arranged by his uncle Ted, without irony. “I wanted to see what it was like”—and he spent evenings “teaching himself to play the guitar … I don’t really go out a lot.” Ted Van Dyk, John’s boss at the think tank, told Time that John “had never really been to Washington. He didn’t even know where the White House was.” (It’s not clear why the myth of John’s unfamiliarity with Washington was being pushed.) John accompanied Van Dyk on a fund-raising trip to Hollywood. The Hollywood stars couldn’t get enough of him. “He began to realize he was a celebrity,” Van Dyk continued. “He had his first contact with clutchers and grabbers. He handled it.”

  At the start of his junior year at Brown, John made the papers because he failed to pay $108 in parking fines. John shared a five-bedroom Victorian town house at 115 Benefit Street, in the tony section of Providence. John had the smallest room in the house. It only had room for a desk and a bed. One Saturday morning, though, the phone rang and briefly upset the delicate balance that existed in the house. The anonymous caller announced to Christina Haag—John’s friend and roommate, who had answered the phone—that he hated the Kennedys and knew where John lived. He threatened to kill John. What to do? Tell John? (He was not in his room, having spent the night elsewhere.) Call the campus police? Call the Providence police? Call Senator Kennedy’s office? When John eventually returned home, Chris Oberbeck, another housemate and close friend (John was the best man at his first wedding), summoned the courage to tell him about the phone call. But John could not have cared less. This was not the first time he had been threatened. He quickly decided it was a prank. He wasn’t the slightest bit worried. “I felt more protective of him than I ever had,” Haag recalled, “and, in a strange way, more in awe of his fearlessness.”

  That same year, John got named to People magazine’s “best dressed” list, although it was not exactly clear why, except for the fact of who he was. “He is the preppy’s preppy, sporting the Ivy League costume of chinos and shirt (often with tails out), Shetland sweaters, loafers—and no polyester,” the magazine observed.

  In the second semester of his junior year, John got the lead role of Christy the playboy in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World about a meek underdog who gets transformed. “He had a way about him that was grace personified,” remembered James Barnhill, one of John’s theater professors. “He took direction well and he improvised well.” But the Brown Daily Herald panned the production and especially John’s performance in it, essentially because John was too good-looking to portray an Irish peasant who evolves. John also appeared as the character Longshore, a tough, hip Irishman in his mid-thirties, in Miguel Piñero’s play Short Eyes, a drama about men in prison directed by Santina Goodman. John’s character murders a child molester. The reviewer for the Brown Daily Herald praised the “frightening realism” of Goodman’s production and said of John that he played the role of Longshore with “perfection” and that he “[threw] his bulk around the set with infinite self-assurance and an air of stubborn defiance.” (Best-selling author Jeffrey Eugenides, a classmate of John’s, “skillfully” played a “cynical” prison investigator.)

  * * *

  BY THE TIME JOHN WAS A SENIOR at Brown, where he majored in American history, he had finally shaken off the yoke of academic ineptitude and become something of a decent student. Mary Gluck, for one, had noticed the improvement from the first class he took with her to the last. His final college paper, which he hand-delivered to her wearing cutoff shorts, was about Wordsworth. “He said, ‘Just hot off the press,’” Gluck recalled. “I’ll never forget the enormous pleasure.” She gave him a B-plus on the paper.

  On June 6, 1983, John graduated from Brown. It followed an all-night party, and no sleep for John and his friends. His classmates did their best to surround him to try to prevent the swarm of photographers from taking his picture (which of course failed). The day after graduation, John had a party for about fifty classmates at the family compound in Hyannis Port. “I don’t remember much more than people sleeping in the emptied pool and in the screening room beneath the grand matriarch Rose’s big house,” Rob Littell said. From there, a smaller group of John’s friends accompanied him to his mother’s new 150-acre spread, Red Gate Farm, in Martha’s Vineyard. “We stayed for days, reluctant to let the party end,” Littell remembered.

  For about a month after graduating from Brown, John returned to Providence to study for the LSAT. He had decided to go to law school, no doubt with the support and approval of his mother. The LSAT completed—his score was just average—he spent much of the following year in India. With the help of the Indian and American governments, John traveled through India largely unnoticed. In Delhi, he stayed at a variety of places, including the embassies of foreign nations and in fleabag hotels in the center of the city.

  At a cocktail party one night at the Irish embassy, Narendra Taneja, a local journalist, met John, who was staying in a sleeping bag on the second floor. (He didn’t know it was John initially.) “We just got talking,” Taneja recalled, “and I asked him where he was staying for his trip to Delhi, and he, with a smirk, pointed toward a corner of the room’s floor.” At the time, Taneja had the use of a large four-bedroom home belonging to a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology and so he offered John one of the empty bedrooms, figuring he would prefer it to sleeping on the floor. “He took up the offer,” Taneja continu
ed, “and after some time we took a tuk-tuk and left for my place. As we talked sitting in the living room and having instant noodles for dinner later that night, he brought out his diary and started to flip pages, showing his written musings about travels, family and so on. As he flipped through the pages, there were photos of him and his family. After quick glances, I started to realize that most of his pictures were with John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie Kennedy. I inquired about the photographs, and he replied, ‘Well, they are my parents,’ and that is when I realized I had John F. Kennedy Jr. living in my house.” The next morning, the American embassy called to check on John and to make sure his whereabouts were kept secret from the press and other institutions.

  That wish was a short-lived one. Word quickly got around that John F. Kennedy Jr. was staying on campus. One professor called Taneja and invited the two of them to tea, hoping to score a visit with John. “I hesitated but agreed, telling him no one else should know about him staying here,” Taneja said. But when they arrived at the professor’s home, they discovered that he had invited about twenty others to join, apparently in order to show off that he knew the son of the former president of the United States. “We decided to stay even though I had asked him specifically not to let anyone know,” Taneja continued. “After a while, the professor decided to ask John a question, and he asked, ‘So do you remember when your father was assassinated?’ John, aghast, looked at me, and I stared at the professor in disbelief that this question was actually tabled to him. We left his house within minutes, and I apologized to him. ‘It’s O.K., it’s just that no one ever asks me that,’” he said.

  The next day, Taneja told John he was heading to Tundla, a small town near Agra. John asked to join him on the trip, despite the fact that the accommodations and transportation were decidedly third-class, at best. In Tundla, John met a bunch of the locals. A palm reader, or jyotishee, wanted to read John’s palm. He agreed. After a few minutes, the palm reader declared, “This man is the son of a king.” John was a bit startled by the pronouncement, understandably, but said nothing, given his desire to travel incognito. Later that day, however, he returned to visit with the palm reader, and spent two more hours with him.

  John spent another week with Taneja in Tundla before heading to the spiritual city of Varanasi, also in Uttar Pradesh, on the banks of the Ganges. From there he spent another week in Calcutta. With the help of the Indian government, John stayed for a week with another journalist, M. J. Akbar. “It was great fun having him,” Akbar recalled. “I remember that women used to line up around the staircase of the building as he ran up and down, bare bodied, for eight floors whenever there was no electricity and the lift would not work.” (Akbar later served as the Indian minister of state for external affairs.) In Calcutta, John also visited with Mother Teresa and, at the behest of her charity, helped to teach English to children in the slums of the city. John ended his time in India in the resort state of Goa, where his mother met him. They traveled together for two weeks.

  After India, John returned to live and to work in New York City. For the first two years back in town, John and Rob Littell rented a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment together at 309 West 86th Street, on the Upper West Side. While Littell worked at a small brokerage firm, John spent much of the next two years first working at the city’s Office of Economic Development and then as the deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation, which was formed to revamp the area from a seedy, drug-and-porn-infested corridor into a major tourist attraction, along the lines of Piccadilly Circus, in London. Shaaz Ali, who worked with John at the Office of Economic Development, remembered he used to go into the stairwell between the floors of the office and scream, just so he could hear the echo. He also used to chew the tops of the pens, and people would hide their pens from him as a result. Ali gave John his first paycheck. “But he lost it,” Ali remembered. “It was sent to the cleaners in his pants, so we had to send him another one.”

  According to Littell, their work was not really the point. They just wanted to have fun in New York, which “at that particular moment in history,” he wrote, was one of the most “exhilarating” places to live. “The city was edgy, raw, more dangerous and less civil than it is now, but also coursing with energy,” he observed. “Cocaine and pot were the drugs of choice in the city then, available anywhere anytime. You could have your cocaine delivered, or you could stop by the dry cleaner and pick it up on your way home.” He said they worked hard to moderate their intake of such substances, in part because of their own vanity and in part because, as Littell commented, “We both had friends who lost control, some who battled back to a healthy life and others, sadly, who were swept away.”

  Ed Hill remembered just soaking it all in as one of John’s sidekicks. Things would happen that Hill found hard to fathom. “I would find my eyes rolling on a regular basis.” He remembered being out with John somewhere in New York City when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. “I looked at it and there written in cursive was this woman’s name and her phone number,” Hill said. “I recognized the name right away”—it was that of Julianne Phillips, an actress who was then married to Bruce Springsteen—“and said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Of course he just laughed, because here he’s got Springsteen’s wife’s phone number in her handwriting.”

  There was always time for the requisite weekend touch football game in Central Park. John and Gary Ginsberg probably played touch football in the park every weekend for the next fifteen years. “It was an ungodly amount of time,” Ginsberg recalled. “I mean hundreds and hundreds of hours. What was interesting is how much time we would spend organizing these games, and it would start at phone calls. There was no internet back then. There was no email. He would do it all by phone, and the phone calls would start early on Saturdays.”

  Along with working on the redevelopment of 42nd Street, John continued to dabble in theater. At the end of January 1985, he and his old friend and housemate from Brown, Christina Haag, who was studying acting at Juilliard, began reading through Lovers, by the Irish playwright Brian Friel. It was a way for Haag to escape what she called “the rigidity” of Juilliard and a way for John to rekindle his love of the theater. Robin Saex, a director and mutual friend of theirs from Brown, had been looking for a play that would work for her two friends and that might actually get produced off-Broadway. After months of read-throughs, in June Saex informed John and Christina that the play would be staged at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen. There would be six invitation-only performances. At John’s insistence, there would be no publicity (of course, this proved impossible to prevent). Although they both were in relationships, they started falling for each other. “No matter how many times you fall in love,” Haag later reflected in her book, Come to the Edge, “it always comes at you sideways. It always catches you by surprise.”

  It was a relationship with many fits and starts, and over the years that followed, it had its own unique challenges. For example, there was the time, in January 1986, when they were set to go to Pennsylvania together for the weekend. A day or so before they were to leave, John called to cancel. She was confused. The Challenger shuttle had exploded, killing its crew, he explained to her, and he had to go to the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, for the memorial service with President Reagan and other government dignitaries. It had to be either him or Caroline, he said. It was his turn.

  * * *

  JOHN HAD APPLIED TO MANY of the top law schools, not because he wanted to practice law—he most certainly didn’t—but as a way to buy time. It would be three years where he could hang out and where no one could criticize him for being a slacker. Plus his mother wanted him to go and figured law school would divert him permanently from his continuing interest in acting. (She had once nixed him from guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.)

  Of course, his LSAT scores were not particularly good—he gave Littell the thumbs-down once when asked about them. Heretofore this had not been a proble
m. He had moved from St. David’s to Collegiate, despite academic concerns. He had moved to Andover from Collegiate, despite academic concerns. He had moved from Andover to Brown, despite academic concerns, rejecting Harvard (and other top schools) in the process. But law school for some reason was different. Maybe it was the LSAT scores. Maybe it was his choppy academic record at Brown. Maybe it was that the schools intuited that he wasn’t devoted to the law. In any event, he was rejected from Harvard Law, despite his family’s lineage at the school. Eventually, after other rejections, John got into the New York University School of Law. He decided to go there, beginning in the fall of 1986, once again a full-time student.

  John’s relationship with Haag was in full swing. The summer before John matriculated at New York University law school, they went together to Red Gate Farm, in the southwestern end of Martha’s Vineyard. It was an extraordinary—and very valuable—property, with a mile of ocean frontage, that Jackie had purchased from the Hornblower estate in August 1978. Jackie had built a series of shingle-style saltbox homes on a small portion of the property in 1981. There was a garage, a caretaker’s home, tennis courts, and a vegetable garden. There was a guest cottage, known as the Barn. Next to the Barn was the Tower, an attached “faux” silo with a bedroom at the top. This was John’s lair.

  In June 1986, People named John America’s “most eligible bachelor.” The magazine touted John’s “self-effacing charm” and that he liked to “hang out” at the Palladium disco, in Manhattan, where he would introduce himself to women with “Hi, I’m John.” But the magazine incorrectly reported he would be attending Columbia Law School—where Caroline was entering her second year—in the fall, and repeated the error in another short piece on John the day before his sister’s July wedding. The second piece on John noted that he was making $20,000 a year as an assistant to the commissioner of the Economic Development Agency of New York and that the “only blemish” on his record was that he had been caught speeding, three years earlier, on the Connecticut Turnpike going eighty-one miles per hour in a fifty-five zone and then, incredibly, had his driver’s license suspended because he failed to show up for the court appearance.