Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Departing from the apartment he shared (and trashed) with Littell, John decided to stay on the Upper West Side, moving—per his mother’s recommendation—to the top floor of a brownstone on West 91st, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Haag moved from Brooklyn into the same neighborhood, a studio apartment on the ground floor of a shabby building on West 83rd Street. They settled into a boyfriend-and-girlfriend routine—John focused more or less on his law school studies, Christina on her burgeoning career as an actress. Most days, after breakfast at a health food restaurant on Columbus Avenue, he cycled the four miles down to Washington Square to go to class.

  Like many people, John found the first year of law school difficult. The summer after, he and Christina lived together outside of Washington. He was working at the Civil Rights Division in the Reagan Justice Department; she had an acting gig in town. Often during the summer, she urged him to visit for the first time his father’s gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery. Haag knew that John would occasionally recall memories of his father: His father would sometimes take a buttercup and put it under his chin and tell him he liked butter; John would do that to Christina, too. He remembered that his father sometimes called him Sam, which he found somehow upsetting. He remembered playing under his father’s desk in the Oval Office. He remembered one of the last times he and his father were together, nine days before he went to Dallas, on the balcony overlooking the South Lawn of the White House when the Black Watch bagpipers were performing. But despite Haag’s urging, John always seemed reluctant to go to Arlington, until the last day, as they were heading back to New York together, when he decided to visit the grave.

  * * *

  BEFORE STARTING HIS SECOND YEAR of law school, John planned a fabulous trip for him and Christina to Venice at his mother’s recommendation. But it was not to be. Haag got an offer to play Ophelia in Baltimore. When she called John to tell him, he said he was excited for her and urged her to come over to 91st Street so they could celebrate together. When she got there, though, his mood had darkened considerably. She found him sitting in a metal chair on the small deck off his bedroom. He was smoking a cigarette and staring blankly into the middle distance. “You will always be leaving me,” he said. She tried to console him, to break his funk. The next morning, he was better. He had moved on. “I’ll get used to it,” he told her.

  He saw Haag perform twice in Baltimore that fall. While visiting, John asked her if she would spend the summer with him in Los Angeles, where he had been offered a job as a summer associate at a prestigious law firm founded by Charles Manatt, former head of the Democratic National Committee. Haag got to pick where they lived, and she chose a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court, by the beach in Venice. John bought her an old powder-blue Buick Skylark Custom with a black interior to drive. As they were living near Santa Monica Airport, John took up flying lessons. Nearly every Saturday, he went up with an instructor “and always came back happy,” Haag reported. His skills improved throughout the summer, and one day he decided he wanted to fly—with the instructor seated next to him—to Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles. He invited Haag to join in the fun. “Don’t worry, Puppy,” he told her. “The instructor will be there.” One cloudless morning, with John at the controls, the three of them headed out over the western Los Angeles neighborhoods and then over the Pacific Ocean. With the Catalina runway in view, atop a sixteen-hundred-foot mesa, the plane began to shake, and John was afraid of stalling. Fortunately, the instructor perked up, mentioned something to John that perhaps he had forgotten, and the plane relaxed, the wings leveled. John landed the plane smoothly. They celebrated with buffalo burgers at the Airport in the Sky café inside the small Catalina terminal.

  On July 11 that summer, John went to Atlanta for the 1988 Democratic convention to introduce Teddy, the senior senator from Massachusetts. The Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, introduced John by reminding everyone how beloved he was, is, and would be again. Then twenty-seven, John was dressed in a navy-blue suit, white spread-collar shirt, and dark tie. He looked radiant and as handsome as ever. The crowd gave him a standing ovation for two minutes.

  Gary Ginsberg and John went together to a party that Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, threw for his staff. There, Gore had had a lot to drink, Ginsberg remembered, and said to John that he needed to come visit him in his Senate office. “We’ve got to talk,” Gore told John, “because we’re both American royalty and I think I’ve got some lessons that I can teach you about how to cope with it.” For years afterward, John and Ginsberg would laugh about what Gore said to John. “Not even close,” Ginsberg said.

  It was no surprise, after his star performance, that many wondered whether John was considering a political career. It was so obvious, given his good looks, his pedigree, his intelligence, his theatrical skills, and his natural sense of empathy. “Stars are born at conventions,” one Democratic official told New York magazine. “He certainly came out as a Democrat everyone will be watching for a long time.”

  That September, just as he was starting his third, and final, year at law school, People magazine, not content with previously bestowed honors, named John the “Sexiest Man Alive.” The magazine’s writers commented on his abs, his thighs—“legend has it that if he lived in Tahiti, instead of Manhattan, he could crack coconuts with them,” the magazine fawned—and his butt, and wondered what he would look like naked. His relationship with Haag was mentioned, as was the fact that they had shared a house together in Los Angeles. But there were also passing references made to other women with whom John had been seen: There was a Madonna look-alike (but not Madonna) that showed up with him at Zanzibar and Grill, on East 36th Street, and model Audra Avizienis, who told People that they had been out together on a few dates but that they were not “dating” because he had a girlfriend.

  Some said he loved the attention. After People awarded him the hollow honor, he “used to sprawl at an outdoor table at the Jackson Hole hamburger joint, shirt off,” according to the journalist Michael Gross. “One neighborhood woman says Kennedy would stop her to ask for the time. ‘My sense was that he was dying for attention, dying for people to look at him,’ she says.” But there was also a sense, among his friends, that being named the “Sexiest Man Alive” was a bit of a dividing line in his life. While there were times when he could walk around New York City, or Providence, or Andover unnoticed and undetected, after the People magazine cover story, that possibility decreased materially.

  Sasha Chermayeff thought that after the People story, it became harder and harder for John to make new friends. He could no longer trust people’s motives quite as easily as he had before. “He used to make fun of it and complain to us, like ‘You guys get to meet new people, you get to make new, really close friends. I can’t.’ He couldn’t really go out in the world that way. It was too overwhelming. It was too much. John was too much for everybody. Everybody was just so blown away by him, that side of him. He was kind of stuck with people he’d known for a very, very long time, at a certain point.”

  And the old friends loved giving him a hard time after the story came out. John Perry Barlow said, “It turned out to be a really great way to take the piss out of him, ‘Oh, do I have the sexiest man in the galaxy on the phone?’”

  * * *

  TOWARD THE END OF HIS LAST YEAR in law school, John won a coveted spot as an assistant district attorney in the office of Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan DA. It was a very difficult job to get, and John was not the first son of the rich and powerful whom Morgenthau had hired. John agreed to stay in the office for at least three years. At his May 1989 graduation from NYU School of Law, the paparazzi bombarded him with questions. To answer the query of what he would do next, he answered, “Pass the bar.”

  Ah, the bar exam, the bane of the existence of many recent law school graduates. It’s a grueling twelve-hour, two-day ordeal, filled with rote questions best answered through brute memorization. He set about studying for it so
on after graduation. His plan for the summer was to take some vacation time—Hyannis Port and Martha’s Vineyard—and to study for the bar, which was in July. None of this played to John’s strengths, considering his abundant nervous energy and his inability to focus on his studies for an extended period of time. “What really struck me was his restlessness,” someone who took a bar review class with John told People. “He couldn’t sit still for more than 10 minutes at a time. The classroom had a door that opened onto a little deck, and every day he’d get up and open the door three or four times for really no reason.”

  His job in Morgenthau’s office started on August 21. The deal with Morgenthau was that you could keep your job as an assistant district attorney if you failed the bar twice. There was a $3,000 raise when you passed and another $1,000 when you formally joined the bar. If you failed three times, though, you were fired. By June, John could tell it was going to be a tough slog for him. He told Haag that studying for it was “a mother beyond belief” and that his day-to-day existence was monklike. Haag had her doubts about that. By then, their relationship had become more episodic, periods of distance followed by periods of great intensity, followed again by periods of distance.

  The previous December, John said he wanted to see other people “for a time,” with the implication being, at least from Haag’s perspective, that the separation would be brief, more of a last sowing of oats before the ultimate get-together rather than a parting of the ways. He told her he loved her. But by then he had already met the movie actress Daryl Hannah and supposedly had been on a date with another model of some sort, or maybe even Madonna after all. But he denied those encounters. In any event, their separation was just six weeks, and then they went to Jamaica together (where they barely survived an ill-advised and harrowing kayaking expedition). But Haag was still a bit concerned. She had found among his stuff a wayward earring, a Filofax that did not belong to either of them, and a bent pair of cat-eye glasses.

  That March, Michael Gross wrote a long piece about John, “Favorite Son,” in New York magazine. It was a cover story. Despite his denials to Haag of his rumored dalliances with other women, Gross’s piece made them harder to believe. He wrote that Madonna had “set her cap” for John and that she was “obviously the aggressor.” She invited him to one of her concerts in Madison Square Garden. They worked out at the same gym. There was also a rumor that John had proposed to Daryl Hannah, and one about John dating Molly Ringwald, the actress, but “Ringwald” turned out to be Haag, whom Gross described as his “steady girlfriend of four years.” Haag described herself as John’s “law widow.” But according to Gross, “there were the models.”

  Gross also revealed that the year before John had paid an astounding $2,300 in parking fines. The only reason he paid them, Gross reported, was because he had to clear his name before applying for the job in Morgenthau’s office. “I don’t think he enjoyed writing the check,” the administrative law judge who presided over John’s appearance told Gross. “He said in view of all the tickets, perhaps he ought to get free parking in the future.” Instead, the judge gave John “a gratuitous little lecture. I told him he’s going places. He should take care how he’s perceived.”

  John wrote Gross a letter after the cover story appeared. (It was not a model of articulateness.) “Now that I can stop glaring at myself glaring back at me,” he wrote in longhand, “I wanted to write you what was not quite a thank you letter—yet since I’ve never written one of these before—defies a better label.” He conceded that while he could not be “a dispassionate critic” of Gross’s article, he did find it fair and largely accurate. He wrote that he had heard through the grapevine that Gross had conducted himself professionally in the reporting of the article and joked, in a concluding nod to how thorough Gross had been, “Incidentally, I’ve lost a few phone numbers over the years—perhaps I could borrow your file and renew some old ties. Anyway, as my English nanny used to say after force-feeding me lima beans (but surely you must know this already): ‘It wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be was it?’ That was. This wasn’t.”

  After he graduated in May, John again asked Haag for some space. They still saw each other but Haag had her own “distractions.” Around the same time, she was offered a part in a new production of Molière’s The Misanthrope, in La Jolla, California, and in Chicago. They had a last night together in June. John was deep into his studying for the bar exam; Christina was leaving for Los Angeles the next day. They were going to go to the tony Café des Artistes but instead ended up at the All State Café, a basement pub on West 72nd Street. “I took that night with me,” she reflected, “one he later called pure pleasure. I took it with me that summer, through phone calls of back-and-forth, and misunderstanding and possibility. Through distance, through humor. I took it with me, until frayed and worn, it no longer was enough.”

  In November, John found out he had flunked the bar exam.

  * * *

  ON THE WAY TO HIS FIRST DAY of work in Morgenthau’s office, the press followed him from 91st Street into the subway and then rode with him downtown. Their burning question for John seemed to be if this was the start of his political career. Gracious as ever, he replied, “Hey, this is just my first day at work.” The swearing-in ceremony was private. Still, hoping to catch a glimpse of John, some one hundred reporters congregated outside the office building. A paralegal, making $15,000 a year, was offered $10,000 for a picture of John at his desk. The next day, there was an article in the paper that John had mu-shu pork for lunch. As an assistant district attorney, John worked in a special prosecutions unit focused on cracking down on white-collar crime, low-level political corruption, and other felonies. He was not permitted to actually try a case—he could only do research—until he passed the bar exam. When people would come to the office with a complaint, he would interview them. “It was funny to see the way they’d react,” his boss, Michael Cherkasky, said. “Having this legend sit down and scribble down your complaint has got to be a little strange.”

  Jill Konviser and John started at the district attorney’s office on the same day. They had adjoining offices and were experiencing similar feelings of being fish out of water. Every two weeks or so they would be assigned to the “complaint room,” yet another specialized section of the strange world they found themselves inhabiting. It was where people who’d been arrested first met with prosecutors. “This place was the great equalizer, a dungeon where you would be working through the night,” Konviser recalled. “It’s three o’clock in the morning and you haven’t eaten and you are exhausted. You are getting paid $35,000. It doesn’t matter if you’re John Kennedy or Jill Konviser or anybody else. You’re wrecked. And I think John appreciated that. Everywhere else he was the son of a president. Here it was disgusting, it was filthy. You had to steal a chair if you wanted to sit down. You are sitting there interviewing a defendant who is handcuffed to a chair. And it stinks, and people scream at you. We all complained; he never did.” (She is now a New York State judge.)

  When John failed the bar exam the first time, it caused barely a ripple in the media. Of the sixty-five new staff members in Morgenthau’s office who took the bar for the first time, seven failed. John resolved to work harder at studying for his second attempt at the exam, in February 1990. The test was graded on a 1,000-point scale; passing was 660. In May, John discovered he had flunked the bar exam again. This time, the media went berserk. Three New York newspapers trumpeted the news with some variation of the one that appeared famously on the cover of the Daily News: “THE HUNK FLUNKS … AGAIN.” Photographers who caught up with John on the street “made him look like a startled mobster fleeing a grand jury room,” according to Bob Greene, the syndicated columnist. John told the media, with his usual charm and humility, “I am very disappointed, again. God willing, I will be back [to take the test again] in July. I am clearly not a legal genius. Next time you guys are here, I hope it will be a happy day.” He vowed to keep trying to pass the exam �
�until I’m 95 if necessary.”

  John’s private humiliation was now public, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, other than to suffer in silence. More than half of the other twenty-five hundred people who had taken the New York bar exam had also failed, but no one heard a peep about them. Ed Koch, the New York City mayor, wrote John, “Don’t feel badly, I failed my bar exam, too, and it didn’t stop me from becoming mayor.” John wrote back, “It was very kind what you wrote, but I’m going to have a lousy summer.”

  There wasn’t much time to stew. The next bar exam was in July, a couple of months away. He got himself a serious tutor—who promptly advertised that John was a client—and took four weeks off to study. John somehow arranged to take the bar exam alone, by himself, and with looser time restrictions. This time he passed. This was big news, too. “The Hunk Finally Does It” blared the headline of the New York Post on November 4 after he passed. “We never doubted that he would pass,” Morgenthau told the New York Times. His salary was increased to $34,000 and he remained in the special prosecutions bureau, and was now able to try cases.

  John won the first case he prosecuted in the Manhattan DA’s office. It was known as the case of the “Sleeping Burglar” and, if the New York Times was to be believed, it was the easiest case to win ever. Apparently, the defendant, David Ramos, thirty-three, fell asleep in the apartment of the woman he robbed on East 29th Street, with her jewelry in his pocket. He was arrested on November 1, 1990. The trial, in August 1991, lasted a week and the jury reached its verdict in less than a day.