Ed Hill remembered how John really enjoyed meeting the genuine, salt-of-the-earth-type New Yorkers who inhabited the offices of the Manhattan district attorney. “In fact, he affected kind of a New York accent,” he said. “I would talk to him on the phone and he would say things like, ‘Ah, fuhgeddaboudit.’ You’d never heard him speak like this before.” They would go out drinking with the cops and the other assistant district attorneys. He asked Hill to take him around to parts of the city he had never seen before. “I remember taking him up through Inwood and taking him around all over the Bronx,” Hill continued. “He’d never been to these places before. So here he was suddenly liberated from 1040 and actually learning something about the city, and he loved it.” After two and a half years investigating and prosecuting white-collar crimes, he moved to the trial bureau.
Brian Steel met John soon after he started in Morgenthau’s office in 1991. They found themselves together in the Early Complaint Assessment Bureau. It was the late shift one night. They were prosecuting misdemeanors. The attorneys prosecuting felonies had their own offices. They talked throughout most of the shift. They clicked. The next day, John called Steel and asked him if he wanted to play Frisbee with him in Central Park. They became friends.
They used to go kayaking together a lot, especially after John moved to Tribeca. There was a rental place at the west end of North Moore Street, on the Hudson River, where John stored the two kayaks he owned. He and Steel would use them regularly, usually during the day. They would kayak to New Jersey. They kayaked around the Statue of Liberty. One night at around ten o’clock, Steel remembered, John suggested they go kayaking from North Moore Street to the George Washington Bridge, a distance of nearly fourteen miles. It was a ridiculous suggestion, of course. But out they went anyway, into the middle of the Hudson River at night. At the time, the New York Fire Department used to keep a boat docked along the Hudson River, and as they were kayaking along, John spotted it and decided they should stop and check it out. “He was always curious,” Steel said. As they got closer to the fireboat, they saw there were firemen on board. He wanted to go say hello. They invited John and Steel on board. John was wearing some sort of goofy hat but when he took the hat off, the young firefighters, many of whom were Irish Catholics, recognized him. They stayed on the boat for about thirty minutes.
Another time they set off across the Hudson to the New Jersey side of the river. As they approached the marina, they heard someone bellowing out, “John, John.” John said he thought it sounded like his uncle Teddy, and sure enough it was. Senator Kennedy had been invited as a guest onto the massive sailing yacht of Wayne Huizenga, the founder of Waste Management, parked at the marina. John insisted to Steel that they go “hang out with Teddy.” They docked their kayaks and headed to the yacht. “There are ten deckhands all dressed in red jackets,” Steel recalled. “They’ve got shrimp this big and bottles of Dom. We have like four or five shrimp, a glass of Dom, a tour of the boat, and kayak back. That was John’s life: We were kayaking to Jersey and you run into Teddy.”
John loved his kayak, and he loved kayaking adventures. “The more dangerous the more exciting for him,” Gary Ginsberg said. In July 1991, John and three of his friends decided to go on a ten-day kayaking trip to the Baltic. “Four desk jockeys in search of manageable danger,” he wrote a year later in the New York Times about the trip. It was classic John: an off-the-grid adventure that defied logic and sense but promised a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Their destination was the Åland archipelago, a collection of sixty-five hundred islands equidistant between the coasts of Finland and Sweden, in the Baltic Sea. John’s idea was to fly to Stockholm and then take the overnight ferry to Turku, Finland, and paddle their one-man kayaks west to the islands, hopping from one to the next and camping along the way. The final destination was Åland, the largest of the islands, and its capital Mariehamn, from which they would take a ferry back to Stockholm.
The trip was not for the faint of heart, even for someone as skilled and experienced in the wilderness as John. The plan was to kayak for 135 miles from the Finnish coastline to Åland, packing their food and supplies in the seventeen-foot-long hull of each kayak. It was important to make good progress in the early days of the voyage, where they could hug the coastline through calmer passages. Once they got into the open ocean, the four paddlers were at the mercy of the weather, the winds, and the waves. It turned out the winds were calm at night. “We slept by day and paddled at night through still water, marveling at the extravagance of a sky where sunrise, sunset, and moonrise occur almost simultaneously,” John continued. For readers wondering why the hell anyone would undertake such a challenging expedition without a guide, let alone rope three friends into it, John provided an answer: “The sea kayak, derived from the Eskimo word ‘qajaq,’ is well suited to the archipelago’s coastline. Longer and more stable than the river kayak, the sea kayak offers an easy way to observe the ocean environs more intimately than would be possible in any other craft. Despite the occasional discomforts of tired shoulders and dampness, the rewards are immediate.”
As expected, the trip became more challenging when the group hit the open water of the Baltic, away from the Finnish coastline. The wind in their faces was punishing, but John found a “certain sustaining smugness” that each wave was overcome “aided by our own weary arms.” There were others rewards, too—a school of perch here, a flock of black swans there, as well as long-tailed ducks and otters. John’s plan was to zigzag for eight miles to get to the island of Ahvensaari, which they chose because they liked its name. Some three-quarters of the way across the channel, with the waves getting more formidable, they heard a yelp and discovered that a group member’s kayak had capsized. They hightailed it back to him, knowing he “was no great swimmer and that in the 50-degree water, hypothermia was possible.” He climbed up onto the back of John’s kayak, his feet dangling in the water. He was starting to “shiver fiercely,” an early sign that his body was trying to fight off hypothermia. None of the four of them were doctors, of course, and there was no way to request a rescue if needed. But John obviously knew a thing or two about what to do for him, given his experiences on Outward Bound and NOLS.
They made their way to a nearby island. By the time they got there, his legs were so numb that he could not walk. They carried him and put him inside a sleeping bag and set up camp to wait out the wind. That’s all John wrote about that; the reader could only assume that his friend warmed up and continued on the journey with the three others. They stopped on one small island and convinced the owner of a pine cottage to give them some water from his well. They resumed the voyage, through narrow waterways by small, rocky islands, and traveling at night. They sunned themselves on the rocks in the morning. They kept moving forward, taking into account a request for a less treacherous passage to Mariehamn, and the ferry back to Stockholm. They got to a large lake within ten miles of the Mariehamn ferry when a ferocious summer storm hit. The four men took refuge in a two-man tent they had set up under a stand of birch trees to wait out the storm. “At dawn it was raining and blowing even harder,” John wrote. “The entire coastline of the lake was eclipsed by rain and fog, and huge slate gray rollers with whitecaps beat against the rocks below us.”
It was certainly not a day for kayaking. But they had no choice. They had to go out into the storm anyway. That was a poor decision. “At my first stroke beyond the shelter of the island, the wind lifted my paddle and threw it over my head, nearly capsizing me,” John wrote. “I righted myself just in time to see [his friends’ kayaks] capsize after being slammed by a huge wall of water. The trip was over. We washed back up on shore in pieces.” They towed their “yaks” back to the island. That’s when they caught a break. A Finnish couple had watched the fiasco from their bedroom window and offered to drive them the final ten miles in the back of their van to the ferry. They had paddled 125 miles in eight days and had made it within 10 miles of their destination.
This love of treac
herous kayaking had taken him into the Hudson River and into New York Harbor (despite the looming presence of ocean liners and reckless motorboaters), into dangerous Jamaican waters, and into the frigid Baltic somewhere between Finland and Sweden. He also, apparently, took a ten-day kayaking trip—alone—to the Arctic. “He was dropped off in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Sasha Chermayeff remembered. He told her that if he capsized at any time, he would have died nearly immediately in those waters. “You would freeze to death no matter what,” she said. He told her how scary it was to get on and off floating pieces of ice, where he’d go when he wanted to rest. She was at a loss to explain why he would do such things, by himself, in the middle of nowhere, when certain death was merely one bad move away. “It’s a thrill-seeking thing these guys need to just be able to survive,” she said. “I’m a nesty-type woman so there’s no way I can explain to you why a man needed to go and be, like, dropped off alone in the Arctic to kayak.”
John’s kayaking trip to the Arctic remains a bit of a mystery—he supposedly did it alone after all—and it almost seems apocryphal. Who would possibly do such a thing solo, with the risk of an unmitigated disaster being so high? But Sasha said that not only did John do it but also, while he was there, he found a perfectly preserved skeleton of a baby whale on the shore of an island, and brought most of it back to New York with him. He asked her to make, if she could, two Calder-like mobiles out of the perfectly bleached whalebones. It was not a completely crazy request. She had made some jewelry. And she read a Calder book that explained the intricate twists and turns of his sculptures. She decided to give it a try, for him. He was living with Daryl Hannah at the time. Using the small rib and vertebra bones, John took a stab at making the mobiles and then handed them over to Sasha for her to “fine-tune” and to fashion into balanced Calder-like mobiles. “Fine-tuning,” she laughed, “was like undoing what he had just done.” John gave the whalebone mobiles to his mother, who loved them, and then hung them above the dining room table at her home in Martha’s Vineyard.
John’s love of kayaks and kayaking extended to the point of trying to buy a handmade kayak company in the Adirondacks. He teamed up with Michael Berman, a New York City friend, and formed Random Ventures, a mini buyout firm. Using Berman’s name, they went together to upstate New York to visit the crusty old guy who owned the kayak company. He had no idea who John was and was not that interested in selling his company in any event. John’s next idea—also quickly abandoned—was to start a business that rented dogs, so that people could have a dog when they wanted one but not all the time. That one was not for Berman.
After working at several major ad agencies and public relations firms, Berman started his own public relations and marketing firm—PR, NY—representing Fortune 500 companies. After meeting on the New York social scene, John asked Berman to handle his press inquiries. “The press became an issue,” one of John’s friends told Esquire. At first, the requests for John were a few every week, but after he failed the bar the first time and then the second time, the press inquiries became nearly overwhelming.
John stayed a fourth year at the district attorney’s office before quitting in July 1993. Soon thereafter, Jackie asked Joe Armstrong, a magazine publisher, to meet with him and chat about what he might like to do next. “Jackie admired the fact that he was so open to things, so curious, that he loved adventures,” he remembered. “She identified with John—he was full of life and good humor, a constant spark—but she worried about him, too. She knew he had leadership potential, but he was so charmingly casual all the time. He needed to go out and do things on his own, but she was always working behind the scenes, totally vigilant, trying to subtly make things happen, come up with options and ideas.”
John made visits to both the Labor and Justice Departments, in Washington, fueling speculation that he was about to get a job in the Clinton administration. There was speculation he might enroll at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, or that he might run for Congress. He was encouraged to run for the congressional seat in Manhattan that became available in September 1992 after the death of Democrat Ted Weiss. John turned down the chance. By this time, his on-and-off relationship with Daryl Hannah was decidedly on again. Although they had first met in the early 1980s on St. Maarten, a Caribbean island, when they were both vacationing with their families, and saw each other again in 1988 at a wedding, it wasn’t until her longtime, tumultuous relationship with the singer Jackson Browne ended in September that they finally got together as a couple, confirming the rumors of their dalliances when he was still dating Haag. After that, they were nearly inseparable. According to People, “It has been John and Daryl biking in Central Park; John and Daryl eating apple pancakes at their favorite Chicago breakfast spot, the Original Pancake House; John and Daryl cooing at Manhattan’s China Grill; John and Daryl nuzzling and teasing each other on an Amtrak train headed for Providence, site of his 10th reunion at Brown University (where they played touch football with other alumni); John visiting Daryl on the L.A. set of her latest movie, HBO’s Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.” John moved out of his Tribeca rental, back to the Upper West Side, and into Hannah’s “sprawling” apartment on Central Park West. The paparazzi captured them making out in Central Park, on the stoop of a West Side brownstone, leaning against a parked car. They vacationed together in Switzerland, England, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the remote beaches of Palau, in Micronesia. “He really liked dating Daryl because she was as famous as he was,” Ed Hill said, “and he saw the possibility there of getting some attention off himself. But that, again, is reflective of that period in his life where the attention that was being paid to him was just frippery. The press loved him and the American people loved him, but you know darn well that the tabloid press had their fingers crossed every day wishing for a great scandal. So it made perfect sense that during that period of his life he enjoyed the possibility that his girlfriend might actually provide a distraction to the press.”
But they also drew attention to themselves for their very public spats, on Manhattan’s streets, in movie theaters, and in Central Park.
One summer evening, it must have been in 1994, I was walking home from my job at Lazard, in Rockefeller Center, to my apartment on the Upper West Side when I ran into John at Columbus Circle. He was just getting off his mountain bike outside what was then the Paramount Communications building on Columbus Circle—it’s now a Trump-branded hotel. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. His fly was open. We hadn’t seen each other in a few years, probably since the last time I had bumped into him around town, but we picked right up where we left off and had a nice thirty-minute conversation. After a while, as he was locking his bike to some scaffolding (I was thinking that it would make an inviting target for an ambitious thief, who might take apart a piece of the scaffolding to get to it as had once happened to me when I locked my bike to the scaffolding surrounding the Columbia University School of Journalism), I asked John what he was doing there. He said he was seeing a movie with Daryl. “Then why have you spent the last half hour talking to me?” I wondered. The question triggered his realization that he had left her waiting downstairs in the theater, and off he went. By then, tabloid readers knew that John and Daryl had their problems, but that was when I knew for sure the relationship was unlikely to last, what with all their passive aggressive behavior toward each other.
But there were other issues with Hannah, too, namely the fact that neither Jackie nor Caroline much cared for her. What especially upset Jackie was that John and Hannah made a mess during a party at Jackie’s farm on Martha’s Vineyard, over Memorial Day weekend in 1993.
After John left his job at the district attorney’s office, he spent the rest of the summer with Hannah, in Massachusetts, New York, and California. With the two of them living together in New York, and Browne left far behind, Hannah was focused on getting John to marry her. “She was desperate to marry him,” Hannah’s friend Sugar Rautbord told Christopher Anders
en in his book The Good Son, about John. In July 1993, it almost happened. While in Santa Monica, they got a marriage license and Hannah bought a vintage wedding dress at a flea market at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. But according to Andersen, “another round of petty quarreling” put those plans on ice. In September, when John and Daryl visited Jackie for dinner at 1040 Fifth, her disdain for Hannah was so palpable that she wouldn’t even eat with them, preferring to have her dinner on a tray in her bedroom. Jackie and Caroline were set to attend Ted Kennedy Jr.’s wedding in October, but when they discovered that John was bringing Hannah, they decided not to go at the last minute, leaving John and Daryl to fend off the paparazzi on their own. Soon thereafter, John told some of his friends that he and Hannah were going to get married in a “top secret” ceremony in Martha’s Vineyard. But three hours later, he called them back and said the wedding was off.
November 22, 1993, marked the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s assassination. Jackie decided to eschew the plethora of events commemorating her husband’s death, and instead went horseback riding at the Piedmont Hunt Club in the Virginia countryside. At one point her mount, a gelding named Clown, stumbled and fell on some rocks that had been loosened along a wall by a previous rider. Jackie was thrown to the ground and knocked out. She was rushed to the hospital amid fears she may have been paralyzed from the fall. She remained unconscious for thirty minutes. When she came to, the doctors noted a swelling in her right groin and diagnosed a swollen lymph node. She was prescribed antibiotics, and the swelling went down but did not completely disappear. A month or so after her fall in Virginia, Jackie and Maurice Tempelsman, her wealthy boyfriend, were cruising on his yacht around the Caribbean for the holidays when she became ill, complaining of a cough, swollen lymph nodes in her neck, and a pain in her abdomen. She called her doctor in New York City. He recommended she return home for an examination at New York Hospital.
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