My Unrequited Love Story with J.F.K., Jr.

It began with the simplest of questions: What would it be like to be him? Him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., our American Prince (or as close to one as we were going to get). What would it be like to be that handsome? That strong? Endowed not only with a privileged birthright but—unlike the actual princes over in England, who had weak chins and went bald young—the physical stature to match? What was it like to have Jackie O. for a mother? To summer on your stepfather’s private Greek island? To be wildly sexually successful without even having to try? In the world as I knew it then (meaning college), there were two basic conditions: that of being John F. Kennedy, Jr., and that of being everyone else. This is all a way of saying, Yeah, I knew the guy. Not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull that he exerted, like some great big moon, causing tides of excitement and longing to flow around our campus every time he crossed the green. Before he arrived, the image I had of John was the one everyone had. The film footage from his father’s funeral, in 1963, where Jackie Kennedy, in her black veil, bends down to whisper into three-year-old John’s ear, after which he steps manfully forward to salute his father’s casket. I was too young to remember the Kennedy assassination. John, a year behind me in school, was as well. And so that was another question. What was it like to be iconic? Historical? Engraved upon the nation’s memory but not your own? So that you watched that poor little saluting fatherless boy as if from afar, forgetting that he was you? These questions swirled in our heads. And then, one warm September day in 1979, he appeared in living color to answer them. I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts, tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near. I might have spent the next few years watching John from a distance. But it turned out that he was an actor. So was I. In what ended up being our mutual senior year, we were cast in a production of Miguel Piñero’s “Short Eyes.” The play is set in a house of detention. John played an Irish inmate named Longshoe. I played Captain Allard, a prison guard who subjects him to a long interrogation. I got to see him up close, every day at rehearsal. I got to act with him, the two of us alone onstage. He easily could have been a movie star. He had the looks, the talent, and the stage presence. When I asked about this once, he said, “Nah. My mother doesn’t want me to be an actor. She thinks it doesn’t have enough social benefit.” What, then, did he want to be instead? President? (I was too scared to ask that.) He had many political advantages. Charisma, good manners, a surprising lack of entitlement, and the ability to interact with everyone he met. He was interested in other people. Whenever I published something in our college literary magazine, John would ask me about it. He didn’t necessarily read it, but he made clear that he respected the endeavor. How he managed to appear so normal was a mystery. Or maybe not. Maybe the mere fact of having been born illustrious, with no apparent faults, with nothing to prove or to be ashamed of, had liberated John from the resentments the rest of us feel, and from the cunning and ambition such resentments fuel. His curiosity extended to the universe. One night, at a house party, John and I ended up in the back yard, drinking beer. Suddenly he stood up and gazed at the night sky. “Hey,” he said, “you take a lot of reli-stu, right? Can I ask you something? Do you think there’s a God?” I said I thought it was highly likely. “My family’s Catholic,” John said. (And that was endearing, too. That he didn’t presume I knew that.) “It just seems to me that there has to be a God. Like, how did we get here? You know what I mean?” There’s a long monologue in “Short Eyes,” where the character of Ice describes his masturbatory fantasies about the actress Jane Fonda. At its climax, he cries out again and again, “Janey baby! Oh, Janey baby!” The soliloquy was something of a showstopper at every performance. On the night Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis came to see our play, the actor playing Ice had an idea. We were crowded together in the dressing room, getting ready to go on, when he said, “Hey, John, your mom’s here tonight, right? I was thinking. You know my monologue, where I go ‘Janey! Janey!’ while I’m talking about jerking off? Maybe I could switch ‘Janey’ out for another name tonight.” It took a moment to sink in. Then John began shaking his head. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, to general amusement. You couldn’t be around him without thinking about who he was. Even if you succeeded for a moment, you would soon get a reminder. I remember being at a loud party, with loud music, and sweaty bodies packed together on the dance floor. At some point, I began to sense, from the flutter of activity across the room, that John was present. (And that was another thing, the way people said, “John”—“I just saw John,” “Is John here?” “I was talking to John and . . .”—never specifying which “John” they meant and never needing to.) Turning my head, I saw John’s silhouette against the far wall. He was dancing, too, though it wasn’t easy for him. No one would let him alone. People kept coming up, girls especially, and he would lower his head so they could shout in his ear. (The same ear that Jackie Kennedy had whispered in, all those years ago.) As I watched, I realized the song that was playing was none other than “Sympathy for the Devil,” by the Rolling Stones. Uh, oh. Here it came. The famous lyric. Nothing could stop it now. I watched John as, from the stereo speakers, Mick Jagger’s voice, in the role of Lucifer, sang, “I shouted out / ‘Who killed the Kennedys’ / When after all / it was you and me.” Did John hear that? Did he hear it and block it out? Or had he stopped noticing things like that because they were everywhere? The lyric came and went, John showed no reaction, and we all danced on. My most intimate encounter with John happened a few months after the run of “Short Eyes.” It was the middle of the night. I was making a postcoital trip to the bathroom in an off-campus apartment that wasn’t mine. As I inched along the hall, in boxer shorts, a door opened and John stepped out. He was also in boxers. It wasn’t his apartment, either. We faced each other in the darkness. And then, sizing up the situation, John grinned and said, “You dog!” Me? A dog? And so designated not just by anyone but by a Kennedy. Magnanimously, like Henry V, he had included me in his band of brothers. A little touch of John-John in the night. He inspired fealty. You have to reach back for a feudal term like that to describe the effect he had on people, and especially men. On the morning of graduation, I was standing with John and a group of guys as we waited, in our caps and gowns, for the signal to start marching. Someone passed a joint. At that moment, from every direction, photographers appeared. They’d left John alone during his time at Brown for the most part. But they weren’t about to forgo getting a picture of him on graduation day. As they streamed toward him with cameras raised, John did something I’d never seen before. He looked embarrassed. He hung his big handsome head, defenseless against the approach of the paparazzi. All at once, as if by instinct, the rest of us clustered around him. Turning our backs to the photographers, we spread our gowns and tilted our mortarboards to shield our prince from view. I’d never felt anything like it. The sense of duty. Of fidelity. I might’ve been kneeling before John and calling out, “My liege!” It worked. They didn’t get a picture of John until the joint was gone. And that was pretty much it. We graduated and, after that, I ran into John only a handful of times. As the years passed, I kept up with him through the media. Pictures of John with different girlfriends (Christina Haag, Daryl Hannah), or riding his bike through the Manhattan streets, or on the cover of the New York Post when he failed the bar, under the headline “The Hunk Flunks.” I took special interest in the news, in 1998, that John had got his private pilot’s license. My father had been a pilot. Four years earlier, he’d crashed his single-engine airplane into woods outside Daytona Beach International Airport and hadn’t survived. That—and the fact that, when I’d applied for a life-insurance policy, the first question the adjuster had asked was, “Do you have a private pilot’s license?”—had made me acutely aware of the dangers of flying your own plane. Weirdly, too, John had earned his certification from the same place my father had, the FlightSafety Academy, in Vero Beach, Florida. The news dismayed me. But I think I understood it. Presumably, one reason John went around on a bike was the freedom and anonymity it provided. The same went with flying his own plane. Everyone knows what happened. On Friday, July 16, 1999, at approximately 8:30 P.M., John took off in his Piper Saratoga airplane from Essex County Airport, in Fairfield, New Jersey. With him were his wife of three years, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren. The plan was to drop Lauren off on Martha’s Vineyard before continuing on to Cape Cod, to attend John’s cousin’s wedding that weekend. They never arrived. I’d moved to Berlin that June, and so it was from there that I heard the news of John’s death. Ever since my father’s crash, any report in the news about a small-plane accident would bring it all back. It was even more so with John. As I sat in my kitchen, listening to BBC radio, I was swamped by feelings of shock, grief, bewilderment, and regret that had barely diminished in the ensuing five years. As I’d once tried to piece together the mystery of my father’s accident, reading over the transcripts of his communications with air-traffic control and trying to figure out what had happened and what had gone wrong, I now scrutinized the details of John’s crash. There were almost too many mistakes to count. He’d been in a hurry to take off and hadn’t asked for a weather report. He was still hobbled from a paragliding accident he’d suffered six weeks earlier. When a flight instructor offered to fly along with him, John had declined. The plane itself was a problem. He’d only flown thirty-six hours in it, just ten of them at night, and three solo. Finally, John wasn’t certified to fly by instrument rules. It was hazy that night. If he’d kept to the coastline after he hit Rhode Island, he might’ve been able to orient himself by the lights along the shore. But, no doubt to save time, he’d headed directly for the island, over some thirty miles of open water. You wait for the N.T.S.B. report, thinking it will be definitive, and the report comes back and says, “Pilot error.” Which explains everything and nothing. If you know the pilot, if he’s your father or your friend, you can’t be satisfied with a simple conclusion. In your imagination, you keep going up with him, flying in the front passenger seat and trying to see what exactly happened. The question I’d started with—“What was it like to be him?”—was one I could never fully answer. But I knew a few things now. Despite his openness and surprising sensitivity, or maybe because of it, he had to hold himself in check. The world demanded a simplified portrait; John provided it, and, after a while, the two merged. His closest friends were jocks, big, athletic guys, not as inquisitive as he was, and not worthy of him, in my opinion. I was the one worthy of him, or so I secretly believed. That was why he’d come to me to talk about the existence of God. That was why he’d asked about (but didn’t read) the things I wrote for the college literary magazine. In John’s presence, I always hoped that he would bestow some mark of distinction on me that would elevate me above my station. Once, he gave me a number to the guard house in Hyannisport. He told me to call if I felt like coming out to visit that summer. From Michigan, I called the number again and again, leaving my name each time, but never heard back. Only later did I realize that John had to do things like that, give out his number, to seem normal and to not disappoint the many people who wanted to be his friend. Looking back now, trying to fathom the person on whom we projected so many of our desires and expectations—and who continues to be fictionalized, as in the recent television series, which I haven’t watched—it seems obvious that the only way John could escape the pressure of everyone’s attention was to flee it. If you were J.F.K., Jr., what would make you feel free? Maybe only risk; paragliding, flying a plane, moments when you brought yourself to the edge of safety. Or took you beyond the edge. It’s impossible to know what John was thinking in his last moments, as the lights of the coastline disappeared behind him and before him lay the blackness of the ocean, and the haze, the horizon line indistinguishable from the sky. The noise of the engines, the mounting anxiety of his wife and sister-in-law, who may have cried out as the plane nose-dived, could only have increased his own. What was John thinking before the surface of the water appeared before his windshield, rushing forward at terrifying speed? None of us were there that night to protect our one-time prince. And who could tell if his destiny was inevitable or of his own making? One risk too many in what had seemed the most fortunate of lives. ♦