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I’d
heard of Robert Littell a couple of years ago because his former step-mother, the actress Tina
Sloan McPherson,
is a friend
of mine. We were talking one day about John F. Kennedy Jr. when she
told me that Robbie, as she called her stepson, had gone to Brown
with JFK Jr. and they had remained very close friends after graduation.
I’d never heard of him otherwise – never in the magazine
articles or gossip columns as a “friend” of young Kennedy.
This is not surprising. Very often famous people have intimate friends
who are never part of the sphere of celebrity, and everyone quite
likes it that way.
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Click
to order
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It occurred
to me then that if indeed he were a close friend of Jack
and Jackie Kennedy’s only son, he should indeed eventually
either talk to other writers (specifically historians) about his
college chum, or write a book himself. He’s obviously taken
the latter route with The Men We Became; My Friendship with
John F. Kennedy Jr. (St. Martin’s Press).
This is a rare sort of memoir, written by a real insider, literate
enough to tell his own story. It is also, considering what we do
know about the ill-fated young man who was “America’s
prince,” a “guy” book, its early pages laden with
late adolescent testosterone.
It is also another book about a Kennedy. But it is a fair balance
to the tabloid hee-haw the male model wrote about the late Carolyn
Bessette Kennedy and her late husband. Littell makes no
shocking or troublesome claims that question his veracity; this is
a book
by a college roommate buddy who became a lifelong close friend. He
knew much about Kennedy’s life, his dreams, ambitions, loves,
and his wife. He tells his story very respectfully but with revelations
allowing great insight.
John and Rob were two very nice, privileged white boys who enjoyed
many of the perks of late 20th-century American life. They were both
athletically inclined, Eastern-bred and instilled with a sense of
family and traditional objectives. Both came from families where
there was more than one marriage, and both lost fathers at an early
age under tragic circumstances.
The first chapters of the book have the romanticism that Scott
Fitzgerald first articulated about the upper middle class
American psyche — a highly romantic notion of male friendship
(Littell uses the word “bonding” several times in referring
to the development of his and Kennedy’s friendship). His “preface” sets
the tone:
“In ancient Greece, heroes who died were sent to the night sky
where they offered guidance and inspiration for those left on earth.
We
all have our own constellations, filled with the public and private
heroes of our time.” Continuing …. ”I loved him
like a brother. I still love him. And I miss him dearly.”
You the reader might feel similarly before the book is finished.
It is hardly an expose or astonishing or one of those stories where
you think “I don’t believe it.” Young Kennedy is
in many ways as you might have imagined him. There are things we
already know, for example: he was the outsider Kennedy in the family,
thanks to his mother’s choices. He is close to several of his
cousins, especially Timmy Shriver, Bobby Kennedy and Willie
Smith,
but he had a “slightly strained relationship with the tight-knit
crew as a whole.” |
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Littell
and JFK Jr. playing frisbee in the park
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There
are other “revelations” which are essential elements
to a portrait, clues to add to the roadmap of the man’s
life, such as:
“Physically he was pretty clumsy when I met him, though he had the body
of an NFL quarterback. He’d take his shirt off and you’d picture
cheering crowds and trophies in his past. Then you’d notice that he could
barely walk down the stairs. He dropped more passes and stumbled over more pebbles
than anyone I know. Partly it was a psychological thing: As a game, any game,
would progress, John would become distracted. (ed.note: my itals). He’d
realize he was losing his focus, try to compensate, and lose his grip even more.
There’s an art to closing a match, and it eluded John for years.”
As the millions of us who read about him throughout his life know, he loved sports.
Littell adds something crucial to that: “When he got to Brown he was determined
to play something. He was what I call athletic scrap,” that is a guy who
really wanted to play but wasn’t a talent. (Although he said JFK Jr.’s
skiing was a beautiful to the point of poetry.)
Nevertheless, the enthusiast who could be clumsy worked at those games. He had “learned
to hold his focus (again my itals) in the crunch.” He did this, Littell
observes, long after college by keeping himself in great shape “while the
rest of us moved to the couch.”
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John
and friend Michael Murphy at an annual ARC (Association
for the Help of Retarded Children) dinner.
[Courtesy of the ARC/New York
Chapter]
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He
was also vain, well aware of his astonishing movie star looks,
(albeit endearingly so) rarely missing that quick sideward glance
as he passed by any mirror. He loved looking good, loved clothes,
had dozens of suits — meticulously placed in his closet in
gradations of blues, a devotee of style. And because he was also
a man full of humor, he was easily chided for it, and just as easy
to laugh when Littell poked fun at him for this.
Being famous from infancy was something he seemed very comfortable with, or at
least well-adjusted to. It may – I’m guessing – have been his
mother’s wise guidance. It may have been his inherently good nature and
sensitivity to others. For although he was always pursued by photographers, he
was almost always accessible and accommodating. That is perhaps why it was always
speculated on that he would have loved to have been an actor had his mother not
discouraged it. Littell doesn’t think Jackie discouraged it. In fact, he
says Jackie really enjoyed seeing her son perform and thought it was a good way
for him to express that person who was otherwise public property.
Littell says that JFK Jr. turned away from acting on
his own. There was instead a very strong sense within
of a political future, almost the way the eldest royal son can expect
to be king. There are telltale signs and an occasional remark. When
he read that Hillary Clinton was going to run for
Senate in New York, he cracked, “what am I supposed to do,
move to Arkansas?” The thought seems extremely presumptuous
to this democratically-reared and inculcated reader. Perhaps it was
a naïve conception, although he was certainly not the first
of his family who seemed to live with the idea of political succession
(publicly referring to it as service).
Whatever he was, he was a dear boy and a dear man, no matter the ego or the conceit
he also carried with him. He had his share of stalkers and Littell tells of one
story that demonstrates how well (and how kindly) he handled those strangers
who felt they had a claim to his persona.
Equally endearing and ultimately admirable was the way he avoided playing on
his father’s myth or reputation. Once when the two boys were traveling
in Ireland (and without funds, because of the way they’d mismanaged them),
they ended up in their sleeping bags in the public park (same in London too,
more than once) and were befriended by “one kind lady (who) invited us
to tea in her home after watching us play Frisbee in the park.” Prominent
on her mantle were two pictures: one of Christ and one of JFK.
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Littell's
wife Frannie and JFK Jr.
[Courtesy of Sara Barrett]
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Littell writes: “I
almost wanted to tell her who was sitting on her couch, because
it would have made her day. But John, generous though he was, would
have killed me. I think I said something like ‘What did you
say your name was son?’ as we left her lawn. John dropped
his chin and didn’t answer. We slept in the same park, named
after President Kennedy, that night, but we didn’t talk about
the name.”
Much of the boys’ relationship was their shared love of
physical activity. “For us, competition was a fundamental element
of friendship. But it wasn’t a ferocious contest of egos, as
it seemed on the football field in Hyannis Port. It was one of the
ways, maybe the purest way, we connected to each other. Some friends
have heart-to-hearts over dinner. We didn’t do that. We played
racquetball. And skied. And talked a little between bantering. People
will ask me questions about John sometimes and not understand how
I don’t know the answer. Well, I never asked the question ....
We enjoyed each other’s company most when we were wholly engaged
in something physical.”
The portrayal of their physical activity begins to reek of Hemingway-esque
fable to this non-activity oriented writer, with words and phrases like: “Cojones …” “Are
ya coming?” (sky-diving) JFK Jr. asks Littell, who writes: “This
was a ball check. I said yes.”
However,
as they grow up, now out of college, Littell marrying,
JFK Jr. now living in his beloved New York, studying, failing, deeply
disappointed but undaunted, studying more to pass the bar, the young
man emerges. As does the Mother and the Sister. I found myself once
again caught up in that Great American Story that compels. There
are interesting insights into the mother and sister. As he matures,
the Mother we think we knew about, fills our own dreaming.
“John and I shared a belief that the first half of one’s life is
for generating stories and the second half is for telling them. He even suggested
that I’d be writing about him one day. At the time, he was reading “Johnny,
We
Hardly Knew Ye,” a memoir of John F. Kennedy his father’s friends Ken
O’Donnell and Dave Powers, and uncharacteristically pondering
his own place in history, I just laughed at him.”
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This
family portrait was taken at Morton Downey Sr.'s
home on Squaw Island, Hyannisport, summer 1962.
[Photo by Cecil Stoughton]
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We might laugh
a bit too. But we also realize that the upshot of that gargantuan
publicity of that woman and her children, especially her son who
seemed to bask in its glow, continues to evoke the sadness of their
untimely departures. Towards the end of the Robert Littell’s
memory of his beloved friend, all of those memories somehow envelop
the reader too, playing once again on the universal experience of
love and friendship, of love and loss, to the point that the loss
that you know is coming in this story starts to loom ...
I was reminded of that day in May in 1994, standing on the terrace of a friend’s
apartment at 10 Gracie Square overlooking the East River, watching the funeral
cortege of Mrs. Onassis moving across the Triboro Bridge, heading to the airport
where her body would be flown to Washington, never to return. I never knew her,
never even saw her except for a couple of times – heard all kinds of things
about her; not always kind or even complimentary but it didn’t matter.
She was who she was, to me, to us, just as I am who I am. So, it turns out, was
her son. It remains a powerful story. |
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