In his own way, he was. Not free of his name, though he preferred to be called “just John” without the middle initial or the “Jr.” (Contrary to myth, his family never called him John-John–the nickname was a reporter’s invention.) Not free of celebrity. Although he was not afraid to take a swing at a paparazzo who pushed too close, he certainly wasn’t shy about stripping off his shirt in public places, and he cleverly marketed a magazine on the mix of celebrity and politics. Indeed, he might as well have called George, cheekily named after George Washington, John. Nor was Kennedy ever spared the snide gibes of the press, like the headline THE HUNK FLUNKS after he failed his New York State bar exam–for the second time. And he could never be free of the expectations that can overwhelm the sons of the great and famous.
But he lived more freely than you might expect for a man who had to go through life bearing the name of a mythical figure. JFK Jr. somehow escaped the more corrosive effects of unearned fame. He was never bitter or drunk or full of self-loathing, like so many scions, including a few in the extended Kennedy family. He was not crushed by his father’s early death or his immense legacy. He was not made heartless or ruthless, though cold calculation was in his genes. He had an insouciant charm, a larksome quality that endeared him to friends. He had any number of girlfriends, and any one of them could have sold a six-figure kiss-and-tell story or just foolishly blurted indiscretions to a friend. But none did, at least not in any lasting or hurtful way. Kennedy seemed to inspire loyalty even in the women he rejected. He married a striking six-foot blond wife with an instinctive sense of style. Despite some well-publicized spats, the attraction between Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette was palpable.
JFK Jr. did not earn his freedom by playing cautiously. “Men are not made for safe havens,” lectured his Uncle Bobby. Taking physical risks is a Kennedy family tradition. During World War II, the oldest son, Joe Jr., chose the riskiest service branch, naval aviation, and died on a virtual suicide mission in a plane rigged out as a giant bomb. Jack Kennedy chose PT boats, rickety crafts whose crews boasted that “they were expendable.” Bobby Kennedy’s children always seemed to be falling out of trees. Aren’t you worried about them? friends asked Ethel Kennedy. No, she said. She was following the example of Rose and Joe Kennedy, who believed that their kids needed to endure bumps and bruises and breaks. Far worse, the Kennedys believed, was to grow up afraid.
Kennedys extol bravery. JFK won a Pulitzer Prize for a book entitled “Profiles in Courage.” JFK Jr. was not reckless like his cousin, Bobby’s son Michael, who died last year skiing into a tree while tossing a football. But “[JFK Jr.] had a certain daredevil quality to him,” said John Whitehead, a trustee of the Kennedy family trust and a close family friend. “John had great self-confidence in his ability to come through these things,” Whitehead told NEWSWEEK. “He had the sense that ’there is nothing I can’t cope with myself’.”
White-water canoeing and kayaking, rock climbing, skiing, scuba diving, paragliding, Kennedy seemed to have tried most of the high-thrill sports, save bungee jumping and free-fall parachuting. Flying for him was great sport–and an escape. “He said it was the most fun he ever had with his clothes on,” Richard Wiese, an old college friend, told NEWSWEEK. “You know, it was just him up there, away from everybody, and it made him feel free.” He got his license a year ago, and openly joked with a reporter about how friends and family were afraid to take off with him. “The only person I’ve been able to get to go up with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife,” Kennedy told USA Today. “The second it was legal she came up with me. Now,” he said with a smile, “whenever we want to get away, we can just get in a plane and fly off.”
That interview was in May 1998. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy may have lost some of her enthusiasm along the way. On weekend trips to Martha’s Vineyard, she sometimes chose to fly up in a different plane piloted by a professional. Joann Ford, a former waitress at the Martha’s Vineyard airport restaurant, often served the couple chowder or fish cakes when they arrived for a weekend visit to the house he inherited from his mother. Usually, Ford told NEWSWEEK, they would fly in separately. “She said to me, ‘I don’t trust him’,” Ford recalled. Ford said she thought Carolyn was half-joking. Social friends of the Kennedys on Martha’s Vineyard also told NEWSWEEK that Carolyn preferred to drive up and take the ferry because she was frightened to get in a plane with her husband. On the Fourth of July weekend, she did fly with JFK Jr.–but with a flight instructor aboard. Kennedy told friends that with his ankle in a cast (he broke it making a landing while paragliding), he could not work the flight controls. Last Thursday, after removing the cast, a doctor cleared him to fly, a family friend told NEWSWEEK. His new plane, a Piper Saratoga, was faster and more powerful than most single-engine craft but also harder to control in an emergency.
It has often been written that Kennedy was, if anything, overprotected by his mother. It is certainly true that Jackie Kennedy dreaded the exposure his name was sure to bring, especially after her husband was martyred by an assassin’s bullet. “We would never have named him John after his father if we had known what was going to happen,” she once lamented. She feared for her children’s physical safety. When Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968, she anguished, “If they’re killing Kennedys, my kids are number-one targets. I want to get out of this country.” And she did, on the arm of Aristotle Onassis, who whisked young Caroline, then 10, and John, 7, to his fortified Greek island of Skorpios. But they were back in New York City before long, where the dangers included assaults by paparazzi. Jackie wanted to protect her children from the temptations of celebrity. “Don’t let them steal your soul,” she told her children. She kept them away from the worst excesses of their cousins, some of whom were living fast and loose and experimenting with drugs.
Elegant and cultured, Jackie Kennedy did not particularly like the rough-and-tumble spirit of the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. But she, too, believed that her son should be brought up in a manly way. As an adolescent, JFK Jr. went to one character-building outdoor school after another. In 1971, when he was 10, he went to an island camp off the coast of Wales to learn sailing, canoeing, rock climbing and camping on the moors. He spent the summer of 1976 providing earthquake relief in Guatemala, sleeping in the jungle and living on beans. The next summer it was off to Outward Bound, a rigorous survival course, where he had to spend three days subsisting on two quarts of water and edible grasses. In 1978, he went to Wyoming as a wrangler; the next summer, to the National Outdoor Leadership Course on Mount Kenya in Africa, where he had to evade a charging rhinoceros.
He learned through all these experiences to make light of danger. “Kennedys don’t cry,” instructed Uncle Bobby. Nor do they take themselves too seriously. When he returned from Outward Bound, a gushy girlfriend said to him, “You must have learned a lot about yourself. You must know a lot about John Kennedy–the man.” Kennedy looked at her gravely and spoke with exaggerated slowness: “I… learned… I’ll… never… allow… myself… to… be… that… hungry… again.”
Kennedy loved goofing around–and serious play-acting. He was not much of student–he flunked math at Andover and had to repeat a year. But he was a talented actor at Brown. His mother frowned on a stage career, seeing it as an invitation to tabloid dissection. Kennedy was not a rebellious son. He loved his mother dearly and spoke often and intimately with her. He was quick to reassure her that his thespian ambitions were strictly amateur. “It’s only a hobby,” he told the reporters.
But what was Kennedy to do for a real job? At his mother’s urging he went to law school and worked in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, but he was bored. Into his 30s, Kennedy seemed to drift a bit, to suffer from arrested development. He could be a bit of a slob. “Whenever he would get on one of those best-dressed lists, we would just howl,” said Wiese. “He would always be walking around with some stain on his shirt. He was a mess.” Kennedy would self-consciously dress down for a fancy party, arriving in sports clothes more suitable for biking than cocktails. Cavorting shirtless in Central Park, skateboarding and swanning about, he seemed more wandering soul than fulfiller of family destiny. As a prep-school classmate had once predicted, he seemed to spend a decade “dating.” There was truth to the wisecrack. JFK Jr. could have just about any girl he wanted–and he did. He was never accused of being a womanizer like his father or Uncle Ted. But he dated all kinds–actresses like Sarah Jessica Parker and Daryl Hannah, fresh-scrubbed preppy girls, even, supposedly, Madonna.
He did not like his playboy image, however. It irked him to be dubbed The Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. At moments, it seemed like he might take the plunge and run for office. He consistently worked for a range of charities–for retarded children, human rights, the environment. But none of these endeavors seemed to get in the way of kayaking, dancing, Rollerblading and so on.
In 1995, when he suddenly emerged full-blown as the publisher of a new mass-market magazine, he was not taken very seriously. He looked great in a suit, but what did he know about journalism? Critics, including those at NEWSWEEK, predicted that the magazine would flop or that Kennedy would lose interest. Kennedy took pleasure in proving them wrong. George magazine, which seeks to sell politics to the politics-averse public by dressing it up with glitz, has not made money, and it is hardly must-reading for policymakers in Washington. But it has a reasonably healthy 400,000-plus circulation, and it can be saucy and entertaining. A year ago, in an interview with USA Today, Kennedy allowed himself to gloat a little. “For almost two years it was like I didn’t have a job. I was sort of doing this [developing his magazine] in secret and everyone was like, ‘What’s John doing with his time?’ " he said. “Now, here it is two and a half years [later]. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool.” Since then, there have been reports of unhappiness between JFK Jr. and his partners at Hachette Filipacchi, the magazine company. Kennedy’s biggest backer at Hachette, David Pecker, left to join the National Enquirer.
Kennedy has taken some risks as a publisher. A few jaws dropped when he posed Hollywood bad girl Drew Barrymore as Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday.” Monroe’s sexy serenade of President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on his birthday in 1962 helped launch the rumors that JFK was sleeping with the star. JFK Jr. infuriated his own relations by describing his cousins Michael and Joe Kennedy as “poster boys for bad behavior” after their sexual indiscretions and marital problems hit the papers. His publisher’s note about the moral obligations of politicians was not so much censorious, however, as opaque.
Still, Kennedy was making his own way. He was adjusting his family’s political heritage to the Age of Celebrity. He had married a woman who was almost as striking looking as his mother. Carolyn Bessette was reportedly overwhelmed by the media onslaught at first, and there have been rumors of rockiness in the marriage. But such chatter is inevitable. Kennedy seemed remarkably relaxed about it all. Not long ago, he invited U.N. Ambassador-designate Richard Holbrooke to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. Kennedy showed up with a wool cap pulled over his head so people wouldn’t recognize him. “He was very easygoing and modest,” recalled Holbrooke, “but he knew what effect he had on people. He used it for specific things like his magazine. He had a very ironic, detached sense of the world around him. It all amused him. The fame and attention, it just went with the territory.” Sadly for the Kennedys, so does tragedy.
