Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
I also think that risk-taking and adventurism are a search for transcendence, but they're also a search for oblivion. It's like there's a desire for oblivion in people who constantly defy death and need that kind of adrenaline high.
I agree. People who are always testing the limits are gambling with their lives, there's no doubt about it. And there's been this enormous shadow hanging over JFK Jr.'s life simply from Kennedy history. What we're hearing now, from the many reports from his friends who went on rafting expeditions with him or ice-climbing on glaciers in Europe, is he was always pressing the limits. He was searching for manhood, trying to come up to the much higher macho standards of his father, a military hero. It's as if he was looking for manhood in some way to escape the warm but suffocating bath of female attention.
My all-time favorite story about him goes way back to when he was 14. A woman journalist wrote a firsthand account of an incident she witnessed on the streets of New York: Jackie was shepherding John into a taxi, and as they were leaning down to get in, Jackie, "her face distorted with an expression that only another mother can understand," whacked him smartly on the back of the neck. I've always loved that story because it shows Jackie's control of him and her determination that he come out right and not be a spoiled brat. It really was a day-to-day effort that she made, and she took great pride, from all reports, in how well both her children had turned out.
Therefore, I'm even more aggravated, as tens of thousands of other people also must be, that JFK Jr. played so fast and loose with his own life, since his mother had given so much to shaping his character and ensuring his survival. It's almost like someone vandalizing a great painting. He was the artwork that was created by his mother's patience and devotion. So it's tragically ironic that the plane would go down within sight of his mother's estate -- the haunted motherland. The Cape Cod Times reports that the registration papers for the airplane --
Washed up on her beach. I give Jackie enormous credit for keeping him and Caroline away from the more destructive Kennedy kids, but I also have to say that as a 5-year-old, I was horrified by John Jr.'s salute to his father's passing coffin. To this day I can't see the salute without cringing, because to push a 3-year-old who had just lost his father out on the sidewalk to salute his horse-drawn coffin feels like coldness. A 3-year-old should be held and comforted, not made to salute when he's lost his father. I felt that viscerally then and I still do.
That's very interesting. I totally trust your reaction since you were so close in age to John at that moment. I myself was in my senior year of high school and thought the gesture was extraordinarily charming. But how awful it was that the death occurred so close to his birthday. Jackie insisted he have a normal party, and everyone had to sing "Happy Birthday" to him. What a terrible, fateful irony -- your father's funeral coinciding with your birthday.
What did you make of his status as sex symbol? Did you ever meet him?
I did see him in person on one occasion, but my sense of his beauty comes from all the magazine photographs I've enjoyed over the years. His physical conformation was absolutely remarkable. What a specimen of human breeding! The depth and breadth of his chest and torso, the shape of his thighs, the clarity and contours of his jaw, his head, his hair, his hands. He had a Cary Grant level of beauty, with the proportions of a Greek Kouros sculpture. It's one of the eternal, unfair principles of nature. Human beauty of this magnitude automatically confers power. Look at poor Prince Albert over there -- dim and balding! There's no way he could ever have John's amazing luminosity.
The one time I saw JFK Jr. was at the party that he threw at the Art Institute in Chicago during the 1996 Democratic Convention. I was in Chicago for the Oprah show and visited the convention, where I heard Hillary give her speech. I heard from people in the hallway that JFK Jr. was giving a big party downtown, and I thought I'd just drop by and see if I could get in, which I did. Normally, I try to keep clear of all that celebrity schmoozing, but I shouldn't complain since that's what got me in.
Anyhow, I did a quick, guerrilla, look-see tour -- zip, zip, zip through the jammed rooms -- and after about 15 minutes was trying to slip out a side door, when there he was -- being swept in through that very door with his stern entourage. He knew who I was, and we briefly shook hands -- I remember thinking how rock-hard his forearm was when I patted it. It was just a moment, but I have to say that in my entire life, I have never seen a more charismatic person. Of course, I didn't see him riding his bicycle around Manhattan or being the humble guy getting the hot dog and the oatmeal and the coffee, OK? I saw him in his royal persona with his battalion of burly, clearly armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards, their jackets bulging with what were surely multiple weapons. He himself seemed enormously tall, and he seemed to radiate this light that has always been identified with exceptional persons in history.
The subject of charisma is one that I've discussed in my own work. It goes all the way back to the sudden influx of grace perceived by early Christians. Halos or auras are always shown emanating from holy beings in world art. It's a theme I've applied in my work to the charisma of great movie stars, the radiant light in George Hurrell's photos of Garbo or Dietrich at the 1930s high point of the Hollywood studio system. I've seen genuinely charismatic people only a few times in my own life, and that night in Chicago was certainly one of them.
At his best, JFK Jr. exuded some strange magic. It's not something that he was necessarily responsible for. It's a gift, but it's also a terrible curse, because it separates you from other people, and the whole body of world mythology shows that the charismatic person usually gets slaughtered, OK? Mother Nature gives, and then she takes away. You don't get one thing without the corresponding other. At his entrance in Chicago, I think everyone saw that light emanating from him. There were hundreds of people milling around. The instinctive stir and parting of the waters in front of him were really kind of royalist. It was the closest thing to an atavistic, royalist phenomenon I've ever seen in our democratic country. It partly came from the mere fact of his celebrity, but it was also his physicality, his dazzling physical presence.
He had a preternatural aura. And he himself didn't know what to do with it. He struggled with it. He knew his personal power over people. He knew that his prominence primarily came from his sonship to the great fallen leader, but he knew also that he had the seductive ability to render males and females of any age into an adoring puddle around him. Now, most of the time he handled that gift well. But I think he was veering in a bad direction recently -- as evidenced by his unnecessarily posing in what appeared to be the nude in his own magazine.
That murky, ghostly shot of him with his arms around his knees now seems even more disturbing, since it shows him looking upward as if from the watery depths. At the time, I thought it was a bizarrely provocative gesture, particularly combined with his sermonizing in that issue about his Kennedy cousins being "poster boys for bad behavior." Something was starting to get unhinged there, as early as a year ago. Things were coming apart. Obviously his magazine wasn't doing as well as might be hoped, but the fact that he broke his ankle this year in that sports accident was a sign that his control of the physical world and of his own physicality was starting to slip. It was a warning sign to slow down -- to stop and reassess. Instead he pushed forward. Something was turning in his own life and fate, but he didn't listen to the signal.
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