Love Life (32 page)

My longtime publicist Alan Nierob was on the line. “Apparently JFK Jr. stood up in today’s staff meeting and said he had just seen a pilot for a new TV series that was the embodiment of everything he founded
George
magazine to be. He was emotional about it, very moved by the show and inspired to help people hear about it. He thinks
The West Wing
can be one of those once-in-a-lifetime shows that can change people’s lives. Your character of Sam Seaborn was his favorite and he wants to put you on
George
’s September cover.”

Although the advance copy of
The West Wing
had been receiving freakishly unanimous raves, I was ecstatic and humbled by this particular endorsement. It’s impossible to imagine living JFK Jr.’s life and then watching a show whose central theme was the heart and soul of the American presidency. His whole world has been shaped by the office, the service to it, and the tragic sacrifice in its name.
The West Wing
was going to be about “the best and the brightest.” His father’s administration all but coined the phrase.

“Um, Alan, does John realize that there is no guarantee that the show will last through the fall?” I knew that
George
was in serious financial trouble and could ill-afford to feature a show with the high likelihood of attaining the ultimate creative Pyrrhic victory: worshipped by critics, ignored by the public. If the show was quickly canceled (and quite a few thought it would be) it would be a financial disaster for John and, possibly, could be the end of the magazine. “Rob,” Alan said, “John is putting you on the cover. He couldn’t care less.”

The politics of the workplace can be complicated, Machiavellian, self-serving, and just downright stupid no matter where you work. My grandpa ran a restaurant in Ohio for fifty years. I’m sure every now and then he would get nervous when his most popular carhop got uppity and started wanting better hours. My father practices law to this day and deals with those who smile to his face, then wish he would step on a limpet mine in the middle of Ludlow Street. That’s the way it is in the world. It’s just worse in Hollywood.

Someone, somewhere, got it into their heads that it would be a bad thing for the launch of our new show if I was on the cover of
George
. It was made very clear to me that I had no right to be on this cover and that John should rescind the offer. When pushed for a reason as to why it would be a bad thing for a show no one had ever heard of to get this kind of recognition, the response was: “Everyone should be on the cover. Not you.” I understood that there was no single “star” of the show, but still thought it was a great opportunity for all concerned. The higher-ups remained adamant and they asked John to take me off the cover. He refused.

As I puzzled over (and was hurt by) this disconnect between me and my new bosses on
The West Wing
, John was in New York planning the cover shoot. He chose Platon, one of the great photographers, and lined up the journalist for the profile. After it was clear that John made his own choices on his covers, and could not be pushed around, the folks at
The West Wing
backed down and allowed an on-set visit and an additional article about the show, cast, and writers to be written. John wanted to throw a party for me in New York to coincide with the magazine’s release and the premiere of the show. I made plans to attend and to thank him for supporting me at a time when no one else had. I picked up the phone and called his offices, and got an assistant. “He just came out of the last meeting on your cover issue and is running late for the airport. Can he call you Monday?”

“No problem,” I said, “we’ll talk then.”

I hung up and started preparing for Monday’s table reading of the first episode of
The West Wing
. John hopped into his car. He was rushing to meet Carolyn and her sister Lauren, eager to get to the airport to fly them to his cousin Rory’s wedding. It was a hazy summer evening, the kind we remember from childhood. He was probably excited. He was going back to his family. He was going home.

It’s been my experience that when a phone call wakes you, it’s never good news. I had taken a small cottage in Burbank, a few blocks from the studio for late nights and I was asleep when I got the call. It was Sheryl and I could tell she was upset. She wanted me to turn on the news.

At first it seemed like it couldn’t possibly be happening. Clearly these reporters had it wrong. John, his beloved wife, and her sister would surely be found in an embarrassing mix-up or miscommunication. They could not be gone. No one is that cruel. No God can ask that of a family. No one would so much as imagine the possibility of the horrific and arbitrary sudden nature of fate. Search teams scrambled and, like most Americans, I said a prayer of hope.

Monday came. The search for John, Carolyn, and Lauren continued. At the studio the cast and producers gathered for the very first table reading of
The West Wing
. I stood and told the group how much John admired the show and asked that we pray for him and work with his inspiration. It was very quiet. People were numb.

Later there was talk of canceling the cover shoot, now just days away. I was devastated and in no mood for it. But John’s editors insisted, pointing out that John’s last editorial decision was to make this happen. It was what he wanted. By Tuesday the worst had been confirmed. The plane had been found. There were no survivors. John, Carolyn, and Lauren were gone. I heard the news on my way to the photo session.

Being on the Oval office set is very moving. It is an exact replica of the Clinton version, down to the artwork on the walls and the fabrics on the couches. (It was designed by the amazing movie production designer Jon Hutman, who does all of Robert Redford’s movies and whom I’ve known since he was Jodie Foster’s roommate at Yale.) It is so realistic that when I later found myself in the actual Oval office, I felt as if it was just “another day at the office.” I was, however, fascinated with the one thing the real Oval office has that ours did not, and that was a ceiling. I stood looking up at it, staring like an idiot while everyone else oohed and aahed at all the amazing historical pieces that fill the room. However, it’s not authenticity that takes your breath away when you step onto that soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios. It is the solemnity of history, of destiny, and of fate; you are certain that you are actually in the room where power, patriotism, faith, the ability to change the world, and the specter of both success and tragedy flow like tangible, unbridled currents. You feel the presence of the men who navigated them as they created our collective American history, and you fully realize that they were not disembodied images on the nightly news or unknowable titans or partisan figureheads to be applauded or ridiculed. It feels as if you are standing where they stood, you can open their desk drawers, sit in their seat, and dial their phone. They are somehow more real to you now, they are not the sum of their successes or failures, they are human beings.

Presidents get to redesign the Oval office to their own tastes and they have the National Gallery, Smithsonian, and National Archives warehouses of priceless pieces to choose from. John Jr.’s mother knew her way around a swatch or two, so she made sure her husband’s Oval office was simple and chic (but with enough plausible deniability if called out for it) and with the proper nod to history. For the president’s desk she chose the “Resolute” desk, fashioned from the timbers of the HMS
Resolute
, found abandoned by an American vessel and returned to England, where Queen Victoria later had the timbers made into a desk and sent to President Rutherford Hayes as a goodwill gesture. FDR also loved the desk, but insisted that a modesty panel be installed to swing closed at the front in order to prevent people from seeing his leg braces as he sat. Years later, as JFK attended to the nation’s business, tiny John Jr. would be famously photographed impishly peeking out from being the desk’s panel.

I am leaning against a replica of that desk now, the flash of the photographer’s strobe jolting me, illuminating the darkened soundstage, cutting the tension and sadness of the
George
cover shoot. A number of staff have flown in from New York. John was more than a boss to them, obviously, and they are devastated. They share stories of John’s life. Some cry, but all soldier on through this melancholy and bizarre photo shoot on the Oval office set.

Platon wants me to embody strength, dignity, and power. He is asking me to focus in on his lens, to bring the sparkle that sells magazines. But my thoughts are elsewhere. I’m thinking of how unexpected yet oddly preordained life can be. Events are upon you in an instant, unforeseen and without warning, and oftentimes marked by disappointment and tragedy but equally often leading to a better understanding of the bittersweet truth of life. A father is taken from his son, a promise is unfulfilled, and then the son is reunited with him, also in an instant and under the cover of sadness. A theme continues in that unique, awful beauty that marks our human experience.

The flash explodes in my face again. I put on a smile (none of these shots will ever be used) and remind myself that John’s journey is over and, with some thanks to him, a new journey for me is ahead. I never knew him well. Many Americans also felt a connection to him without knowing him at all. In some ways, he was America’s son. But I will always be moved by John Kennedy Jr.’s steadiness in the harsh, unrelenting spotlight, his quest for personal identity and substance, for going his own way and building a life of his choosing. I will always remember his support and kindness to me and be grateful to him for being among the first to recognize that with my next project,
The West Wing
, I just might be a part of something great.

M
y mother awakens me. She is worked up, highly strung. She is pulling me out of bed from a deep sleep. I’m scared. It feels like it’s the middle of the night, although in a weird example of the capabilities of our modern age, a quick Google search today tells me it was probably just about 10:15 p.m.

“Robbie! Wake up! It’s important!” she urges. She has tears in her eyes. Quickly I’m placed into my footie pajamas and she hustles me downstairs. My baby brother is asleep; if my dad is home, he is not awake. It’s just the two of us. Coming down the stairs, I see the glow of the television, her favorite blanket on the couch. She must have been watching TV right before she rushed upstairs to wake me. I’m groggy and confused as she sits me next to her in front of the eerie gray-blue light of our Zenith black-and-white television. She takes my hand and I notice it is shaking.

I try to make out images on the television screen, but they are fuzzy and garbled. Mom is hugging me now, as I finally begin to make out some clarity in the picture. “We copy you down, Eagle,” a man is saying. A slight gasp from my mother, as on the television a fellow Ohioan is saying, “Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Within moments, Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta, Ohio, twenty miles from my grandparents’ house, sets foot on the moon. It seems at once fake, like being woken up from a dream (which I was), and yet of dramatic importance even to a four-and-a-half-year-old. I look at my mom. She has tears running down her face. “Nothing will ever be the same,” she whispers.

My mother was right. The world did change. Soon thereafter I lost my father. He wasn’t taken from us in a heroic/tragic fashion; in fact, he wasn’t even dead. But when there is suddenly that emptiness in your home and in your heart, the loss feels very similar to death.

Like most boys, I idolized my father, even as a four-year-old. He was movie- star handsome, a cross between Paul Newman and a
Godfather
-era Jimmy Caan. Like the latter, he had a way with the ladies; like the former he was a product of the Midwest of the 1950s, set in his ways, cloistered, and with a premium on politeness and not rocking the boat to get your true needs met. He was athletic and strong, a champion tennis player in an era when few had yet discovered the sport. My earliest memory may be of him sawing his wooden Jack Kramer racquet in half at the handle so we could hit together, even though I was substantially shorter than the tennis net.

He and my mother were “pinned” in college at DePauw, true school sweethearts. My mother was an English major and boasted William Faulkner as one of her professors. She was bookish and beautiful, from a small town in Ohio. Her father was the archetypical self-made man. The youngest of nine children, he left home at eleven years old to escape his family’s grinding poverty. Starting as a butcher’s apprentice, my grandfather eventually worked his way up to owning the entire grocery store, parlaying that into two successful restaurants. By the time my mother was a little girl, her dad was the only man who could afford a Cadillac in all of Shelby County, Ohio. And so she was raised in nouveaux privilege, a sheltered world where only good things happened and where life clearly rewarded those with the proper intentions. With her arresting beauty, she not only looked like a princess, she was treated like one.