Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (2 page)

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.

CHAPTER
2

My 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.

My father, on the other hand, was from Indiana, a place of hard-nosed pragmatism. He loved to fight, to brawl—a trait that served him well as a four-foot-eleven high school freshman, and less so as a five-foot-nine newlywed. But together, they made a handsome couple and were married on the eve of my father’s departure for law school at the University of Virginia.

What makes the equation of man and woman so eternally mysterious, glorious, and explosive? It almost seems as if each decade has its own unique “battle of the sexes.” The field of conflict is ever changing, as are the players, but the carnage and confusion are always fueled by the enduring quest for sex, love, and emotional fulfillment. (This list is in varying order according to experience and gender.) In the ’80s we navigated the legacy of the then decades-old free love movement, as well as a status-seeking ethos powered by booze and coke and a vague sense that this sexual smorgasbord wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) last forever. And with the arrival of AIDS, it did not.

My mom and dad faced different challenges. They wanted to escape the uniformity and banal conventions of the ’50s, but didn’t have the road map later created during the upheavals of the late ’60s. On a practical level, sex was still the domain of married couples only (in theory) and the pill didn’t exist. Indeed, on their wedding night both my parents were virgins. On the first night of their honeymoon, as my mother fought an anxiety attack waiting in the hotel room, my dad escaped to the hotel pool, avoiding the inevitable by swimming lap after lap after lap. (And I wonder why whenever I’m stressed, I head to the water!) At some point, however, they must have figured it out, and on March 17, 1964, I was born at the university hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For the then standard three days of my mother’s hospital stay, my father was forbidden to hold or touch me. As my mother and I bonded, my father and I remained separated by the glass of the observation window, looking at each other across the distance, the first notes in a theme that would be played out for the rest of our lives.

When I was six months old, my dad graduated from law school, and we left Charlottesville for Dayton, Ohio. (Later in life as my love of history, of tradition, politics, and government became a constant, I began to wonder if I wasn’t imbued with these passions by virtue of being born in the town Mr. Jefferson built.) My parents chose Dayton because it was then a bustling, growing city, home of a number of major businesses, including National Cash Register, Dayton Tire, AC-Delco, and Mead Paper. We moved into a nice three-bedroom house, whose floor plan I can still remember, in a leafy suburb. My dad joined a law practice; my mother gave up her job as a high school English teacher and stayed at home to raise me. They were the quintessential young, upwardly mobile midwestern couple of the mid-’60s. They discovered fondue, the cast album of
Camelot
, and gin and tonics. (Later it would be
Jesus Christ Superstar
and pot.) They had a close circle of like-minded friends.

According to family lore, at one of these fondue parties, thrown by my parents to introduce a young dentist to their circle of friends, my mother’s naïveté was unveiled for all to see, in a fashion that seems almost impossible today. Attempting to drum up new business for the dentist, she told a hushed room that she loved going to his office because “he was so gentle when he put his prick in my mouth.” She went on with enthusiasm to recount how she was never scared when he “puts his prick in,” that sometimes “it feels good.” My father, by then likely more well versed in such matters, burst out laughing in the horrified silence, simultaneously enraging and confusing my mom.

“What did I say?”

“Um … well … Barbara…”

“What? I’m just talking about his prick and…”

“Barbara,” he began to explain, but gave up as she looked at him with a mixture of blithe indulgence and dawning reproach of what was clearly a deviant mind. Meanwhile, my dad (and every single other fondue eater present), swallowed his laughter and attempted to steer the evening back on track.

To me, this snapshot of their early marriage is revealing. My mother and father were moving in different currents toward different worldviews. So much so that when I was old enough to have such thoughts, I couldn’t imagine that they ever had anything in common. But they were becoming themselves and, over time, this meant they were becoming increasingly dissimilar: Dad crystallizing into a dashing, successful, gregarious, hot-headed up-and-comer, and Mom becoming an earnest, thoughtful teacher, always slightly off the public frequency, beginning to occupy her solitary spot outside conventional wisdom and custom.

There were other warning signs that all was not well with them, but I was far too young to be aware. Claw hammers were thrown, lipstick was found in places it shouldn’t be, and the painful clichéd narrative of being married too young to someone you don’t really know because they don’t know themselves headed toward its climax.

My dad started working late, my mom and I spent more and more time at my grandparents’ (without my dad), and it became normal that my dad’s presence in the house was minimal. One day when I was four years old, my mom told me I would be having a brother. Looking back, I might have assumed as much, as the third bedroom had been redone in a Dumbo, the flying elephant, motif. “I’m going to name him Chad,” she said. I remember thinking that the name “Chad” reminded me of the word “ChapStick.” I didn’t get it and I asked her to reconsider the name. Invoking her parental prerogative of not having to explain herself to her four-year-old son, she told me that the matter was closed.

My brother was born on January 15, 1968. I have no memory of Chad’s birth, although I know my dad fainted dead away when he was told about it in the waiting room. Apparently, not letting him hold his newborn had some wisdom to it after all.

Baby Chad came home, my father did not. At least that is my assumption, as he is absent from my memories of this time. But these recollections are fuzzy and likely distorted. I believe it’s not because I was so young as much as it is because the house was so filled with unhappiness; my mother’s, my father’s, and as a result, my own. I had already begun to tune out reality, to retreat to a private world and block out any pain. From this period of my life I have only two distinct memories—both events are unique; impossible to experience more than once in a lifetime: a stopping of time after which nothing will ever be as it was. One is my mother waking me up for the moon landing. The other memory has played out in my mind again and again over the course of my lifetime. I knew the moment it happened that all I had known was over; it has taken forty-three years to begin to understand the ripples that have emanated from that day. The shattering, dull wounding, the mistaken lessons, and also, the circuitous road that opened up that day, leading me to eventual happiness and fulfillment that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.

Again, it is just my mom and I. I’m five years old. Chad is not there, and I am waiting for my mother to finish her errand at the lumber store. It’s a big place, brightly lit, with giant stacks of two-by-fours and other cuts of wood, all in rows, one after the other. I’m sitting on one of these big stacks, watching my mother at the cashier. I’m sipping chocolate milk through a straw. It’s summer and even though I am wearing shorts, it’s hot and humid in the giant store, and I’m restless. I’m also thinking that there has been something bothering me, I’ve been sad and uncomfortable, anxious now, for a while. When feelings well up I push them down, lose myself in make-believe, play, cartoons, toys. I can’t name this thing that is bothering me; I’m not old enough to know that I should even try. And today, in the sticky Dayton summer it’s upon me again, this unease, this feeling of something bad about to happen. Usually chocolate milk from Mom can make it go away. Today it won’t.

I’m watching my mom walking toward me. Later in life her hair will turn brown, but now she is still blonde, with a perfectly shaped nose and clear blue eyes. She seems tiny in this giant store, alone. Inside me something clicks. I see our life together very clearly, in all its reality for how it is and is not what I want it to be. Everything falls away, all other thoughts, all other feelings. Just a question forming now, for the first time, triggered by my mom walking toward me in a lumber store. She looks at me and smiles. I blurt out, “Is Dad ever coming home?”

My mom pauses for just a moment, then answers. “No, he isn’t. We’re getting a divorce.”

I have spent my career on high alert to clichés, excising them from scripts and speeches whenever I could. I’m deeply suspicious and rarely entertained by conventionally accepted turning points in a plot, of events that are meant to seem earth-shatteringly dramatic when in fact, to me, they are merely predictable.

There is no hoarier cliché than a child’s psyche rocked by divorce. And for much of my life I have not only resisted this notion, but have had a sort of vague disdain for anyone who pinned their adolescent or adult challenges on their parents’ broken lives. To do so is to substitute another’s life mistake for your own. And so later in life as I came to face my own shortcomings, I rarely considered the effect of a lost father on a four-year-old boy. That understanding would only come later, as I confronted my alcoholism and, more clearly, when I had two sons of my own. Anything painful surrounding my parents’ breakup I sealed off and buried, left unexplored and undisturbed, like nuclear waste.

My mother was unprepared for my reaction to her unvarnished, truthful answer. At the mention of “divorce,” my body felt as if I had been shot, shot full of terrible stomachache and a swirling, spinning-out-of-control desolation. I began to cry. Clerks and customers passed us by, oblivious, before my mom hustled me outside as I began to deteriorate. “Do you know what divorce is?” she stammered. I remember thinking, you idiot, what do you take me for … a
kid
?! “Of course I do!” I snapped. “I watch
Divorce Court
!”

By the time we reached our navy-blue station wagon I was inconsolable. All I wanted was my dad. In the onrushing, awful vision of life without him, I was confused and scared. When would I see him again? Would I
ever
see him again? If so, for how long and under what circumstances? I told my mother I wanted to see him,
now
!