John John Kennedy: The Boy Who Wanted to Fly

This article was published in the July 15th 2009 issue and we resubmit it today to retrace the changes Vanity has undergone over the last 20 years. Here are all the articles we are republishing

I watch a rerun of an old episode of the show on a satellite channel Seinfeld. The woman of the group says in ecstasy that she met John John Kennedy in the gym, doing spinning behind her, admiring her perfect buttocks. She will then try to hook him up, but he (invisible) will end up sleeping with a virgin and she will just dream about it while she practices auto-eroticism. In TV reruns you live forever, you remain young, sexy, desirable.

He was born on November 25, 1960. It was Thanksgiving Day. His father, elected president of the United States a little over two weeks ago, was on a plane. He was hurrying back from Palm Beach, where he’d gone against his wife’s wishes, bedridden with the flu and pregnant, to meet his brothers. At the news of the labor pains he boarded the plane of the press, which had come to follow him, and ordered a retreat. He connected to the on-board radio with headphones and followed the news of the caesarean section. When they said to him, “It’s done! It’s a boy!” He took off his earphones and smiled. His publicist briefed reporters. There was applause. There was champagne. Jackie was already alone with her son.

On April 12, 1962, in one of his first public appearances, he showed up in the garden during the visit of the Iranian rulers: the Shah of Persia and his wife, Farah Diba. The US government supported his regime, but when the Empress bent down to offer little John a present of a daffodil, he pulled away and said peremptorily, “No!”

He grew up playing with the baby animals that his father received as gifts from the mighty of the Earth and brought to the White House. He loved Zsa Zsa more than anyone else, the rabbit who drank beer and could play the trumpet. He had two hamsters which he named Maybell and Bluebell. They drowned in the bathtub. The news made the front page. When the president received a free Indian tiger, the boy was very excited, but the feline never arrived at its destination. Jackie said there was a limit.

His sister Caroline was not happy to have the show stolen. At the end of a day in the snow in the winter of 1961, she wrote in her diary: “John is a naughty whiny boy who tries to spit in his mother’s Coca-Cola.”

He was never nicknamed John John by his father. He was hiding in a closet when the president called for him to come out, repeating his name twice, over and over: “John! John!». Journalists decided that it would become.

On February 6, 1963, while the president was delivering his state of the union address, he tripped and fell, hitting a step in the White House and losing a tooth. When she was done crying she went looking for him, found him and smiled, with a hole in her teeth. His parents, when he returned, were worried about it and told him to keep his mouth shut for a while. There is no subsequent photo where he doesn’t proudly display the empty space.

Every time the president left on a plane without the child, he gave him a plastic airplane and said: fly this and when you grow up you will have a real one. In November 1963, the Kennedy family spent a weekend on the farm in Atoka, Virginia. At lunchtime there were two empty seats at the table: the president and his son. The housekeeper went to look for them, she walked without hesitation to the helicopter hangar. They were in the cabin, helmets on. Very serious, the father took orders from the child, who was appointed commander. The next day the president would actually take a helicopter. To get from the White House to the Air Force One field. And from there to Dallas. Terminus.

On her third birthday, she went to her father’s funeral instead of a party. He bowed before the coffin, saluted, then the governess carried him away. They went into a room in the Capitol where his attention was drawn to a collection of American flags. An officer offered him one: “And for my sister?” Another one. “Thank you,” he said. “And please, can I have one for my father too?”

In February 1964, Jackie took the children to Manhattan. They went to see Bill, an old family friend. John was playing with the cars, arranging them like a security convoy, when Bill’s daughter said, “Dad?” He replied, “Yes?” The boy dropped the cars. He asked, “Are you a dad too?” Bill admitted. “Then throw me in the air.”

On the first day of school, his classmate came home to his mother in tears. “What happened to you?”. “The new one punched me in the nose!” “And who is this naughty boy?” “He says his name is John Kennedy.” Two months later, on the Dallas anniversary, as he was leaving school, that boy and others sang to him, “Your father is dead! Your father is dead!”

She looked into the face of the man her mother had remarried, an old Greek named Aristotle. He asked him, “Why do you call me a toad?” He replied, “Mother says if you choke on croaking we’ll be so rich.”

During a party on the yacht Christina received a toy rifle as a gift from a guest and enjoyed shooting at the stars. “That’s enough!” the old Greek hissed. He didn’t obey. The Greek got up, snatched his rifle and threw it into the sea. He ordered one of his waiters to lock the boy in the cabin. Jackie got up, grabbed a valuable movie camera from her husband’s table and threw it into the water. She then took her son by the hand and left the reception.

At 15, he waited on the island of Skorpios for the old Greek’s body while reading a comic book. As the photographers surrounded him he stuck his tongue out at them.

His father wanted to be a writer, but was forced by his family to take up politics. He wanted to be an actor, but his mother told him: “If you go on stage they’ll shoot you and I couldn’t bear that too.” Maybe that was decisive, or maybe it was the critic who wrote: «He doesn’t know how to move properly. He stands on the scene frozen and self-aware. His voice doesn’t work: it sounds like a rich teenager from New York.’ He enrolled in law school. To enter the club called Phi Psi he agreed to swallow a goldfish, swallowing it with gulps of beer.

He graduated June 6, 1983. Jackie waited on campus in a purple polka dot gown. A plane wrote in the sky: “Good luck John.” It was the 15th anniversary of his uncle Bobby’s death.

In the summer of 1988, he took a girl to a nightclub in Manhattan. As the taxi stopped at the entrance and they got out, a platoon of paparazzi fired. She said, “It must be awful for you to deal with things like this every day!” He smiled. “That’s half the fun,” she said.

Appeared on the cover of People as sexiest man alive. He dated Madonna. Dated Daryl Hannah. Dated Xuxa. With Julia Roberts. And with a train of blondes. His mother didn’t approve of one. They said they all reminded them of Marilyn Monroe. The only one who said no was Sinéad O’Connor. While Daryl was in the bathroom, he handed her a pen and paper to write down her phone number. She smiled and broke the pen.

Jackie left before he could reject the last, icy blonde: Carolyn Bessette, whom he married in a private ceremony. John was beside his wife when she died. He was at the controls of the plane, commander, but not for fun.

It happened on the night of July 16, 1999, ten years ago. On John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga, which took off from Caldwell, New Jersey, were the two of them and her sister. We wondered how this could have happened. Every time a plane crashes, dismay is generated: conspiracy theories, supernatural explanations.

Five days later I made the trip again in a similar plane, piloted by a stunt pilot: Yuri. We took off at 8.45pm. “Darkness,” he said, “forces you to follow the instruments, you must know them well. The boy had had the patent for four months». We flew for an hour, same direction: Martha’s Vineyard. Then the descent: from 6,500 feet to 2,500 in five minutes. We were 18 kilometers from the finish line. In total darkness we could be anywhere. At that point John John inexplicably leaned towards the East, he began to fall. What happened? “Disorientation,” Yuri said. «If you don’t know the plane and its instruments well, it’s easy to happen. You think you’re going down, instead you’re going up. In the dark you are a fly on the blackboard, you lose your reference points and…». He dropped the aircraft. We went diving down, at 230 an hour towards the wall of water. The stomach became a bolt. Then Yuri slowed the descent, put the plane back in position, went smoothly towards the runway. “The boy wasn’t experienced enough to do this,” he said.

The boy died. He dragged with him the eternal hope of family revenge, the gossip, the curse that died with him, a curious political magazine, the expectations of good and those of evil. Ten years later, there are no more reruns.