Fairy Tale Interrupted (26 page)

“Hi, Dad, how are you?” I asked him on the phone.

“I’m fine. I’m all right.”

Our conversation was banal, as are most exchanges with people right before they die. What had John and I talked about—air-conditioning? By now I was accustomed to the absurdity of the mundane words attached to moments of such import.

Death followed me, I was sure of it. I was convinced my mother would pass away if I went out of town and was in a constant state of high alert, wondering who would be next. I read meaning into ordinary occurrences. I found signs everywhere, and they all spelled fatal events for my loved ones.

Yes, I was watchful of everyone—except myself. I didn’t care what happened to me. My survival instinct had drowned in all that death. One afternoon, I stepped off a curb on Third Avenue, near my apartment, and began to cross against the light when a bus passed inches away from me. Such a moment should
have taken my breath away at the thinness of the line between life and death. But instead of sighing with relief, I felt nothing.
So what if the bus had hit me?

My mom used to say that “death can’t be that bad, because nobody has ever come back.” I thought,
If it happens to me, so be it
. I was broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed. I would simply have to learn to live with my injury and move forward, even though I was certain that everything good in my life had already happened.

I thought I’d never feel better again, but I couldn’t hole up in my apartment forever. I was running through my severance and needed to make money. The offers weren’t exactly pouring in, and I didn’t know how to look for another job. So I called a headhunting agency that advertised in the
New York Times
. “High-profile executive assistant positions,” the advertisement boasted.

I should have realized it was a bad idea. A higher-profile assistant position than the one I had did not exist. What was I going to do—work for the pope? But walking into the headhunter’s dingy, gray reception area was worse than I could have imagined. The magazines in the waiting room were depressingly out-of-date. An actress on the cover of
People
boasting about the secret to her happy marriage was now divorced. A
Martha Stewart Living
had 101 ideas for summer entertaining even though we were in the dead of winter. The heavily pawed issues reinforced the cheapness of the midtown office.

I looked out of place in my navy Narciso Rodriguez suit with a skirt that hit tastefully above the knee and a cinched jacket that showed off my tiny waist (the grief diet). To complement
the perfect suit, I wore a pair of gorgeous black leather Manolo Blahnik slingbacks with little bows atop the pointy toes. Long before
Sex and the City
had popularized the brand, I wanted a pair but couldn’t bring myself to spend five hundred dollars on shoes. When I was leaving
George,
the staff presented me with a thousand-dollar gift certificate to the discreet boutique, hidden away on West 55th Street (Carolyn would have been so proud that I had my first Manolos).

I decided to wear them to the headhunter’s office, assuming the better I looked, the better the jobs they would send my way. But like so many other misguided moments I had experienced over the past several months, my outfit was a joke against the backdrop of the run-down space. When I saw “reason for termination of last job” on the form I was to fill out, I couldn’t stand it anymore and left.

In the six months since John had passed away, I had trouble figuring out what to do next. I was so confused, I could hardly decide what to eat for lunch (if I ate at all), let alone plan for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to work for anyone but John. The trust he had put in me, the relationship we had forged, the work I did for him, all that I had learned—how would I ever find another dream job like that? Selling myself to prospective employers was the last thing I felt prepared to do.

I didn’t even feel comfortable putting the name JFK Jr. on my résumé. Still wanting to protect his privacy, I refused to offer the details of my job, no matter how innocuous. But it was the only work I had to show for myself.

So far, however, John’s name was only a distraction. People hiring tripped out when they saw it—either asking me to share or, more likely, sharing their own stories. At one job interview,
the man reviewing my résumé burst into tears. “I remember where I was when he died,” he said, reaching out to hold my hand for support. “My friend called me, and it was so hard because I watched him grow up.”

The entire world knew John or, rather, wanted to feel as if they knew him. So anytime I met someone new, whether at an interview or out with a friend, I had to sit through the John Kennedy Jr. Rorschach test. Having been his assistant, I became a convenient receptacle for everyone’s reactions—people put him on a pedestal or tore him down. Listening to people tell me what John was really like didn’t anger me (if anything it was a comforting reminder of his significant place in time), but it did become tedious.

Occasionally, I became incensed. During an interview for the assistant position to the powerful founder of a big company, the executive spent the entire time asserting his virility over that of a dead man. “This job is going to be the complete opposite of whatever you did before,” he said. “I’m not looking to promote myself the way John Kennedy did.” Instantly despising him, I wanted to say, “You couldn’t promote yourself like John Kennedy if you handed out a million dollars in cash on the street.”

The insensitivity of strangers I encountered was unbearable.

“I heard his wife was cheating on him.”

“He was so dumb.”

“That magazine was failing anyway.”

“Why’d he get in that plane?”

We are three months out of this. Can you give me a fucking break?
But I didn’t lash out because I understood John wasn’t real to most people. He was a headline or a photo. So
I stopped defending him. Now that he was gone, the effort seemed pointless. Instead, I limited interactions with people I didn’t know and went blank when others delivered their John Kennedy dissertations.

So I wound up like any other lost soul, taking a series of random jobs. Without the counsel of John, Carolyn, Frank, or my dad, I bounced from moment to moment as if I were taking a ride on someone else’s life.

As a receptionist for a famous photographer, I answered phones, filled the copier with paper, and arranged for the dog walker. Within days I was mind-numbingly bored. My title with John was that of an assistant, but the job had been more like a chief of staff—prioritizing his schedule, organizing his life, keeping the freaks away, offering judgment on important issues. It didn’t occur to me until after John died how amazing it was that my opinion had value to someone like him. I’d had a privileged position. And now I was taking messages from massage therapists and professional poop scoopers.

The receptionist gig didn’t stick. I turned to catering and freelance PR stints—doing junior-level or menial tasks that, thankfully, didn’t require much thought or last too long. The cash tided me over, but whenever I rushed out from the kitchen in a uniform, carrying a platter of mini crab cakes, I worried that I’d see someone from my former life.

It was bound to happen eventually. New York isn’t a big place when you travel in certain circles. Stationed outside the new Hermès store on Madison Avenue for an event celebrating the boutique’s grand opening, I was working the door, pulling famous people out of the line and ushering them into the
store—the kind of job twenty-year-old starry-eyed interns do. I was scanning the line for angry celebs when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw Matt, the pity on his face pure torture. “Is this what it’s come to?” he said. “If John were alive right now, he would be like, ‘Can someone
please
get that headset off her?’”

If John were alive
. I thought those words all the time.

Eventually, I heard about a job I wanted. Word went around in political circles, where I still maintained sources, that Bill Clinton was looking for an assistant for his new, postpresidential offices in Harlem. Although it was another assistant position, I really wanted that job. And I was perfect for it. Aiding a charismatic man with obvious sex appeal and an overabundance of public attention, who everybody wanted a piece of but who also needed to maintain a cogent, smooth, targeted schedule in the most discreet manner—the job had my name written all over it.

I started working the phones like I used to do for John, but now I was making calls on my behalf and the process was not nearly as smooth. My first call was to Senator Kennedy’s office. I thought Ted Kennedy might write me a letter of recommendation. Not only had I worked closely with his staff through the engagement rumors, wedding aftermath, and of course, funeral ordeal, but also he knew me personally. He had witnessed my unwavering loyalty to and efforts in support of John on more than a few occasions.
This is a no-brainer,
I thought as I put in my request with his assistant.

But my request was quickly rejected. The senator couldn’t call the president’s office on my behalf, one of his aides
instructed, because that would be asking for a favor. Only once had he done that, for his sister Jean, and he wouldn’t be able to do it for me.

I was stunned. I wasn’t asking to become secretary of state, just an assistant. After keeping guard for so long, I thought I might have earned a favor. But I learned the hard way that that’s not the way politics works. I tracked down my old admirer Harold Ickes, with whom I had shared that enchanted evening at the correspondents’ dinner, which now felt like a distant dream. Clinton’s former adviser remembered me and happily wrote a lovely note in which he said, “I’ve never worked with this girl, but she’s worth looking at.”

I didn’t get the job, and I felt like the biggest loser in the world, even though a friend of mine explained that it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was the John Kennedy Jr. Complex. “God could have written you a recommendation letter, and it wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “There’s no way Clinton would let himself be compared to JFK Jr. No guy wants the girl who used to sit outside John’s office sitting outside his.”

The past five years seemed to count for nothing. No, it was worse than that; it was as if they counted against me. I had gone from being someone who could open any door with the magic words “from John Kennedy’s office” to someone who was completely powerless. Tragedy followed me around like a shadow; it was written across my résumé and accompanied me on every outing. I was a different person from the girl who had told John off when he took my office at PR/NY—I knew that much. But I wondered if it was worth the pain of losing it all. Maybe it would have been better if the past five years hadn’t happened. Maybe it would’ve been better if John and I had never met.

I stood in the wings of the stage and took one final look at the audience before the show started. As the theater lights dimmed, I could see family and friends fill the seats of the packed house. There was Nancy, my best friend from high school, a college friend who had flown in from Los Angeles, my sisters, Jessica, Matt, and several of my other friends from
George.
And of course, there was my mom: front row and center.

They had all come to support me on the opening night of the off-Broadway play,
Touch,
that I had produced with Michele and another dear friend, Robin Chambers, Robert De Niro’s longtime assistant, whom I had met when the actor posed for the cover of
George
. Despite all the hard work I had put in to get to this point, the moment felt like magic.

I first read the script for
Touch
right after John’s death in 1999. After the funeral was over and the packing done, I took off for Vermont with Michele to get away and try to clear my head.
A professional actress, Michele had brought along the script about an astronomer whose wife of six happy years goes out to buy whipping cream on Thanksgiving and never comes back. She’s later found murdered and buried on a Navajo reservation. When I saw the emotion it elicited in Michele, I decided to read the script. Halfway through, I was sobbing.

The story spoke directly to my own experience. The main character, Kyle, trying to deal with the sudden loss of a loved one, doesn’t know how he’ll go on. In many respects, he doesn’t want to go on. He would rather remain in the past, no matter how painful it is to be there. I felt that way, too. Knowing that you can survive grief takes a long time.

The first few months after John died, I was inundated with beautiful and touching condolence cards, notes, and calls. It was comforting to be in constant contact with John and Carolyn’s friends and family members. As long as everyone else was grieving with me, I could hold on to them and the life that I had with them. I didn’t have to move on.

Eventually, of course, people moved on. That’s when my grief became paralyzing. John’s death was all I thought about for the first few years afterward. He had such a lasting impact that all those associated with him ask themselves from time to time, “What would my life be like today if John were still around?” For me the question was ever present. John had been my day-to-day, and so became his absence.

Because I could never replace him or my experience at
George,
I didn’t know what to do. I had to get a sense of who I was without being associated with the most famous person in the world. As I struggled to forge a new identity and reinvent my career, bringing
Touch
to the stage became a labor of love. I
wasn’t a theater producer, but with Michele and Robin equally enthusiastic about the project, I was sure we could make it happen. I wanted to see Kyle come alive.