Dealing with a celebrity co-worker may tell you stuff no one else knows.
He joined the company I worked for to produce a magazine, and though he had no experience he did have guts—great determination to make a success of what he proposed to create.
It was a magazine called George, one that would look somewhat askance at the world of American politics, often in a tone that was decidedly tongue-in-cheek.
John F. Kennedy Jr. brought his vision to our offices; he also brought his devastatingly good looks.
You’d see him in the lobby, in the elevator, in the hall somewhere, and you were always taken aback. He looked better than any movie star of his time. Men as well as women felt his presence. But none of us was supposed to say anything.
It was made clear (by our supervisors) that he shouldn’t be noticed, or even acknowledged. He wanted to be considered just another working stiff, even though nobody regarded him as anything but an extraordinary hybrid.
This was not a man you’d greet with a smile or a handshake; we were schooled, all of us, not to make eye contact unless, for any reason, he chose to speak, which he rarely did. If he happened to appear on my floor, it was no secret; there was kind of a buzz—whispers, murmurs—that signaled that the best-looking man in the world was in our midst.
I had a date with a writer one day, someone I’d invited to lunch. My expense account mostly depleted, I chose to take him to a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant half a block from my office. The restaurant was nearly empty when we arrived; we were seated at a banquette, one table in from the aisle.
Within a few minutes, another diner was seated at table number one: John. He was sitting opposite me, within inches of the writer with whom I was making small talk. Our magazines had not been digitalized yet, so even before the waiter brought him his “regular,” young Kennedy pulled a set of galley proofs out of a small valise and spread them out on the table.
He had a pencil, which he used from time to time, but mostly he groaned. Reading those proofs seemed agonizing for him. Why? I wondered. Was the writing so bad, the wording so clumsy, that reading this material was horrendously upsetting?
I doubted that. His agony, I think, was the result of some form of dyslexia, which I suspect was why it took him three tries to pass the bar. Even though I kept my eyes glued to my plate and my ears attuned to my lunch guest’s idle chatter, I was aware that the man at the next table was having a bitch of a time.
We finished lunch about the same time, but he dashed out ahead of us. My lunch partner had been oblivious to the presence of young Kennedy but watched in fascination as the man rushed out into bustling Eighth Avenue and literally stopped traffic.
We’d never seen anything like that—no honking or nudging ahead. Cars came to a dead stop, as John dashed across the street, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder.
It was clear, by then, why he’d had such troubled relationships with his own hand-picked editorial crew—he fought with them noisily, and often. He was extraordinarily bright; he had great verbal skills. But anything printed was threatening—he had to strain to process and absorb whatever was written.
We are all flawed in some ways, but by adulthood have usually devised ways to cover or compensate. Not John. He struggled, agonized—and fought. Years after his death trying to pilot a small plane to a wedding on Cape Cod, people who knew him wondered if he would ever have settled in…made a success…or found peace in a job where his amazing good looks would never have mattered.
It’s not just pretty women who are often cursed by Mother Nature.
Image courtesy of wikimedia.