Christopher Kennedy Lawford, nephew of Jack and Bobby, tells Anna Mundow about about life as a 'second string Kennedy' coping with addiction
Christopher Kennedy Lawford was given his first apartment, complete with nanny, when he was two months old and his first car when he was seven. His first stop on the way home from being born, in 1955, was at the Beachcomber Bar in Malibu, where his parents set him down on the counter and ordered Martinis. For his 21st birthday his father gave him a vial of cocaine, not Lawford's first. Such excesses seemed normal to the son of the English actor Peter Lawford and the Irish-American princess Patricia Kennedy - until they almost killed him.
"Receptionist: We need to schedule you for treatment right away.
"Me: What are you talking about?
"Receptionist: Your biopsy came back and your liver is on its way to looking like a piece of cardboard.
"Me: Are you kidding?
"Receptionist: No, sir. We don't kid."
This is one of the wittier exchanges in Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption, Lawford's earnest account of growing up as one of the Washington and Hollywood elite. This is not, he insists, just another book about the Kennedys. He is not interested in reworking "the same old bullshit". Yet the photograph on the front cover shows toddler Christopher playing by the pool while his uncle Jack Kennedy - lithe in swimming trunks - smiles down at the boy and fills most of the frame.
That is, of course, what male Kennedys were brought up to do: fill the frame no matter who was being photographed. And despite Lawford's stated intentions to the contrary, these men also fill his book. Old Joe, Jack, Bobby, Teddy: there they are, upstaging everyone, even Sinatra. There are notable women, too: not just Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and the like, but also Rose, Ethel and, in particular, Patricia Kennedy, whom Old Joe regarded as possessing the best business brain in the family. Perhaps, but her son suspects that she did not breastfeed him, and that is far more serious.
"I think, look, you know, it's sort of like I spent 50 years not going there." It is 9am in California, and Lawford is gracious but "a little tired" and at first a little incoherent. No, he did not have a late night. He does not live that life any more. He is tired from driving his son around to look at schools. (Lawford left his 17-year marriage and three children in 2001 but is, in his own estimation, a good parent.) "All that Kennedy family stuff, I mean," he says, stifling a yawn, "that was radioactive to me. It's hard to go back. But my editor was great. She never asked me to go on about the wallpaper in Hyannisport, stuff like that."
To be fair, wallpaper is never mentioned, Lawford having been at first too young and later too stoned to notice not only decor. Even the family's tragedies fail to command his full attention. "I don't know whether Oswald acted alone," he writes. "I have no idea who, if anyone, had sex with Marilyn Monroe. I was 13 when my uncle Bobby died and 16 when my uncle Teddy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick."
Like his father, and like the Kennedy males around him, Lawford did pay attention to booze, women and power, not necessarily in that order. "I'm Irish," he says, laughing. The claim is allowed to pass because it is, after all, only 9am in California. "And, like I say in the book, maybe God invented alcohol to keep the Irish from ruling the world." Lawford adds that his family "almost proved Him wrong", but he, at least, reinforced the stereotype.
A reportedly sweet child and kind brother to three sisters, Lawford quickly became the quintessential spoiled rich kid, attending private schools, sailing with uncle Jack, skiing with uncle Bobby, flying down to Disneyland with Elizabeth Taylor, frolicking with "bunnies" in the Playboy mansion. "I knew I was lucky," he says when his privileged upbringing is mentioned. "I never said 'Poor me'. I was more like: 'Jesus, why can't I get my shit together?' "
The answer, he concluded when he became sober in 1986, was not only alcohol and drugs but also insecurity. Which brings us back to breastfeeding. "Because I never bonded with my mother through suckling," Lawford writes, "I view the world as a dangerous place where no one can be trusted, especially women." Hmm. Add the long Kennedy shadow - "If having a relative elected president forced me to re-evaluate my ambitions, having him martyred while in office assured that I would forever come up short" - and you have, according to Lawford's logic, one wounded boy.
One wounded boy taking lots of drugs: in Manhattan, where his mother moved the family when she left Peter Lawford, in 1964 ("We hung out in Central Park at a place called Dope Hill, where the elite of the drug culture congregated"), in California, where 18-year-old Christopher returned to live with his father ("It was a great day when my dad let me make the trip to the top of Mulholland to pick up some of the best coke in Hollywood"), in Boston, where he managed to graduate with a law degree ("I had a great drug dealer in Boston named Floyd"), in Washington, where he was always part of the Kennedy parade (If the police showed up, Lawford usually said: "My uncle is Senator Kennedy.")
That is one of the more shameful admissions in a memoir that claims to be a chronicle of "human struggle" and "recovery" but nonetheless supplies plenty of Kennedy trivia. Do we really need to know, for example, that Lawford once spied Aunt Jackie exercising naked? "Okay, some of the Kennedy stuff is somewhat superficial," Lawford agrees. "You know, when I showed the book to Tony [ Anthony] Hopkins, he said, 'It sounds very dramatic,' and that's not really the way I see it. So, yeah, there are probably things I would change. Maybe I didn't go deep enough."
To his credit, Lawford, who finally became an actor, best known for his role in the daytime soap opera All My Children, does not present himself in a flattering light. The boyish charmer who inherited his father's good looks but not his mother's business sense, who realised early on that he would "never be a first-string Kennedy", was by the mid 1980s "finally somebody, somebody that nobody wanted to be with. The money, movie-star girlfriends, wild nights at Studio 54, and getting high with rock stars were all faded memories. I had been born with every conceivable advantage. I had failed to take advantage of any of them." He was a drunk and an addict.
Today, Lawford salutes Edward Kennedy's ex-wife, Joan, for taking him to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where he learned that he was not unique, not even special. He also observes that "many of us remain just as despicable sober as we were when we were using. We just aren't as obvious."
Lawford's other addiction was to "the narcotic of attention", a fact he recognised at his aunt Jackie's funeral, when he moved to a higher step outside the church in order to be seen above "all those big-teethed Kennedys on TV". His elevation was bound to be fleeting, chiefly because the Kennedy journey into history, for all its ugliness, remains far more interesting than Lawford's journey to enlightenment.
Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption, by Christopher Kennedy Lawford, is published by William Morrow & Company, $25.95 in US
Carole Radziwill, widow of Jackie O's nephew, was also a friend of JFK jnr and Carolyn Bessette. she talks to Anna Carey about their lives and untimely deaths
Carole Radziwill divides her life into two parts. There's her life before the summer of 1999, and then there's her life after it. That was the summer when she lost first two close friends, John Kennedy jnr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and then her husband, Kennedy's cousin Anthony Radziwill. They had been staying together in Martha's Vineyard when Kennedy, Bessette and Bessette's sister died in a plane crash; it was Radziwill who raised the alarm when their flight didn't arrive. A few weeks after that terrible night, Anthony died of a rare form of cancer.
"It took me a long time to forgive everyone for dying," says Radziwill, a tiny figure clad casually in a cashmere sweater, jeans and Converse All Stars. "That summer was a difficult summer to begin with, because Anthony was very ill. He'd been ill for five years, and now he was dying. And when the plane went down - well, people say it must have been heartbreaking, but it was so much more than heartbreaking. It was soul-crushing. We were all preparing for one death, so I kind of thought, well, things can't get any worse than this. But the minute you say that, you should know something is right around the corner."
She may have felt angry with her husband and friends for dying, but she was angrier with the "emotional rubberneckers", the acquaintances who asked for details of the crash before expressing their condolences for her loss. "There were times when I'd be out for dinner with a friend, and there'd be people I didn't know well, and inevitably the subject of 'where were you when you heard about JFK jnr's plane crash?' would come up," she says. "Everyone wanted to claim that story as their own. They wanted a connection to the tragedy. It happened again after 9/11: people wanted to personalise it."
Now Radziwill has reclaimed the story in a beautifully written and deeply moving memoir, What Remains. But writing a book wasn't a huge leap. An Emmy-winning television journalist, she has reported from some of the world's most dangerous war zones for ABC television. It was while working at ABC that she met Anthony, a producer whose mother happened to be Jackie Onassis's sister, Lee Radziwill. Anthony and John Kennedy jnr were close friends as well as cousins; each was best man at the other's wedding.
Radziwill, who came from an ordinary working-class family in upstate New York, bonded with Bessette, then Kennedy's girlfriend, who became a close friend. Both women had moved from down-to-earth backgrounds to a dazzling elite world, one that came as a culture shock to Radziwill. But she never felt as if she was from the wrong side of the tracks. "Our families were very different in many ways, but because Anthony and I met when we were both journalists, we were on a level playing field. We were professional equals," she says.
Radziwill kept working at ABC after the summer of 1999, covering the war in Afghanistan for the station. She left two years ago, partly because "working there kind of felt like part of an old life, because Anthony had worked at ABC with me. So working there was all tied up with this life that I no longer had".
Soon after leaving her television job, she began What Remains. "I started writing it for two reasons," she says. "It was about four years after that summer, and I had started moving on in my life. But that meant that I was forgetting details and memories, and that was making me anxious. So I wanted to record everything."
The fear of forgetting was accompanied by a sense of responsibility to her dead husband and their friends. "In the chaos that followed that summer, I think I took on the responsibility of keeping them alive, in my mind. I was reluctant to let them all go. But I knew that if I was going to move on with my life in a way that was healthy, I'd have to get them out of my head and on to paper. And also, when I started writing, I realised that constructing a narrative creates order out of chaos. It gave the story some sort of resolution."
It feels almost intrusive, asking someone to talk about the death of her husband and best friends, but Radziwill doesn't mind. In fact, she has enjoyed doing interviews for the book. "I like talking about them all, and I rarely get the chance to in my ordinary life," she says. "I've reached the stage where it's just fun remembering them."
Radziwill is looking forward to the future. She's now writing a novel, which she says "will definitely have a happy ending". And she remains, almost miraculously, an optimist. "My life didn't work out the way I thought it would," she says, with characteristic understatement. "But sometimes, you know, when life gives you lemons you've got to make lemonade." She laughs. "Or preferably good strong Martinis."
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship & Love, by Carole Radziwill, is published by Scribner, £12.99 in UK