Filed under: in praise of athletic beauty, not hot | Tags: 1999, death, jfk jr
Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the death of John F Kennedy, Jr. The most athletic Kennedy is someone I never thought about much at the time, which in retrospect is kind of surprising: he was in the tabloids every week running around with his shirt off, and as a teenager I was not picky about hairy shirtless celebrities.
Kennedy was a child star in many senses, one whose father might have become as much a demanding stage dad as his grandfather before him. He grew up in front of cameras, unwittingly leaving his greatest mark at the age of three, when he saluted his father’s coffin. From a young age the press called him John John, a name they didn’t let go of until his death. I know the women of America were enamored with him, and that his behavior was fairly laddish. Yet despite whatever romantic trysts he was having, or magazines he was publishing, or whatever, he almost always seemed to be on vacation. Work, at least as the media portrated it, was a mild distraction from endless beach-going and working out. In photos he’s usually moving, running or swimming or climbing rocks, but he hardly ever seems to be going anywhere.
JFK Jr was a prep school frat boy, exuding an unmistakable aura of old-money privilege in nearly every photo. Even his death–crashing a propellor plane that he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard–has a narcissistic air about it. They say he neglected calls from ground control, and some speculate that he was fighting with his wife, causing him stress that led to his crashing the plane. That’s something that happens to rich people in unimaginative melodramas, not in real life.
