uExpress.com: Ted Rall by Ted Rall -- (07/21/1999) ON CELEBRITY MORTALITY

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ON CELEBRITY MORTALITY

07/21/1999

Or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Not Being Dead

HYANNIS, Mass. -- I met JFK Jr.

No, I wasn't a friend of his or anything like that. Hell, I wouldn't even qualify as a distant acquaintance; my only interaction with him consisted of a few short sentences and a handshake. Nonetheless, it was a little weird.

It happened at a George party in a railroad-themed restaurant on the top floor of Bloomingdale's department store in Manhattan last month. I had a cartoon in a George book called "250 Ways to Make America Better," a compilation of 250 ideas from famous people and people like me on, well, you know. (In my suggestion for national self-improvement, I wished for something we're not likely to get: a better class of rich people. Consistent with my world view, I was not paid for my contribution.)

I got there early, didn't recognize anybody I knew and determined quickly that the food was lousy and the barkeep incompetent. I was about to take off when I spotted JFK Jr. leaning up against the back wall of the restaurant. To tell the truth, I'd been mystified when People declared him America's sexiest man; seeing the guy in person cleared all that up. He was astonishingly attractive, a perfect interaction between chiseled masculinity and a certain femininity to soften any potential "jockosity." And he was tall. At 6 feet, 2 inches, I don't look up at many people. The truth is, John-John wasn't at all photogenic.

(Ted Rall Exclusive: He was on crutches. The rumored foot injury mentioned as a possible cause of the July 16 crash did, in fact, occur.)

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Fortified by a pair of Heinekens and my determination not to let the evening go to waste, I zeroed in on the heir to the Legacy.

"Hi," I said, shaking his hand. "I'm Ted Rall. I drew the cartoon on page 103."

"Oh, yeah," he replied, having absolutely no idea who I was or what I drew. "That was really great. Thanks a lot for doing that."

"No problem," I lied. "Thanks a lot for using it." He smiled famously, then resumed his chat with some boomer with a bad hair weave who earnestly believed that (a) Hillary really was going to run for the Senate and (b) that fact somehow mattered.

This will seem dumb, but what everybody says about him was true: JFK Jr. was a nice guy. You could tell.

Oh, he wasn't about to donate his wealth to Timorese orphans or give up a spare kidney, but he just had a nice, relaxed demeanor about him, the kind that lets you know he doesn't fly off the handle the first time you drip foodstuffs on his exquisite double-breasted suit.

Yeah, he dressed great too.

Anyway, that was June 10, just five weeks before he drove out to the Essex County Airport and hopped into a single-engine Piper and flew himself and his wife and her sister off into a stinking hot haze, never to be seen alive again.

As is often the case with celebs at parties, few people dared to approach Kennedy when I saw him. Fame is intimidating; that's probably the only part about it that sucks. I've had similar experiences with Dave Barry and Roger Ebert at parties; if it weren't for my elevated blood-alcohol level at the time, no one would have talked to the poor guys.

But here's the strange thing: I have a vivid, very recent memory of shaking hands with a guy who would be lying dead at the bottom of the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean (moments after experiencing time-distorted seconds of God-knows-how-much terror), his body strapped in the wreckage until someone got around to pulling him out. Until last Friday, he was just another guy with plans and nuisances and aches and pains who liked certain music and hated certain books, and now he simply doesn't exist. I've known other people who died, of course, but I've never been able to accept or understand that people just end. Just whenever. It's lunacy, obviously. Who thought up such a stupid system?

In coming months we'll be peppered with post-JFK Jr. media madness: Will Caroline carry on the legacy? Can post-JFK Jr. George continue to collect enough ad revenue to survive? Who will get his stuff? Could the plane crash have been avoided? Is the inane media coverage of breaking news with no developments whatsoever -- this beach resort town is flooded with satellite trucks -- appropriate? But none of that crap matters to me. What matters to me is that, for a minute, I shook hands with a guy who seemed pretty nice and that -- just like that -- he isn't around anymore.

(Ted Rall, a cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, has had cartoons published in George magazine.)