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Christopher Kennedy Lawford
Christopher
Kennedy Lawford
No Penalty for Early Withdrawal
by Ronald Sklar
Copyright ©2005
PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: October
22, 2005.
“The brilliance about
being a drug addict and an alcoholic is that I’ve had my worst day,”
Christopher Kennedy Lawford says. “Nobody can do to me what I already did
far worse to myself. In terms of telling the truth about myself, no matter
how much condemnation or disagreement I get from people, I’ve done far
worse to myself.”
Lawford is telling the
truth about himself as he performs a brave and scary task in his new book,
Symptoms of Withdrawal (William Morrow). Though he is almost two
decades sober and drug free, he is exposing a vulnerable nerve and beaming
an unblinking light into the far reaches of his dark side. This is a rare
and unusual move for a member of America’s Royal Family, all of whom are
accustomed to having their every step chronicled and their every weakness
magnified, but very rarely do they personally tell-all, minus the
hearts and flowers.
Face it (as he has) and
ask yourself: if I’m born into a very public family, who am I?
The completion of his
book, which chronicles his uneasy journey, allowed him to emerge with some
definitive answers.
“It was so amazingly
cathartic,” he says. “To write it was wonderful. I’ve never had any
regrets in terms of any of the stuff that was in it. I truly believe that
we’re only as sick as our secrets. I truly believe that one of the
difficulties in the world regarding relationships is when people are being
other than who they say they are. One of the greatest things that you can
do is realize who you are and what your truth is. People may not like that
or want to hang out with you or have anything to do with you, but that’s
their prerogative and you’ll find some people who do.”
Warning: If you’re
looking to dig through the Kennedys’ garbage can, you’ll come up with some
trash, but nothing you can sell on eBay. Still, you can’t completely
separate the man from the family – so yes, Lawford has plenty to say about
Camelot’s rise and fall, and about his own famous father, actor Peter
Lawford, who suffered his own plummet into an inescapable haze of alcohol
and drugs, which eventually took his life.
Before the tragic end,
did the Lawford father and son have a happy ending of bonding and
revelation?
“Not really,” Lawford
laments. “We had a very specific relationship. We engaged in all sort of
inappropriate behavior. That was bonding on some level, but it is not the
kind of bonding that I would choose to do today. I regret that we could
not have a more significant, more appropriate way of bonding, but it was
the best either of us could do at the time. I love my father and I know he
loves me. I carry my sobriety for him, and I think that his death had a
lot to do with me getting sober.”
Christopher Lawford’s
own introduction to addictive substances happened while at a private
boarding school. He recalls, “When I was fourteen years old, my friends
had asked me to do [LSD trips] with them, and I knew that it was wrong,
but I did it anyway, and that sent me on this journey. I truly believe
that my addiction was brought on by three things – a perfect addictive
storm, if you will. One: a genetic predisposition; two: the times I grew
up in, which were very different than they are today. People did not have
an awareness of this problem to the extent that they do today. There was a
lot more tolerance of experimentation [back then]; the third thing: the
circumstances of my life were scary and somewhat painful. I come from
divorce, which is painful for a kid. Two of my uncles had very public
murders. And that’s scary. Those three things together provided an
opportunity for me to do what I did, and then I ran with it.”
Sure, as a child he hung
out in the White House with Uncles John, Bobby and Teddy, and sure, his
father allowed him a front-row seat to the infamous ring-a-ding-ding
banter of the Hollywood Rat Pack, and without a doubt, he enjoyed close
friendships with his cousins (including John F. Kennedy, Jr. and David
Kennedy), but this book is ultimately about Christopher. It’s about his
descent into Hell and his eventual rise from the ashes. His supportive
family happens to be with him and they naturally rally around him for that
bumpy ride, but they take a back seat.
He professes nothing but
love and respect for his clan, but he also admits, “One of the great gifts
in writing this book is that I don’t ever have to talk about my family
again. From now on, anybody who asks me about my family, I can say, ‘I
don’t talk about that anymore – go read my book.’”
Like most of the
thousands of Kennedy books that line the bookstore shelves, this one is
brutal (even though it’s Lawford being brutal on himself), but unlike most
Kennedy books, it’s free of an agenda.
Of the print obsession
for his family’s equally wonderful and tragic story, he says, “I’ve read a
few [Kennedy books] in terms of some of the research I did for this, just
to get a sense of some things about my parents. Usually, these
outside-the-family [writers] get it fifty per cent wrong. That may be
fifty per cent factually or just that they don’t really put it into
context. It kind of boggles my mind that anybody would even be interested
enough to write these books. Look, if it’s a serious book about my uncles
as political figures, I get that. [But] spending time writing about my
family in terms of the stuff that some of these people write about is mind
boggling to me. I guess it has a lot to do with the money and that they
can sell that book. I don’t spend a lot of time reading that stuff.”
No need to read it when
you’re living it. And live it they do, to the tenth power. The family
matriarch, Rose Kennedy, had once said, “To those to whom much is given,
much is expected.”
Lawford comments on
growing up with that mouthful of a motto: “We do enjoy life and we do
enjoy the gifts that we’ve been given. I love that ethic. I’ve learned
that the two greatest things in life are love and service. That doesn’t
mean that I spend my time chasing those two things. I spend a lot of my
time chasing money, property and prestige, like everybody else in this
country. But I do know – having lived the life I’ve lived – that those
things will not bring me contentment and peace. It will not bring me joy.
What will bring me joy is love and service. Selfless service. I appreciate
the fact that my family gave me that ethic. It has been engrained in my
life to one degree or another. I practice it very imperfectly but I’m
grateful for that lesson.”
Unlike many of his
relatives, he claims that the title of “World Leader” was not a career
option for him – at least not for now.
He says, “I certainly
thought that maybe I would get to the White House one day, because
everybody grows up knowing that anybody can be President of the United
States – I don’t necessarily believe that – but it’s one of the things
that we are taught from a young age here. After my difficulties and my
arrest, it didn’t seem like that was going to happen. It was clear that I
did not have the makeup in terms of the presentation or the inner strength
to do something like that. I’ve always been interested in politics,
because once you are exposed to it, especially at a young age, it’s a very
compelling world. It’s exciting. It means a lot. The people who are in it
are more or less dynamic. There are a lot of aspects to it that are
interesting. Plus, I grew up in a family in which public service was part
of our ethic. I still have that feeling. I would never run for office now,
because I think the process is so broken on so many levels that to be
really effective is so difficult.
“My Uncle Teddy manages
to do it but he’s a genius at it and he’s been doing it for thirty odd
years. I respect and admire what he does there. But he has to do a lot of
things that I can never do. You have to compromise and you have to be
patient. These are not qualities that I’m terribly good at. I’m not sure
that I would be very good at it. That’s not to say that one day I might
not just get fed up enough to run. But I’m much too radical to get elected
anywhere but very few populations in this country. My views are way left.
But we’ll see. We’ll see.”
In the meantime, three
family members are especially vital to his journey back to life: his three
children, David, Savannah
and Matthew, to whom he dedicates the book. He says, “This is an oral
history for them. They can come back to me and ask me stuff about me that
might be generated from reading the book. It’s a beginning point. They can
see it. They can touch it. They can feel it. They can read it and
re-examine it. That book is a very good representation of my life and who
I am as an individual. To be a good father [is what I’m striving to be].
And not to be right all the time, and not to be sane all the time, but to
be present and consistent, pretty much all the time. Some days are better
than others, and I’ve made some mistakes in terms of my relationships with
my kids, and I’ve made some choices for myself that my kids don’t
necessarily agree with. Getting a divorce from my wife is not a decision
that my kids liked, and it’s not a decision that they necessarily
accepted, and it has impacted our relationship. But we were able to
maintain a relationship in the face of that pain – and that is also
another gift of sobriety.”
Ultimately, what does
sobriety mean for Lawford?
“Everything,” he says.
“It means the ability to truly live and realize my life; it means the
opportunity to make mistakes and correct them; it means the ability to be
conscious of my life, to have relationships that are present and
meaningful; it means having the ability to take advantage of all the stuff
that I have been given in my life; it means that I can have a conscious
contact with a power greater than me, that I can have a spiritual life. It
means that I can – as my grandmother [Rose] said, live life fully, in all
of its joys and its duties. If I was still using, I would be dead,
certainly, but I would not be able to do any of those things.”
One of the passions he
continues to pursue is acting. He had a long-running role on the ABC soap,
All My Children, and is working with Anthony Hopkins in the
upcoming film, The World’s Fastest Indian.
However, he will
continue to find joy in writing.
“[Writing a memoir] is a
really new experience for me,” he says. “Finding a voice – and getting it
down on paper was a new, freeing wonderful experience. I had no idea I
could do it. My mother said that I could do it and I didn’t believe her.
And I found out at 48 that I could do it. One of the great gifts of this
book is to find out that I could do something that I never thought I could
do. Many people have this gift. If this book proves anything, is take a
chance to do something. I was lucky because somebody paid me to do this,
because I’m a member of the Kennedy family and they figured they’re going
to get a Kennedy book and they could sell that and they paid me for it.
Most people can’t get paid to write their books. But that doesn’t mean
they shouldn’t write them. Believe me, the least good thing about this
book was the ‘getting paid for it’ part. Not that getting paid isn’t good,
but compared to all the other gifts I got from it, getting paid was at the
bottom of the list.
“There is a freedom to
this. I grew up in a very public family. So on some level, my emancipation
has to be public. I’ve written an honest book about who I am. Now there
are no more secrets or angst. It is what it is and now I can move on.”
