Tuesday, October 11, 2005
William Kennedy Smith
William Kennedy Smith, aka Willie circa 1986, roomed next to me in the Bryn Mawr College dorms during our opening round in the premedical postbaccalaureate year there. Actually he spent more time in my room, discussing in no particular order - Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies, his disdain for the press (I was a reporter for dailies in West Palm and western Colorado and an easy target), his wayward cousins (again I had coincidentally been standing next to his cousin David in a bar the night before he died in Palm Beach). One night I took a late shower and found my door open with Willie bouncing on my bed, doing a dance called "The Clam" from an early 60s Avalon pic.
"C'mon Doctor Dan" Let's do the clam." He was hard to refuse, in any and all cases, but I just gawked. That was typical Willie, leading with his impulse.
Another day, we drove to the pool on the Pew estate that Bryn Mawrters could use in summer school. We jumped the fence after hours and Willie commenced to strip. Turns out he was a huge skinny-dipper, as were his cousins. I decided not to strip and when a campus police cruiser flashed its lights on the pool on patrol, I ducked beneath the surface.
"Why'd you do that," Willie asked. He was angry.
"Because Willie," I said, "guess which one of us doesn't get kicked out in the morning if we're caught." It would have never occurred to him that there were limits, or that there might be consequence to action. Willie would just have to make a few calls to smooth things over, I bet.
On another occasion, Mister Smith, hungry and peeved that the dorm cafeteria and pantry were closed, fashioned a rope out of tied bedsheets and swung like Tarzan from a dorm room window to an open pantry window, a distance of 15 feet -- at 3 stories up -- and after 5 minutes, emerged, his shirt stuffed with miniature breakfast cereal boxes. And all the while, Willie was yelling "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."
The summer before he entered Georgetown Med, he left me the key to his carriage house rental in nearby Haverford and asked me to take care of the plants. Every week I went in to water the plants and pick up the mail, but one of the plants died. When Willie came back from vacation, he unloaded. No thanks for the time I had spent helping him gratis. Nope. He chewed me out and told me he could never trust me. I felt like Mister Roberts in the movie -- I should have thrown the damn thing overboard.
So ended my year in the vicinity of a Kennedy, a really intelligent, articulate guy with a wild streak. When my old paper The Palm Beach Post was covering his rape trial, I did a phone interview with a Post reporter and reminisced. Virtually no other story ever mentioned his Bryn Mawr year, instead concentrating on his undergrad experiences at Duke and med school in DC. I had some complimentary things to say, on the record, and the Post used about 6-8 paragraphs in a profile.
The epilogue - Willie went to UNM for internal medicine, then to Northwestern for rehab medicine, where he practices today.
"C'mon Doctor Dan" Let's do the clam." He was hard to refuse, in any and all cases, but I just gawked. That was typical Willie, leading with his impulse.
Another day, we drove to the pool on the Pew estate that Bryn Mawrters could use in summer school. We jumped the fence after hours and Willie commenced to strip. Turns out he was a huge skinny-dipper, as were his cousins. I decided not to strip and when a campus police cruiser flashed its lights on the pool on patrol, I ducked beneath the surface.
"Why'd you do that," Willie asked. He was angry.
"Because Willie," I said, "guess which one of us doesn't get kicked out in the morning if we're caught." It would have never occurred to him that there were limits, or that there might be consequence to action. Willie would just have to make a few calls to smooth things over, I bet.
On another occasion, Mister Smith, hungry and peeved that the dorm cafeteria and pantry were closed, fashioned a rope out of tied bedsheets and swung like Tarzan from a dorm room window to an open pantry window, a distance of 15 feet -- at 3 stories up -- and after 5 minutes, emerged, his shirt stuffed with miniature breakfast cereal boxes. And all the while, Willie was yelling "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."
The summer before he entered Georgetown Med, he left me the key to his carriage house rental in nearby Haverford and asked me to take care of the plants. Every week I went in to water the plants and pick up the mail, but one of the plants died. When Willie came back from vacation, he unloaded. No thanks for the time I had spent helping him gratis. Nope. He chewed me out and told me he could never trust me. I felt like Mister Roberts in the movie -- I should have thrown the damn thing overboard.
So ended my year in the vicinity of a Kennedy, a really intelligent, articulate guy with a wild streak. When my old paper The Palm Beach Post was covering his rape trial, I did a phone interview with a Post reporter and reminisced. Virtually no other story ever mentioned his Bryn Mawr year, instead concentrating on his undergrad experiences at Duke and med school in DC. I had some complimentary things to say, on the record, and the Post used about 6-8 paragraphs in a profile.
The epilogue - Willie went to UNM for internal medicine, then to Northwestern for rehab medicine, where he practices today.
