Word: want
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thought, What a star, a natural star. I thought I was looking at the kind of beauty that movie stars want and are supposed to have but don't. A face just old enough to be interesting and young enough to be perfect, with the kind of manly features that make you think of the handsome man in a 1950s magazine ad. Thick, shiny black hair, a slim muscular body on which his dark suit draped in soft folds. Afterward, I wondered if it was something like what Scott Fitzgerald saw when he remembered the college football stars...
Where's the famous child? the helicopters want to know. Where's John-John, who became, in time, the Kennedys' hunk Telemachus, next in the family's line of dreamboats and (in the tabloid version) satyrs and--can it be?--latest to fall before some mystery of bad karma on a dynastic scale...
...vulgar to demand meaning in what may be, after all, just the piling on of bad luck arriving in bizarrely unusual clusters? We want Sophocles or Shakespeare--or, rather, in our day, tear-drenched mass-media renderings of equivalent tragedies--to broadcast inflated significances, messages from God. (We have before us the ghastly example of Diana's death and the mawkish excesses that followed.) But maybe we are merely in the presence of outrageous fortune. To my mind, standing on this beach, the Kennedys' accumulation of dooms seems as inarticulate as the boulders that the glacier left...
...only one again of that trio that faced a life so peculiar that only they could understand one another. "They rarely made a decision without checking with the other," said a board member of Harvard's Kennedy School. Jackie sheltered them from the garish glare. "I don't want my children to live here anymore," she said in anguish after Bobby's assassination, fearing America's violence. She was also wary of the immense pull of the hyperactive clan and the demons that came with it. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told Jackie at Caroline's wedding how striking the closeness...
...what few details of the family's hardscrabble upbringing remain undocumented. It may be a crowded McCourt season. Frank's sequel, 'Tis, is one of the most anticipated books of the fall, and Malachy has a contract for his own follow-up. Insatiable fans of the literary clan might want to save room on their bookshelves: a fourth brother, Michael, will surely find his literary voice shortly...