Christina Haag Recalls JFK Jr. and Five-Year Love Affair

Monday, May 23, 2011

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Contributor

In the last hours of one of the rare sunny days this spring, Brown alumna and actress Christina Haag described the sunny spring of Providence in 1982—the season she fell in love with John F. Kennedy Jr.

Haag, who graduated from Brown that year, has just written a memoir about her five-year relationship with JFK Jr. entitled Come to the Edge. She met Kennedy in Manhattan as a teen and the couple was reunited in their collegiate years at Brown in the late 1970s.

The author returned to her alma mater to read a few passages on early Friday evening and answer questions from the small but attentive audience. Her continued affection for her school is clear, and Haag comfortably read a long, detailed passage that described her walking through campus and the surrounding East Side.

Living together on Benefit Street

Haag and Kennedy lived in a large house on Benefit Street together, with Christiane Amanpour, the famed ABC anchor, among others. In her detailing of her relationship with Kennedy, Haag mentions a variety of Providence landmarks. She recalls street corners and ivied buildings with studious precision.

The rendering of her love affair with Kennedy in Come to the Edge is sentimental; Janet Maslin wrote in her book review in New York Times that some passages are reminiscent only of a “dewiest romance novel.”

A worthy trip backwards in time

However, Haag’s portrait of Providence and Brown in the late 70s and early 80s is a worthy trip backwards in time.

The campus that she remembers was filled with hippy idealism; she lived in a co-op in Waterman Street “so filthy” that her parents refused to enter. She remembers tofu lasagna, Allman Brothers records, large sheets hung from dorm room windows that read “No Nukes” and “End Apartheid Now”.

She describes Carrie Tower at the corner of Prospect and Waterman Streets. In a sentimental, though genuine reference to her relationship with Kennedy, she quotes the passage carved into its base from memory: “Love is strong as death.”

Within the tale of Haag’s love affair with JFK Jr., there is a loving and carefully written portrait of Providence in the early 1980s. The city and campus are clearly still beloved to the author, who gazed out the window onto Thayer Street as she told the crowd, “I am so pleased to be here in this city that meant a great deal to me in my formative years. Its beauty stays with me.”