The four friends had been doing some strenuous paddling under the Baja sun, and as soon as they pulled their ocean kayaks up onto the deserted beach, John Kennedy plunged into the Pacific. It was a glorious day in the mid-1980s. Kennedy; his girlfriend at the time, actress Christina Haag; and their old friends Lynn Weinstein and Billy Straus were vacationing together, communing with the extraordinary gray whales in Magdalena Bay. Now the others were relaxing on the beach, not paying much attention as Kennedy swam farther and farther out into the open sea, well beyond the big lines of breakers rolling toward shore--until the friends suddenly realized they couldn't see him at all. They stood onshore, panicking and scanning the horizon, wondering whether and where and how to go after him. Finally, after a few gut-wrenching minutes, says Straus, "all of a sudden he just reappeared." Emerging from the heavy surf--dripping, exhilarated, wondering what all the fuss was about. "I've been with him in a few difficult situations, and he's always come out the other side."
Which is why, on Saturday morning, when Straus and other close friends of Kennedy saw the first nonstop coverage of Kennedy's missing plane, they were more than skeptical. The media were going crazy about John again--nothing new there--and though it surely looked dire, he just had to be all right. He was the "Master of Disaster," always getting into scrapes but escaping. Perhaps he and Carolyn and her sister Lauren had ditched the plane and hitchhiked out of there, or maybe they were holed up on the beach of a tiny uninhabited island Kennedy knew, waiting to be discovered and sharing a little joke at the world.
All this seemed possible because John F. Kennedy Jr. had such a complex relationship with his own fame--sometimes amused, often appalled, always highly ironic toward the weirdness in which he lived. He had to get away from it sometimes--to Baja, to Alaska, up in the Piper Saratoga--because his celebrity had never not been there. He couldn't tell you where the media images of his childhood ended and his own memories began, and learning to live with its effects hadn't been easy. People were always approaching him, always wanting something from him, but he stood in the fray and treated them graciously. "He assumed the best about people and never became cynical about their motives," his close friend Dave Eikenberry told TIME, "and that's amazing, given the sycophants and leg humpers he had to deal with every day. It took enormous fortitude for him to stay well grounded in the face of his bizarre celebrity, but he did it. Besides which, he was just the best guy to do stuff with I've ever known. I'm going to miss him for the rest of my life."