News

Late socialite John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s former childhood sweetheart and lover has turned the journals she wrote to cope with the grief of her ex-boyfriend's death into a new book about her time with American 'royalty'.

Actress Christina Haag, 50, enjoyed a five-year romance with Kennedy, Jr. in the 1980s and she recounts the special relationship she had with President John F. Kennedy's son in her memoir Come to the Edge.

She tells the Los Angeles Times newspaper, "What I was really writing about is a love story, and it happens to be with a boy I met in high school, lived with in college as roommates and then fell in love with when I was about 25.

"We were together about five years and parted. The person happens to be John. It's not a book about the Kennedy family. It's a love story and a story of friendship. I began writing in 2003... I began writing after his death just to deal with my grief. It was several years later that it was a real desire to capture that time in my life and to hold on to those memories and embrace them."...

John F Kennedy Jr’s former lover Christina Haag has revealed how the man had a penchant for tantric sex and smoked marijuana. Haag reveals in her forthcoming memoir that the pair was offered an ‘enormous spliff’ by some islanders after they almost drowned at sea while kayaking. “He’d secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. He had also packed something else – a book on tantric sex a friend had given him after returning from Thailand,” the Daily Mail quoted her as writing in the book. She added that Kennedy was shook up after the kayaking incident. “Unable to be still, he ...

John F Kennedy Jr’s former lover Christina Haag has revealed how the man had a penchant for tantric sex and smoked marijuana. Haag reveals in her forthcoming memoir that the pair was offered an ‘enormous spliff’ by some islanders after they almost drowned at sea while kayaking. “He’d secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. He had also packed something else – a book on tantric sex a friend had given him after returning from Thailand,” the Daily Mail quoted her as writing in the book. She added that Kennedy was shook up after the kayaking incident. “Unable to be still, he ...

John F Kennedy Jr’s former lover Christina Haag has revealed how the man had a penchant for tantric sex and smoked marijuana. Haag reveals in her forthcoming memoir that the pair was offered an ‘enormous spliff’ by some islanders after they almost drowned at sea while kayaking. “He’d secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. He had also packed something else – a book on tantric sex a friend had given him after returning from Thailand,” the Daily Mail quoted her as writing in the book. She added that Kennedy was shook up after the kayaking incident. “Unable to be still, he ...

John F Kennedy Jr’s former lover Christina Haag has revealed how the man had a penchant for tantric sex and smoked marijuana. Haag reveals in her forthcoming memoir that the pair was offered an ‘enormous spliff’ by some islanders after they almost drowned at sea while kayaking. “He’d secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. He had also packed something else – a book on tantric sex a friend had given him after returning from Thailand,” the Daily Mail quoted her as writing in the book. She added that Kennedy was shook up after the kayaking incident. “Unable to be still, he ...

John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s former girlfriend Christina Haag has opened up about their relationship in a new tell-all book, recalling the late star's love of danger and a near-death experience during a vacation.

The elder son of assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy dated the actress for five years in the 1980s, prior to his marriage to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.

Haag has now recalled her time with Kennedy, Jr. in her new memoir, Come to the Edge, and in excerpts published in Vanity Fair magazine, she details a brush with death in Jamaica during a kayaking expedition.

The pair went out on the ocean without life jackets but they were plunged underwater as they attempted to make their way back to shore, and Haag was convinced she was facing death.

She writes, "This is it. This is how it ends. We are going to die together. This is what it means to drown. My lungs hurt, and as we crested a steep wave, I coughed, spat water, and clung to the edge of the boat with my head down. I waited, fully expecting to be flung backward out of the boat, but we made it over. I looked back at him, amazed, and saw that he had never stopped. He'd never given up... and we were coursing past the break to safety."

Haag also reveals that after the incident, Kennedy, Jr. was oblivious to the danger they had been in. She told him, "John, we could have died," and he replied, "Yeah, Chief, but what a way to go."

Kennedy, Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999.

Photographs: left, by L.J.W./Contact Press Images; right, by Laura Cavanaugh/Globe Photos.“Let’s go dancing, Baby!,” J.F.K. Jr. wrote on a card accompanying flowers he sent to Christina Haag—the woman he dated for five years over the latter half of the 1980s—after she broke her foot while horseback riding. “He wanted me to be a trouper, a sport,” Haag writes in a Vanity Fair excerpt from her memoir, which illuminates Kennedy’s compulsion to live on the edge. In her story, she recalls a kayak expedition during a Jamaican vacation that nearly killed the both of them and demonstrated daredevil proclivities that eerily foreshadowed Kennedy’s tragic death ten years later: “Just a little farther, Chief. It’ll be fun,” Kennedy told Haag the first time they set out to explore the unknown ocean waters. (He called her Chief; she called him King.

A former girlfriend of John F. Kennedy Jr. is being paid over $1 million for a memoir detailing her relationship with the late hunk, who reportedly cheated on her with pop star Madonna. Actress Christina Haag, a former girlfriend and college housemate of Kennedy's, has secured a $1.2 million advance for her upcoming book. A source tells the New York Daily News, "They knew each other from (attending) Brown (University), so the book is going to cover the party years." Last year, another one of Kennedy's close college friends, Billy Noonan, declared that Kennedy had a sexual fling with Madonna while he was dating Haag in his memoir. The book will also reportedly include details on Haag's difficult relationship with John's mother, Jacqueline Onassis. A source adds, "Jackie never approved of Christina because she was an actress." The book is being published by Doubleday Imprint Spiegel & Grau, who signed the secret deal with Haag in November. The notoriously-private Onassis worked as an editor for Doubleday in New York City in her final years.

Pasadena Playhouse

Through Feb. 22

British playwright Tom Stoppard has developed a sort of brilliant and brainy drawing-room comedy-drama that is his unmistakable signature. From the enigmatic "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" in 1967 to his latest, "The Invention of Love" (playing at London's National Theatre), Stoppard has managed to blend an inordinate amount of research, dazzling language and fascinating ideas. Along the way, he's managed to win a couple Tonys and New York Drama Critics Awards.

All this is vital preamble to Stoppard's "The Real Thing" (written in 1982). At best, it's solid stuff -- still a far cry from a Stoppard production at its best. Somehow, director Sheldon Epps has let the production flatten out and become much too academic and preachy.

Stoppard is never meant to be preachy. He's clever, biting, witty, passionate, ironic, enigmatic and full of incredible language and questions about the nature of writing (Stoppard is one of theater's great wordsmiths in the tradition of Shakespeare) and tenuous and ever-changing human relationships. With Stoppard, you really have to lean in, listen and ultimately work.

When the show was first staged more than a decade ago, it was done swiftly with a series of shifting panels, which blended past and present into a continuum -- part of Stoppard's conceit. With the revolving set of scenic designer James Leonard Joy and the lighting of Michael Gilliam, "The Real Thing" seems slower and set in an onstage world of reality instead of Stoppard's world of poetic leaps and bounds, where anything goes.

"The Real Thing" centers on playwright Henry (the apt Jeff Allin) and his search for the core of relationships, especially with his former actress-wife Charlotte (the solid Colette Kilroy), his current actress-wife Annie (the lovely Christina Haag) and teenage daughter Debbie (Annie Meisels, who is quite good). Scott Ferrara, David Purdham and David Mann add able support.

Against this backdrop of backstage relationships is the onstage business of Henry's plays, in which actors appear to act out their backstage relationship. As such, we get to see it both ways, once as theater and once as life, hence "the real thing." Soon the fact and the fiction blend, and we are left with the task of sorting things out for ourselves. It's not a simple task but well worth the effort.

THE REAL THING

Pasadena Playhouse

Director: Sheldon Epps

Playwright: Tom Stoppard

Scenic design: James Leonard Joy

Lighting design: Michael Gilliam

Costume design: Marianna Elliott

Sound design: Jeff Ladman

Cast:

Henry: Jeff Allin

Billy: Scott Ferrara

Annie: Christina Haag

Charlotte: Colette Kilroy

Brodie: David Mann

Debbie: Annie Meisels

Max: David Purdham...