LARRY FLYNT
Publisher, Hustler

He invited me as his personal guest to the White House correspondents' dinner in May. A couple days later, he called me because some of the East Coast press had taken a swipe at him for bringing me along -- as you know, there's no upside for a public figure to have Larry Flynt as a friend. So he tells me, "I'm getting a lot of heat, you know, for inviting you." And I said, "I'm really sorry," and he says, "Oh, no, no, I'm loving every minute of it!"

I had first met him at a party for George magazine. I got an invitation out of the blue to a party he was throwing in New York. He and Carolyn spent almost the entire night talking with me, mostly about publishing. After that, we talked every once in a while on the telephone. I'm amazed that we never did have a discussion about his mother. You can understand why it would not be appropriate for me to bring it up, but he didn't, either. There was a person, once, who attempted to sabotage our friendship, asking him how he could be friends with the man who published nude photographs of his mother in Hustler in 1975. His response was "I'm a Kennedy. I'm thick-skinned."

ANN LOUISE BARDACH
Writer

I was writing this story for George about Mary Bono, and John told me that she had waged this campaign to kill it. He'd been at an event in Washington a couple of weeks before, and she had come over to him. He said, "I'm sitting there, and I have this broken foot in a cast, this helpless person, and this woman comes over. She's towering over me and starts in, 'Is your writer out to ruin me? What is your magazine doing? How could she ask me these questions?' " And John said to her, "You're complaining about the press to the wrong person."

PAUL BEIRNE
Principal, Sanford Bernstein & Co.

Last year, John and I were talking at the Municipal Art Society dinner, and Ashton Hawkins, who was a great friend of Mrs. Onassis, came up. John said, "Hello, Mr. Hawkins," in a very formal manner, and after a pause, everyone started laughing, because this was a holdover from how his mother told him to address his elders and he was acknowledging it and laughing about it. Twenty years of training really had taken their toll.

SUSANNA HOWE

One night, we were working late -- Gary Ginsberg and John and I -- and we decided to go to the U.S. Open. Gary was like, "Let's go! Let's go!" So we all jumped in John's car and drove out there. We didn't have tickets, so we scalped them, and they turned out to be really good seats. It was one of those really beautiful late-summer nights -- I think Michael Chang was playing.

At one point, John and I went to buy ice cream, and somebody took a picture of the two of us. It ran the next day in the Post! It was a really big picture -- really blurry, because the photographer had been really far away -- and it said something stupid like courting in flushing meadows. Which was completely erroneous. We laughed about it -- it was absolutely no big deal. It was obviously much weirder for me than it was for him.