Attachments

By Patricia Blake

THE BEST OF FRIENDS by David Michaelis Morrow; 318 pages; $14.95

When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune," said Emerson. Still, he was bemused: "I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter." One hundred and forty years later, sociologists have probed the phenomenon of male bonding, and movies have celebrated buddies in times of war and peace. But deep attachments between men still activate suspicions of misogyny or homosexuality. Few books have been written about the real friendships of real people. Thus it took a quantum of cultural courage for David Michaelis, 25, to undertake the subject. It was worth the plunge.

In The Best of Friends, Michaelis examines seven friendships. In each case, he displays a conspicuous gift for drawing out his subjects, such as the torrentially voluble, visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, 87, and his friend of 50 years, the laconic sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, 78. Michaelis, a 1979 Princeton graduate, is most successful at re-creating the Ivy League background of the lifelong friendship between George Love, 82, and Donold Lourie, 83. Both men, who went on to become heads of families and the chiefs, respectively, of Chrysler and Quaker Oats, never ceased to view themselves as the golden boys of Princeton's class of '22. Vastly popular leaders at a time when undergraduates spoke of having a college "career," the pair headed virtually every campus organization. "They understood one another with a kind of sweet simplicity," Michaelis writes. "Theirs was a friendship uncomplicated by demands, jealousy, competition." On Class Day, the awards chairman slapped a pair of handcuffs on them, "so that even graduation would not separate them." It was a fitting jest. When the two men donated Lourie-Love Hall to Princeton in 1964, the original handcuffs were preserved in the cornerstone of the new dormitory.

John F. Kennedy and K. LeMoyne ("Lem") Billings became best friends in the early 1930s at the Choate School, an elitist institution then run on authoritarian lines. Both boys were rebels. Born underdogs they had been "almost the runts" of their respective litters. Jack was chronically ill; Lem had grown up "scrawny" and "practically blind." Neither boy was a match for his older brother. As Kennedy's nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. puts it, "When Lem and Jack got together, it was almost as if they were thumbing their noses at the world."

Billings, who was less successful than Kennedy with women and who never married, was the target of some of J.F.K.'s affectionate jokes. The President once invited Greta Garbo to dinner at the White House with Billings, who was immensely proud of having squired the actress around the Italian Riviera the previous summer. By prearrangement with Kennedy, Garbo loudly professed never to have set eyes on Billings before that evening.

Michaelis' account of the book's final pair of friends, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, comes as something of a shock. The relationship between the two antic entertainers is like a half nelson after a series of handshakes. Aykroyd's attachment to his friend, dead of a drug over dose in 1982, sometimes edges close to hysteria: "Whenever Danny Aykroyd drives by [Belushi's] graveyard, he always honks his car horn -- long and loud -- on the good chance that somewhere, somehow, in some form, John can hear it."

That is not quite what Emerson had in mind in his 1841 essay on "Friendship." Still, in all seven cases, Michaelis aptly demonstrates what the transcendentalist meant when he said that men are bound "by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope . . . by every circumstance and badge and trifle." By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.