The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As Ethel took it all down, Ted dictated a brief statement that basically explained that Michael had volunteered to enroll in a rehabilitation program in Maryland, the Father Martin’s Ashley center in Havre de Grace, northeast of Baltimore. He would enter on February 1.

  The press release would be issued to the media in the morning.

  A Deal with the Devil?

  Victoria Denise Gifford—Vicki—hadn’t been raised to be a quitter. After all, her father, Frank, had been a Hall of Fame football player for the New York Giants back in the fifties, playing both offense and defense. He was as ambitious as he was talented, determined to not only make his mark on the sport but to also have his children use the example of his success as a guide for their own lives. Frank had married Vicki’s mother, Maxine Avis Ewart, in 1952. They had three children, Jeff, Kyle, and then Victoria, on February 20, 1957.

  After Frank Gifford retired from the Giants in 1964, he became a popular sportscaster on ABC’s Monday Night Football. In the seventies and eighties, he was instantly recognizable as an affable, handsome personality with the square-jawed and chiseled-face looks of a movie star. In his private life, though, he had his challenges: Maxine suffered from multiple sclerosis, and even though their marriage had failed, he was determined to support her, making sure she had what she needed financially to do battle with her insidious disease. He was a good man who lived by the strength of his convictions.

  Frank’s daughter, the blond and blue-eyed Vicki, was also made of tough stuff. By the time she married Michael Kennedy in 1981, she was twenty-four, college educated, and raised to not only excel in life but to be smart about her choices. Still, some thought that she was too young to know what she was getting herself into by marrying into a complicated family like the Kennedys. She’d only had one boyfriend prior to Michael, and it was not serious. Michael was her first love, and he wasn’t exactly easy to understand.

  By 1994, after thirteen years of marriage, Vicki had long ago been disabused of any illusions she’d ever had of Michael being any different from many of his male relatives. He’d been cheating on her for years, and she knew it. That summer, while at the Cape, Vicki told one of her sisters-in-law that there were days when it was all she could do to force herself to get dressed, put on some makeup, and get on with things. Sometimes what she most wanted to do, she said, was to curl up into a little ball and never leave the house. If not for her kids, that’s probably what she would do, she admitted.

  At the time, Vicki and this sister-in-law were walking along the beach in front of Rose and Joe’s home, commiserating about their bad marriages. To stay or to leave, that was the dilemma. For now, these Kennedy wives decided to stay. However, they agreed that it was as if they’d made a deal with the devil. They couldn’t help but reflect upon other women like them from the previous generation who, though deeply wounded by Kennedy patriarchy and infidelity, had made the same bargain. How often had they consoled each other while walking this very same stretch of shoreline? This wasn’t the 1960s, though. It was 1994. However, apparently, some things never changed.

  According to this account, the sisters-in-law also talked about something they’d both heard through the family’s grapevine: Joan Kennedy had, in recent weeks, decided she wanted to see the bridge at Chappaquiddick her ex-husband, Ted, had driven off and killed Mary Jo Kopechne, back in 1969. Joan had waited twenty-five long, painful years before she could muster the courage to go to that fateful site and see it for herself. When she finally did, she thought she’d be awash in emotion considering the destruction that accident had caused to the Kopechnes and the Kennedys, not to mention her marriage. She had even had a miscarriage because of it. Instead, as she later told it, she felt … nothing.

  “Poor Joan,” Vicki said. “She’s dead inside, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” her sister-in-law agreed. “Dead inside.”

  “Is the price of power just too high?” the sister-in-law asked.

  According to this account, Vicki mulled over the question and, true to her pragmatic nature, answered, “Maybe. Or perhaps a better question is: Why can’t these men just keep their dicks in their pants?”

  About six months had passed since that moment on the beach shared by Vicki and her sister-in-law. Now it was January 22, 1995, three weeks since the family’s intervention for Michael. Coincidentally, it was also the last day of Kennedy matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life. At 104, she’d been a widow for twenty-six years, since the death of her beloved husband, Joseph P. Kennedy, back in 1969.

  Very early that morning before that sun had risen, Vicki awakened with a feeling of dread, a sense of alarm. Maybe it was an intuition that her grandmother-in-law was taking her last breath, or maybe it was something else. All she knew was that she was uneasy and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  Vicki rose from her bed, put on a robe, and looked around the room. It was dark; she turned on a light. That’s when she realized Michel was not in bed. Confused, she left the room and slowly walked down the hall, searching one room after the other for him. Maybe he was in one of the children’s bedrooms, she thought. A good and caring father, Michael would often lie in bed with one of the kids if the child awakened with a bad dream and called out for Mommy or Daddy. He wasn’t in any of their rooms, though; in fact, he seemed nowhere to be found. Something, as she would later recall, then began to draw her like a magnet to the room Marisa Verrochi now slept in since having moved in with the family. Slowly, Vicki made her way to that spare room. She cracked open the door, peered inside … and that’s when she got maybe the biggest shock of her life: Michael was in bed with Marisa.

  She couldn’t help herself; according to what she later told family members, Vicki screamed loudly, the piercing sound filling the enormous home and waking up her children, who began to cry. Michael then explained that he’d been drunk and had stumbled through the darkened house and somehow—he couldn’t imagine how, he said—found his way into Marisa’s bed. By this time, the teenage girl was also crying so hard, Vicki wasn’t even able to get her side of the story.

  With the scene so quickly out of control and emotions running hot, Michael started to babble on about his addiction. He said it was worse than Vicki knew and that he had hidden the severity of it from her for a long time. He must have been drunk, or high, or … who knows? He also pointed out that he and Marisa were both dressed in pajamas, so obviously nothing untoward was going on between them. Besides, she was only sixteen, he noted. (Marisa would turn seventeen in a week’s time.) Why would Vicki think the worst of him?

  Actually, to hear her later tell it to relatives, Vicki didn’t know what to think. Her mind was a jumble; she needed time to figure it all out.

  The next day, a distraught Vicki sent the kids to her father’s home and Marisa back to that of her parents. She elected not to tell the Verrochis about what had happened, leaving it up to Marisa to tell them about it if she wanted to do so. But what to do about Michael? Vicki didn’t know the answer to that question. All she knew was that she needed time.

  A Gruesome Discovery

  After the shocking discovery of her husband in bed with the family’s teenaged babysitter, Vicki Kennedy knew she needed help. Could she go to one of Michael’s siblings for it? She wasn’t sure how they would react. Because they were so loyal to one another, she questioned how much support she could expect from them. Therefore, she went to someone else, a Kennedy cousin named Michael Skakel. This man was someone with his own checkered history; he’d actually been at the center of a murder mystery for the last twenty years.

  It had all started back on October 31, 1975, six years before Vicki Gifford had even married Michael Kennedy. It was on that day that Michael’s mother, Ethel, forty-seven at the time, first learned about a crime that would haunt her family for decades to come.

  “What!” Ethel said, answering the phone in the pool house in her inimitable way that Halloween morning. She’d been getting calls for hours and seemed particularly agitated
, so much so that her property manager, Noelle Bombardier, knew to leave her to her privacy. When she finally emerged from the pool house, Ethel seemed weighted down with a problem. Once back in the main house, she received yet another phone call. “What!” Noelle stayed in the kitchen and heard Ethel’s end of the conversation, which was mostly along the lines of her making exclamatory statements such as “There’s no way,” “It can’t be true,” and “I can’t believe it.”

  “I remember thinking, My God, what is this?” recalled Noelle. “Was somebody sick? Did somebody die?”

  Though a Halloween party had been planned for the Kennedys at Hickory Hill that night, Ethel had her own idea for mischief: She planned to go trick-or-treating with Elizabeth Stevens, wife of George Stevens Jr., the longtime producer and writer of the Kennedy Center honors; his father had directed Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun. It was typical of Ethel to want to have her own bit of fun on Halloween. Around five P.M., she pulled Noelle aside. “Help me get dressed,” she told her. The two then walked up the long flight of stairs and down the hall to Ethel’s bedroom. As Ethel started to don her costume, Noelle realized it was a black witch’s ensemble, complete with pointy sorcerer’s hat, clunky shoes, and a broom. After she put the outfit on, Ethel sat down at her vanity and began applying gobs of green makeup to her face. “So, how do I look?” she asked as she whirled around to face Noelle.

  “Fantastic,” Noelle said. “But I think you’ll still be recognized. You are Ethel Kennedy, after all.”

  Ethel chuckled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to wear sunglasses.”

  As the two women made their way downstairs, Noelle asked Ethel what was going on. Handing her the broom that was integral to her costume, Ethel said, “Come with me.” She led her into the drawing room and quickly closed the sliding doors behind them. This was a spacious area designed in a Victorian style with royal colors of gold and burgundy. There were no couches; instead there were several round red oak tables with enormous matching chairs with red velvet coverings, all organized into separate conversation areas. It looked royal if not exactly comfortable. Right in the middle of the room on a silver pedestal and enclosed in a glass box was one of the strangest souvenirs one might ever encounter: a gleaming gold-and-white pope’s miter. When she first started working at Hickory Hill, Noelle had asked to which pope it had belonged. With a mischievous glint in her eye, Ethel said, “Guess. And I’ll tell you if you’re right.” Rather than reveal that she didn’t know the names of very many popes, Noelle just passed on the offer. Therefore, in all her many years working there, she never did find out which pope had donated his miter to Hickory Hill.

  “As you know,” Ethel began, “I’ve had many calls today. They’ve been from the Senator. It looks like maybe…” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Maybe, my nephew Michael Skakel … killed a girl.”

  “Oh my God, Mrs. Kennedy. Who’s the girl?”

  “I think her name is Martha something or other,” Ethel answered.

  “How?”

  Ethel said that the victim’s body had been found in a yard, lying in a pool of blood with a broken golf club next to her. Shuddering, she said Ted told her it had been a particularly gruesome scene. She wasn’t sure why he felt Michael Skakel might be the culprit, “but time will tell, I guess.”

  Years later, Noelle would recall, “Picture it: I’m standing with Ethel Kennedy in a Victorian setting in the middle of which is a pope’s miter in a glass box. She’s dressed in a witch’s costume with green makeup on her face. And she’s telling me that one of her nephews may have slaughtered a girl with a golf club. It was surreal, to say the least. I had to sit down. She sat next to me. ‘I can’t imagine that Michael would do something like this,’ she said, trying to process things. ‘Why, he’s only fifteen.’ ‘Will he be arrested?’ I asked. ‘Who knows?’ Ethel answered. ‘Who the heck knows?’”

  At that moment, the doorbell rang. Ethel took a deep breath. “Can you believe I have to go trick-or-treating now?” she asked. Noelle suggested that maybe she should cancel. “No. Liz is counting on it,” Ethel said. Noelle then handed Ethel her witch’s broom. Ethel looked at it and shook her head at the absurdity of it all. As she walked away, she turned back to Noelle and whispered, “Not a word about this to anyone.”

  * * *

  TWENTY YEARS HAD passed since that fateful day in 1975 when Ethel Kennedy learned of her nephew Michael Skakel’s possible involvement in the murder of Martha Moxley. However, by 1995, he still hadn’t been charged; there simply wasn’t enough evidence against him to support a conviction. However, the case would always linger in the background of his life and in those of the Kennedys. Some family members felt he was guilty of murder, while others weren’t so sure. His aunt Ethel was one of those who believed in his innocence.

  Michael Christopher Skakel was the middle son of seven children fathered by Ethel’s brother Rushton Walter Skakel and his wife, Anne. The Republican Skakels and Democratic Kennedys had feuded over business for years before Ethel married Bobby, and even after the merging of the two families they didn’t get along. Ethel says she was proud to now be a Democrat even if, by her own admission, she says her family “thought I was a little Communist”—and she wasn’t smiling when she said it. “The Skakels supported Nixon, not Jack, in the 1960 election,” recalled Ethel’s brother Jim Skakel in a 1994 interview. “That was tough on Ethel. She managed to let it go without too much of a problem, though. I remember that when Jack was elected, Ethel got a nice block of tickets for the Inauguration. This was supposed to be a really big deal, of course. She gave them to our brother George to distribute to our family. Instead of doing that, George went into the streets and handed them out to bums and hobos. So, on the big day for the Kennedys, these smelly and messy guys ended up sitting right next to all the close friends and relatives of the Kennedys. Ethel was pissed. She gave George hell for that.”

  Michael Skakel didn’t have much to do with his Kennedy relations until sometime in the mid-eighties, when he became sober after a long bout with addiction. He then began hanging out with the Kennedy brothers Bobby Jr. and David and, in the process, became an example of what life could be like sans drugs and alcohol. He’d had a tough childhood but was still a positive and happy person. Bobby would describe him as “a mix between John Candy, John Belushi, and Curly from the Three Stooges. People begin laughing as soon as he enters a room.”

  Largely because of his own recent dependency issues, Michael Skakel had recently become much closer to Michael Kennedy, especially after Kennedy invited him to join him on Ted Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. (In order to distinguish the two, everyone soon began to call Michael Kennedy by his first name and Michael Skakel by his last.) The cousins’ friendship deepened even further as they traveled to Cuba, Portugal, Angola, and Brazil together on business, this after Skakel took a job at Citizens Energy as its international director.

  In the winter of 1994—a couple of months before Vicki discovered him in bed with their babysitter—Michael Kennedy called Michael Skakel to ask if he could visit him and his wife, Margot, at their home in Windham Mountain for a week of skiing. Skakel agreed to the idea. A few days later, Michael showed up with his three kids, but not with Vicki. He explained that she wasn’t well. In her place was Marisa. The Skakels couldn’t help but sense that something wasn’t right with the situation, especially when, on the second night, Michael asked the sixteen-year-old for a massage. “Sure,” she said. After he then took off his shirt and lay on his stomach on the couch, Marisa straddled the thirty-six-year-old athlete and began to apply hot oils to his back, which she just happened to have handy in her purse. “You don’t see something like that every day,” Skakel would later recall. “It made me and Margot uncomfortable. So we went to bed and left the two of them in the living room.” The next day, Skakel didn’t ask Michael about it, and Michael didn’t bring it up.

  Kennedy Detox

  On Sunday, January 22, 1995, the day a
fter Vicki Kennedy’s discovery of Michael and Marisa, she insisted that he needed to check into a rehab center immediately and not wait until February 1. If he was going to cite addiction as the reason he was in bed with Marisa, then fine, she said. He needed to address the problem right away. Without hesitation, he agreed; he must have known he didn’t have much ground to stand on.

  Like her husband, Vicki had also begun to enjoy the company of Michael Skakel, who was lately becoming fairly ubiquitous. She thought he could be trusted and seriously doubted stories that linked him to the brutal Martha Moxley murder. She admired this man who always seemed to have a rosary in his pocket and went to Mass almost every day, and actually felt a lot closer to him than she did to any of her other in-laws. Like her brother-in-law Bobby, she sensed that Skakel was a deeply empathetic person who had a real understanding of flawed humanity. She knew he wouldn’t judge her husband, or even her, for what she’d recently discovered. Therefore, on Sunday, Vicki called Skakel to confide in him. He wasn’t shocked by what she said she’d discovered in her home, especially considering what he and his wife had earlier witnessed of Michael and Marisa. Rather than ask a lot of questions, Michael decided to just do what Vicki asked of him, which was take her husband to the treatment center. Skakel speedily made all the arrangements and, shortly thereafter on that same Sunday, he and his cousin made the six-hour trip to Havre de Grace.