Now Maria knew the truth about Arnold, Mildred, and Joseph. Making it all the more painful, when doing the math in her head she quickly realized that she’d been pregnant at the same time as Mildred; she and Arnold welcomed Christopher into the world shortly before Joseph’s birth.
“Does Arnold know?” Maria asked Mildred.
“Yes.”
“Of course he does,” Maria said, shaking her head. “For how long?”
“Ten years.”
The timing of such a devastating revelation couldn’t have been worse. Soon after her mother’s death, Maria and her siblings moved Sarge into an assisted-living residence in Bethesda called Fox Hill, close to where her siblings Mark and Timothy lived with their families. It was torturous watching Sarge slowly slip away; soon he didn’t even remember his daughter’s name. She needed to marshal all her strength and resolve to get through it. Therefore, whatever Arnold had done ten years earlier couldn’t matter, at least not at this time. No, Maria decided; she would deal with it later.
Mildred Baena was ready to quit, too ashamed to stay on as the family’s housekeeper. Maria said it wasn’t necessary. Instead, she suggested that Mildred stay on for the rest of the year. “Oh, and by the way, don’t let Arnold know that I know,” she told her. She agreed.
Apparently, Arnold wasn’t the only one who could keep a secret.
The Truth Hurts
In January 2011, after seven years of governing California, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term was over. He had come into office with no experience, just an abundance of ambition and personality, which, as it would turn out, wasn’t really enough to get things done—especially with a Democratic Senate blocking him every step along the way. He started out tough and adversarial, not understanding that he would need Democrats to see any agenda through. As a result, he made many enemies early in the game and was never able to successfully reach across the aisle. Instead of balancing the budget as he’d promised voters, the deficit rose from $6 billion in 2003 to more than $25 billion by the end of 2010. He did see to landmark climate change legislation, though, and certain infrastructure advancements as well. However, when it came to fully understanding fiscal and budgetary matters, he was in way over his head. Back in 2003, when he first got into office, he was so popular there’d been talk of a constitutional amendment so that, though he had been born in Austria, he could run for President. By the time his second term was over, his approval rating was only 22 percent. His political life was probably over, or at least that was the popular consensus. What people didn’t know, though, was that there was also about to be a real sea change in his personal life.
On Arnold’s second day out of office, the morning of January 4, Maria decided it was finally time to get a complete airing of his relationship with Mildred Baena and the child born of it. She started the new year by setting an appointment with the marriage counselor the two had been seeing of late. Maybe Maria didn’t feel she could get the truth out of Arnold on her own. Arnold had always been so secretive, as Maria knew after thirty years with him. Once, years earlier, he was scheduled to have open-heart surgery and had decided not to tell her about it because, as he put it, “she had a tendency to blow things up into high drama.” He informed his doctor that he was going to tell Maria he was going to go on a one-week vacation to Mexico. Then he would have the surgery and afterward check into a hotel for a week. His physician thought he was out of his mind and urged Arnold to tell his wife what was going on—which he finally did. There were so many stories like this over the course of her marriage, Maria didn’t want to try to have it out with him about Mildred without someone present to referee the exchange and prevent him from just outright lying to her. “We’re here today because Maria wants to know the truth,” the therapist began as the couple sat before her. “Your governess’s thirteen-year-old son, Joseph. Is he yours?” she asked Arnold. “Are you the father?”
With his mind probably racing, Arnold looked as if he didn’t quite know what to say. Finally, he just blurted it out: “Yes, it’s true.” Of course, Maria already knew it was true, as she then explained, and had known it for some time.
“You knew and didn’t tell me you knew?” Arnold asked, trying to turn the tables on her.
“That’s not really the issue,” Maria said, barely able to look at him.
Arnold then filled in some details; he explained that he and Mildred had gotten together back in December 1996 when Maria and the kids were out of town and he was completing Batman and Robin. The two found themselves in the guesthouse one day, and nine months later, Joseph was born.
Mildred—who must have had her reasons—said the baby was her husband’s, and Arnold believed it, or at least he wanted to believe it. He then allowed the growing boy to play with his own children; everyone got along well. However, by the time Joseph was three, Arnold couldn’t ignore the strong resemblance. He then demanded the truth from Mildred, and she gave it to him. He decided not to tell Maria, even when she had her own suspicions, for many reasons. He recalled that the first time Maria asked about Joseph’s paternity, he denied being the boy’s father because he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to hurt her and “blow up” their marriage. He also admitted having reservations about whether she would keep the secret since, as he put it, “you share everything with your family.” He finally concluded that she was already going through such a difficult time because of her parents’ illnesses; he didn’t want to add to her load. “There are a lot of reasons,” he said. He felt “horrible” about all of it.
“And so you decided to just let her continue living in the house and working for us, all right under my nose?” Maria asked.
“Yes.” He explained that he thought he could “control the situation better” if she was still under their employ. Also, he felt as if it would be punishing Mildred if he let her go. “I fucked up,” he said, all this according to his memory of the therapy session.
Arnold had been a good father, Maria would have to admit, and a strong leader, too, but in terms of being a faithful husband? Obviously, he’d fallen short of the mark. Prior to this therapy session, she’d had time to acknowledge her own complicity in their bad marriage. She’d already owned it. Now she was done with it. Maria said she wanted out of the marriage; she just needed time to figure out “how that will look.”
Arnold didn’t even try to talk her out of it. What could he say? “The truth hurts,” he said pitifully. Maria had to agree.
“I asked myself what had motivated me to be unfaithful, and how I could have failed to tell Maria about Joseph for so many years,” Arnold would later recall. “As I told the therapist, secrecy is part of me. Much as I love and seek company, part of me feels that I am going to ride out life’s big waves by myself.”
Maria Shriver didn’t know exactly how the future would play out for her and Arnold after this therapy session, but she did know one thing for sure: he would definitely be riding out the rest of “life’s big waves” without her at his side.
On January 11, a week after Maria confronted Arnold, her father, Sargent Shriver, died quietly in Bethesda, Maryland. The funeral Mass would be at Our Lady of Mercy, the home parish where Sarge had attended Mass almost every morning. He was buried next to his wife of fifty-six years, Eunice, at St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville, Massachusetts.
Four months later, in April, Maria and Arnold sat down with their children to tell them that their mother and father needed “a break” in their marriage while offering no details about Arnold’s having fathered a child outside of it. Maria then moved into a nearby hotel.
In May, word got out about the separation; it wasn’t long then before the revelation of Joseph’s paternity was headline news in the Los Angeles Times. The day before the story broke, Arnold was forced to tell his children about the deception. “I asked them for forgiveness,” Arnold later said. “They cried. It tears your heart out.”
As of this writing—2018—Maria and Arnold are still not officially di
vorced, seven years after Maria’s filing. They haven’t explained why they’ve not moved forward, either, choosing to keep their privacy. Though they don’t live together, the couple seems to have found a way to be friends as they co-parent their children.
Sometimes family dynamics are too complex for outsiders to completely fathom the ebb and flow as people change their opinions of one another while grappling with matters of the heart. According to their intimates, though, credit has to be given to Maria, for she is the one who set the standard as to how she wants her children to treat Arnold. They respect him, just as she and her brothers had always respected Sarge. Apparently, they no longer question his bad choices; they just love him despite them.
PART VIII
A Miraculous Life
Just Perfect
By July 2011, Kara Kennedy’s cancer had been in remission for eight years. Doctors now considered her cured, as did she and her family. It was a true miracle, and no one in the family would ever take it for granted.
Though Kara had dated a few men after her divorce from Michael Allen, she’d never really been romantically interested in any of them. Was it because of the way she saw her father treat her mother? The suggestion was often made by friends. She didn’t know if she’d been affected by her parents’ bad marriage, and she didn’t feel compelled to figure it out, either. Instead, in addition to raising her children, she spent time addressing some of the root problems in her relationship with Joan. Feeling blessed to even draw breath, she couldn’t imagine holding on to old grudges about the past, especially relating to the way she was raised. As a mother herself, Kara had come to understand that Joan had done the best she could under the circumstances of her life at the time. In recent years, Kara had spent many of her summers with her children and Joan at Squaw Island. Mother and daughter would take daily long walks on the beach and try to deepen their understanding of each other, especially now that Ted was gone. “I was so mad at her for so many years,” Kara said at the time, “for me to continue to try to rescue my relationship with my mom is so important to me.”
Joan was actually a lot better; she wasn’t drinking, anyway. She had her good days and her bad. Her bipolar medication tended to make her unpredictable; Kara knew she had to give her latitude and not take anything she said in a moment of anger too personally. Ted’s death had been particularly hard on Joan. She’d never been able to reconcile their relationship; there’d just been too much history. In a perfect world, they would have had that one great talk that would have helped them come to terms with all their bad history. However, Joan knew that Ted had lost patience with her a long time ago, and it broke her heart. “But all of your other relatives are just as screwed up as I am,” she once told him. “How come you’re okay with them, but not with me?”
On July 15, the Kennedys came together for the wedding of Kara’s brother Patrick to a thirty-six-year-old sixth-grade history teacher named Amy Petitgout. Finally, he was getting married; everyone in his life was elated. Now that he was out of public office, Patrick’s story had taken a decidedly better turn, especially when he met and fell in love with Amy. Married previously, she had a daughter, Harper, who was three. The couple met back in March 2010 at a fund-raiser in Atlantic City. “He was tired,” Amy says of Patrick of the time they first encountered each other, “and really emotional. Not a regular guy. He didn’t sleep well, and he talked a lot about his dad. It was a big departure for me, because, well, my last relationship was not very much about feelings. I liked that kind of openness.”
With his addictions now at long last under control, Patrick was a completely different man. “We’re relying on AA and a totally different lifestyle,” Amy told the writer Stephen Fried. “And,” she said, smiling, “I’m nice to him all the time.”
The couple was wed on the beach at the compound. It was sad, though, that relatives didn’t show up as they once had for big events such as a Kennedy wedding. Caroline, who was never really one for these sorts of family events anyway, wasn’t present and neither was Maria Shriver. Kara admitted to being a little disappointed; she missed her best friends, but she understood that things had changed and that people had moved on with their own lives. Still, plenty of family members were present, such as Ethel’s offspring: Kerry, Chris, and Max, as well as Bobby Jr. and Cheryl Hines, and Rory Kennedy and her husband, Mark Bailey. There were also Anthony, Tim, and Bobby Shriver. Vicki, Ted’s widow, was present, of course, as well as her two children.
“My mother, Joan, and my aunts, Ethel and Jean, are spending a lot of time playing with their great-grandchildren all around them,” Patrick—tall as ever, still red-haired and still freckled—told the media that had assembled just outside the gates. “I feel like my dad’s orchestrating everything from up above and that he’s doing a great job and he’s telling us to get out on his sailboat and enjoy the ocean like he always did. My brother, Teddy, is my best man, which makes the day even better for me.”
“Okay. See you in September, kid,” Patrick told Kara as he kissed her goodbye at the end of a long, memorable day. He noted that he and Amy would soon visit her in Washington, “and, who knows? We may even have some good news,” he added, winking. Kara knew that her brother and his new wife were trying to get pregnant. “You can do it, Pat,” she told him as she playfully chucked him under the chin. “I have faith in you.”
A week after the wedding, Joan and Kara were spotted browsing a village antique shop in the center of town. “She’s my best friend,” Joan said of her daughter to this reporter, who happened upon them while on a research mission in Hyannis Port. Though Joan, at seventy-three, appeared small and frail, she still had the great smile of her youth. Her blond hair was piled under a baseball cap and she was wearing large aviator sunglasses. “We do everything together,” she added, beaming at Kara.
Gazing at her mother, Kara handed her a small trinket. “Mom, look at this little diamond elf,” she said. “What does this remind you of?”
Joan examined Kara’s offering. “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed. She said it looked exactly like a doll she and Ted had given Kara for Christmas years ago when Kara was about ten. “I always called you my little elf,” Joan said. “Daddy found that doll in Alaska.”
Kara smiled at the memory. “Oh, how I loved that doll,” she told me. “I’ve always wondered what happened to it.”
Joan smiled. “It’s in the attic at home,” she told Kara. “I still have it. I’d never throw it out. Never.”
Turning to her mother, Kara made a decision: “You know what? I’m going to buy this for you,” she said. She then handed the piece of jewelry to the store clerk to ring it up. “Would you like a box?” the cashier asked. No, Kara said. She then took the trinket and carefully pinned it to Joan’s lapel.
Joan took a step back. “How does it look?” she asked.
Kara sized up her mother. “Perfect,” she said. “Just perfect.”
A Great Loss
On Friday morning, September 16, 2011, Patrick Kennedy wolfed down a big breakfast of eggs, pancakes, and bacon in his hotel room at the Four Seasons in Washington while speaking to Amy on the telephone. He was in town for a political rally, and he and his wife were making plans for the next day; Amy would be arriving in the morning and they would have dinner with Kara at about five. “Cool,” Patrick said, “see you then.”
Patrick was looking forward to seeing his sister especially since he and Amy were expecting, just as he hoped they’d be by this time. He planned to break the news to Kara over dinner. Amy thought it was maybe a little too early, though. After all, she was just six weeks along and was worried about jinxing things. No, Patrick decided, he was too happy to keep the news to himself. Because Kara had been the first Kennedy to whom he’d introduced Amy, he felt she had a vested interested in their happiness; he wanted her to be the first to hear the good news. “And besides,” he said, “I don’t believe in jinxes.”
A couple of hours later, Patrick was sitting at a desk in his room an
d preparing a speech when the phone rang. It was his former chief of staff, Sean Richardson. He said that Kelly O’Donnell from NBC News had just called him to ask him to confirm some terrible news. “They found Kara,” Richardson said, his voice shaking. “She was in a steam room at her health club. They think she’d just done some laps, and … I don’t know … they found her, Pat! They found her.”
Patrick didn’t understand. “What do you mean, they found her?” he asked, his panic rising.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Sean said. He didn’t have to finish.
All Patrick could manage to ask was: “How?”
Kara was only fifty-one. It was sudden. She’d had a heart attack after working out. Later it would be thought that unbeknownst to them all, the chemotherapy she’d undergone to treat her cancer had damaged her heart. It was hard to believe. No one even had a chance to say goodbye to her, but as the Kennedys well knew, life doesn’t always provide the perfect cinematic goodbye.
Sobbing, Patrick hung up and called Amy to give her the terrible news. He also called Teddy, who said he would call Joan. Then quick calls were made to as many of Kara’s loved ones as could be reached: Caroline in New York, Maria in Los Angeles, Kennedys, Shrivers, Smiths, and Lawfords all over the country. “After everything she’d been through, it seemed impossible,” Patrick recalled. “She was in such great shape and always had an amazing attitude about life. You just couldn’t imagine that this could happen.”
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 48