Regardless of what else is going on, the Kennedys hold fast to holiday tradition. On Easter Sunday, the clan attends Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church. But rumors that something shocking has happened at the Kennedy estate are already spreading, although some locals take a rather blasé attitude.
“Over the years I’ve been to many parties at the Kennedy house,” socialite Susan Polan tells People magazine. “One plays tennis there, one goes to parties there, but there are times when you don’t go up to the Kennedy house unless you expect to be raucous. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.”
Nevertheless, by late afternoon on Monday, April 1, 1991, Palm Beach detectives are knocking at the door of the mansion, though most of the family has already left town.
Sadly, it’s not the first time Palm Beach detectives have needed to talk to the Kennedy family at Easter.
Seven years earlier, over Easter week 1984, Ethel and Bobby Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son David Anthony Kennedy was found dead of a fatal overdose in Room 107 of the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach.
The family is devastated, but not shocked—for years they’ve all been asking each other what to do about David and his escalating addictions.
David—the fourth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children, after Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr.—has always been a sensitive, small boy. Family friend Chuck McDermott remembers, “There was some level on which David tapped his father’s sensitivity. You would find him walking with David or with his arm around David. David just seemed to need it.”
In April 1968, Bobby consults the child psychologist Robert Coles when twelve-year-old David has a run-in with police, who catch the boy throwing rocks at motorists passing near Hickory Hill. Coles recalls Bobby’s eyes widening when he makes the connection that David “was a little like him, throwing rocks at strangers—or LBJ,” as Bobby had been metaphorically doing since Jack’s death in 1963.
A few months later, on June 4, David nearly drowns while swimming in the Pacific, but his father is able to jump in to save him. Later that same night, while up watching Bobby’s victory in the California primary, David is horrified to witness his father’s assassination live on TV.
His near-death experience “made Bob even larger than life to David,” remarks Kennedy family friend John Seigenthaler. “And then 12 hours later, he lost this father in a most horrible way.” Ethel similarly notes to her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier, that Bobby “saved David’s life the very same day he lost his own, and David really never could understand any of it,” theorizing, “It was as if he thought God had traded his life in for his dad’s.”
The boy’s trauma is largely swept under the rug, however. “No one ever talked to me about what I was feeling,” David states. When he tries to bring it up to his mother, Ethel snaps that “It’s not a subject I want to discuss.” What they do instead, apparently, is medicate his emotional pain away. “We took him to the doctor and the doctor put him on some medication. One thing led to another,” Ethel tells Bombardier. David moves on to recreational drugs, and by the time he’s fifteen, he and his cousin Christopher Lawford are hitchhiking to New York City and buying heroin in Central Park. “David and I sort of decided together that there really wasn’t any reason to be good any more, so we might as well be bad,” Chris recalls.
In August 1973, when David is eighteen, he’s injured in a jeep accident on Nantucket caused by his older brother Joe. Joe, David, and five teenage girls, including David’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Pamela Kelley, are all in the car at the time. Joe “was doing his SuperKennedy act,” as David puts it. “There was all this crazy energy. I suppose Teddy was that way before Chappaquiddick.”
“It was typical Kennedy horseplay,” Kelley agrees. “We were all laughing as Joe spun the Jeep ’round and ’round and ’round.” Of the passengers, she is the most seriously injured—permanently paralyzed in both legs. David’s injuries are less severe, but after receiving morphine at the hospital, he becomes ever more reliant on drugs.
By 1976, David has dropped out of Harvard and Boston College, and in 1978 suffers an overdose (though publicly his uncle Stephen Smith, the Kennedy family spin doctor, labels it “pneumonia”).
For the next several years, David’s in and out of various rehab clinics, making optimistic attempts to get better but always backsliding. So it comes as no surprise to the clan when Ethel’s son is arrested in 1983 after overdosing on heroin.
Except it’s not David.
It’s Bobby Jr.
“David was the Kennedy screw-up, not Bobby,” his cousin Christopher Lawford points out. “This was a real wake-up call.”
Fortunately for Bobby Jr., his stint in rehab is far more successful than David’s many attempts, which in some ways leaves David feeling worse than ever. “Kennedys don’t fail,” his uncle Ted tells him. Yet David has failed sobriety over and over.
He feels like he’s been letting his family down, failing to meet their high expectations. Once, when the question of what it means to be a Kennedy is posed to him, David replies, “It means that we’re exactly the same as everybody else, except better.” Yet the Kennedy he most relates to in his darker moments is Rosemary: “She was an embarrassment; I am an embarrassment. She was a hindrance; I am a hindrance.”
On March 19, 1984, he again attempts a stint in rehab, and a month later, heads to spend Easter with his extended family and ailing Grandma Rose in Palm Beach, Florida. Instead of staying at the “Kennedy Winter White House,” David checks in to the Brazilian Court Hotel, along with several other family members, as the house on North Ocean Boulevard couldn’t hold them all. Over the course of the next week, he rotates between dutiful visits to Rose and heavy drinking; various friends, family members, and hotel staff all later remark on David’s ability to consume staggering amounts of alcohol. (“I’ve heard it said that God invented alcohol to keep the Irish from ruling the world,” Chris Lawford later writes in the opening line of his 2005 memoir. “My family almost proved Him wrong.”)
Ethel isn’t down in Palm Beach for Easter that year, but she becomes increasingly concerned when she cannot reach her son after multiple calls to the hotel. She sends David’s cousins Caroline Kennedy and Sydney Lawford to check on him, but although the young women make two visits to the hotel, they are unable to locate him. On April 25, 1984, Ethel calls the hotel to request they open the door to David’s room. Ten minutes later, they call her back—but before they can inform her of what they’ve found, Ethel knows.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she says, gasping and hanging up on learning she is right. She’s later overheard lamenting to a friend, “When David died, my chance to be a better mother died with him.”
Press coverage of David Kennedy’s death in Palm Beach is extensive yet respectful. Seven years later, however, when his cousin Willie’s Easter scandal breaks, again in Palm Beach, the entire Kennedy family finds themselves drawn not only into the court of public opinion—but into an actual courtroom, where they witness one of their own stand trial.
And this time, the treatment the Kennedys face will be very different.
Chapter 45
The bombshell allegations of rape on the beach outside the Kennedy mansion are splashed across the world from Au Bar, which doubles as the reporters’ impromptu Palm Beach newsroom.
Reporter Steve Dunleavy gets a sit-down scoop with Anne Mercer, who is paid forty thousand dollars for two ill-advised interviews broadcast on the tabloid TV show A Current Affair. And despite knowing nothing about what happened between Willie and Patricia Bowman, Michele Cassone charges multiple TV talk shows a thousand dollars each for dishing on Ted’s pantsless antics on that night.
On May 11, 1991, Willie turns himself in to the Palm Beach police on a sexual battery charge, and immediately posts bail. He calls the charges against him “an outrageous lie” and says he’s looking forward to being vindicated at trial.
By the time Case No. 91-5482—Th
e State of Florida v. William Kennedy Smith—comes to trial, Newsweek predicts it “will be the most-watched legal proceeding in American history.” The brand-new Courtroom Television Network secures live broadcast rights, agreeing to obscure Bowman’s identity. “This trial was perfect for TV of course,” Alan Dershowitz points out, “it had sex [and] the Kennedys.”
The trial is watched by millions on television, but the Palm Beach County courtroom itself is small and cramped, allowing only three seats apiece for Patricia Bowman’s family and Willie’s. The extended Kennedy family comes out to support Willie—most notably his mother, Jean, and his aunts Ethel, Eunice, and Patricia, who rotate their supportive presence under close watch of the cameras.
Though his aunt Jackie doesn’t appear, John F. Kennedy Jr. makes two celebrity cameos at his cousin’s trial, and the public vie for glimpses of the famous family members. The Sun-Sentinel prints a “Spectators’ Guide” to “Smith and his entourage,” while local businesses cash in on the hundreds of reporters in need of photocopies, A/V hookups, and parking—not to mention entrepreneurs selling novelty Ted Kennedy-in-his-underwear T-shirts, or Sprinkles, the scoop shop with “trial flavors” like “Willi Vanilli,” “Teddy’s Best” (a boozy option), or “Lupo Lemon” (a reference to the judge’s sourpuss expression). As one TV reporter notes of the media coverage, “It looks more like a football game than a news event.”
* * *
The trial begins on December 2, 1991. William Kennedy Smith’s attorney is Roy Black, a celebrity Miami criminal defense trial lawyer known as “The Professor.” Unlike prosecutor Moira Lasch, who’s been given the nickname “The Ice Queen” and disdains the press, Black always seems to find time to give interviews.
Despite Lasch’s excellent reputation and conviction record, she fails to convince Judge Mary Lupo to allow testimony from three other women who all claim to have been similarly assaulted by Willie over the previous decade.
In 1983, “Lisa” was a nineteen-year-old law student dating Willie’s cousin Max (Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the ninth of Bobby and Ethel’s children). She meets then-twenty-three-year-old Willie at a party in Manhattan, and finds him “quite charming.” Since he “in no way” seems to be coming on to her, she accepts Willie’s invitation to stay in a guest room at a nearby Kennedy home. Once there, however, Lisa says “he attacked me.” Then, when she managed to get free, “he tried to convince me that that wasn’t what had happened.”
Lisa tells her boyfriend, Max, of the disturbing encounter, which he downplays—although after his cousin’s arrest in Palm Beach, she states in court papers, Max apologizes for not taking her seriously back then, telling her, “Sounds like Willie has a really big problem. He needs some help.”
A second woman, “Lynn,” now a doctor, says that when she was a Georgetown student in the spring of 1988, Willie invited her to a family get-together. When Lynn arrives, Willie claims the others are all in the pool, although it’s clear there is no one else at the house. To Lynn’s dismay, Willie then “take[s] off his clothes” before diving nude into the water. Back inside, Lynn is even more surprised and frightened when Willie comes at her: “He threw me over the couch and I landed on my back, pinned to the floor by his wrist with him on top of me.” When he eventually lets her up, she quickly leaves.
The third woman is “Michele,” who states that when she was a grad student in 1988, she got drunk at a college picnic and Willie—“somebody that I knew…somebody that I trusted”—offers her a ride home. Instead, however, he takes her to his Georgetown carriage house, where he “started just getting more and more aggressive,” she recalls, “almost animal-like” and “ferocious.” He attempts to force her to give him oral sex, but “That’s when I kind of lost it, and I just passed out.” When she woke up the next morning, Michele says Willie was condescending and dismissive.
Judge Lupo rules the women’s depositions inadmissible.
In her opening statement, Moira Lasch portrays Patricia Bowman as a normal, hard-working single mother and Willie as a man who can’t accept rejection, while Roy Black says that following a “consensual act of sexual intercourse,” Bowman was the one who then felt slighted and resentful.
Lasch calls Anne Mercer as her first major witness. The night before the trial, the second of Mercer’s two paid interviews airs and during cross-examination, Black portrays Mercer as a liar and opportunist. He accuses her of changing her story to embarrass Senator Kennedy and of using the TV payout to finance a vacation in Mexico. Mercer is “a disastrous witness,” and Black later jokes, “I have to thank Steve Dunleavy for what he did,” regarding his interview with Mercer on A Current Affair.
Black is slowly managing to turn Willie into the victim.
Chapter 46
It’s the fourth day of the trial. Over the previous two days, Patricia Bowman has testified about her experiences in the early morning hours of March 30, 1991. While occasionally tearful, she’s direct and poised.
Roy Black, Willie’s defense attorney, highlights the gaps and contradictions in Bowman’s memory of events—discrepancies intensified by Judge Lupo’s exclusion of the prosecution’s expert on rape-trauma syndrome—but she’s resolute in her story. What Bowman says she struggles to understand, however, is “how this nice guy had turned into that one, the one who had raped me.”
Despite the allegations, a “nice guy” is how a number of people describe Willie, the second of Jean and Stephen Smith’s four children (his older brother by two years is Stephen Jr.; sisters Amanda and Kym are six and twelve years younger, respectively). A Georgetown friend calls Willie “a regular guy who happens to come from this amazing family,” while a supervisor notes Willie “doesn’t have any violence in him.” An ex-girlfriend says the rape allegations are “inconceivable,” stating that Willie is “a gentle person.” According to an article in the Washington Post, Willie has dated a “harem of women,” including Meg Ryan when they were both in their late twenties and she was filming When Harry Met Sally.
But other sources say Willie’s otherwise “unassuming” personality undergoes drastic changes when he drinks, and according to a sworn statement by James Ridgeway de Szigethy, John Jr.—now a Manhattan assistant district attorney—told de Szigethy that his cousin Willie is guilty, and that the family “‘should have done something about Willie years ago when he first started doing this,’ meaning get help for him when he first started raping women.”
Publicly, the Kennedy family provides a united front, repeatedly declaring themselves “a very close family” who all express their complete support. Privately, one family friend says, “They’ll stick by Willie through thick and thin, but when this is over, and they’re all alone, they’ll beat the shit out of him.”
Throughout the trial, Willie’s extended family take their turns in the limited seats available in courtroom 411, and the press runs warm and fuzzy photos of Willie with his new dog, or out with his family, or kneeling at prayer. James Ridgeway de Szigethy recalls confronting John Jr. over the family staging such photos, thereby indicating “a public expression of confidence and trust in his cousin,” to which he says John Jr. replies, “You just don’t understand the pressure I’m under.” John Jr. reveals to de Szigethy that he doesn’t want to attend Willie’s trial, but is being forced to do so. The older Kennedys aren’t taking any chances; Newsweek reports that Willie’s mother, Jean, “has reportedly imposed a dating and drinking ban on young Kennedys” and Vanity Fair quotes a local hostess as having been told that the Kennedys “have a strategy session every night at dinner at the compound.”
“I’m the one who’s on trial,” Willie tells reporters and spectators at the courthouse, “but it’s difficult not to feel sometimes that my family is on trial for me.”
That certainly does seem true of his uncle Ted.
As Dominick Dunne writes in the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, “Senator Kennedy [is] already at the lowest point in his career,” but while “he has been forgiven h
is trespasses over and over again,” Ted now “has the earmarks of a man who has given up hope, of whom too much has been asked, who wants to abdicate all responsibility. And he drinks.”
Expectations are not high as the Massachusetts senator enters the courthouse, although cheers go up from scores of court watchers who have lined up for hours. But Ted acquits himself well—his voice cracking as he recounts his motivation for taking the boys out that night. How the recent death from cancer of Willie’s father, Stephen Smith, has left him severely depressed over the loss of a close friend. He talks about how close the family is, how he, Ethel, Eunice, Patricia, and Jackie have all rallied around their sister Jean. Willie tears up, too. One of his attorneys offers him a handkerchief.
“I wish I’d gone for a long walk on the beach instead,” Ted says of that Good Friday. “But I went to Au Bar.”
As for Willie, “I was very moved by a lot of things my uncle said,” he tells the press later that day. “I think this process has been unfair to him. I don’t say that in a bitter way. I just mean it in my heart.”
Next on the stand is Ted’s son Patrick, visibly nervous and less polished than his senator father. That same week the National Enquirer has exposed Patrick’s cocaine habit, revealing that he had a stint in rehab at age sixteen. Despite testimony that occasionally contradicts his father’s, after two hours on the stand and no questions from the defense, Patrick walks away unscathed.
Now it’s Willie’s turn. He confidently strides to the witness stand, comfortable enough to make friendly eye contact with the six jurors, four women and two men. Patricia Bowman watches Willie’s testimony from a TV in the prosecutor’s office.
The House of Kennedy Page 21