“He took me with him and encouraged me,” Joan says of Bobby. “He had a theme, ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ the Woody Guthrie song. I’d play that on the piano and everyone would come in, feeling really great about everything. It seems like a long time ago, but it’s part of my memories.” Though Joan had been narrating Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf every year since 1965 in special orchestral shows, the Philadelphia date was the first time she brought her musical talent to the public on the concert stage.*
On the night of her performance, the always lovely Joan Kennedy walked out onto the stage to thunderous applause wearing a striking black, formfitting Valentino gown, her dusty blonde hair pulled into an elegant French twist. She performed the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, following it with Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1. When she finished, she was presented with a large bouquet of cherry red roses while she bowed and accepted a rousing standing ovation from the full house. It was a decidedly big moment for her, and even though she was advertised as “Mrs. Edward (Joan) Kennedy,” she still felt that the victory was hers and hers alone. Ted, who was not used to sharing acclaim with his wife, seemed at a loss as to how to respond to Joan’s moment of triumph when he came backstage after the show. In truth, he was fairly dismissive of it, but at least he was there trying to be supportive. After someone poured him a shot of J&B scotch, he patted Joan on the shoulder and said, “Well done, Mommy.”
PART FIVE
Ethel
Ethel Kennedy
When the lives of Ethel Skakel and Robert Kennedy are considered, it is clear they had much more in common even than marriage to each other and being the pugnacious runts of high-profile, large, and prosperous Roman Catholic families, families fraught with both triumph and tragedy.
Ethel was born on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, to Ann Brannack and George Skakel, who made a fortune in what would later become a highly prized and successful division of SGL Carbon, a multibillion-dollar high-tech manufacturer of graphite and carbon electrodes. Ethel attended the all-girls Greenwich Academy in Connecticut as well as the Convent of the Sacred Heart before enrolling at Manhattanville College in New York, where she and Jean Kennedy became running buddies and roommates. Ethel’s raucous personality and fearlessness were legendary, and some of her outrageous behavior got her and her more reserved roommate, Jean, into trouble at Manhattanville. But Ethel’s practiced wiliness would more often than not save the day, helped along by her father George’s deep-pocket contributions to the school’s endowment. Once, when Monsignor Hartigan, a diocesan prelate, arrived at the college for a visit in a big, flashy Cadillac, Ethel was outraged at the hypocrisy and placed a placard on the car’s windshield on which she had printed, “Are the collections good, Father?” The monsignor grounded the entire school until finally a chastened but unbowed Ethel came forward to admit her guilt.
Completely at odds with Ethel’s peccadilloes was her deep commitment to her Catholic religious principles. In fact, she once seriously considered becoming a nun, and did attain what many Catholics might consider the next best thing: a Child of Mary.
Eventually, Jean Kennedy ended up playing Cupid to Ethel and Bobby. The problem, though, was that Bobby was interested in Pat, Ethel’s older sister. When Bobby invited Pat for a holiday visit with the Kennedys in Palm Beach, Jean invited Ethel at the same time. The Bobby-Pat love boat ran aground when Pat decided Bobby was immature and too young. Fortunately, Ethel was on hand to toss Bobby a lifeline as he floundered just within reach.
Ethel and Bobby began “going steady” within a few months of the Palm Beach vacation and became engaged two years later. For many observers, the relationship seemed to lack the kind of passion usually associated with young love, more like brother and sister than two youngsters on the threshold of a lifetime commitment. (Indeed, Ethel remained a virgin until her wedding night. She once famously stated that she was so inexperienced, “Bobby was finished before I even got into the room. But,” in a veiled reference to their many children, “we later got the hang of it!”) The marriage took place on June 17, 1950, at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich. It was a lavish affair planned and executed with great taste by “Big Ann” Skakel and witnessed by more than two thousand people, many uninvited, who jammed the flower-filled sanctuary. The couple was attended by siblings from their respective families, with JFK as his brother’s best man and Pat Skakel as her sister’s maid of honor.
The happy couple settled into their first home in Charlottesville, Virginia, until Bobby finished law school. Two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, Bobby and Ethel welcomed a baby girl, Kathleen, on Independence Day 1951. With law degree in hand, Bobby, now living in Washington, went to work briefly for the Department of Justice before resigning to manage JFK’s successful Senate campaign in Massachusetts. One of Jack’s key committee assignments was as a member of the Government Operations Committee, chaired by the demagogic Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, an avowed and outspoken anticommunist, who attained instant notoriety in his conduct of the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings, televised in real time to the nation. Bobby was hired as minority counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with Roy Cohn doing duty as majority counsel. With both JFK and his brother Bobby now appearing somewhat regularly on network TV, the hearing-room audience was the place for the Kennedy women, with Ethel sallying forth as pack leader, obstreperous and bossy, as she herded her sisters-in-law and others in her party to their prominent seats, usually down front.
In 1956, one hardly need recall the advice Rose Kennedy imparted to her daughter-in-law at her and Bobby’s wedding reception six years earlier: “Lots of children, Ethel. Have lots and lots of children. They’ll keep your marriage strong, as strong as mine.” (Of course, the couple would go on to have ten children, and an eleventh would be born after Bobby’s death.) While expecting their fifth child, Bobby and Ethel purchased the sprawling antebellum estate Hickory Hill from Jack and Jackie in 1957. Nine months before they moved into the property, tragedy struck when Ethel’s parents, Ann and George, died in a fiery plane crash near Oklahoma City. Three days later, she joined her siblings and their families at St. Mary’s in Greenwich for her parents’ funeral, a solemn requiem High Mass. As was so often the case with the way her mother-in-law Rose confronted her own many tragedies, Ethel was shored up by her unwavering faith and the firm belief that God’s will be done, yet there was something about the way she dealt with the death of her parents that some found disconcerting. “She didn’t let it in,” said a relative of hers. “The next day, it was as if it hadn’t happened. She kept saying they were both in a better place, and that was the end of it. It felt as if she never really grieved, that she kept her emotions bottled and instead threw herself into her life with Bobby and the children.”
Bobby soon became quite crucial to Jack’s (and Joseph, the ambassador’s) presidential ambitions, and over the next four years devoted himself to that successful end. When JFK and Jackie found themselves in the White House, Bobby and Ethel’s stock zoomed. Now as attorney general and head of the Department of Justice, Bobby was able to claim his own place in the spotlight, Ethel dutifully at his side. She eagerly courted the press and happily fed them whenever they staked out Hickory Hill on some breaking story. The press loved her in return and rewarded her with much positive media attention when she wanted it and respected her privacy when she requested it. They were a great team, Bobby and Ethel—whom he called “Ethie” (which, of course, is where Ted got the nickname for her).
No matter how popular she was, though, everyone knew that it was her sister-in-law Jackie who was the most acclaimed of the Kennedy wives, certainly the one thought to have the most style and panache. Maybe this was unfair, because Ethel certainly had her own fashion sense and was quite the clotheshorse, too. In fact, she spent money like mad. For instance, her clothing expenses were often tripled because she liked to have not one but usually two backups for each of her designer dr
esses, Oscar de la Renta being her favorite designer. She also wanted de la Renta’s designs in different colors. She loved imported cosmetics, as well.
“She spent so much on fancy imported cosmetics, Rose actually went over to the house one day with a clipboard to take an inventory,” said Barbara Gibson, Rose’s secretary, describing a day in 1970. “She sat in the bathroom… writing down the names of cosmetics and when she finished she and Ethel had a loud row about it, but Ethel didn’t cut back. ‘That money is mine and Bobby’s as much as it’s anyone else’s,’ Ethel said, and she was right to an extent. The money came from trusts that Joseph had set up for each family, and Ethel’s, Jackie’s, all of the families, in fact, got about $150,000 a year to live on—which was a lot of money in the late 1960s. [The average per capita income in 1970 was $9,350.] Rose was just afraid Ethel was going to go through it all, so she always had Stephen Smith knocking on Ethel’s door to cut back; it never worked.”
Still, even with her own style, Ethel apparently felt she had to defer to Jackie when it came to fashion sense. A good example: In the late 1970s, TV personality and reporter Barbara Walters happened to be in Washington for a weekend and for some reason had to go on television unexpectedly and didn’t have anything appropriate to wear. Because she and Ethel wore the same size, she called Ethel to ask if she had anything in her closet she could borrow, and maybe some accompanying jewelry too. Ethel’s assistant Noelle Bombardier was in the room when the call came to Hickory Hill. Ethel seemed to become very uncomfortable at the request. “Well, I’m not Jackie, you know,” she said apologetically. “I mean, I do have some nice two-piece outfits that I think would look nice on television,” she said. “I suppose I could send them over, as well as a couple of pieces of jewelry. But you must know, Barbara, I don’t have the kinds of jewels Jackie has!’ According to what Ethel later recalled, Barbara said, “But Ethel, I would never suggest that Jackie had better taste than you. Never!” Of course, Ethel knew as much, but she still felt a little embarrassed by any kind of comparison, even if self-imposed. Still, she put together a couple of outfits with matching jewelry and then had her assistant, Noelle, deliver them to Barbara at the Mayflower Hotel. It turned out that one of the outfits worked just fine.
Andy Williams, the popular entertainer, had for many years been one of Ethel’s closet friends. He had also been one of Bobby Kennedy’s best friends back in the 1960s. In fact, at Ethel’s request, he sang at his funeral, and as a final gesture to their friendship, Bobby was buried wearing one of Andy’s favorite ties. After he separated from his wife, singer Claudine Longet, in the late 1960s, Andy began to date Ethel.
“We had a lot of fun,” he recalled of his many years at Ethel’s side. “She was so fascinating to me, and surprising. For instance, she knew the words to pretty much every Broadway show tune, so we would sing a lot and she had a very good voice! She also knew all of my songs, ‘Moon River,’ ‘Almost There,’ all of them. We’d play golf. We’d sail. Sometimes there were so many people on the boat, along with picnic baskets and wine and sodas and all sorts of games, the boat would be practically sinking before we would even be out in deep water. She would say, ‘It’s okay, Andy. We’ll swim back to shore.’
“I adored her but it wasn’t like the fan magazines made it out to be,” Andy continued. “They had us living together, married, her pregnant with my child. The truth was very different. I could never replace Bobby in her life, and I wouldn’t have tried. That said, I think if she had been interested, maybe something could have come of us with the passing of time, but there was no way she could be interested in another man after Bobby. She told me once, ‘My love for Bobby is eternal. Do you know how long eternity is?’ she asked. I said I did. And she said, ‘Well, it’s a hundred times longer than what you think it is.’ ”
A Cross to Bear
It was a sunny day in August 1969 when Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson, found Ethel Kennedy sitting in the kitchen of her home at the Kennedy compound, crying. “Why, what’s wrong, Mrs. Kennedy?” she asked. Ethel looked up with reddened eyes and said that Bobby had been gone for a year, and as a result, chaos had broken out in her home. She said that she could not figure out how to handle her children. She had just that morning learned that Bobby Jr. was being intimate with a local girl, and of course, as a Catholic and a mother, it was against everything she believed. Ethel was clearly distressed. “He’s fifteen and this is what he’s doing?” Ethel asked. She then said that she didn’t know how to punish her son because, as she put it, “Nothing works.”
“If you want my opinion, I think you should ban him from the household altogether,” Barbara Gibson suggested, according to her memory of the conversation. “Just throw him out, Mrs. Kennedy. That’s what my mother would do, and that’s what I would do if he were my son. That’s the only thing that will teach him.” Ethel looked surprised. “Can I do that?” she wondered. “Is it legal for a mother to do that?” Barbara Gibson smiled. “You’re Ethel Kennedy,” she said. “You’re not going to get arrested for disciplining your child.” The decision was made, then. Ethel said she was going to do as Barbara suggested. Now that she had a solution in place, unconventional though it may have been, Ethel seemed to feel better. That night, she gave Bobby the bad news: He was banished from the home he and the family shared at the compound. “But where am I supposed to live?” he asked. “That’s your problem,” Ethel told him. “If you can’t live by my rules, then you can’t live in this house.”
That night, young Bobby Kennedy pitched a tent on the beach, where he would sleep for the next two weeks. At night, he would sneak into the homes of relatives in the compound and raid their refrigerators for food. “Sargent Shriver knew what he was up to and always made sure there was some chicken in the refrigerator for his outlawed nephew,” recalled Barbara Gibson. “I don’t know that the punishment did much good, though. I think Bobby just looked at it as an adventure. I felt badly for Ethel. The kids made her life very difficult when they were young. She was very complex. It took me years to understand her.”
Ethel hadn’t been herself since Bobby was murdered. Those who knew her well found it ironic that she’d just been on the cover of Time a few months before the Chappaquiddick incident in a story about her courage and bravery, in which she was portrayed as “the most remarkable member of her remarkable family.” New York senator Jacob Javits described her in the article as “the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female.” That was a lot to live up to, especially since privately Ethel didn’t feel very courageous or brave. Rather, she was often consumed with confusion and anger about the way things had turned out for her and her family. She and Bobby had had so many plans, so much to do. He had been such a good and decent man who only cared about being of service to others. A deeply religious woman, Ethel couldn’t understand why God had taken him from her and her children. Like her mother-in-law and just about all the members of the family, Ethel was a devout Catholic. “We had holy-water holders in every door of our house,” her daughter Kathleen told Newsweek’s Lisa Miller in 2009. “We said prayers before and after every meal. We went to Roman Catholic schools. On Sundays, we put on our white gloves and shined our shoes. Women wore the mantillas. If we did something good, we got a gold star in heaven.” Kerry Kennedy Cuomo said of her mother in 2010, “She still goes to Mass every day of her life. She prays on her knees before church, prays before every meal, and prays on her knees before going to bed.”
Still, even Ethel’s faith couldn’t give her strength on what she called “the bad days.” In the public eye, she knew she had no choice but to act strong. After all, as either the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, or Bobby once put it, depending on which family member you talk to, “Kennedys don’t cry.” Privately, though, Ethel felt she had a right to her anger. That she had so many children to care for made things that much more difficult for her.
When Bobby was alive, Ethel’s home was always filled with politicians and reporters and the most interesting
mix of people. He had a knack for mixing with everyone, and enjoyed holding court as the most unlikely of viewpoints converged. He loved to debate, he enjoyed differences of opinion. Nothing pleased him more than inviting a diverse mix of people to Hickory Hill for a rousing game of touch football on the expansive lawn and then a serious debate about politics at the dinner table. It was fun and exciting, and, as Ethel put it, “it was like being at the center of the universe.” But now that Bobby was gone, the house was just filled with unhappy children. It was difficult for Ethel to reconcile such a dramatic lifestyle change.
She always knew what she had to do to survive, though. The way she coped with sadness was to ignore it as best she could. It was as if she feared that to acknowledge it would have been to risk falling into a deep emotional abyss from which she could never be rescued. Therefore she never talked about the past, about Jack or Bobby, or about any of her loved ones who had died—her parents in a plane crash in l955, her brother in another ten years later—other than to place the deceased in the context of their heavenly mission, which was to watch over the rest of the family left behind and take care of them from on high. This kind of avoidance frustrated many of her family members, especially her sons, who just wanted to have a reasonable conversation with their mother about their deceased father. For some of them, such as David and Michael, that they could never address their father’s murder in some constructive way seemed to create an environment in which the only way they felt able to survive was to escape, either with alcohol or narcotics. There was also a pervasive feeling that some secret was being kept, that there was information not being revealed to them about the murders of Jack and Bobby, and as Patrick Kennedy, Ted’s son, once observed, “It’s your secrets that make you drink. Keeping them. Wondering about them. Fearing them.”
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