Ted’s and Jean’s Sad Memories
It was to be just another Easter weekend for the Kennedys at La Guerida in Palm Beach, or at least that’s how it was anticipated. “I suppose we’ll do what we usually do,” Jean Kennedy Smith, who was then sixty-three, said when asked how she planned to spend the first Easter without her husband. “My children and I will go down to Palm Beach. Probably Ted will be there, too. And anyone else who wants to join us. We would love to see Jackie and Maurice,” she said. “We’re hoping…”
As it happened, the holy holiday brought out something melancholy in Ted and Jean, who were both deeply grieving the recent death, in August 1990, of Stephen Smith, Jean’s husband. Smith had always been a tough, uncompromising person, but had been integral to nearly all of the campaigns of the brothers over the years, and as such commanded a great deal of respect among the Kennedys. He also ran the family’s finances as chairman of the family’s business office in New York after Joseph passed away. Ted had become extremely close to Stephen over the years, and as it became clearer that Stephen would probably not live much longer, Ted took it harder than most people, with the exception being, of course, Jean. Stephen was barely sixty when he died of cancer. “He was the last one left,” Ted said of Smith, “the last great man in this family.” (Sargent Shriver might have taken offense to that statement, but then again, it was never very surprising when Ted discounted Sarge.)
Though their marriage was troubled almost from the start, at the end it was appropriate that Jean would be the ever-present and dutiful wife to the ailing Stephen. She’d never stopped loving him, after all. He had just been very difficult to love, given his unfaithful behavior over the years. However, they had adopted two children together and had two of their own, so, in the Kennedy tradition, Jean felt a real responsibility to them and to the rest of the family to at least try to have a good marriage. She had history with Stephen. That counted for a lot. There was comfort, there was familiarity. He was a good man in many ways, smart, funny. It certainly wasn’t the worst thing in the world to stay married to him. Now that he was gone, she missed him terribly.
Jean’s life changed a great deal in the 1980s and into the 1990s. She began to take responsibility for some of her own decisions and stopped blaming her mother for her unhappiness. Her work with her charity, Very Special Arts, had forced her to focus on the problems of others, and it was to her own advantage. She began to express a much more clear-eyed assessment of her childhood and life as the fourth—and not as well known—daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. She had also become a force to be reckoned with when it came to raising her own children. Not surprisingly, she was a lot like the mother she had often criticized. She was forceful and strong in the way she raised her children and, also like her own mother, Rose, she didn’t much like it when they stood up to her or defied her.
On the night of Good Friday, March 29, 1991, Ted, Jean, and some friends—including retired FBI agent and RFK’s personal bodyguard William G. Barry (who had leapt from the crowd and wrestled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground after he shot Bobby), along with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law—began reminiscing about Stephen and other loved ones from the past as they sat by the pool listening to Frank Sinatra records on the sound system. The Kennedys were customarily stoic about their lives and times, rarely discussing among themselves the many tragedies that had befallen them, so this was an unusual night for Ted and Jean.
The conversation went from one topic to the next:
Joseph’s debilitating stroke, on a golf course in Palm Beach, and how different things might have been had it never occurred.
The shootings in Dallas and in Los Angeles, and how such cruel twists of fate had taken Jack and Bobby from Jackie and Ethel, from their children, and from all of their loved ones.
Joan’s alcoholism.
The tragic accident at Chappaquiddick and how very different things might have been for Ted if only it had never happened.
Ted Jr.’s cancer.
David’s death—also in Palm Beach.
Their recounting of so much painful history evoked such strong and unexpected feelings of bittersweet nostalgia that it’s no wonder the experience took a toll on both Ted and Jean. By the time they were ready to retire for the evening, both were emotionally spent. “I found at the end of that conversation that I was not able to think about sleeping,” Ted would later recall. “It was a very draining conversation.”
Jean went right to bed, but not Ted. Unable to sleep, his face flushed from the night of drinking, he wandered aimlessly through the expansive mansion in his grief and sadness, looking for someone else to talk to, someone to perhaps take his mind off his troubles. By this time, Jean’s grown children Kym and Steve had left the family home, leaving behind her daughter Amanda and son Willie—whose full name was William Kennedy Smith. Ted soon found his son Patrick and nephew Willie standing by the glass windows adjacent to the patio. He opened the door. “Say, do you guys want to go out for a drink?” he asked them. “Sure, why not?” they answered.
An Alleged Rape at the Kennedy Estate
The week preceding Easter 1991, Ted Kennedy and his son Patrick and his nephew Willie made many visits to a place called Au Bar, a disco and nightclub on Royal Poinciana Way in Palm Beach. There, they would pick up women and bring them back to the Palm Beach estate where they would, according to most accounts, have sex with them—something else that never would have been allowed to occur had Rose still been in residence.
At this time, Patrick was a recovering addict after having spent time in a rehab about five years earlier dealing with a coke problem. He was much better now, but determined not even to drink lest he relapse. He was turning out to be a fine young man despite his troubles in the past. Ted and Joan were both proud of him. He had been the youngest member of the Kennedy family to hold elective office when, in 1988, he won a seat in the Rhode Island legislature at just twenty-one. He would also suffer from bipolar disorder and depression for most of his life. In 1991, he was young—twenty-four—and single, and some thought that there was certainly no reason he shouldn’t be allowed to have sex with consenting women if he wanted to. It was just that he would sometimes be with his father when the two men met available women, which rubbed people in the media, and also in the family, the wrong way. “If my dad was alive, I could never do it, that’s all I can say,” John Kennedy Jr. had said. “But, you know… to each his own, I guess.”
Willie, who was thirty years old, had a full, thick Kennedy-like mop of black hair and thick dark eyebrows. The youngest son of Stephen and Jean, he was completing his final year at Georgetown Medical School to attain his doctorate after graduating from Duke University with a degree in premed. Previously, he had attended boarding school at Salisbury School in Salisbury, Connecticut. He was generally thought of as a decent young man, one of the less spoiled of the third generation, and though he got into trouble from time to time with his cousins, Jean Kennedy Smith always felt that he, as she put it, “has his head on straight.” He had given a moving eulogy at his father’s funeral; Time reported that “he outshone Arthur Schlesinger.” The children of Jean and Stephen Smith kept a low profile, much like their parents. They were seldom featured in stories about the Kennedy family. “Don’t put them on a pedestal,” Stephen Smith had said of his children to one reporter. “They are children just like any other.” Many years later, Willie recalled, “I think the first time people from my high school were aware that I had a connection to the Kennedy family was when my uncle Teddy spoke at my graduation.”
At the club, Ted, Patrick, and Willie met Anne Mercer and Patricia Bowman. Though the two Kennedys and Smith were trying to have a good time, it wasn’t working out for them. Ted’s dark mood was apparently contagious. “You look like you’re having a great time,” Anne said to Patrick, being playfully sarcastic. “Who are you to say anything?” Ted shot back angrily, as he threw back another Chivas scotch. Later, Anne called Patrick a “bore,” adding, “with genes
like this, there’ll be no more Kennedy dynasty.” To which Ted indignantly responded, “How dare you speak in this manner? This young man is a member of the legislature of Rhode Island!”
By about 3:30 in the morning, Ted’s back was bothering him, he was drunk, tired, feeling his age, and ready to go home. Therefore, he and Patrick—along with a twenty-seven-year-old waitress Patrick had met named Michelle Cassone—headed back to La Guerida, leaving Willie behind with Patricia Bowman, who was a twenty-nine-year-old single mother.
Once the three got back to the estate, they talked for a while—“mostly the senator held court,” Cassone would recall. At a little before four, the two young people excused themselves and went into one of the downstairs rooms, leaving Ted alone. They were cuddling in that room when suddenly Ted appeared in the doorway without his trousers and wearing what appeared to be nothing but a long nightshirt. He cleared his throat, as if to announce his presence. “Then he just stood there with this very strange look on his face,” Cassone would recall. Was he just wandering the house and had stumbled upon them? What in the world was going on? “To tell you the truth, I was completely freaked out,” Cassone recalled. She jumped to her feet. “Okay, I’m out of here,” she said. She and Patrick went outside, where she asked him, “Does your father embarrass you?” The two then engaged in a conversation about Patrick’s relationship with his dad.
Meanwhile, Willie had apparently returned to the mansion with Patricia Bowman. By all accounts, the two began to have sex by the pool. Willie would later say he “pulled out” and was glad he had because, as he would tell it, he had a “bad feeling” about Bowman. She seemed like one of those women the young Kennedy cousins often talked about, the kind who were only interested in them because “we are Kennedys”—as if they didn’t use their family name and heritage to interest women in the first place. That said, Willie would later tell Patrick he was glad Patricia left, driven away, apparently, by Dennis Spear, the estate’s caretaker. But then she showed up again for no reason he could think of, and, as he would recall it, “my heart skipped a few beats, I was so freaked out when she just popped up again. And I thought, man, this girl is whacked.”
All of this was going on while Jean Kennedy Smith was sound asleep upstairs in the ocean-view room that had for decades been used by her mother. Of course, Jean would never have condoned any of what was going on that night, but Kennedy women had long ago abandoned any hope that they might influence the men in the family when it came to their personal behavior.
On Saturday morning, Jean rose early as she always did and took a long, five-mile walk along the beach. When she returned, she went for a swim in the estate’s pool. After lunch, she went shopping. When she returned, she found Ted playing tennis and watched the game. The family seemed fine, Willie and Patrick giving no signs that anything strange had happened the previous night, and certainly no sign of it from Ted either. What no one knew was that Patricia Bowman had gone to the police that afternoon to file rape charges against Willie.
Tough Love
Things quickly went from bad to worse.
When William Kennedy Smith was finally officially charged with sexual battery, the floodgates of controversy opened and the nation became quickly spellbound by the unfolding melodrama, the latest Kennedy scandal. With his mother at his side, Willie surrendered to the Palm Beach police to be booked. While he looked concerned and almost stricken, Jean looked strong and defiant. “We will get to the truth, I can assure you,” she told reporters. “I am very distressed that someone is trying to hurt my son. He says he has done nothing wrong and I believe him. We all believe him.”
The Kennedys did what they always did in times of trouble—they closed ranks. An attack on one of their own was an attack on all of them. Bobby Kennedy Jr. called a meeting of his brothers and sisters to tell them that they had to stick together, “now more than ever,” as he put it. Outraged by the charges brought against one of their own, the Kennedys fought back with a vengeance. Who was this accuser, anyway? As well as calling her sex life into question, the Kennedy investigators assigned to look into her background told the family that she supposedly had been a user of cocaine, had had three abortions, had a child born out of wedlock, and even had received seventeen traffic tickets—though actually it was impossible to know what was true and what was not true about her. On April 16, she was even named in the New York Times. Up until that time, releasing the name of an alleged rape victim was unheard of in the reporting of such an incident. The Times was widely criticized for its decision and later explained its reasoning to name her by saying that it “did so only after her identity became known throughout her community and received detailed nationwide publicity.” None of this mattered to the Kennedys, though. What was important was that they present a united front. Did they consider that Willie could be guilty? No. Or as one friend of the family put it, “I believe the sense in the family was that even if he did it, there was nothing anyone could do about it at that moment except just be supportive. There wasn’t, I think, a lot of concern about the victim. Only about Willie, which I guess is, as a family, understandable.”
To help prove their case, the prosecutors eventually found three women—a doctor, a medical student, and a law student—who claimed that Willie had had rough sex with them between 1983 and 1988, forcing himself on them just as, allegedly, he had done to Patricia Bowman. Even though their testimony would ultimately be judged inadmissible in court—a devastating blow to the prosecution—it received national attention and helped paint Smith as a man out of control and possibly a sexual predator. Still, Jean remained unfazed.
“I don’t care what anyone says. I support my son no matter what,” she told one attorney during a meeting in his office to discuss the case. Present were Jean, two attorneys, Willie, and a legal secretary. Jean reiterated her belief that her son was innocent and said that she would “not allow him to be victimized like this. Family means everything to the Kennedys,” she said, “and if someone is attacking our family, I believe we have no choice but to fight. Family matters, that’s what my father always said,” Jean continued, “and it is the credo by which we have lived our lives from the very beginning. We will remain strong and defiant through this,” she concluded. “That’s exactly how my father would handle it.”
When Willie said he was afraid that the public would believe the charges, Jean shot him an annoyed look. She was in his corner, but clearly she was also quite angry with him. “I’m just saying…” he continued, according to witnesses. Jean cut him off. “Quiet,” she commanded in a very sharp tone. Smith just nodded and looked down.
One of the attorneys present then said that the family would be able to fight the charges but that doing so would take time and money. “Oh, that’s easy,” Willie said with a slight smile. “We have plenty of both.” Everyone looked at each other in silence. It seemed like the most inappropriate thing William could have said in that moment. In response, Jean very slowly rose from her chair, walked over to her son, and stood directly in front of him. “I’d like to talk to you in the hall,” she said looking down at him. With a sheepish expression, he looked up at her and said, “Yes, Mother.” The two left the room. Jean returned fifteen minutes later, but without her son. “Now,” she said, sitting back down and addressing the attorneys. “Where were we?”
Jean’s antagonism toward her son did seem somewhat odd to the observers, as if something else was going on that only the two of them knew about. “Though Jean was obviously annoyed at her boy, she was still involved in every strategy meeting,” recalled Dominick Dunne, who was in the courtroom for the proceedings and wrote about them for Vanity Fair. “The lawyers didn’t know much about her. They all knew about Eunice, Jackie, Rose, Ethel, Joan, and even Pat because of the Peter Lawford marriage. But Jean? In terms of the women in the family, most people knew virtually nothing about her, but they came to find out that she was quite formidable. They learned that she was determined, focused, and driven—decidedly a f
orce to be reckoned with.
“There were strategy meetings every night at the Kennedy mansion—often over dinner—where all of the lawyers were staying,” continued Dunne. “You might say it was a command center. In those meetings, Jean displayed a fiery temper, especially with her son. The sense was that she loved him very much but was also quite unhappy with him. She would freely chastise him, often in the company of others, and had a tough-love approach to dealing with him. Most found their relationship to be quite tense. When he wasn’t around, she spoke lovingly of him. But when he was present, it was a different story.”
One attorney very close to the case but not authorized to speak about it recalled, “William owned a cell phone, which was about the size of a small brick, typical of the times. During one particular meeting around a conference table, it rang and he pulled it from his jacket to answer it. ‘No, Willie,’ his mother said, glaring at him. ‘But it might be urgent,’ he said. ‘Nothing is more urgent than what is going on here,’ she said. ‘I am quite sure you will agree.’ He nodded his head and then put the phone back in his pocket.
“There was another instance when William seemed to not be paying attention to a point Mrs. Kennedy Smith was trying to make regarding the case. In his defense, he was obviously under a great deal of pressure. After all, he was facing fifteen years in prison, and also pretty much the end of his medical career. On this day, he seemed distracted. At one point, he seemed to be drifting off, staring into space. While his mother was speaking, she very casually stood up, went to a bookshelf, and pulled a book from it. We all thought she was going to look something up. Instead, she stepped behind her son, raised the book over his head and dropped it with a loud thud on the table right in front of him. He was obviously startled, as were the rest of us. Then she just went back to what she was saying, all without missing a beat.”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 40