After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The greatest loss, without a doubt, was that Jackie wasn’t present to see her son wed. “Carolyn resembled Jackie strongly,” John Perry Barlow said, “in the sense that her nature was complex, subtle. Jackie was the most exceptional woman I ever knew, and Carolyn reminded me of her. Carolyn, too, was unconventional, charismatic, and, like Jackie, she had so much compassion for others. But I think what they had in common overall was their absolute femininity. Carolyn’s femininity was almost mystical. She was something like the Delphic oracle. I never knew a woman who knew how to handle men so well. As for John, her love for him was at once absolute and tinged with ferocity.”

  The reception for the newlyweds was held at the Greyfield Inn, a luxury hotel on Cumberland Island that was built in 1900 and was once the home of Margaret Ricketson, daughter of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie. It’s so secluded that guests can only arrive by ferryboat or helicopter. The Kennedys rented the entire thirteen-room inn for the occasion, buying out anyone with prior reservations. During the festivities, the couple cut a three-tiered butter-cream wedding cake. Then a very happy Ted Kennedy toasted the happy bride and groom as his own wife, Vicki, beamed at him. “Jack and Jackie would have been very proud of you and full of love for you as you begin your future together,” he said while raising a flute of champagne to the newlyweds.

  PART TWENTY

  Michael’s Story

  Michael Kennedy’s Troubles

  On New Year’s Eve 1997, many members of Ethel Kennedy’s family—some of the third generation of Kennedys and their children who were the fourth—were at the scenic Sundeck restaurant atop Aspen Mountain, surrounded by spectacular views of snow-covered mountains, enormous aspen trees, and a cobalt blue sky as far as the eye could see. Eating duck quesadillas and sipping hot chocolate in the wood-and-glass-structured restaurant designed as a very large chalet, they excitedly talked among themselves while waiting for the mountain to clear of skiers so that they could play a very dangerous game, which they unofficially called ski football. The Kennedys had been playing it all week, dividing themselves into teams and then careening down the slopes on skis at high speeds, usually without the protection of helmets, and without poles and dangerously close to one another. They would jettison a football toward each other, making improvised goals. It was a fast and furious kind of game, the kind of sport most people wouldn’t have dreamed of playing, and which the ski patrol definitely did not endorse. More than once that week, the Kennedys were told that the sport was too deadly to be played on the icy slopes and that it was feared the family was encouraging such activity among the other vacationers. Someone was going to get hurt, the patrol warned—or worse. By late afternoon, the sun was going down, the temperature was dropping, and the hills were becoming icy. Though most skiers were finished for the day, the Kennedys—there were thirty-six in their party—were waiting for everyone to get off the slopes so that they could begin their game.

  * * *

  Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, thirty-nine, was an expert skier and quarterback who loved the risky sport so much he enjoyed taking video footage of his siblings as they raced about the mountain, throwing a small plastic football among themselves. “Michael really had a tremendous drive for living on the edge. Whether it was kayaking or skiing, he just did it,” says James Hilliard, a longtime friend and former business associate of Michael’s. “It wasn’t arrogance in his personality, it was just his strength.”

  The year 1997 had been a terrible one for Michael. Previously he had been running his brother Joe’s Citizens Energy Corporation as chairman, and helping his uncle Ted win his 1994 Senate reelection campaign. He was thought of as a giving, openhearted person, a philanthropist and expert political strategist who, it was believed, could very well forge his own political career. Like many of his relatives, he cared deeply about a wide range of causes, some of which most people would never even consider. For instance, he was a founding board member of the Angola Education Assistance Fund and had traveled often to Angola, where he helped open a Roman Catholic university. He also helped to fund loans to female-owned businesses in Ecuador and even operated a company that provided heat to 150 homeless shelters in Boston. He was also scheduled to begin work on Joe’s campaign for governor of Massachusetts, a campaign that would have to be abandoned because of the public spectacle of Joe having asked his ex-wife, Sheila Rauch, for an annulment. Coinciding with Joe’s high-profile scandal, unfortunately, would be his own.

  In April 1997, Michael was accused of having had a sexual affair with the family’s former babysitter, allegedly beginning when the Massachusetts girl was just fourteen. It was an awful and, for some, unbelievable accusation. Yet from all available evidence it seemed to be true, and it was made even more disturbing by the fact that his wife, Victoria, reportedly found him with the girl in one of the bedrooms of their enormous harborside home back in 1995. Michael and Victoria were so close to the parents of the girl in question, they had attended the inauguration of Bill Clinton together. Understandably, everyone was quite shocked, hurt, and angry. As a result, Kennedy’s entire life seemed to implode. The incident would eventually mark the end of his sixteen-year marriage to Victoria, which had resulted in three children—Michael, Kyle, and Rory. She actually stayed with him after finding him with the girl, hoping that the marriage could be repaired. Michael explained that he had been under the influence of liquor when he bedded the babysitter, and promised to get help. He then sought professional treatment for his alcoholism in 1995 and, a year later, for sex addiction. But then he continued seeing the girl—who was very mature for her age and, from most accounts, also in hot pursuit of Michael—and being intimate with her. When Victoria found out about that, she finally had had enough and left him.

  What was so strange about the situation to many people inside the family’s circle was that Michael Kennedy had always been such a levelheaded and reasonable person, not given to the errors of some of his siblings and cousins. However, something seemed to have snapped in him in 1994—it’s not known what—and he began drinking heavily and becoming extremely depressed. Eventually, Michael admitted that he had been intimate with the girl, but said that she was sixteen, not fourteen, when he first started having sex with her. She was nineteen when the story broke. Apparently the two had been involved for several years, to the complete astonishment of Michael’s family. He passed three polygraph tests with his version of events, which didn’t make the relationship any more acceptable, but at least it didn’t rise to the level of statutory rape, according to the laws of Massachusetts. Even so, Michael Kennedy still appeared to a lot of people to be nothing more than a megalomaniac with no moral code whatsoever—an image that the Kennedys had long fought against as a family, but that persevered just the same, precisely because of these kinds of sordid events. To people who thought that the Kennedys played by a different set of rules and didn’t care what others thought, this episode was all they needed to prove their belief. As the New York Post put it in its April 26, 1997, headline, “They’re At It Again!” What made Michael Kennedy want to do such a thing? And what made him think he could get away with it? These were the questions with which his stunned and disappointed family members grappled, and to which they never really got good answers.

  Because the babysitter’s parents declined to press charges, the whole ugly mess eventually blew over, but not without a great deal of heartache suffered by all concerned. “Ethel was so humiliated by it,” recalled a close friend of hers. “Frank Gifford [the Hall of Fame football player, TV announcer, and Victoria’s father] had been a very close friend of hers for many years, as was his present wife, Kathie Lee. It was just very sad.”

  “I can tell you that Michael also felt horrible about what he had done,” says close friend John Rosenthal, a real estate developer. “His biggest concern was the impact it had on his children.”

  Kennedy tried to move past it, though. In October 1997 he appeared at an AIDS conference at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. At the ti
me, there were also reports that he and Victoria might reconcile after they missed at least one divorce hearing and were then seen dining together in various Boston restaurants. “Probably the central thing in Michael’s life was his wife and his children,” said Larry Spagnola, a documentary filmmaker and Michael’s former Harvard roommate. “It was definitely his intention to reconcile.”

  It was around this same time, the autumn of 1997, that Michael and his brother Joe were mentioned in one of John’s controversial editorials in George. In an effort, it has to be assumed, to be provocative, John Kennedy Jr. posed apparently nude for the photograph that accompanied the essay, showing only limbs, chest, and face as he pondered a dangling apple. The headline was, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

  “I’ve learned a lot about temptation recently, but that doesn’t make me desire any less,” John wrote somewhat cryptically. About Michael, John speculated that his cousin “was looking for a hedge against mortality.” He “fell in love with youth and surrendered his judgment in the process.” He also suggested that Joe and Sheila Rauch “chased an idealized alternative to their life” and that Joe had “left behind an embittered life.” Speaking about the public condemnation of both, he wrote, “Perhaps they deserved it. Perhaps they should have known better. To whom much is given, much is expected, right?”

  To this day, it’s often reported that John in the autumn 1997 article labeled his cousins the “poster boys for bad behavior.” That’s not true. The quote was out of context. The point Kennedy was making was that the public—not he himself—had decided that his cousins fit that description. He was actually defending his family members, not indicting them. “The interesting thing was the ferocious condemnation of their excursions beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior,” he wrote. “Since when does someone need to apologize on television for getting divorced?” At the time, some people in the family apparently reacted to the press reports about the column, and didn’t actually read it themselves. As a result, this became one of the rare times—and maybe the only time—that JFK Jr. at least temporarily fell out of favor with some members of the family. Of the editorial, Joe said, “I guess my first reaction was, ‘Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine.’ ”

  Of course, such flare-ups were common among the third-generation cousins and often didn’t represent anything more than just momentary venting. After all, they’d known each other since they were kids. They often argued. Joe had the kind of temper John didn’t condone. And Joe always thought John was kowtowed to, made to seem more important than the other Kennedy sons because of his parentage. Still, though they didn’t always get along, the cousins had a deep and abiding love for one another. Joe knew who John was at his core, and John knew the same of his cousin. Bobby better understood the context of what John was trying to say. “You have to read the actual editorial John wrote, not just the press about the editorial,” he told this writer in November 1997. “Is my brother [ Joe] upset about it? I guess. Maybe. But most of my family read the text and we knew what John was trying to convey. And even if some of us were mad, we’re Kennedys. We don’t stay angry for long. We can’t,” he said, laughing. “We’re thrown together too much to stay mad at each other.”

  To celebrate the holidays, Michael Kennedy just wanted to be with his family in Aspen, nursing his wounds, relaxing and have a few laughs, not worrying about the media, its coverage either of John’s editorial or of his own unfortunate exploits. With his mother, Ethel, back at the restaurant sipping cocoa and nursing a hurt shoulder from a tumble she had taken earlier, he and his family members went noisily up to the slope and then divided themselves into two teams—Michael the captain of one and his sister Rory leading the other.

  Apparently the stakes were high. On the previous day, the score had been tied between the two teams. “We’ll play tomorrow,” one of the Kennedys had proclaimed, “and death to the loser.”

  “Oh My God, Not Again!”

  It was on this December 31, 1997, at about four in the afternoon, that a dangerous game of ski football was under way. At lightning speed, Michael Kennedy, who was once described by former U.S. Olympic ski coach Bob Beattie as the best natural skier he’d ever seen, set off down the mountain with his camera in one hand and a football in the other. “Photo op! Photo op!” he yelled out as he took photos of the others while skiing backward. Wearing a bright copper ski suit and no helmet or any other kind of protection, he was followed by his son, Michael Jr., fifteen, and daughters Kyle, thirteen, and Rory Jr., ten.

  R. Couri Hay, a publicist, reporter, and friend of the Kennedys who had often skied these slopes with them, was present that December day and recalled the events. “I didn’t play,” he remembered. “Though I am a good skier, the idea of whooshing down Aspen Mountain playing football was beyond my athletic capabilities and, to tell you the truth, beyond my imagination, too. But they were such daredevils, the Kennedys, and I wanted to be part of the fun because I was a friend of Michael’s. So I said, ‘I’ll carry the poles.’ And that’s what I did. I carried Michael’s poles.

  “After the first goal, which was made by Rory, Michael got serious about the game and gave the camera to a friend so he could concentrate on it. ‘Michael! Michael!’ someone called as the football sailed his way. Michael turned around to get the pass and he caught it. But in doing so, a terrible thing happened. He veered off the trail in his determination to get the pass and slammed into a massive spruce tree. It was awful. His skis hit the tree first, then his head hit and he just crumpled like a rag doll and fell backward onto his back. The crash was as loud as a head-on collision of cars. It was traumatic to witness. I was about twenty feet away and got to him as fast as I could, but I knew the truth immediately. I knew he was dead. Blood was pouring from his nose. His face had gone completely white.”

  There was chaos as frantic Kennedys descended upon Michael from every direction. Rory Sr. kicked off her skis and ran over to her brother. Trying her best to stay calm, she went to work on him. “There’s no pulse,” she screamed out. “There’s no pulse! Somebody call the ski patrol!” She then laid Michael on his back, pried his bloody mouth open with her fingers, and began giving him mouth-to-mouth. Counting off, “One. Two. Three. Four,” she breathed into his mouth and pounded on his chest, trying to get his heart moving again. “I’ve got a pulse!” Rory exclaimed. She then turned Michael on his side as he began to once again breathe, in order that he not choke. There was a fleeting moment of disbelief and exhilaration when it seemed as if Michael was going to be okay. Exhausted, Rory dug her hand into the snow and wiped her face with it before spitting Michael’s blood from her mouth. She leaned in close to him. “Michael,” she said to her brother through her tears, “now is the time to fight. Don’t leave us,” she begged him. “Do not leave us, Michael! Please! Please!” Meanwhile, each of Michael’s three crying children made the sign of the cross and fell to their knees. No one told them to do so, it somehow just came naturally to them, as if by instinct. “As they kneeled in the snow and prayed,” R. Couri Hay recalled, “their prayers were interrupted with their cries of, ‘Please, God, not my daddy! Not my daddy!’ ”

  “Our Father who art in heaven…” they began to pray, and they continued to pray and weep—along with all of the others present—until the paramedics arrived and began working on Michael. Finally, Rory gathered up the children and told them to “think good thoughts” as the paramedics fit Michael with a cervical collar and put him on a toboggan, covering him with a yellow blanket. “Let’s go pray for Daddy,” she told them through her tears.

  “When I came upon him, it didn’t look like he was aware of anything,” says Davis Factor, an L.A. photographer who was skiing that day and stopped to help. “I don’t think this guy knew what hit him.”

  “At this point, I started to back away from the scene because I realized that this was an intensely personal and tragic family moment,” recalled R. Couri Hay. “As the toboggan took Michael
down the slope, I took the poles and slowly skied behind the toboggan… it was eerie, unbelievably sad.”

  Michael Kennedy was dead by the time they got him to the hospital, the official cause listed as “massive head and neck trauma.” In an instant, another Kennedy life was over. It was impossible to reconcile. “Oh my God, not again,” Ethel Kennedy cried in the hall outside of the emergency room as she fell into her daughter Rory’s arms.

  Reckless or Accidental?

  Of course, there was a great deal of media coverage about this latest Kennedy tragedy, much of it focusing on what was perceived by many critical observers as Michael Kennedy’s reckless behavior, suggesting a kind of hubris that makes the family feel somehow invincible. It’s actually a reductive and simplified way of looking at them. Yes, they’re a big family that enjoys adventure, which obviously puts them in danger from time to time. It could be said that their passion for sports runs a close second to their passion for politics. However, much of the press about Michael’s death suggested that he was just the latest Kennedy killed while engaging in some sort of sporting activity, as opposed to the truth, which is that he was actually the first. As for real “risk-taking,” of course, most of the family will admit to a certain amount of it, but not so much in terms of their participation in sports as in what they have done as public servants. “My family has often been called ‘risk-takers,’ a phrase said with an undercurrent of opprobrium, an explicit or implied understanding that a life lived with such risk is inexcusable and unjustified,” noted Max Kennedy. “It is true that my father took risks. But it is also true that nothing can ever be achieved without risk. In a book on the literature of ancient Greece, he underlined a sentence that read, ‘Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens.’ ” When Max Kennedy and most of his other family members think of “risk-taking,” they think of his father exploring the bottom of a communist-controlled mining operation in Santiago, Chile, in order to get a better understanding of the dangers faced by people working there. Or traveling to South Africa during a time in the 1960s when apartheid was simply unheard of by most Americans. Or going to the Mississippi Delta to assist in aiding starving children. Or meeting with gang members after the Watts riots. Or prosecuting some of the world’s most notorious mobsters. But sports activities? While risky, they don’t necessarily rise to the standard any Kennedys would consider particularly perilous. Maybe a more accurate explanation, although it too is weak, can be found in the notion of the so-called Kennedy curse, which encompasses all of the tragedies the family has suffered, something Sargent Shriver once dismissed by saying, “So be it.” “The Kennedy Curse” is what screamed out of Newsweek’s cover, with a photo of Michael and a headline that read “Another Reckless Life—and Tragic Death.”