Only Ethel’s close family members knew of her sometimes overwhelming sadness and anger. Others simply enjoyed being in her company.
“I always knew that Ethel was a complex person,” says her longtime friend the singer Andy Williams. “You knew that there was this sadness about her and maybe a certain amount of anger, but if you weren’t close to her, you’d never know it. She didn’t want people to feel sorry about her. Plus, she had an image of being strong and stoic, and to a certain extent, that’s the way the family promoted her. Therefore, I think she felt an obligation to be that sort of woman, at least for the world.
“Of course, having known her for more than forty years, she and I talked a lot about her sadness, but I would never divulge what she’d said to me,” continued Williams. “But, always, there was that other fun-loving Ethel at the ready.
“I remember one of my birthdays, for instance, when she took me to a high-class restaurant [the Jockey Club of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C.] to celebrate. I had on a beautiful and expensive suit. She brought out a big cake and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. As I was getting ready to blow out the candles, I leaned in and, sure enough, she palmed the back of my head and pushed my face right into the cake. ‘Happy birthday, kiddo!’ she said, laughing. But that was Ethel. I still get a Valentine’s Day card from her every single year. On it she always writes, ‘Will you be my Valentine, Andy? Love, Ethel.’ ”
Brian Holloway, the former NFL offensive tackle for the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Raiders, and his wife, Tammy, are good friends of Ethel’s and of many of the other Kennedys. “What do you think the Celtics are going to do this year?” Ethel asked him one day when they were sitting out on the porch enjoying a beautiful, sun-drenched Cape Cod afternoon. She was always full of sports questions whenever she was in Brian’s company. “Who’s going to win the playoffs?” she would want to know. “Do you think the Rams should have left Los Angeles?” she asked. As they were talking, Ethel suddenly got an idea. “Come on, let’s go see Dionne Warwick.” It was so random a suggestion, but very much like Ethel these days. “I don’t have anything to wear,” Brian protested. “Oh, just wear what you have on now,” she said. “You’re a football star, you can get away with it.” Within thirty minutes, the two were in Brian’s car, racing to see Dionne Warwick at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis. “And there we are in the front row enjoying the show,” he recalled. “Afterward, we went backstage and, much to my amazement, Ethel and Dionne seemed like best friends! Who knew? Then Ethel and I went back to the Cape and we had a fabulous dinner. It was all so spontaneous and fun, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, Ethel Kennedy sure knows how to live!’ ”
“Ethel is definitely the matriarch,” Brian’s wife, Tammy, recalled. “Everyone will be seated for dinner—her children and their friends—and then Ethel will walk into the room and everyone stands, led by her children. She sits, and everyone else follows suit and sits down, so there is definitely that kind of formality. Everyone in the family is very respectful of her.
“One thing I noticed over time is that she has French fries at every dinner. Whatever was being served, be it lobster, chicken, steak, or whatever, there would always be a bowl of French fries on the table. So I asked Ethel about it. And she said, ‘Oh, that’s what Bobby and I had on our honeymoon. French fries. So we have fries with just about every meal.’
“You definitely still feel Bobby’s presence all over,” Tammy Holloway continues. “For instance, Mrs. Kennedy still wears her wedding bands. I once asked her about it and she said, ‘It would be like cheating on Bobby if I ever took them off, so I never have.”
Every Sunday at 3 p.m. while the family is in residence, a priest says Mass in Ethel Kennedy’s living room. If you happen to be at the compound at that time, you are expected to attend. “You honor that request, whatever your beliefs,” said Tammy Holloway. “It’s lovely, beautiful, everyone sitting around in couches and chairs in the living room while the priest says Mass. Sometimes the little kids get up and read scripture.”
The main bathroom downstairs is the biggest attraction of Ethel Kennedy’s house at the Kennedy compound, said Tammy Holloway. “Whenever someone new comes by, it’s always, ‘Have you been to the bathroom yet?’ ” she recalled, laughing. “Everyone who doesn’t know better wonders why it takes so long for people to come out of the bathroom. It’s because there are black-and-white pictures of Ethel and Bobby’s entire life, everywhere—on the burgundy-and-white-papered walls and under Plexiglas on all of the counters. It’s such a tribute to her life and times, all of the Kennedys represented with all of their children at different ages, different times of their lives. You’ll see JFK here and Jackie there, Eunice, Sargent, Ted and Joan, all of the kids of the third generation, John Jr., Caroline—all of it displayed so lovingly. When you’re in this bathroom, you feel that you have to stop and take in every single photograph because it really hits you that, truly, this is your American history just as much as it is the Kennedys’.”
In 2009, Ethel was in attendance at a Daughters of the American Revolution benefit performance in Washington, D.C., with Ted Kennedy and her friends Andy Williams and John Glenn when she found herself greeted by a face from the past—her former personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier. “I actually didn’t even know Mrs. Kennedy was there,” Bombardier recalled. “I first saw Andy’s manager and went up to him to say that I knew Andy from my days with Ethel Kennedy, and that I wanted to say hello to him. And the manager said, ‘Why, Mrs. Kennedy is here too! Why don’t you come backstage after the show and say hello?’ The curtain then went up, I enjoyed the show, and afterward I made my way backstage.”
As Noelle was walking down a hallway to the backstage area, she saw her former employer standing in a corner talking in an animated fashion to Andy Williams. She stood and smiled at her for a moment, remembering all of the rich history the two shared, much of it involving Ethel’s lost son David. Ethel stopped talking to Andy and stared at Noelle with a look of astonishment as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. It had been thirty years since the botched kidnapping attempt on Noelle’s daughter that caused her to quit Ethel’s employ. “Is that you, Noelle?” Ethel asked. “Is that really you?” The two women then embraced and had a warm reunion. “The years have passed, but we still look pretty good, don’t you think, Mrs. Kennedy?” Noelle asked as she smiled at Ethel. “Heck, yeah, we do, kid,” Ethel said, laughing. “You betcha we do!”
Flynn
On July 4, 1998, John and Carolyn joined the Kennedys for a major family celebration of the Independence Day holiday at the Kennedy compound. The festivities started with a special Mass under a tent in Sargent and Eunice Shriver’s yard during which the sacrament of Communion was offered. Then there was a family cruise in Hyannis Harbor with at least thirty Kennedy relatives on board, including Rosemary Kennedy, who was visiting from St. Coletta’s.
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy could roughhouse with them as if she’d been born into the family, chasing John’s cousins around the property, playing football with them, jumping into the ocean and dunking them. On this day, she spent an hour on the sand with the youngest Kennedys of the third generation, trying to teach them how to do cartwheels and somersaults. Meanwhile, Ethel stood on the beach and admonished her, saying, “Carolyn, don’t do that. You’re going to hurt yourself!” John chuckled. “Don’t worry, Aunt Ethel,” he said, “she’s made of rubber. I think it’s all that yoga.” Ethel had to laugh. “She’s me at that age, you know?” she told John. “I used to be able to do somersaults too, way back in the Stone Age.” The two smiled at each other and embraced.
An hour later, John and Carolyn took a walk out onto the pier. A photographer appeared from nowhere. John walked over to a bucket, filled it with ocean water, walked over to the photographer—who was snapping pictures the whole time—and threw the bucket of water at him. “Just thought I’d cool you down,” John said, laughing. “It’s really hot out here!” It didn’t seem malicious,
though. Rather, it was a light moment, so much so that the photographer started laughing, as did John.
Later, at the buffet table, John and Carolyn joked about how John had only complex carbohydrates on his plate—macaroni and cheese, potatoes, and corn. “Now that’s what I call a meal, Kitty Cat,” he said, using his nickname for her. Carolyn picked up a grilled steak and put it on his plate along with some avocado, fresh green beans, and some sliced tomatoes. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. Ted, witnessing the scene from his table, remarked to Pat, “God, those kids are so in love, aren’t they? It’s like watching Jack and Jackie again, all these years later.”
Pat, eccentric as ever, was wearing an Independence Day–inspired leotard: one leg designed with white stars against a blue background and the other all red and white stripes. She also had on a colorful red baseball cap and a red, white, and blue ribbon around her neck. Pat seemed to be in a better mood on this day than she’d been in quite some time. She and Ted couldn’t help but sit and watch John eat, laughing all the while. Since he was a kid, John had had a habit of eating his food very quickly while hunched over his plate with one arm around it, as if he were trying to protect it from being stolen. “No one’s going to take your food away from you,” Pat told him with a smile. As John and Carolyn sat talking to Sargent, Eunice, their daughter, Maria, and her husband, Arnold, a bunch of Kennedy nieces and nephews scurried about the yard chasing eastern cottontail bunnies. “You’ll never catch them,” John told the kids with a big grin. “Those things run faster than Kennedys, and that’s really saying something.” Then, gazing at Carolyn lovingly, he added, “Sometimes, though, it’s nice to get caught.”
Most of John’s family adored Carolyn. They knew that she fully supported John in everything he wanted to do, and she represented, in their view, a real anchor for him. She had quit her job at Calvin Klein and was now taking trips to Europe for John on George business. At this time, John was upset that circulation had begun to drop off and was even worried that Hachette might close it down. He was courting other possible investors and Carolyn was behind him all the way. Though at first apprehensive about it, she was also now very supportive of his flying, and went up with him quite often. It was while soaring through the clouds with John, she said, that she felt closest to him. “We can talk up there with no interruptions,” she told her friend Mary Cullen, “and if that’s what it takes to finally be alone with my husband, then I’m all for it.” It was funny, she said, but she just didn’t feel any fear when she was with John. Other people in his life had said the same thing about him over the years. He was so secure and confident and capable no matter how risky the sport in which he was engaged—skiing, sailing, kayaking, flying—that he just seemed invincible. “I mean, what are the chances of JFK Jr. dying?” is how Carolyn put it, “and of little ol’ me just happening to be there at the exact same time? That just would never happen.” In fact, Carolyn said she was planning on taking flying lessons herself very soon so that the hobby would be something the two of them could truly share.
“I think they were coming to grips with a lot of their problems by the summer of 1999,” said R. Couri Hay, “and were on their way to a serious rebuilding of their relationship. The fact that they were going to Rory’s wedding was, I felt, a symbolic decision for them. I think they wanted to present themselves at the wedding as a united couple for the benefit of anyone who had lately heard otherwise of them. In the next year, I think they would have had a child.”
“I know that they had been talking about having children,” confirmed John and Carolyn’s friend John Perry Barlow. Barlow says that John told him that he and Carolyn were trying to decide how to bring a child into the world knowing that the baby would be the subject of such intense scrutiny. “They were already in this unremitting klieg glare,” he said, “and they couldn’t imagine what it would be like with a child. Would it be fair to the baby? How would they, as parents, handle it?” These were their concerns, says Barlow.
What John really wanted was a son. He may not have been sure when it would happen, but he knew it would one day. And he wanted to name him Flynn.
John Kennedy Jr.—Running on Water
It was July 1998 and Tammy Holloway and John Kennedy Jr. were sitting on colorful cotton towels on the cool sand of a stretch of beach at the Kennedy compound. John was wearing nothing but a blue swimsuit, and according to Tammy’s memory, “he was so beautiful, just this amazingly chiseled body, the chest hair, the tousled black mop, the gleaming white teeth. He had a five o’clock shadow, too, very casual, very sexy. It was a beautiful, sunny morning on the Cape, and I was just so happy to be spending it with him.”
“It’s so good to see Brian again,” John said, speaking of Tammy’s husband. “He’s so cool.”
“He feels the same about you, John,” Tammy said, according to her memory. “Thank you for having us here, really. We love coming here every July.”
“Tell me, Tammy,” John said, looking out at the sea with a pensive expression. “How many kids do you guys have now? What is it, like, a hundred?” he asked. He turned to her and smiled.
“Actually, Wendell makes seven,” she said, returning his smile.
“Well, you must have a lot of help, nannies and that sort of thing,” John said.
“No, actually we don’t,” she said. “I just want to raise my own kids, you know?”
“That’s so awesome,” John said. He told her that he and Carolyn definitely wanted children and that when they had them, he wanted to be a real part of their lives, too, just as his mom had been for him and Caroline. “She was there for us all the time, no exceptions,” he said. “And she had a real code of behavior for us. I can still hear her voice,” John continued. “ ‘Just because you are a Kennedy doesn’t give you license to be unkind to others. I don’t care whether he is rich or poor, black, white, whatever… every single person deserves your respect.’ That’s what she used to tell us, and I daydream about telling my kids that.” He lay back and closed his eyes, letting the sun wash over his already tanned face. “So, how did you and Brian meet?” John asked, his eyes still closed.
“It was a blind date,” she answered.
“Wow,” John said, sitting up again and now looking at Tammy with fascination. “So, okay. He’s this big, famous football star, right? And you’re a person in the so-called regular world. And the next thing you know you’re married to this sort of celebrity, right? And you have this new life, photographers pestering you and all of that.” He seemed to be turning the thoughts in his mind as he was speaking them. “So, how did you deal with it?”
“It’s not easy,” Tammy said. “I mean, you have to have a real strong sense of self. At first I wanted my old life back. I once had privacy and my own friends and all of a sudden I was thrust into this new world,” she continued, “and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that people were in my face all the time!” At this point, as Tammy recalls it, she began to wonder if perhaps John was thinking of his wife, Carolyn Bessette, as he asked her these questions. Carolyn wasn’t with him at the Cape, and the reason for her absence was never explained. “I wanted to be a doctor,” Tammy continued, “and I gave all of that up to be a part of Brian’s world. But then I started having some second thoughts about it.”
“So what did you do?” John asked.
“I talked to Brian about it, and I told him how I felt,” she recalled. “And he understood. But it wasn’t about him at all. It was about me. I had to find the strength in myself to deal with it. And I had to do whatever it took to not lose my identity.”
“That’s so interesting,” John said, nodding. His eyes were narrowed and it looked as if he was taking in the information. “I think that’s true,” he agreed. “You have to be a strong person, or the whole thing can just eat you up. It’s really something else, a real sort of freak show,” he concluded.
At that point, John pulled a ratty old pair of sneakers from
a cloth gym bag. He then put them on his bare feet and tied their laces. “I think I’ll go for a run,” he said.
“My God, John, you need some new sneakers!”
He grinned. “Yeah, I know. But these are so comfortable, I can’t seem to give them up,” he said, shrugging. Then, looking out at the wide vista of cobalt blue sea and sky, he added, “Man, I sure do love it out here. I love the water, you know?”
“What is it about the Kennedys and water?” Tammy wondered. “Throughout history, we have seen Kennedys here on this very spot, sailing and enjoying the water, year after year for, what? Forty years? What is that about, John?”
John smiled to himself and nodded. “It’s because when we’re out there in the sea, we are by ourselves, finally, and we are at peace. It’s a beautiful thing, really, that kind of isolation. It’s completely still, quiet. Out there,” he said, gazing out at the sea with great admiration, “it’s like,” he paused, struggling for words, “it’s like heaven.”
She nodded. “I have seen pictures of you running on the beach, and I swear, it looks like you are actually running on the surface of the water. Do you know what I mean?”
He laughed. “That’s a little trick of mine,” he said. “Promise not to tell?” he asked, winking.
She did.
“There’s this little ridge and it’s right at the point where the water meets the sand,” he said, pointing out at the sea. “It’s my secret spot. And if you hit it just right, from back here on the beach, it actually looks like you’re running on the top of the water.” He stood up and stretched. “Wait and see,” he said. “I’m going for a run now, and when I come back this way, take a look. And you’ll see for yourself, okay?”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 53