Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

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  As always, for Rose Marie Taraborrelli

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Considering the many hundreds of books published about members of the Kennedy family over the last forty years, it’s surprising that no author before me has attempted an in-depth examination of the relationships among the sisters-in-law, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, and Joan Bennett Kennedy. While it had been long assumed by some observers that no connection existed among the three women, I always believed that their lives—as well as those of their families—were so completely transformed by marrying three of Joseph P. Kennedy’s sons that there would at least be some interesting interplay among them. And if there were no relationship at all, I decided, then the reasons for such estrangement could also prove to be interesting. As it turned out, much to my fascination, they related to one another very much like sisters—sometimes lovingly, sometimes contentiously.

  The concept behind this book has been an interest of mine for many years, dating back to January 1980 when, as a Los Angeles magazine reporter specializing in African-American pop culture, I was given the unusual assignment to write a series of articles about the Kennedy family’s relationship with that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s for a magazine called Soul (which I would later edit and publish). As part of my research, I not only interviewed King’s widow, Coretta Scott-King (excerpts of which are included in this text), I also conducted a number of personal interviews and had many conversations with longtime Kennedy family friend and unofficial historian Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings. At first I found Lem to be a difficult and conflicted person, but I later learned that his complexities were the result of his loving but often ambivalent relationship with the powerful Kennedy family. As a college roommate of John Kennedy’s and constant companion to many family members, he was a fountain of information for me and—as I found out after conducting hundreds of interviews with others—he was accurate in just about every observation he ever made about any of the Kennedys.

  He told me one story that I didn’t use in the text of this book, but it illustrates the kind of relationship he had with Jack and Jackie.

  Lem was a big fan of Greta Garbo’s, whom he had once met at the Cannes Film Festival. “I was obsessed with her,” he told me, “and couldn’t stop talking about her for quite some time. Jackie told me she was sick of hearing about her. I couldn’t blame her.”

  The President and First Lady decided to play a practical joke on Lem. They invited Greta Garbo to the White House for a private dinner. They also invited Lem. When he showed up, he found his idol, Garbo, casually sitting with Jack and Jackie, talking and laughing as if they were old friends (which they weren’t). Lem was astonished. “Why, Greta! Oh my gosh. How are you?” he said excitedly. After the actress had sized Lem up from head to toe as only Greta Garbo could, she turned to Jackie and, in her most imperious tone, said, “Who is this man?” (Many years later, in the 1980s, Jackie would tell her secretary and close friend Nancy Tuckerman that she herself was fascinated by Garbo, so much so that she once followed her through the streets of New York for ten blocks “before she finally lost me.”)

  When Lem died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five in May 1981, the Kennedys paid tribute to him at his funeral. “Yesterday was Jack’s birthday,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver said in her moving eulogy. “Jack’s best friend was Lem, and he would want me to remind everyone of that today. I am sure the good Lord knows that heaven is Jesus and Lem and Jack and Bobby loving one another.” At the time of our interviews, though, it seemed that Lem Billings’s status in the family was in jeopardy as a result of personal disagreements. “I think they hate me now” is how the emotionally charged Billings put it to me. “I doubt they ever appreciated me. To the Kennedys, the line between love and hate is not only thin, it’s blurred. But love knows many paths,” he concluded, “and always finds its way back to the right heart.”

  I was deeply touched by Lem Billings’s devotion to the Kennedys, troubled by his strained relationship with them, and also inspired by his optimism that somehow it would all work out for the best. I quickly became intrigued by his recollections that—politics aside—the Kennedy family was like most large families, in that loving relationships often gave way to conflict and then usually—or at least hopefully—to reconciliation.

  I decided to research and then write an in-depth article about Jackie, Ethel, and Joan. My intention was that the resulting feature would be candid enough to relay the kinds of stories that would be identifiable to anyone who has ever watched as his or her own family, regardless of wealth or status, grew and its members interacted with one another during difficult times. After just a few interviews with key people in the Kennedy circle, the story of the three sisters-in-law quickly began to emerge.

  My career as a reporter took a different turn when, in 1984, I signed with Doubleday and Company to write my first book, a biography of Diana Ross. Throughout the years, as I wrote a number of other books, I continued developing the story of Jackie, Ethel, and Joan Kennedy, hoping to one day find a publisher for the work. Like most things having to do with the publishing business, the timing had to be right, the research completed, and the publisher willing—all of which finally occurred after my eighth book, Sinatra: A Complete Life, was published in 1997. It was then that Warner Books publisher Maureen Mahon Egen agreed with my ICM agent, Mitch Douglas, that it was time to publish this work, which was originally titled The Kennedy Wives. Over a two-year period, Ms. Egen masterfully helped me shape the manuscript into the book you are now holding in your hands, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot.

  Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, and Joan Bennett Kennedy were strong and courageous women who, despite the many challenges presented them, still managed to lead full, joyous lives. Over the years that I dedicated myself to this work, I found their stories to be heartwarming and moving. This was truly a labor of love for me; I became personally attached to these women in a way perhaps only another biographer can relate to. It is now my hope that the reader will recognize just a bit of his or her own familial experience in the complex relationships among the Kennedy sisters-in-law because, power, politics, and money aside, people are still people, families are families… and most of us, at one time or another, have to work to get along with those we dearly love. In the end, at least in my view, it’s always worth it.

  “Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage, and death.”

  —Jackie Kennedy

  October 1968

  Prologue: Long Live the Queen

  It was a somber Monday morning in May 1994, when the friends and family of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis gathered at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church in New York City for a final farewell to her. It wasn’t easy for anyone to say good-bye to this remarkable woman—those who knew her well, those who loved her dearly, and the rest of the world, fans and skeptics alike, who had watched her extraordinary
life unfold over the years.

  Though she was an accomplished woman with a wide scope of personal experiences, her friends realized that Jackie’s greatest source of pride was the way she had raised her two children, John and Caroline. When they were grown, she then found satisfaction as a book editor for two major publishing companies, Viking and then Doubleday: simply another working woman fetching her own coffee rather than troubling her assistant with such a task.

  In truth, she must have known that she was much more than just another nine-to-five member of the Manhattan workforce. After all, she had been married to a president. She had been the First Lady. She had traveled the world in grand style, met with kings and queens, lived in luxury and wealth, never wanted for much (at least in terms of the material), and experienced the intense love and unabashed adoration—and, of course, criticism—of millions of people, just for being who she was: Jackie. Though her last name was now Onassis, she was still Jackie Kennedy to everyone who remembered a certain time… a certain place.

  Once, long ago, though it seemed like just yesterday, Jackie had been the queen of what was the brightest and best of Camelot: the mythical kingdom she took as an emblem of the Kennedy years when she spoke to a journalist in the days after her husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was brutally cut down in his prime, shot to death as he sat next to her in an automobile in Dallas in 1963. As First Lady, and even beyond her classic reign over this so-called Camelot, she was a woman whose style, personality, and refinement had made such an indelible imprint on our culture that she actually seemed immortal—which was why her death was such a shock. If it was sometimes difficult to remember that she was a woman—flesh and blood like the rest of us—her mortality, the result of the very human and unforgiving disease, cancer, was an all-too-cruel reminder.

  Hundreds of mourners—friends, politicians, socialites, writers, artists, entertainment figures—as well as the many members of the Kennedy family came to bid a tearful adieu to Jackie and to remember their experiences with her. It was a funeral of deeply felt prayers, music, poetry, and warm feelings in the same great marble New York church in which the former First Lady had been baptized and confirmed.

  “It was a service that Jackie would have loved,” said Joan Kennedy afterward, “full of meaning, full of genuine emotion. If you knew Jackie, you knew that there was nothing insincere about her.”

  Perhaps no one understood Jackie better than her Kennedy sisters-in-law, Ethel and Joan, for the three of them shared the special burden of having married into a powerful, ambitious, and often confounding family. Like sisters, they would reach out to one another over the years to comfort and console during times of immeasurable disappointment and pain. And, like sisters, they were also known to accuse and attack one another. However, throughout the Camelot years of the 1960s they would forge a sisterhood, sometimes against great odds.

  Ethel and Joan likely would never forget what Jackie had meant to them. As Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy, his ex-wife, Joan, must have been reminded of Jackie’s patience and kindness to her during the many challenges presented by a life sometimes gone awry. “She was a blessing to us, and to the nation, and a lesson to the world on how to do things right,” said the senior senator from Massachusetts. Joan had been able to depend on her older sister-in-law for a sympathetic ear and sensible advice. Now, with the finality of Jackie’s death, Joan might find it difficult to reconcile the fleeting passage of years.

  Sitting with her large family, Ethel seemed contemplative and understandably saddened this morning. Through the years, her relationship with her sister-in-law had been complex, a mixture of admiration, respect, and understanding, as well as envy and the inevitable contentiousness that arises from vast differences in temperament. As often happens in life, the two sisters-in-law allowed a personal disagreement to come between them. With the passing of time, their difficult estrangement became the natural order of things, almost a habit. Still, inextricably bound to Jackie by tradition and history, a visibly shaken Ethel Kennedy was present at her sister-in-law’s bedside in New York the day that non-Hodgkins lymphoma took her from this world.

  At just sixty-four years old, Jackie most certainly was gone too soon—“too young to be a widow in 1963, and too young to die now,” as Ted Kennedy put it in his stirring eulogy. Just as she had requested, she was laid to rest on a verdant hillside in Arlington National Cemetery beside the eternal flame she herself had lit thirty-one years earlier for her husband. As their mother’s mahogany casket, covered with ferns and a cross of white lilies, was placed next to the final resting place of their father, Caroline and John Jr. knelt at the graveside and fought back tears in the stoic manner known to all Kennedys. On either side were buried Jackie’s stillborn daughter, Arabella, and infant son, Patrick.

  “God gave her very good gifts,” intoned President Bill Clinton at the graveside, “and imposed upon her great burdens. She bore them all with dignity and grace and uncommon common sense…. May the flame she lit so long ago burn ever brighter here and always brighter in our hearts.” The President concluded, “God bless you, friend, and farewell.”

  For Jackie Kennedy Onassis it had been a life of joy, laughter, and fairy-tale endings, as well as despair, sadness, and tragedy—much of it shared in common experience with her sisters-in-law, Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Joan Bennett Kennedy.

  There is much to remember of a time that was like no other. Indeed, even after all these years, we still look back with wonder.

  PART ONE

  Joan…

  Young Joan Bennett Kennedy gazed out upon a cold but clear Cape Cod morning from the veranda of the large three-story clapboard house owned by her in-laws, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy. Ignoring the many friends, family members, photographers, and Secret Service agents coming and going, rushing in and out of the house and slamming the screen door behind them, she quietly slipped into a knee-length wool coat before wrapping a silk scarf around her head. As she walked down the porch’s few wooden steps, she tied the scarf below her chin to keep her blonde hair from being mussed by unpredictable ocean breezes. After a stroll across an expansive, well-manicured lawn, and then down a wood-chipped pathway, she found herself on the sandy coves where the Kennedys went to seek rare moments of privacy and reflection. Joan walked along the shore of wild dune grass and sand, and slowly headed for the breakwater.

  It was November 9, 1960. In what would turn out to be the closest election race in American history once all the votes were tabulated, Joan’s brother-in-law John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been elected thirty-fifth President of the United States. In fact, he had received only about 100,000 more popular votes than Richard M. Nixon, out of some 103 million cast, the equivalent of about one vote per precinct. This close call would find Jack ensconced in the most powerful office in the world—a lot to take in for any member of Kennedy’s close-knit family but especially for Joan, the least politically inclined of them all.

  As Joan walked along the beach, other family members celebrated Jack’s victory in a fashion so typical of the Kennedys: by playing a raucous game of touch football in Rose and Joseph’s sprawling, beachfront yard. William Walton, an old friend of the family who had assisted Jack in the campaign and who was now his and Jackie’s house guest, was on one of the teams. He recalled, “That family had the meanest football players ever put together. The girls were worse than the men; they’d claw, scratch, and bite when they played touch football. Playing to win was a family characteristic. Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Peter Lawford, Eunice and Ethel… tough players, all.”

  “That’s my brother Jack,” Bobby said with a laugh as the new President fumbled the ball. “All guts, no brains,” The President-elect, dressed in a heavy sweater over a sport shirt, tan slacks, and loafers, took a tumble. As he raised himself from the soft ground, his shock of auburn hair mussed and his blue eyes twinkling, he looked more like a high school student than the next leader of the Free World. The only reminder of his age—forty-three—and his aching back was
the groan he let out as he got to his feet.

  Joan, the youngest Kennedy wife at twenty-four, had arrived the night before from her home in Boston, without her boyishly handsome husband, Ted. He showed up in the morning by plane from the West Coast where, as the campaign’s Rocky Mountain coordinator, he had been given charge of thirteen states—ten of which had been lost, including the most important, California, Joan had been up late. At midnight, she was still at Ethel and Bobby’s with the rest of the family, monitoring election results. Exhausted, Jackie and Jack had already retired to their own home, though Jack kept popping over to his brother’s throughout the early morning hours to get updates. When it looked as though a win was probable for her brother-in-law, Joan became caught up in the excitement and started calling Republican friends on the telephone to collect election bets. “Pay up,” she told one chum in Boston. “I told you he’d win.” (Later that morning it wouldn’t look quite as promising for the Kennedys when Jack’s lead began to dwindle, but eventually the slim margin would be decided in his favor.)

  Joan and Ted were parents of a baby daughter, Kara, born in February of that year. They had been married for a little over two years and were about to move from their first home—a modest town house in Louisburg Square, the most exclusive part of Beacon Hill—into a three-story, ivy-covered, redbrick house, one of fifteen others in a horseshoe-shaped enclave in nearby Charles River Square. Ted had actually wanted to move to California to get out of his brothers’ shadow and away from the overwhelming Kennedy family influence. In fact, when he and Joan went there to look for a home, Joan enjoyed the West Coast so much she began to anticipate a contented life there, with the large family she hoped to one day raise in year-round California sunshine. However, much to her dismay, the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, wouldn’t hear of such a move. He suggested—insisted, actually—that the newlyweds return to the Washington area. As Joan would tell it, “And that was the end of that.” She expressed amazement at Ted’s compliance and the way he changed their plans without another word being spoken about it, even to his own wife.