Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding recalled, “People have always said how different they were, and in terms of their personalities, yes, that was true. But as wives, they had a lot in common. For instance, it’s been thought for years that Ethel was the greatest housewife in the world. Untrue. That was a myth created, I think, because of all the children. She was a mess, though, a sloppy mess. She had a lot of help around the house, maids and servants, whom she treated very poorly but who were there just the same, picking up after her and her kids. Jackie was just as bad. She was a woman who had never scrubbed a floor a day in her life. And as a cook? Forget it! Women of her class never cooked their own meals anyway.”

  One morning, according to Spalding, newlywed Jackie pulled sister-in-law Ethel aside at a family gathering to ask a question. “Now, just how do you make that delicious fried chicken of yours?” she wanted to know.

  “Whoever said I made delicious fried chicken?” Ethel asked.

  “Well, Jack says you make the best fried chicken in the world.”

  Ethel laughed. “No, it’s his sister Eunice. She’s the one who makes fried chicken. All I did was get the recipe from her and give it to my cook. And now she makes the best fried chicken in the world, too. I can lend it to you if you like.”

  Jackie thought it over, then asked, “Do you think you could lend me your cook instead?”

  All of This, and More

  Just a little over a year into their marriage, the newlywed Kennedys were faced with their first major challenge as they dealt with Jack’s serious health problems. Ten years earlier, in 1944, Jack had undergone spinal surgery, partly because of injuries he had sustained when the PT boat (the famous PT-109) that he commanded during the war was rammed and split by a Japanese destroyer. After a night in the water, and with his back crippled by the crash, the heroic JFK swam five hours to land, towing the boat’s badly burned engineer behind him. Kennedy had already suffered from back problems even before 1944, however, dating from a football injury at Harvard.

  In October 1954, Jack was admitted to the Hospital for Special Surgery at Cornell University Medical Center in New York City for more spinal surgery. At that time, doctors performed a double-fusion operation on his spine, in hopes of strengthening his back. It didn’t go well, and for the next three days he would be on the critical list.

  Lem Billings recalled, “Jackie was usually the type to never show fear, but she was scared, very much so, about all of Jack’s illnesses. Not only did he have Addison’s disease [caused by underactive adrenal glands], he had a variety of back problems. He was on different drugs and medications, so many you couldn’t keep track of them all, including cortisone shots to treat the Addison’s. [One of the side effects of cortisone is an increase in libido, which likely exacerbated an already existing problem of hypersexual activity for JFK.] He had muscle spasms, and was being shot up with Novocain all the time. He was always very sick.

  “After that first operation, he was in bad shape, critical condition for, I think, three weeks. They had to give him the Last Rites while Jackie stood there. His face was pale and swollen, his breathing heavy and irregular. I remember Jackie placing her hand on his forehead and saying, ‘Help him, Mother of God. Oh, help him.’ ”

  So frightened was she that while she stood at her husband’s side, Jackie barely heard the priest as he intoned the Last Rites, “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna…” Afterward, slumping into a plastic chair in the hospital corridor, she said to Lem Billings, “What if Jack can’t take all of this? What if we lose him?”

  Billings put his hand on her shoulder. “Listen, he’s too goddamn stubborn, Jackie,” he told her with a smile. “I’ve known him too long to think otherwise. He’s not going anywhere. I promise you that.”

  Jackie looked up at her husband’s good friend with tears in her eyes. “If I ever lose him, Lem, I’ll die,” she said, and she seemed to really mean it.

  Later that day, after news had gotten out that the senator was on his deathbed, reporters began to congregate at the hospital. Most were contained in the lobby, but one managed to sneak up to Jack’s floor. He confronted Jackie as she was fretting to Ted about her husband’s condition. “Mrs. Kennedy, is it true that your husband is dying?” he asked. Jackie was stunned by the question. Ted turned and, with tears in his eyes, snapped at the reporter, “Look, my brother’s darn sick, that’s all. But he’s going to pull through, you wait and see. His name is Jack Kennedy—Kennedy—and he’s going to pull through. You got that?” Then Ted took Jackie’s hand and led her away. Edward DeBlasio, a writer who tells this story, adds: “The expression in her eyes was one of pure love, for what Ted had said, for what he had done, for how he had helped her in this, her most trying hour.”

  “When Jack began to recover, Jackie was at his side every moment,” recalls Kennedy friend Charles Bartlett. “She really rose to the occasion, spending every second trying to entertain him, calm him, show him her love for him. Playing games, checkers, Twenty Questions, whatever it took to keep his mind off his pain. The family was very impressed with the way she hung in there. She even brought Grace Kelly to his bedside, for goodness’ sake.”

  Grace Kelly, in an oral history she gave for the JFK Library in June 1965, recalled, “I had been to a dinner party where I met Mrs. Kennedy and her sister for the first time. They asked me to go to the hospital with them to pay a visit and help cheer him [Jack] up. They wanted me to go to his room and say I was his new night nurse. Well, I hesitated. I was terribly embarrassed. Eventually, I was just sort of pushed into the room by the two of them. I introduced myself and he had recognized me at once, and he couldn’t have been sweeter or more quick to put me at ease.”

  A few days after Jack’s surgery, Jackie arrived to find a poster of a movie star taped above Jack’s bed. It was Marilyn Monroe, in shorts and a tight sweater.

  “Now, what is that doing up there?” Jackie wanted to know.

  “I like her,” Jack said with a grin. “I find her rather attractive, don’t you?”

  Two doctors would later say they noted an uncomfortable silence in the room, after which Jackie said, “You know, I have the exact same outfit. Why not take that down and I’ll have a similar photo made of myself for the same space?”

  “A capital idea,” Jack exclaimed. However, the poster of Marilyn remained until the day he checked out of the hospital. In fact, he had it turned upside down, so that her legs were in the air.

  For the next few months, Jack would suffer immeasurable pain, and would have to endure another operation as a result of an infection caused by a metal plate implanted during the first surgery. In one of her oral histories filed at the JFK Library, Jack’s primary physician, Dr. Janet Travell, recalled a conversation between Jackie and Ethel at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

  “Mrs. Kennedy [Jackie] was the most patient, understanding, and brave woman,” said Travell. “At one point, she learned that she had to change the senator’s dressing. This wasn’t easy. It was a substantial wound, a gaping wound, very difficult for a layperson to deal with. Mrs. Kennedy would be the one who would have to change the dressing when he would be released from the hospital, and she did it, and valiantly.” In truth, Jackie did not have to be the one to change the dressings, therefore she must have wanted to. Certainly she must have felt it was her duty as Jack’s wife, and perhaps she also didn’t want anyone else to see his pain.

  George Taylor had been Jack’s valet and chauffeur up until 1946, when Jack had become a congressman. Even after that time, he remained friends with him, and visited him at the hospital. He once recalled, “I remember the day Ethel came to visit, and she found out that Jackie was going to be changing these dressings and caring for Jack. She didn’t understand it at all. ‘How can you do it?’ she asked her. ‘How can you bear to see him that way? I could never do it.’

  “ ‘When you love someone,’ Jackie told her, ‘you do all of this and more, Ethel. All of this and more.’ ”

  By 19
55, Ethel Kennedy had given birth to a third child, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The next baby, David Anthony, would be born a year later. (In the course of the 1950s, Ethel and Bobby would have three more children: Mary Courtney, Michael LeMoyne, and Mary Kerry, in 1956, 1958, and 1959, respectively.)

  A year earlier, Bobby had resigned his post on the McCarthy Committee after only seven months, following a dispute with committee Republican majority counsel member Roy Cohn. He then went to work with his father, Joseph, as his assistant on the Commission on Reorganization of the Executive Branch (also known as the Hoover Commission, since it was headed by former President Herbert Hoover). Bored, Bobby didn’t keep that job for long and ended up hack on the McCarthy Committee, this time as counsel to the committee’s three-member Democratic minority. Bobby joined just in time for the historic nationally televised Army–McCarthy hearings from April 22 to June 16, 1954, which focused on allegations that the U.S. Army was harboring communists; the Army countercharged that Roy Cohn had sought preferential treatment for Private G. David Schine, Cohn’s best friend and a recent Army draftee. (The question of Cohn’s possible homosexual relationship with Schine was also raised in private quarters.)

  As the fifties progressed, Bobby would become known for his racket-busting stance, especially as Chief Counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (known as the Senate Rackets Committee).* By going up against thugs and mobsters as well as assorted blue-collar criminals in the Capitol’s hearing rooms, Bobby acquired his reputation as the shrewdest, most hotheaded of the Kennedy clan. Because Jack was one of the thirty-six senators on the committee, Ethel and Jackie would spend much of the next two years attending the hearings. They were proud of their husbands’ work, and the time they spent together—and with the Kennedy sisters—strengthened their relationship.

  It was at around this time that Ethel and Bobby moved into Hickory Hill. Ethel modeled her Hickory Hill lifestyle after Big Ann’s hectic Lake Avenue estate, and the same kind of mad, hysterical goings-on would come to characterize Ethel and Bobby’s home life.

  On October 4, 1955, Ethel Kennedy received terrible news: Her parents, George and Big Ann, had been killed in a fiery plane crash near Oklahoma City. They had been on a business trip and George, an experienced aviator, was behind the controls. Three days later, Ethel joined her brothers, sisters, and family friends for the solemn requiem High Mass at St. Mary’s in Greenwich.

  In the same way that she would take on most of the ordeals of her life—including when her brother George died in another plane crash in 1966, or when, a few months later, George’s widow, Patricia, choked to death on a piece of meat—Ethel handled the tragic loss of her parents stoically and with a deep sense of the Divine. After Ethel had married Bobby, a distance had developed between her and her family, who did not approve of what they viewed as the Kennedys’ amoral ways, not only with women (Ann was particularly infuriated at reports of Joseph’s philandering), but also with some of the family’s politics as well as their religious convictions—or lack thereof. “Ann thought they were hypocrites,” said Skakel family friend Lawrence Alexander. “And Ethel had to choose a lot of the time. She always chose Bobby and his family. Always.”

  About two weeks after Ethel returned from the funeral, Jack and Jackie paid her and Bobby a visit. Remembered Lem Billings, “Ethel was her old self, as if absolutely nothing had occurred. Later, Jack told me that Jackie had expected to find her to be very upset, visibly grieving. Jackie arrived wearing all black, in recognition of what had occurred. Ethel wore pink. Jackie’s expression was so pitiful that it would have made anyone feel badly. Ethel was all smiles.”

  Billings says that Jackie found Ethel’s attitude completely perplexing. It is more likely, however, that Jackie fully understood the manner in which Ethel concealed her feelings because, in fact, Jackie would often do the same thing. Most people never really knew what Jackie was thinking either.

  “They were there for over an hour and not one single word was said about the tragedy that had occurred. In the Kennedy family, you never addressed tragedy, and the Skakels were exactly the same way,” said Billings.

  As they were getting ready to leave, Jackie approached Ethel.

  “I just want to tell you how very, very sorry I am,” Jackie said.

  “About what?” Ethel asked. The two women studied each other for a moment. Suddenly Ethel’s eyes began to fill with tears, her deep pain evident. She turned away, embarrassed.

  Two years later, Jackie’s beloved father would pass away. In his last few years, because he had become a resentful old man who felt that life had treated him unfairly, it had become difficult for Jackie to continue to have Black Jack in her life. His well-regarded charm had begun to wear as he aged, and friends were no longer as eager to bail him out of his financial woes. Jack had never expected to end up with no money, yet that’s exactly what happened to him.

  Whenever Jackie visited her father during his latter years, she always left with a deep sense of regret that he was nothing like the man she had so idolized. He was perpetually angry and expressed bitterness at having been “abandoned” by both of his daughters. In the summer of 1957, when Black Jack became ill and was hospitalized in New York, Jackie rushed to be by his side. She had arrived too late, however. His last word, according to a nurse, had been “Jackie.”

  Not allowing her grief to get in the way of practicality, Jackie managed to arrange all of the details for the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, notifying only immediate family members and just a few of Black Jack’s business associates. Before she closed the coffin, Jackie took off a bracelet her father had given her as a gift and placed it in his hand.

  Jackie’s cousin Edie Beale recalls, “I remember that about a dozen of Jack’s old beaus [sic] showed up at the funeral, much to Jackie’s consternation. They just showed up, all dressed in black. And there they sat, like a fan club of Black Jack’s.

  “Jackie didn’t cry at the funeral, not a drop. And when they buried him in East Hampton, no tears. Not a drop.”

  After the service, Ethel and Bobby paid Jack and Jackie the requisite post-funeral visit. Mirroring Ethel’s reaction to her parents’ sudden death, Jackie acted as if nothing tragic had occurred in her life as she and her sister-in-law ate the stuffed baked peaches that had been prepared by Ethel’s cook. Before leaving, Ethel presented Jackie with a Bible.

  “Hopefully, we won’t have too much more grief in our lives, Ethel,” Jackie said as she embraced her sister-in-law. Little did the two know what lay ahead for both of them. In just a few years—the Camelot years—they would know the kind of heartbreaking sorrow most people could never imagine. One of them would somehow weather the storm and continue with her life in a fulfilling way despite the tragedies. The other—her dreams shattered, her ambition scuttled—would never be the same.

  Joseph and Jackie’s Deal

  Always ambitious and status-conscious, Jackie Kennedy, it would seem, made a bargain with herself early in her marriage: Any unhappiness she felt as a result of her marriage would be a tradeoff for her position in the formidable, almighty Kennedy clan. Also, those who knew her well realized that she was committed to the notion of family values where her children were concerned; she didn’t want John Jr. and Caroline to come from a broken home.

  Jackie hadn’t always felt this way, though. Back in 1957, after the Democratic convention, she was unhappy in her marriage and distressed that her husband chose not to be at her side when she had a stillborn child, a girl she had named Arabella. Instead, he was on a Caribbean vacation.

  Ethel and Jackie had lunch a month after the tragic pregnancy. Ethel later discussed details of the luncheon with a Georgetown friend, Mary Fonteyn.

  “I don’t want to be married to a man who is so selfish,” Jackie said bitterly. “I am so miserable being married to this… this… person.”

  Ethel was astonished. “Well, Grandpa will never let you out of that marriage, Jackie.”

&
nbsp; “Oh?” Jackie asked serenely. “Well, we’ll just see about that.”

  According to what Ethel remembered, she left the luncheon feeling very uneasy. For the next couple of months, the Kennedys whispered among themselves that Jack’s marriage was in trouble. When Washington columnist Drew Pearson printed rumors of marital discord, his story was picked up and expanded upon by Time magazine. After reading it, Joseph asked his son about the state of his marriage, and Jack said all was well.

  Ethel, perhaps thinking she could win some points with the Kennedy patriarch, decided to betray her sister-in-law’s confidence. She would later say she was doing it to “help” Jackie, though how she thought she was helping was unclear. She called Joseph and told him of her lunch with her sister-in-law and of Jackie’s contemplation of divorce. Joseph thanked Ethel, probably for being such a good little Kennedy, then he sprang into action.

  Sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Kennedy, who had recently undergone surgery to have his prostate removed, arranged to have a luncheon meeting with Jackie at Le Pavillon, an elegant French restaurant on East 57th Street in New York. Though he was still in a weakened state from the surgery, he wasted little time getting to business after he and Jackie sat down under bright crystal chandeliers in plush surroundings.

  Because of the damage it would do to Jack’s political future, divorce was not a possibility for her, Jackie was told as she picked at her chicken polonaise. Something would have to be negotiated, Joseph offered, a way to make her happy in a marriage that was no longer working for her.

  According to a lawyer who worked for the Kennedys from 1957 to 1961 and who wishes to remain anonymous, Joseph and Jackie actually agreed upon a trust fund in the amount of one million dollars for any children she might have in the future. Perhaps Joseph was hoping to give her an incentive to try once again to have a baby. As far as he was concerned, even giving birth was a political act, for each new child demonstrated the Kennedys’ commitment to family values. However, according to the lawyer, it was also agreed that if Jackie didn’t have any children within five years, the million dollars would revert to her. Also—this not from the lawyer but from family friend Lem Billings—Jackie told Joseph, “The price goes up to twenty million if Jack brings home any venereal diseases from any of his sluts.” Billings says that Joseph agreed, saying, “If that happens, Jackie, name your price.”