Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “It struck me as odd that the girls never referred to their parents as ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad,’ it was always ‘Harry’ and ‘Ginny,’ ” said Joseph Livingston, who was a childhood friend of Candy’s and who spent time with Joan. “There were problems, but I think they were never looked at or analyzed. Both parents were drinkers, though no one ever mentioned it, ever. It was as if it didn’t exist, which is the way it is in many alcoholic families. It doesn’t exist.”

  Like Jackie, Joan was the eldest of two daughters and closest to her father; she idolized him, and he felt the same about her. And like Jackie’s mother, Joan’s mother was a difficult woman to please or understand. She was never completely satisfied with herself or her daughters. Ginny thought Candy was too much the party girl, while, on the flip side, she thought that Joan was too complacent. She urged her teachers to make the girl work harder. She expected a lot from her children. Recalled Livingston, “She used to say, ‘I just want things to be right.’ But nothing was ever right where she was concerned. As a kid, I remember staying out of her way because if I didn’t, she would pull me to the side and start straightening my tie or rearranging my hair, saying, ‘It’s just not right, Joseph, It’s not right.’ ”

  As her father made more money, Joan’s family became upwardly mobile, moving into a four-bedroom Mediterranean-style home on a quarter-acre plot in Bronxville and enjoying a thoroughly uneventful lifestyle. Unlike Jackie and Ethel, Joan had no cooks, nannies, housekeepers, or other servants as a child. “We did for ourselves,” Joan says.

  As a teenager, Joan’s beauty blossomed, but she still had trouble making friends, especially in high school, where she remained reclusive. Her sister Candy was more popular. “She was a cheerleader and went out on dates while I went to the library,” Joan recalls.

  On a visit to Bronxville, a researcher would be hard pressed to locate people who remember Joan Bennett; she apparently made little impression in high school. Even fellow students are surprised to learn that she was actually in their class. “I went to school with her?” said one woman who had been in her twelfth-grade history class. “You must be joking!”

  “She stayed to herself,” said Ted Livingston, Joseph’s brother, who dated Joan when both were in the eleventh grade. “But then I got a load of her mother one day when I went to pick Joan up for a date. And I knew why.

  “The mother made me nervous; just her presence in the room made everyone a little uneasy. Joan came downstairs all smiles, beautiful, and wearing a blue knee-length dress and white sweater. Mom followed, also smiling. She seemed jittery, but trying very hard to act casually. Then, just before we left, Ginny said to Joan, ‘I’m still not sure that that dress is the right color for you, Joan. I think it makes you look, oh I don’t know, pale, I guess. You just don’t look right.’ You could just sec Joan’s happiness just sort of evaporate. She deflated right in front of me. I felt terrible for her.”

  Joan’s former assistant, Marcia Chellis, recalls, “Joan talked occasionally about her father but she rarely spoke of her mother, and I sensed that there were unhappy memories she did not care to recall.

  “For Joan’s mother, little or no help would have been available to her for a condition [alcoholism] that was then considered to be a social stigma, a shameful secret, and a sign of personal weakness, especially for a woman. Joan may have been deprived of the warm, secure mother-daughter relationship that provides the basis for self-esteem.”

  In June 1954, Joan graduated from high school and enrolled in Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic women’s college which had just recently moved from Morningside Heights in New York City to a new fifteen-acre campus in Purchase, forty-five minutes north of Manhattan. The young women who attended Manhattanville were taught by nuns. It was an organized environment in which Joan—whose major was in English and minor was in music—seemed to fit, especially as she immersed herself in the study of classical liturgical music, to which she was exposed by attending daily Mass and High Mass on Sundays.

  While in college, Joan emerged; her personality and beauty began to shine. “Thank God, my wallflower days were over,” she recalls. She became a New York “debutante” twice: first at the Fifth Annual Gotham Ball and then, a few weeks later, at the Nineteenth Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball. She then began competing in a number of beauty contests and in March 1956 was picked as “Queen” by the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce for its annual floral pageant.

  In 1957, twenty-one-year-old Joan met her future husband, Ted, during her senior year at Manhattanville. That was the year the Kennedy Physical Education Building, located on campus and financed by Joseph Kennedy, was completed. Because mother Rose, daughters Eunice and Jean, and daughter-in-law Ethel had all attended Manhattanville, the dedication of the new building was a big family moment. Many of the Kennedys showed up for the ceremonies, including Rose and Joseph, Bobby, Jack, and Ted, as well as Ethel and Jackie.

  The day of the ceremonies, Joan would later recall, “the place was buzzing with anticipation because of the distinguished guests, but I locked myself in my room to write my [school] papers. I was probably the only one of the seven hundred students who was absent from the dedication of the gymnasium. I missed Ted’s dedication speech entirely.” Joan did attend a tea that followed the ceremony, which was also attended by the rest of the school’s seniors and the Kennedy family. There, Joan saw Jean Kennedy Smith, whom she had met a few months earlier at a party at George Skakel’s home in Greenwich. Jean mentioned that she wanted Joan to meet her “little brother.” Joan recalled, “I looked up and saw Ted’s six feet two inches towering over me. At first, I was flabbergasted and surprised, and then when Jean drifted away, I knew, somehow, this was the man I would marry.”

  Twenty-five-year-old Ted was a third-year law student attending school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He was the only Kennedy sibling, other than the disabled Rosemary, yet unmarried. At six feet two inches and two hundred pounds, Ted was a better athlete than student. He’d been a rabble-rouser in college—“Cadillac Eddie,” they called him—known for his heavy drinking and reckless driving habits. Rose had asked him to speak at the dedication—it would be his first important public address—and he had agreed to do so.

  “I had never heard of the Kennedys,” Joan recalls. “Never heard of them! I just took no interest in current events. I didn’t know what was going on in the real world.”

  Jean, who had a fairly good track record as a matchmaker (she had already introduced Ethel into the family), seemed to have another success, Ted and Joan hit it off immediately and began to date soon afterward. “He [Ted] liked her a lot,” said Kennedy family friend Lem Billings. “He said to me, ‘She’s so relentlessly cheery, nothing gets her down.’ ‘Nothing?’ I asked. ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘She’s perfect for my family.’ ”

  Naïve though she may have been, Joan did detect problems in Ted’s character from the very beginning. She had heard about his “Cadillac Eddie” reputation but didn’t want to know anything about it. Nothing negative or controversial was allowed to exist in her life. “It was her reaction, I think, to her mother’s determination that she he the perfect little girl,” observed Theresa Carpenter, who attended Manhattanville with Joan, “and to the fact that her mother was far from perfect herself and never really tried to hide that from her children.”

  Though Joan continued dating other men, she saw Ted a few more times during the next seven months. A devout Catholic, she, like Ethel, was still a virgin when she married.

  After Joan’s June 1958 graduation—sixty-eighth in her class of 108—she accepted Ted’s invitation to spend the weekend with him in Hyannis Port, where he wanted her to meet his mother, Rose. “My earliest memory of Joan was meeting her at the airport in Hyannis,” recalls Ted’s cousin and best friend, Joe Gargan, who had been sent to pick up the young Miss Bennett. “You couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was—really beautiful, and just as nice.”

  Br
inging Joan home to meet mother was a big move. Ted knew how eager Rose was for him to marry “the right girl of the right faith,” and Rose had made it clear that if he married the “wrong kind of girl, we’ll all suffer.” In fact, Rose had been saying a nightly rosary that Ted would do the family proud and bring home the perfect Kennedy wife.

  The way Ted had described Joan didn’t impress Rose. Joan didn’t come from a family Rose had ever heard of, and she was afraid that the Bennetts weren’t very wealthy.

  “Oh well, if Ted is interested in her, what can I say?” she told Ethel when the two discussed Ted’s plans in front of an acquaintance.

  “I don’t know if this girl has much class,” Ethel said. “I’ve met her and she seems so… normal.”

  Rose agreed.

  “Oh well,” Ethel decided. “Good-bye wine and cheese. Hello macaroni and cheese.”

  However, much to Rose’s relief, Joan made a good impression on her. She was beautiful, had a good upbringing, seemed well educated, and was properly respectful. The facts that she was Catholic and had attended Manhattanville were most important to Rose.

  “She asked me about Bronxville, Manhattanville, the nuns,” Joan recalls, “but mostly we talked about music. [Rose] played the piano very well, and she asked me to play. I had to give a big recital in order to graduate, and I played some of that music, some Brahms. She played a Chopin étude for me. There was something that first week I met her that really connected. There was so much in common.”

  After Joan’s visit, Rose was on a cloud. Joan may not have been as well bred as Jackie or as wealthy as Ethel, but she was beautiful, charming… and Catholic. “I can’t believe our luck,” she told her daughter Eunice. Still, just to be sure, Rose called Mother Elizabeth O’Bryne, the president of Manhattanville, to verify that Joan was the kind of woman she had presented herself as being. “Oh yes,” Mother Elizabeth told mother Rose. “Joan Bennett is an outstanding young woman. Ted is fortunate to know her.”

  If Joan had any problems in her life, she didn’t reveal them to Rose, which was precisely the right thing for her to do. Rose was convinced that everyone had problems. “She’s not a whiner,” Rose would say later. Rose realized that Joan would see only what she wanted to see: a necessary trait, in Rose’s view, for being a Kennedy wife.

  Joan would spend three more weekends at Hyannis Port before September was over. During her last visit of the month, Ted proposed marriage.

  As a law student in Virginia and nominal head of Jack’s reelection campaign to the Senate, Ted Kennedy was a busy man at this time. “I was young and naïve then,” Joan has recalled, “but looking back, there were warning signals. We didn’t see each other from the time of his proposal until the engagement party.”

  As the November wedding date approached, Joan became concerned. “You would be amazed what you learn about a man after you decide to marry him,” she would say later. “That’s because you start sizing him up for the first time, not as a date but as a potential husband.” Joan didn’t like what she was seeing in Ted. He seemed uninterested in her, and she suspected he was still dating other women. Friends told her that they’d spotted him with different women and in compromising situations. He seemed not to want marriage, and it looked to Joan as though he was being pushed into it by his family.

  Just as would be the case in years to come, Joan felt that she could not speak to Ted about her concerns. Instead, Joan spoke to her father about her worries. Then the men—Harry Bennett, Ted, and Joseph Kennedy—had a conference in Hyannis Port to determine Joan’s future. When Harry told Joseph that Joan had misgivings about the marriage, the Kennedy patriarch exploded. The engagement had already been announced, he argued. “He said they’re not going to put in the papers that my son is being tossed over,” according to Mary Lou McCarthy. “He forced this issue. He was God. The wedding was going to happen whether Ted or Joan like it or not. I told Joan, ‘You can’t cure the addicted woman-chaser.’ And she said, ‘I have no choice but to try, do I? What else can I do?’ From the beginning, she was in trouble, and she seemed to know.”

  So the marriage was on. Ted was late for his own engagement party in Bronxville, where Joan was living with her parents in between the ceremonies of graduation and marriage, and he didn’t even think to give Joan a ring until the night of that party, when he presented her with a box. Inside was a ring he had never even seen; it had been purchased by his father. When Joan expressed her fears to her mother, Ginny, the older woman asked a litany of questions: Had Joan done something to make Ted dissatisfied with her? Had she taken Ted for granted in some way? Had she grown careless about her appearance? Joan decided that she had done all of those things and that she would try harder to be the perfect mate for Ted. Ginny’s words echoed in her head: “He may be a little raw, but Ted can finance a marriage, and a girl needs a man who can do just that. And he likes children, Joan. And you want children, don’t you? Keep him happy whatever you do.” Ginny’s final words of advice were to “get the ring,” as if it had some magical property.

  As with Jackie’s big day, decisions on how Joan’s wedding day was to look would be made by Rose and Joseph. Joan had hoped to be married by Father John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame University. But Joseph had other ideas; he wanted Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York to perform the ceremony. While Joan kept her mouth shut, Ginny mentioned to Rose that her daughter had her heart set on Father Cavanaugh. “Oh, well, I’m sure he’s a good priest,” said Rose. “But he’s not a Cardinal now, is he, dear?”

  “I had no idea what I was getting into,” Joan would later say. “I was just a nice young girl marrying a nice young man. I was to go abruptly from a private, eminently predictable life of contemplation in a windowless cubicle [at Manhattanville] to the rough-and-tumble arena of national politics.”

  Joan became Mrs. Edward Kennedy on November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville in front of just a few hundred guests, including Jackie and Ethel (and five of the six children Ethel already had at that time), Jack and Bobby, and the rest of the extended Kennedy family. Whereas Jackie’s and Ethel’s weddings were attended by more than fifteen hundred people, Joan’s seemed oddly downsized by Kennedy standards. Joan’s father, Harry, had decided that he wanted the ceremony committed to film for posterity. However, no simple handheld camera work would do. He had the church lit like a Hollywood movie, with floodlights all about. Ted and Joan also had microphones hidden in their outfits so that they could be heard on film as they said their vows.

  Joan was a beautiful bride, wearing an ivory satin full-skirted gown with fitted bodice and long sleeves. Jean Kennedy was one of Joan’s four maids of honor, along with Joan’s sister Candy. In what Joe Gargan remembers as “a joyous occasion enjoyed by all,” Bobby Kennedy was one of the ushers; Jack was Ted’s best man. The next day Joan found her and Ted’s picture on the front page of the New York Daily News.

  During their honeymoon, Ted found that his new wife had not been fibbing: She really was a virgin. “Perfect and untouched in any way,” is how Joan put it later. She delighted in telling her assistant Marcia Chellis that she was the one who had “caught” Ted. “The only reason he wanted to marry me,” she said, “was because he couldn’t get me any other way.” After a three-day honeymoon, Ted went back to his law studies and Joan began her life as a Kennedy wife.

  PART TWO

  A Legacy of Infidelity

  The story of the family into which Jackie, Ethel, and Joan married is one of the great political tales of our time, of a dynasty that brought forth three of the most politically savvy—and arguably most self-destructive—men of the twentieth century. It is the story of dreams finally realized and of dreams in ruin.

  When people think of Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy, they often think of them as a unit—the three politician brothers. Yet each was his own kind of person. Jack, the golden boy, wore the mantle of leadership with wit and grace. Bobby, fiercely loyal, was scrappy to the poi
nt of being pugnacious. Ted, “the kid” well into his later years, was fun-loving but often unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, and his infractions had to be covered up by the family name and the money that stood behind it.

  Whether or not one needs to be a great man in order to be a great leader has always been a hotly debated question, especially in recent times. Arthur Schlesinger makes this point: “History shows no connection between private morality and public conduct. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, had wayward sexual habits but was all the same a tremendous moral force for his people and his nation. On the other hand, Pol Pot of Cambodia was a faithful family man. All he did was murder hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.”

  While the story of each important American politician is unique, how his personality and morality were shaped and molded can often be traced to his family’s background—and to his parents’ example.

  The Kennedy family lived in a rarefied world, one in which patriarch Joseph had endowed each of his children with ten million dollars in trust just so that they would never have to work. Throughout their political careers, Jack, Bobby, and Ted would have a difficult time understanding poverty. Similarly, Joseph endowed each of his sons with a distinct impression of a woman’s allotted roles. His sons were brought up neither to understand, nor to be considerate of, women.

  The standard for the way Kennedy husbands treated Kennedy wives was set years earlier by Joseph Kennedy, who started the legacy of rampant infidelity among the men of the family. A Harvard graduate obsessed by his pursuit of wealth and power, the dynamic Kennedy used his skill in manipulating the stock market in the early 1900s to build—or in any case preserve—his empire when the market collapsed. There have also been persistent stories that, during Prohibition, Kennedy made money as a bootlegger. Inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom Joseph would aggressively campaign, his ambition would move him from the world of high finance into politics. Joseph viewed politics as a ladder of social mobility and finance, not an instrument of social change.