Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  After a few moments of heavy silence, Eunice began to say the Our Father, aloud, with Ted, Jean, and Pat each taking a line.

  “Forgive us our trespasses,” Ethel said when, after a pause, it seemed as if it should be her turn.

  “As we forgive those who trespass against us,” Jackie added, reaching over and taking Ethel’s hand in her own.

  “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” Rose intoned, finally, her head hanging low.

  Then, from behind, in a small, barely audible voice, someone said, “Amen.” It was Joan.

  In agreement, everyone else echoed Joan Kennedy’s final word, as Joseph Patrick Kennedy passed into history.

  The End of Camelot

  Rose Kennedy would live another twenty-five years after her husband, Joseph’s, death, finally dying at the age of 104 in January 1995. In her later days, Rose was paralyzed on her left side, unable to walk or speak, partially blind, and had to be fed through a tube. It would be Ted’s agonizing decision to have his mother removed from life-support systems; she had been confined to her rose-colored bedroom for years. Rose had thirty grandchildren and forty-one great-grandchildren. She would be buried next to her husband in suburban Brookline. Ethel, who, along with Rose’s children, had been at Rose’s bedside when she died, would read passages from the Bible during the funeral for her mother-in-law.

  However, long before the Kennedy family’s matriarch would pass away from complications of pneumonia, a confluence of events in the family’s history would cause the Kennedy generation of the fifties and sixties, which had so fascinated the world, denizens of Camelot, so to speak, to begin a slow and final decline. With Joseph Kennedy buried, this generation of Kennedys began focusing on their own lives, careers, marriages, and children, to make way for the next generation, which would one day include more than a few of its own politicians. Like the other family members who began to consider their lives separately and apart from the Kennedy infrastructure, Jackie, Ethel, and Joan also began looking to the future—a future after Camelot.

  While Jackie Kennedy’s life changed when she married Aristotle Onassis, one thing that remained was the public’s intense interest in her. During her marriage to Onassis—and beyond—tons of newsprint would be devoted to her and eagerly devoured by a world famished for the beauty and elegance she continued to represent. She would continue to be deified and, despite the disappointment the public had expressed about her marriage, she would remain for many an object of great adoration, obsessive interest, and intense scrutiny. To the millions who would continue to read about her every move and scrutinize her every action, she would transcend human confines and become something called “Jackie O,” an appellation that she would deplore.

  While some who knew them insisted that they loved one another, others say that Jackie and Ari wanted little to do with one another. Ellen Deiner, publicist for the Greek National Theater and a friend of Onassis, recalls a remarkable incident that said much about Onassis’s feelings about his wife. Apparently, Onassis had been collecting pictures of Jackie for years and by 1969 had, without exaggeration, probably over a thousand photos in his possession. In fact, according to Deiner, he had a secret room at his Paris penthouse that was, for lack of a better word, a “shrine” to Jackie.

  Onassis himself seemed to have realized that this was a somewhat unusual tribute to his wife, because he took measures to make sure his wife didn’t find out about it. Though Jackie often asked what was in the room, she was never told. One day, while at the Paris apartment working on a project involving the theater and Onassis, Deiner heard a loud woman’s voice saying, “What in the world is this?” She went rushing upstairs and down the hallway, and there was Jackie standing in the doorway of the “closet,” staring at the huge, black-and-white and color framed posters of herself on the walls, and smaller photos of herself all about.

  “What is all of this?” the shaken Jackie demanded. Somehow, she had found a key to the room; she was holding it in her hand.

  Ellen Deiner, in a moment of panic, could do little more than shake her head helplessly. She had never seen the inside of the room, either.

  The two women stepped into the secret room and slowly took in the surroundings, moving from photo to photo, each one a documentation of Jackie’s ever-changing image through the years. It was a veritable museum of Jackie Kennedy memorabilia. (Ironically, the home of Jackie’s father, Black Jack, had also been something of a shrine, filled with pictures of his daughter Jackie.)

  Jackie paused at a small silver-framed photo on an end table, picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then put it back down. It was a picture of her wedding day to Jack. On the wall was a large framed photograph of her on that horrible day in 1963 when she stood next to Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office. However Jackie interpreted all of this, she was visibly shaken, especially after looking at the photo of Johnson’s swearing-in. She turned and walked from the room, shaking her head in dismay.

  The next day, at her direction, the room was completely cleared of all photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Ari’s reaction to that remains unknown.

  Aristotle Onassis would die on March 14, 1974, after catching pneumonia during recovery from an operation for gallstones. He had never recovered from the emotional devastation of his son Alexander’s death in a plane crash a few years earlier. Alexander’s death had changed him; he became embittered and filled with hopelessness. He treated Jackie poorly, according to those who knew the couple best. Jackie was not at his side when he died in Greece; she was in New York.

  Neither Joan nor Ethel would attend his funeral. (“Maybe I can get out of it if I call Ted and see if he’ll represent the Kennedys,” Ethel told her assistant Noelle Fell.)

  Three days after his death, Jackie’s good friend Lady Bird Johnson wrote her a lovely letter saying that Onassis’s death “sent my heart winging your way. The shadow of grief, which has pulled at your family life, seems an unendurable one,” she wrote. “I know your strength and composure has been put to the severest tests, always in the public’s watchful eye. I dearly hope the years ahead bring the balm of happier days for you and the children.”

  Jackie would contest her ill-conceived marital contract and, after much legal wrangling, ended up with $26 million. She would then go on to become an editor in the publishing world, first at Viking (which she left after Viking published a fiction book that supposed a death threat against Ted Kennedy), and then Doubleday. Her two children, John and Caroline, would become living testaments to the common sense and wisdom she, as a mother, had always demonstrated. (Jackie’s own mother, Janet, would die in July 1989 at the age of eighty-one, six years after having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease Jackie had always feared would be passed down to her, at least according to her stepbrother Yusha Auchincloss.)

  At the end of the sixties and into the seventies, Ethel Kennedy retreated to her home at Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia. In staying close to home, hearth, and family, she hoped to raise her eleven children—with the help of an army of nannies, nursemaids, cooks, and social secretaries—by drawing comfort from the familiar and embracing the past rather than running from it.

  In years to come, Ethel would change little in the house; pictures of Bobby would remain where they’d always been—throughout the home, on walls, on top of the television sets, the piano, and everywhere else. In some ways, it was as if he would live on almost as large as life at Hickory Hill, his memory counseling and guiding his wife and children. Or, as Ethel put it, “Bobby is here, in every smile, in every joke… in every tear.”

  One moment that says a lot about Ethel is remembered by Ray Springfield, a young landscaper employed by Alex Johnson (who worked for Rose Kennedy every year planting flowers on the grounds of the Hyannis Port home). It was the spring of 1974 as Johnson walked about with Rose, who was dictating the kinds of flowers she wanted planted and where. As they walked up the steps of Rose’s back porch, they noticed Joan and Ethel
sitting side by side on large wooden chairs. “As I walked by them, I heard a brief snippet of a conversation, Joan saying to Ethel, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time living in the past. It can’t be good for you.’ And Ethel snapping at her, ‘Well, what choice do I have? You tell me.’ That’s all I heard, as Mrs. [Rose] Kennedy and I rushed by.”

  An hour later, Johnson and Rose Kennedy walked by the same spot. The Kennedy sisters-in-law had left. Rose motioned to a thick book on the porch floor between the two chairs upon which they had been sitting.

  “Would you bend down and pick that up for me?” she asked the landscaper. When he did so, she looked at it for a moment, then held it to her breast as they walked back into the house. It was Bobby and Ethel’s wedding album.

  Joan Kennedy’s personal life had been challenging ever since the day she married into the family. Unfortunately, it would not get better for her in the seventies, and in many ways the death of Joseph P. Kennedy would mark the beginning of a ten-year stretch of even tougher times. As a result of a series of difficult events in her life—Ted’s ongoing philandering, her mother’s death from alcoholism, and her own vast insecurities and emotional problems—Joan’s alcoholism would spin out of control for the next ten years. Though she would take Jackie’s advice and begin seeing a psychiatrist in 1971, it would be years before she would reconcile her emotional problems. “It’s sad to say,” she recalls, “but I think I had to suffer an awful lot and cause my family and friends a lot of trouble in coming to terms with myself.”

  Joan was becoming a lonely, desperate woman. The one thing she and Ted had always enjoyed together was a satisfying sex life. However, that was long gone, according to those in whom Joan had confided. The more Ted drank, the less he was able to function. “Joan once told me she missed more than just physical passion,” said a friend of hers from Boston who is still close to her today. “She longed for simple physical intimacy. She so wanted a man to be close to, to hold, to make her feel that she wasn’t alone.”

  Then, there would be Ted’s affair in the spring of 1972 with Amanda Burden, the daughter of William S. Paley, chairman of the board of CBS. It would get to the point where Joan would be afraid to pick up the newspaper for fear of reading about this particularly well-publicized relationship.

  In the fall of 1973, her twelve-year-old son Teddy would be diagnosed with cancer. His leg would have to be amputated, and the tragedy would drive Joan deeper into self-destructive behavior with alcohol.

  “I remember the time that Ted had a dinner party while Joan was knocked out in the bedroom,” recalled Barbara Gibson. “Ted dressed the children’s nanny in Joan’s chic clothing and had her act as hostess. The implication was obvious, especially given Ted’s reputation. Ethel was outraged when she showed up, demanding to know, ‘What the heck is that woman doing in Joan’s clothes?’ She wanted to see Joan, but it was impossible that evening.”

  “What happens to the human spirit is like what happens to a high cliff when the waves are too strong and too high and too constant,” noted Joan’s good friend Muffy Brandon. “The cliff erodes and the underpinnings get shaky. That’s what happened to Joan. When you have two brothers-in-law assassinated, when your son has cancer, when your husband almost died in an airplane crash, when you’ve had several miscarriages—how much can the human spirit endure?”

  Joan had a three-week stay at Silver Hill Foundation, a small private hospital in Connecticut, in June of 1974. Two weeks after her release, she was back for a longer stay. In October of that same year, she pleaded guilty to drunk driving after slamming her Pontiac GTO convertible into another automobile in McLean. She was fined and lost her license.

  Ted and his aide, Richard Burke, would rifle through Joan’s bedroom in search of stashed-away liquor bottles, or “contraband,” as Burke called them. After so many years of drinking, though, Joan would be able to find relief in many ways: she would use a mouthwash, for instance, with a high alcohol content.

  Meanwhile, as Joan continued giving interviews to the press about her drinking, insisting to one reporter that hers was “a recovery in progress,” the public would remain unaware of the fact that the interviews were Ted’s idea, not Joan’s. “The senator urged her to acknowledge openly her chronic difficulties in order to stave off further innuendo,” recalled Richard Burke, “[all the while] we were spiriting more bottles out of her bedroom.”

  After finally separating from Ted in 1977 thanks to thrice-weekly psychiatric sessions, Joan would move into a seven-room condominium on Beacon Street in Boston and begin doing interviews about her alcoholism and how she was working to overcome it, as well as about her terrible marriage. A year later, she would be back at McLean Hospital, drying out once again. Meanwhile, at that same time, her mother would die of alcoholism-related disease.

  The years after Camelot would be difficult ones for Joan Bennett Kennedy. She would leave her children—Kara, seventeen, Teddy, sixteen, and Patrick, ten—with Ted, when she moved to Boston. She realized that she couldn’t take care of herself, so how was she able to care for her children? This is what it would come to for Joan and her children—weekend visits.

  PART TWELVE

  Ted Hurts Joan Again

  It wasn’t until the 1970s and the beginning of the women’s movement that things began to change for many females in this country, including two of the Kennedy wives—Jackie and Joan. Both women’s experiences, as they would unfold throughout the next decade, would prove to be emblematic of their time.

  Interestingly, Ethel would choose to stay out of touch with the women’s movement. She never really understood the notion of uplifting the feminine consciousness, and believed that a woman’s place was in the home, subservient to her husband—if she were still lucky enough to have one. So, while Jackie and Joan would each go on to expand their horizons, Ethel would stay home at Hickory Hill, surrounded by her children, mourning her late husband, and often lamenting what might have been.

  By the end of 1971, Joan had taken Jackie’s advice and had begun therapy with a Washington psychiatrist. At this time, many people still believed that only those with the most severe emotional problems consulted psychiatrists. At the urging of Jackie and other friends, Joan was able to get past that kind of archaic thinking in an effort to help herself with her “issues.”

  Some of her choices—particularly her fashion choices—were often still the subject of controversy.

  For instance, earlier she had worn a shimmering minidress, cut low at the neck, to a formal reception hosted by President and Mrs. Nixon at the White House to honor the country’s senators and their wives. The invitation had specified formal dress, suggesting floor-length skirts for the ladies. The next day practically every newspaper in the country ran photos of the formally attired First Lady, in a gown with white gloves to her elbows, sneaking an astonished look at Joan’s long legs while being greeted by her in the receiving line. Fashion reporters across the country noted that “Jacqueline would never have dressed that way.”

  Helen N. Smith, Pat Nixon’s press aide, later said that the First Lady was more “concerned about Joan” than she was angry because “it did seem a bit odd.” However, though Joan’s wardrobe was often eccentric—ranging from funky miniskirts to typically sixties bell-bottoms and garish flower-printed gowns—it was probably no more bizarre than Ethel’s plastic minis with their asymmetrical designs. Joan just got more attention for her clothing, probably because she was known to have troubles (“poor Joan”) and the public and press were watching her for clues to her state of mind.

  Joan had wanted to speak to a mental health professional for some time, but Ted had always objected to the notion. First of all, like Ethel and many other members of his family, he mistrusted psychotherapy. Also, he may have feared that certain family skeletons would come to the surface during the course of Joan’s sessions. He actually asked Joan, “How do we know whoever you see isn’t going to go running to one of those fan magazines with everything you’v
e told him?”

  However, for the first time Joan didn’t care what Ted thought. She went into therapy and would become only the second family member to voluntarily do so (Bobby being the first, after Jack’s death, but for only a couple of visits before Ethel convinced him to stop). “This was the first step in a long, long process,” said Luella Hennessey. “But it was a beginning.”

  Finally, Joan was looking for ways to empower herself. She was now thinking about what might be best for her and how she might want to consider living her life from this time onward. As Hennessey indicated, it would be a long and sometimes torturous process, for it would be years before Joan would accept that she was an alcoholic. As Joan herself would later note, “I found that small steps add up to big strides… for me, though, it wasn’t one day at a time, it was more like one moment at a time.”

  As it sometimes happens, Joan’s life changed in small but significant ways as soon as, during therapy, she started to review, recognize, and at least try to understand the reasons behind not only her perceived weaknesses but also her inarguable strengths. “It just started rolling, like a snowball down a hill—good things,” Joan said, “all as soon as I started looking within, as soon as I started trying to figure me out.”

  For instance, in late summer of 1970, thirty-four-year-old Joan received an invitation to appear as a piano soloist at an October fundraiser for Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. During her performance, she would be accompanied by musicians from the esteemed, sixty-strong Philadelphia Orchestra. The great Metropolitan tenor Jan Peerce would sing. The event would mark her concert debut, and before an audience of almost three thousand people. While she had narrated Peter and the Wolf, first in 1965 and every year since, this was a completely different experience for Joan in that she would be performing as a pianist for the first time in front of such a large audience. After giving it some thought, Joan eagerly accepted the invitation, viewing it as an opportunity to challenge her potential and, she hoped, grow as a woman.