Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  It was not surprising that Ted, who would be up for reelection in November, was not happy about Joan’s decision to accept the invitation. “I’m going to need you out there stumping for me, Joansie,” he told her. “The timing for this thing, it’s not good.”

  When Joan somehow assured her husband that she would be able to rehearse for her engagement and still find the time to do her part as a Kennedy wife on the campaign trail, he relented. By the fall she was on the road, wearing an “I’m for Ted” button, and hitting briefly on subjects that were unique for Joan. “Women should stick up for their rights,” she told one packed house, “but never, never become so aggressive that they lose their femininity.” While she was clearly sitting on the fence between a fifties’ conservatism and a seventies’ feminism, the changes in Joan Kennedy seemed profound to some observers just the same. “She’s stronger, more focused, more in charge,” wrote a political analysist for the Boston Globe. “She does Ted proud, even after the Chappaquiddick debacle.”

  A week before her performance, William Smith, assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, joined Joan at her sixteen-room home overlooking the Potomac River in McLean to help her rehearse her material. “She struck me as a very unconfident young lady who had to do this to prove she could do something on her own,” recalled William Smith, who said that Joan seemed a little out of place among the McLean trappings of tennis court, playing field, swimming pool, and servants’ quarters. “She didn’t seem as confident as I imagined a Kennedy woman would be. It clearly showed in her demeanor, in the way she had of wringing her hands. She had the feeling of filling very large shoes in that royal family atmosphere, where she had to prove herself or be submerged. But it was her grit that impressed me.”

  After two more days of campaigning for Ted, Joan was on her way to Philadelphia, accompanied by just one family friend who would double as her publicist, Pat Newcomb (who, eight years earlier, had represented Marilyn Monroe in the same capacity).

  The next evening, Joan walked onto the stage in an elegant, black lace Valentino gown with sloping neckline and long sleeves. As the applause rang out, she walked confidently to the black Steinway piano, followed by conductor William Smith. For her performance, Joan had selected the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, which was more popularly known at the time as the theme to the motion picture Elvira Madigan. She would follow that selection with Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1.

  As the lush strings came up behind her, Joan played beautifully, her hands moving adroitly over the keys, her head tilted back, her eyes sometimes closed as if in a meditation. As she played she would weave back and forth, seemingly in a musical trance, surrendering herself to her music.

  A private woman who had, for the last twelve years, lived her life in crowds, Joan Bennett Kennedy had always seemed alone in a serene world of her own choosing whenever she played piano. Now, on this stage, as she would later recall, the music carried her away to private places in her soul, “places only I could know or understand.” At the end of her first number, the applause rang out loud and strong. Bolstered by the enthusiastic reaction, she began the next song. After it was over, she stood and took her bows to a rousing standing ovation.

  Of course, the theater that evening was filled with friendly Democrats, but it didn’t matter to Joan. Even though the marquee outside the theater read ”Mrs. Edward (Joan) Kennedy—World Piano Debut,” the audience appreciated her not because she was Ted’s wife but because she had proven herself as a musician and, as a performer with limited experience on the stage of such a prestigious venue, a courageous woman as well. Overwhelmed by the moment, Joan walked off into the wings in tears, only to be brought back on for three curtain calls. During the last, she was presented with a large bouquet of red roses. A smile spread across her face as she cradled the flowers with her right arm and dabbed at her eyes with her left hand.

  While cheers continued to ring out, a beaming Ted made his way down to the backstage area to greet his wife. Joan’s eyes immediately zeroed in on his ruggedly handsome face when she finally walked offstage. She ran over to him, giddy as a schoolgirl, and reached out to her husband. Flashbulbs popped all around her.

  Rather than lovingly embrace his wife and congratulate her for her stellar achievement, Ted put his arm around her shoulder as if she were a pal and not a lover. “Well done, Mommy,” he said. “Well done.” Joan glanced downward, the color rising in her face. Suddenly she looked gloomy.

  It was a humiliating moment, and not only for Joan but for Ted as well. He had made his dismissive appraisal of her accomplishment in front of a reporter, who then passed it on to the public the next morning in the Philadelphia Daily News. “ ‘Well done, Mommy’? For God’s sake!” wrote Tom Fox. “This is the way the Irish talk when they have made it to the drawing room. He should be ashamed of himself.”

  In his defense, Ted Kennedy—like his brothers Jack and Bobby—had always been incapable of expressing unabashed affection for anyone in public, even for his wife. Still, for the sake of the newspeople and cameras he might have at least tried. Ordinarily his actions would have been crushing to Joan, but not this evening. She recovered quickly. Judging from the smile on her face as she greeted well-wishers, even Ted could not dampen Joan Kennedy’s sense of achievement on that victorious October evening in 1970.

  Ethel’s Troubled Brood

  While Joan Kennedy battled alcoholism and fretted about her marriage, Ethel Kennedy had her own personal problems, many of which must have seemed overwhelming at times.

  By the early seventies, Ethel’s sons Joe and Bobby along with some of their brothers and cousins had begun using drugs and rabble-rousing about the Cape Cod area—shooting BB guns, racing cars, and mugging other youngsters—to the point where the Kennedys’ neighbors had actually begun to fear for their safety. Once, three of her children tied the family cook to a tree and threatened to set her on fire. “Look, I’m just a single mother trying to raise all of these kids,” Ethel explained to her by way of an apology. “I’m sorry for your trouble, but I can only do what I can do.”

  When the cook threatened to press charges, Ethel said she would welcome the police intervention, saying, “Maybe they can do something about these boys, because I can’t.”

  At one point, when Ethel needed a new governess, she called Ted’s assistant Richard Burke to ask him to find one for her. He suggested hiring a woman who had worked as a nurse at Georgetown University. Ethel agreed. A month later, the governess telephoned Burke, crying. “She was hysterical because the kids had planted a big snake in her bed,” said Burke. “I drove to Hickory Hill and spirited her away from the madness. Ethel wasn’t really concerned, would never discipline the kids over something like that. Bigger things, yes. I think she had to pick and choose her battles, but to say she was an effective parent would be, I think, a mischaracterization.”

  It’s true that with all of her suppressed anger and heartbreak over her beloved Bobby’s murder, Ethel wasn’t as available to her children as she may have wanted to be. For instance, when her sixteen-year-old Bobby and Eunice’s sixteen-year-old son, also named Bobby, were arrested for possession of marijuana, Eunice and her husband, Sarge, sat down with their boy and tried to reason with him. They finally convinced him to curtail his friendship with his cousin.

  Meanwhile, Ethel chased her Bobby around the yard with a broom stick, yelling, “I’ll beat the daylights out of you if I ever get my hands on you!” The youngster ran to Jackie’s home, rushed in and began pleading to her for protection. “Look, Jackie, you can keep him,” Ethel told her sister-in-law when Jackie tried to talk to her about Bobby. “I don’t want him. Maybe you’ll have better luck with him.”

  The teenager stayed with his Aunt Jackie for a few hours before Ethel finally retrieved him.

  “Please promise me you won’t kill him,” Jackie told her, perhaps only half-jokingly.

  “I can’t promise you that,” Ethel answered.


  “Well, I guess I can’t blame you,” Jackie said, trying to keep the mood light for fear of further antagonizing her sister-in-law. “If John ever smoked marijuana, I’d be the mother chasing her boy around the yard.” (Little did Jackie know that John often smoked pot… and that he got it from Bobby!)

  “One summer, we started realizing that we were missing a lot of food from our basement where we stored canned goods and other non-perishables,” recalls Kennedy neighbor Sancy Newman. “When we looked into it, we found that our children were harboring a bunch of Ethel’s kids whom she had kicked out of the house. They were living in our basement! When they were found out, the boys refused to go back home to their mother. Instead, they dug a hole in the woods, covered it up, and began living there.”

  In 1972, a real tragedy occurred when Joe, his brother David, and David’s girlfriend, Pam Kelley, went on a joyride in a jeep on Nantucket that resulted in an accident leaving Pam paralyzed from the neck down. The Kennedys would take care of Pam’s medical costs, and provide for her as well, for the rest of her life.

  “Ethel broke down when she heard about that accident,” says Leah Mason. “She was inconsolable. ‘My own boys are responsible for this,’ she said, ‘which makes me responsible. If Bobby was still here, none of this would be happening. Why did God do this to us? I tried to live a good life,’ she said, crying. ‘Why punish me further?’ ”

  Mason says that Ethel often tried to reason with her rebellious children, “but there were simply too many of them, and they all had their own agendas as to how to get into serious trouble. They looked at her as the enemy. It was her against them. ‘I’m outnumbered,’ she used to say, ‘and it’s hopeless.’ The boys, especially, were as angry on the inside as their mother was about what had happened to their father, and so they acted out terribly.”

  Sometimes, the monkeyshines pulled by the boys were humorous. For instance, teenage sons Joe, Bobby, and David spent one summer selling what they called “Kennedy Sand” for a dollar a bag to fascinated tourists parked outside the gates of Hickory Hill. For an extra quarter, they would even answer “Kennedy Questions.” One day, when someone asked the name of Jackie’s favorite designer, Bobby ran into the house and called his cousin Caroline for the answer. Caroline said she would ask her mother the question for him. When Jackie later telephoned Ethel to ask why Bobby needed the information, Ethel laughed and said, “Oh, I guess he’s trying to make an extra buck out at the front gate again.”

  At other times, the pranks got out of hand. Once, one of Ethel’s teenage sons pulled a knife on Leah Mason and demanded money. When she handed over her purse, he laughed, threw it back at her and said, ‘I don’t need your money, bitch. I’m a Kennedy. You’re a secretary!” Then he ran off. To him, it had all been a joke. However, Mason was “frightened half to death,” she recalls. “When I told Ethel about it, she looked at me squarely and said, ‘Don’t tell me. Tell a cop. Here’s the phone.’ And she handed me the telephone! I shook my head and thought to myself, ‘Oh my God.’ ”

  Mason adds, “There was a time when Rose asked Jackie to talk to Ethel about the children. Apparently, the boys had shot holes into all of the windows at the Catholic church that Rose regularly attended. She was mortified, and had gotten nowhere with Ethel when she brought it up to her. I was standing in the room with Jackie and Rose and heard Jackie say, ‘Grandma, why would you think, after all these years, that Ethel would ever listen to a word I have to say about anything?’ Rose looked at her with an astonished expression. ‘Why, Jackie, she has always respected you more than anyone else in the family. Don’t you know that?’ Jackie seemed stunned by that observation. ‘Still in all,’ she said, ‘I think it would be assumptive for me to tell another woman how to raise her children.’ ”

  With Ethel’s hidden rage and great remorse over the way her life had turned out, to have so many misbehaving children under one roof was more than she could handle. She would often be seen on the rocker on her porch at the Hyannis Port home, rocking back and forth for hours while staring out at the panoramic ocean view. “She would have such a look of sadness on her face that any person would have felt compelled to hug her,” Barbara Gibson said. “But she didn’t want to be hugged. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. ‘I can handle it,’ she would say.” Or, as Ethel also often said, “God is my partner in this ordeal.”

  Will Ted Run? The Joan Factor

  It was spring 1979. After nine difficult years, during which she had battled her alcoholism in the glare of a very public spotlight, forty-three-year-old Joan Kennedy found herself sitting on a couch in a hotel suite being scrutinized and judged by an assembly of family members and doctors.

  “Well, I think Joan’s done pretty well with things,” a smiling Ethel said, as she walked over and grabbed her sister-in-law’s hand. “I mean, just look at her, Teddy. Look at how wonderful she looks.”

  “She does look wonderful,” Ted agreed.

  “Doesn’t she, though?” Ethel asked. “And what’s that scent? My God, she smells so good…”

  “It’s Opium,” Joan answered, studying Ethel.

  “Well, I just love it,” Ethel offered, a bit too enthusiastically.

  “Thank you,” Joan said, with a thin smile.

  Though Joan and Ethel had never fulfilled the promise of a loving, sisterly relationship that seemed to be in the offing after the Chappaquiddick incident, they had remained close over the last ten years. Though she often seemed exhausted by so many troubles with her children, by the end of the decade, Ethel seemed newly energized by the prospect of Bobby’s brother Ted running for President.

  In the decade after Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy had served as one of the leading liberal spokesmen in the Senate, building a legislative record unmatched by either of his brothers. In fact, as his aide Richard Burke put it, Ted was considered by many as “the torchbearer of liberalism” in America, though there were some liberal issues he still found thorny, such as gay rights. As time went on, though, many people in Ted’s circle began to believe that, since it rarely came up in the press anymore, the public had forgotten about Mary Jo Kopechne’s death. Perhaps, it was being whispered, Ted would have a chance at the Presidency. He would wait through 1972 and then 1976, when another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, won the White House. But by 1979, with the Chappaquiddick issue ten years old, Ted thought he had a chance and decided to take on the unpopular Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries. Successfully challenging an incumbent President of his own party would be difficult, Ted knew, but he and his handlers believed it to be possible.

  A meeting in the spring was called to discuss the “Joan Problem,” and the likely pitfalls during the campaign of a presidential candidate whose wife was a well-publicized alcoholic. In fact, by 1979, Joan knew that her alcoholism was still not completely under control, though she hadn’t had a drink in about four months. Working with her therapist, Dr. Hawthorne, from Boston as well as a number of recovery programs, Joan seemed on her way to sobriety. But she knew it would not be an easy road ahead. She was now a forty-three-year-old woman and, tough as it may be for her to do so, she realized that she was ultimately the only one with the power to turn her life around.

  When the couple unofficially separated in 1977 (with Joan moving to Boston and Ted and the children staying at the McLean home), Ted, oblivious to how it would affect his wife, took that opportunity to begin a heated affair with a woman he had met in Palm Beach. It was not a secret; Ted’s friends and business associates knew about her, as did Joan and their children. Even Ted’s eighty-seven-year-old mother, Rose, knew.

  After Joan moved to Boston, Kennedy historian Lester David had a conversation with Rose Kennedy—who was in her late eighties—during which he asked her if Ted’s marriage was ending. When Rose said, she didn’t know, David asked why Joan was now living in Boston while Ted had stayed behind in Virginia. “Virginia!” exclaimed the hearing-impaired Rose. “Who’s she? I’ve never even heard of that one.”


  Ted had asked his aide Richard Burke to call together some of the most renowned psychiatrists in the nation, all specialists in the treatment of substance-abuse problems, along with members of his family, so that they could deal with the “Joan Problem.” Because Joan’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hawthorne, warned Burke that such a meeting should occur only on “neutral territory” and not at Hyannis Port or any home deemed Kennedy territory, Burke booked a number of suites in a moderately priced hotel in Crystal City, Virginia, for the doctors. The family meeting would be held in one of the doctors’ suites.

  “I organized all of it in a secretive fashion, without Joan’s prior knowledge,” confessed Richard Burke. “The thought was that if she was aware of the meeting in advance, she might panic and not go along with it. At the last possible moment, when all of the players were in place, Marcia Chellis, I believe, told Joan about what was going on, and then had her show up for it at the appointed time. However, if I’m not mistaken, I don’t think Joan was told until the second before she and her kids walked into the room, after having flown in from Boston, the extent of what was going to occur—that Ethel, Eunice, and Jean would be there, as well as all of the doctors and Ted’s aides. Any person would have been unnerved by such a confrontation, most certainly.”

  Prior to the meeting, Dr. Hawthorne and three other specialists from Yale, the Mayo Clinic, and UCLA reviewed hundreds of documents pertaining to Joan’s case in order to determine how to proceed. By the time Joan and her children got to the hotel, the doctors had already had a private conference with Ted, Ethel, Ted’s aide Richard Burke, and Ted’s sisters.