by Edward Klein
First thing Saturday morning, Ted would go for a bracing swim in the ocean and then partake of a hearty breakfast of pancakes or crepes. By 11:00 A.M., Ted and his guests would board his boat, the Mya, for a day’s sail. Neil Connolly saw to it that the Mya was stocked with sandwiches, seafood salad, beer, and cases of red and white wine.
Heavy weather did not deter Ted. His guests might choose to stay on shore, but he would sail, rain or shine, in the winter as well as in the spring and summer, even in stormy weather. He was content to sail alone, and he generally did not return until five o’clock in the afternoon.
On Sunday mornings, he would attend Mass at Our Lady of Victory Church in nearby Centerville. When his mother was still alive, he might bring a priest to the Big House to say Mass for her. After lunch, he boarded a private plane and flew back to Washington.13
STORIES ABOUT TED KENNEDY’S abuse of alcohol and his compulsive womanizing became a staple of tabloid journalism. He was romantically linked with many prominent playmates: ski champ Suzie Chaffee, Countess Lana Campbell, socialite Helga Wagner, British debutante Louise Steel, and German princess Angela Wepper.
However, one relationship received scant media attention—his six-year-long love affair with a saucy blonde by the name of Claudia Cummings. Ted went to great lengths to keep Claudia under wraps. Why he did so was anyone’s guess. It was possible that he was more smitten with Claudia than he was with any of his other paramours. It was also possible that Claudia, who later became a backup singer for Jimmy Buffett, simply wasn’t the type Ted wanted to be publicly associated with.
At the time they met, in early 1986, Claudia—a five-foot-eight-inch, one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound former Miss Alabama—was working as an Eastern Airlines stewardess. Ted ran into her on a flight from West Palm Beach to Washington National Airport, and an affair quickly developed. The normally frugal Ted lavished Claudia with a full-length Blackglama mink coat, flowers, love notes, and promises he wouldn’t keep.
“During a trip to Ireland with Claudia in the late eighties,” said a source close to the Kennedy family, “Ted took along Teddy Junior more or less to act as a beard for him with Claudia. Ted introduced Claudia as his son Teddy’s girlfriend, and even insisted that Claudia make a point of being seen going into Teddy’s bedroom at night, then come into his, Ted’s, room through a connecting door.”
Teddy Jr., who was known to friends for his exceptionally sensitive nature, developed a crush on Claudia. Unlike his younger brother, Patrick, a more thick-skinned sort who had adopted his father’s careless attitude toward women, Teddy Jr. didn’t have the stomach for womanizing. In March 1992, when Teddy learned that his father had abruptly ended his affair with Claudia, the young man called her and cried his heart out.14
BY THEN, TED’S self-destructive behavior—his compulsive eating, boozing, and sexual escapades—had developed an unstoppable momentum of its own. The inevitable crack-up occurred on the Friday of Easter weekend in 1991 in Palm Beach, the scene of many past Kennedy revels. Just before midnight, Ted woke up his son Patrick, twenty-three, and his nephew William Kennedy Smith, thirty, and asked them to go bar crawling with him.
Later that night, Smith returned to the Kennedy mansion on North Ocean Avenue with Patricia Bowman, a woman he had picked up at Au Bar. Patricia Bowman later charged that Smith raped her on the lawn of the estate, while Ted (naked except for a long-tailed Oxford shirt) and Patrick (who was making love to another woman) were within earshot, and did nothing to stop the rape.
In the morning, Ted hid from the police when they showed up at the Kennedy mansion to investigate the rape charges. The police later said they were investigating possible obstruction-of-justice charges against the senator.
Ted was shaken by the public’s reaction to the scandal, which was far worse than the political reverberations from Chappaquiddick. Though Ted himself was not charged with the alleged rape, most people held him responsible for leading his young son and nephew into such a sleazy mess. According to a Boston Herald/WCVB-TV poll, 62 percent of Massachusetts voters said they believed that Kennedy should not run for reelection in 1994.
Realizing his predicament, Ted sought the help of one of his closest friends in the Senate, Orrin Hatch, a conservative Mormon from Utah. “Now, Ted [didn’t come] here and [say], ‘Orrin, will you help me?’” Hatch recalled. “He didn’t say it that way. He wouldn’t say it that way. He said, ‘Orrin, can we send the media out to you?’ I said I’d be glad to help, because I didn’t think he deserved the pummeling he got on that [Palm Beach] issue….
“Well,” Hatch continued, “I believed that to the extent that he can, he really cares for me, and I’ve been to his home many times, and he’s always been gracious and so forth. I do care for him and so I said to him … ‘Ted, if you keep acting like this, I’m going to send the Mormon missionaries to you.’”
“His old Irish face got all red and his eyes kind of teared up and he said, ‘I’m just about ready for them.’”15
17
THE POLITICAL LEGACY that Ted had built over the years in Massachusetts seemed to be falling apart,” recalled a Kennedy family lawyer. “He was close to being suicidal. He was slowly killing himself each day; drinking himself to death, not eating right, not taking care of himself at all. He wandered around Hyannis Port half drunk, unshaven, looking like a bum. He would stop people and start inane conversations. He’d stop children and talk to them. It appeared that he was losing it. His nephews and sons were always rounding him up.”1
He held court at Baxter’s Fish ‘n Chips and Boathouse Club, a local hangout, where he’d sing along with Carroll Hill, the longtime piano player, and hit on attractive tourists.
“He’d get to-go fried fish or shrimp and chips and eat on a bench behind the restaurant, all by himself,” said the bartender. “He was really obese, and he’d have a cap pulled down over his face so that he wouldn’t be recognized by anybody who knew him, or let it get to the gossip pages that he was stuffing himself.”2
AND THEN, SUDDENLY he came to himself. Dire circumstances demanded dire remedies, and with his career in the Senate hanging in the balance, he made a decision that put the Kennedy legacy on the line. He announced that he was going to address the torrent of criticism over his part in the Palm Beach rape scandal by delivering a speech at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
On October 15, 1991, a warm, gusty fall afternoon, a grim-faced Ted Kennedy stood before a mixed audience of students, academics, and the media and proceeded to make amends to the voters of Massachusetts, who held his fate in their hands. It was the week before jury selection was to begin in William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial, and it was an amazing moment in American history—nothing quite like it had ever happened before.
Ted freely admitted to the “disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight. To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life…. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world but to make ourselves better, too.”
Afterward, Kennedy spokesman Paul Donovan told reporters: “He knew people had concerns, and he felt it best to address these concerns. He felt he owed it to the people of Massachusetts.”
But Donovan and others in Ted Kennedy’s brain trust knew that words alone would not suffice. If Ted was going to win reelection against his expected Republican opponent—a telegenic, well-funded businessman by the name of Mitt Romney—Ted needed a fundamental overhaul of his image. He was about to turn sixty years old, and he had to put his skirt chasing behind him once and for all. Most important, he had to settle down with a wife. The odds of reeling Joan back in were slim to none. Nor would any of Ted’s other women, such as his longtime lover Palm Beach socialite Dragana Lickle, fit the bill.3
In this bleak season for the fading Kennedy Dynasty, Ted turned to the woman who had helped him write his mea culpa speech at Harvard—Victoria Reggie. An attractive thirty-
seven-year-old, recently divorced mother of two, Vicki was a corporate lawyer in Washington. Unlike Joan, she was a fiercely independent woman, who had been called “a bold personality, strong-minded and direct.” She was more than a match for Ted.
Vicki grew up in Crowley, Louisiana (population 17,000), and was a graduate of New Orleans’s Tulane University and a summa cum laude from Tulane Law School, where she was editor of the Law Review. She and her former husband, Grier Raclin, a telecommunications lawyer, had two children, Curran, eight, and Caroline, six.
“She was definitely looking for someone different from Grier,” said Karen Kilgore, one of Vickie’s Tulane sorority sisters. “Ted is handsome and successful and outgoing like her. Grier is a little quieter.”
Vicki’s family, which was of Lebanese Catholic descent, had ties to the Kennedys going back more than thirty years. Vicki’s father, Edmund Reggie, a retired judge, had run the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy in the state of Louisiana. He had also run Bobby’s and Ted’s primary campaigns in the state. Unfortunately, Judge Reggie was currently under federal indictment on eleven counts of bank fraud for his part in the 1986 collapse of a savings and loan. But at this point, the Kennedy people doubtless shrugged, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Vicki and Ted had begun dating in June 1991. By the following October, she was seated in the front row of the Palm Beach courtroom, listening to Ted reply to questions from the witness stand in the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. Vicki had coached Ted on his testimony, and from time to time, he’d look over and smile at her, and she would smile back.4
They were married on July 3, 1992, in a civil ceremony at Ted’s home in McLean, Virginia.* On the eve of the wedding, Vicki’s sister, Alicia Freysinger, said: “My sister will be a Kennedy; that’s not a scary thing. I know who he is. She knows who he is.”
THE MARRIAGE WAS a good fit. Friends said that Ted gave his word to Vicki that he would cut back on his drinking and stop seeing other women, and that Vicki said, half in jest, “If you don’t, I’ll cut your throat with a rusty razor.”
“Ted and Vicki have serious quarrels like any other married couple,” said a longtime Kennedy friend, “but they also have a lot of fun together. She likes a drink as much as he does, and drinking together is one of their favorite things to do. They drink, joke, laugh, and tell stories together. From the start, Vicki was one of the boys. She likes a ribald joke, and can tell them as well.
“Ted has always been extremely interested in women until he gets sexually satisfied, then he wants to be with the guys,” the friend continued. “Vicki’s one of the first women who was different, and certainly that’s one of the reasons he married her.
“Vicki also has a sense of the theatrical that Teddy likes. For staff office parties, Ted and Vicki have an affinity for costumes and mini-plays that are often inside-the-Beltway satire. One Christmas, he painted his face green, dyed his hair lime, and donned a Santa suit. The theme was ‘How the Gingrich stole the election.’ Vicki came as Shirley Temple wearing butterfly wings. Another time, Ted dressed as a dinosaur that he named ‘Tyrannosaurus Sex.’”
Friends described Vicki as the consummate political animal. “She instinctively looks out for him,” said one. “For example, when they are having a drink in a public place, and she spots a camera aimed their way, she will move Ted’s drink out of sight or stand in front of it.5
“Vicki also has a sharp sense of the importance of Ted’s political legacy. It was at Vicki’s insistence that provisions were made to add a wing to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to house Ted’s papers, memorabilia from his life and career, and eventually to serve as a shrine to his accomplishments.”6
FROM THE BEGINNING, all three of Ted’s children were opposed to the marriage, and they let their father know how they felt. They were understandably concerned about their inheritance. How much of their father’s fortune, estimated at more than $30 million, would come to them? There was a very real likelihood that the bulk of their father’s estate would go to Vicki and, by extension, to Vicki’s children, Curran and Caroline.
“When Vicki and Ted were talking marriage, the last thing he had on his mind was a premarital legal contract,” said a Kennedy family lawyer. “His lawyers begged him to get a prenup. Everybody advised him to do it. But he didn’t. His kids are furious because Vicki is going to get everything.
“He has left trusts for his children,” this attorney continued. “That was handled many years ago. But they aren’t going to divide his estate. That will be Vicki’s to do with as she pleases.
“The kids never minded their father’s relationships with women. They always accepted it as part of his character. They know it’s something of a tradition in their family. But the idea of sharing their fortune with another family was appalling.
“The one thing Vicki and her kids will not get is the Hyannis Port house. The day Ted passes away, she must move out. Ted’s desire is that the house be turned over to the JFK Library to be preserved as a museum. The exact terms will have to be worked out because the neighbors are appalled at the idea of tourists trooping through the streets of Hyannis Port. It’s bad enough that in summer there is a stream of cars driving through to get a look. So that will have to be worked out. One thought was that it only be open in wintertime.”7
FRIENDS AND MEMBERS of Ted’s family, who were accustomed to the old way of doing things at Hyannis Port, were less than thrilled by the changes that Vicki brought with her. And they tended to describe Vicki’s new broom in melodramatic terms.
“Until Vicki came on the scene, Kara, Teddy, and Patrick had the run of the place,” said a family insider. “But as soon as Vicki moved in, everything changed. One of the first things she did was to erect NO TRESPASSING signs on the beach. For as long as anyone in Hyannis Port could remember, the Kennedys had always allowed their neighbors to walk across the beach to get to the water, or just as a short cut.
“The next thing was telling the kids that she expected plenty of notice before they showed up at the Big House. Vicki was upset to discover that Kara, Teddy, and Patrick raided the pantry and refrigerators. So she had locks installed. The kids were expected to help shop and bring some of their own food.
“As you can imagine, all of this led to open warfare between Vicki and the Kennedy kids, with Ted silently taking Vicki’s side. As a result, his relationship with his children was affected. They obviously still love their father, but there is a deep sense of resentment and even betrayal. There’s a sense in which pushing them out of their inheritance was the worst sin he could have committed. They think that Vicki and her kids are going to get a lot of what should have stayed in their family.”
TED’S MARRIAGE TO Vicki came as an even bigger shock to Joan than it did to her children. For weeks, she refused to leave her apartment or answer her phone. Though Joan had dated several eligible bachelors during the decade she had been divorced from Ted, none of those relationships had panned out, and she still looked upon Ted as her chief male protector. “Aides in Kennedy’s office had standing orders to put her through to him whenever she called,” Adam Clymer noted.8 Joan instinctively turned to Ted whenever her drinking got her into trouble, which it did with increasing frequency.
One time, in 1988, Joan crashed her car into a fence in Centerville on Cape Cod. The judge suspended her license for forty-five days and ordered her to attend an alcohol-education program. Another time, in 1991, a policeman pulled her over on an expressway after he observed her drinking vodka straight from a bottle. Throughout the 1990s, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers, but nothing seemed to help.
There was something odd about Joan’s struggle with her addiction. People who attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, as Joan did, are encouraged to take personal responsibility for their problems, and to deal with them in private. But Joan seemed to go out of her way to publicize the details of her bumpy journey on the road to sobriety. “It’s such a relief to be free [of alcohol],” s
he would tell reporters. But each interview was followed by another spectacular slip, which also made the pages of the Boston newspapers. It was hard to avoid the suspicion that Joan was seeking attention—or sending out SOS signals for help.
In 1994, in the midst of Ted’s bruising reelection campaign against Mitt Romney, Joan sent her attorneys back to court to demand that she be given more money in a revised divorce settlement. Her timing was calculated to generate the maximum amount of press attention, which didn’t thrill Ted or his wife of two years, Vicki Kennedy, who was already fed up with Joan’s constant intrusions into her married life. Even Ted’s children were appalled at their mother’s timing, and they convinced her to put the case on hold until after the election.
Ted won the election. But it marked the first time that a Kennedy had received less than 60 percent of the vote in Massachusetts.
FROM THAT ELECTORAL low, the path of Ted’s life could only head upward. Sometime later, former senator and longtime Kennedy friend George Smathers declared, “The combination of age and a new wife is doing the job.”9
In the 100th Congress (1987–88), Ted achieved an astonishing record. “He shoved thirty-nine bills through his committee and into law, including a big AIDS package and restrictions on the use of lie detectors in the workplace,” noted the Washington Post. “Of nine Democratic objectives in the Senate for [the] second session of the 101st Congress, five will be routed through Kennedy’s Labor Committee.”10
There were several explanations for Ted’s increasing effectiveness as the years went by. To begin with, he did not personalize political differences, and he always showed respect for his ideological adversaries. In the words of the late muckraking journalist Jack Newfield, “Kennedy has found a way to be both bipartisan in his affections and alliances and partisan in his belief that government has an obligation to make America a more equal country.”11