George Skakel, Ethel’s father, was a self-made multimillionaire who made his fortune with what became the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. Ann Brannack Skakel, his Irish-Catholic wife, had given him seven children, four daughters and three sons. “Big Ann,” as she was known, was oversized in everything, from her enormous frame, the intensity of her faith, and the decibels of her voice to the rudeness that she inflicted on underlings and shopgirls. The Skakels did not live country club lives of sedate games and gatherings but partied and played with wild, frenetic energy.
Bobby knew all about a self-styled, self-made father who was often not home, a deeply religious mother surrounded by nuns and priests, lives of endless privilege and energetic good times. But that was the end of the similarities. Bobby’s father was a man of immense social ambition. Insecurity is often the father of achievement, and Joe had propelled his sons to make their proper places in the world.
George Skakel, by contrast, didn’t give a tinker’s damn that in Greenwich his family was considered boorish, uncouth, Catholic interlopers. Unlike Joe, he didn’t have a fancy Harvard education. He taught his children that wealth was their preserve, and they could do whatever they wanted.
Joe, the son of a liquor dealer, had made a fortune in the liquor industry. He was willing to sell it as long as he didn’t have to drink much of it. He saw liquor not so much as the curse of the Irish as their pathetic cliché. Joe would no more sit around drinking whiskey than he would go out on the street carrying a shillelagh.
Joe felt so strongly about the pernicious impact of drinking that he had promised his sons one thousand dollars if they did not drink until they were twenty-one. Bobby had earned the money without regret or temptation. He might take a drink occasionally, but at social events he did not head nervously to the bar. Although Jack didn’t quite make Joe’s deadline, he did not drink much either.
The Skakels, however, considered liquor the fuel of good times, and they liked nothing more than good times. They had none of what they considered the Kennedys’ prissy, puritanical fear of liquor.
Big Ann didn’t drink sherry from a thimble but whiskey from a crystal tumbler. She did not live the corseted life of Rose Kennedy, speaking in clipped civil terms and keeping her house in such impeccable condition that at any moment she could happily have invited a prince of her church into her living room. Fancy furniture did not intimidate Big Ann. She liked dogs and gave them the run of the house. So be it if they stained the old rugs and chewed up the furniture.
For a person who preferred more than one weak drink before dinner and considered politics an unholy bore, an evening at the Skakels was far more amusing than dinner at the Kennedys. The Kennedy siblings thought that put-downs of each other were funny, but the Skakels turned their humor outward onto the world. God and laughter were the two great solaces of their lives.
They might cry when times were bad, but they attacked sadness, laughing, singing, and drinking until the blues gave up and joined the revelry. Ethel’s three brothers, excessive in everything they did, were the engines that drove these wild good times. They drove their cars at a hundred miles an hour over country roads, and they handled everything else the same way. They liked nothing more than riding around Greenwich with one of them standing on the roof of the car while the driver tried to find a branch low enough to knock his brother off his fancy perch. They drove cars into the pond on the estate and ran from the silly cornpone cops who had the audacity to think they could catch a Skakel.
On one occasion George Jr., his father’s namesake, lost control of his car running from the police and smashed into an abutment, breaking his jaw. Ethel was their sister in name and deed. Running late to a horse show at Madison Square Garden, she drove her car up onto the sidewalk in Central Park, passing the other cars moving slowly down the parkway.
Ethel, like Bobby, was lost in the midst of her family. The sixth of seven children, she struggled to compete with her big sisters or to get the kind of attention that came so easily to her pretty baby sister, Ann. Bobby and Ethel had much in common, but to those who watched them, they seemed more buddies than lovers. “It was very nice and cordial, but I never saw him except once put an arm around her or give her a kiss in public or something like that,” recalled Bobby’s football teammate Nick Rodis. “We were driving Ethel somewhere. Bobby and Ethel were sitting in the back seat. I turned around one time, and I talked to him and he had his arm around her and everything. And I just kept my eyes on the road from there on in.”
Ethel was one of the guys, and immensely popular with Bobby’s friends. “I think Ethel was great for him,” recalled Gerald Tremblay, a law school friend. “She brought him out more. He became a little more of an extrovert. He was a pretty introverted person. He never discussed his feelings with people. To my knowledge, he never had anybody, like a friend, that you might discuss a pretty intimate problem with, maybe about your love life or your relationship with your father or your mother.”
Ethel had made Bobby her life project. Bobby did not appear mindlessly, breathlessly in love with Ethel, electrified by her touch, morose when she was away. He had found in Ethel a rich commonality, but he found something different and dangerous with Joan. The two women symbolized the two directions that Bobby’s life might take. His big brother Jack had stood on an open road too, with one road pointing westward toward freedom and uncertainty, the other road heading east toward more restricted venues of power. For Bobby, the journey toward Joan led to freedom and uncharted passages. Whatever else he felt about Ethel, the journey toward her meant that he was ready to pick up all the heavy burdens of his family name and position and walk a pathway set out by his father.
Even across the Atlantic, Ethel could smell the perfumes of romance and see the smoke of betrayal. She suddenly arrived in London with Jean, ostensibly to attend the Olympic games. Bobby prided himself on his honor and honesty, but now both he and Ethel indulged in the petty duplicities that often save a romance but destroy a love. Bobby took Ethel and Jean to see Joan performing in The Chiltern Hundreds and backstage introduced them simply as his sister and a friend. Joan was the only innocent.
When Bobby went backstage each evening, he was entering an exotic world unlike anything he had known in America. In her way, Kathleen had entered a different world too, and her death symbolized just how dangerous it might be to travel beyond the parameters of the known.
Joe disdained Bobby’s foreign fling. Joe and his father had both married up. That was the Kennedy way. Joe did not believe in squandering his family’s social capital on a romance that was as likely to be a tingle in the groin as a tug of the heart. Love was an unexpected bonus, but it was not the primary reason to marry. If a man married right, he married well. The Kennedys and the Skakels were two of the wealthiest Catholic families in America. Marrying Ethel would be a mating of dynasties, a further solidifying of the family’s position in the world.
“Don’t cry,” Joan recalls Bobby saying as he left late that summer. “I’ll be back next summer. I can’t stay away from you.”
Bobby sailed back to the States and entered the University of Virginia Law School in September 1948. He would have much preferred to go to Harvard, but with his abysmal college record, he was fortunate to get into the southern school. Ethel came down to visit him often, and if his love for Joan had been less than profound, he would have forgotten the British actress. His feelings were such, however, that he kept his promise to return the next summer to England. It was perhaps even harder to say good-bye this time, and when Joan stood on the ship bidding him adieu, she recalled how he talked “about my coming over to be with him.”
Bobby was not the sort of man to invite Joan to the States for some hidden assignation. If she sailed westward, it would be only if Bobby had decided to stand up to the father who so dominated him, to take a first dramatic step away from the life that had been cut out for him so long before, and to marry Joan.
Joan did not stand on the beach looking seaward lik
e the betrothed of a sea captain, but she waited just as loyally and just as long. Bobby wrote her love letters passionate in his devotion, and she knew that if she did not sail westward, he would at least be back the next summer, as he had the summer before. In May 1950, she received a letter that looked like all the others but announced that he was marrying Ethel Skakel, a woman whom Joan remembered only as Bobby’s sister’s quiet friend.
The force of circumstance and custom is at times stronger than that of love and honor. Bobby was a loyal soldier marching to a tune his father had composed. But then, how could he turn away from Ethel? When she descended on Charlottesville for the weekends, she was a force that nothing could deny. Bobby was a competitor, but no one played tennis the way Ethel did, as if defeat and death were roughly synonymous. And that was nothing compared to how she played the larger game of romance.
Ethel was a joyful woman who lifted Bobby’s spirits and seemed to hold them up with the sheer force of her will. That she loved Bobby profoundly nobody could doubt. There was a tantalizing quality there, of which Bobby was only too aware. “My financee [sic] followed me down here,” he wrote his sister Pat, “and wouldn’t let me alone for a minute—kept running her toes through my hair & things like that.”
14
The Grease of Politics
When Bobby married Ethel in June 1950, the Skakel brothers and their friends arrived at his bachelor party like a wandering minstrel troupe of such spirited demeanor that they made everyone dance to their song. Bobby’s old college football teammates were ready for the party too, and by the time the thirty or so guests left the Harvard Club they had consumed twelve and a half bottles of champagne, five bottles of Haig & Haig Pinch Scotch, half a bottle of rye, most of a bottle of gin, and a third of a bottle of bourbon. On their way out, one of Bobby’s friends picked up a fire extinguisher and doused the room, causing over a thousand dollars of damage, before staggering out into the New York night.
The Skakels conceded nothing to the Kennedys, considering themselves their equal in wealth and position, vastly superior in their enjoyment of life and sense of humor, and lesser only in their lack of pretense. The Skakels did not have the Kennedys’ public name, but they were an immensely powerful psychological force that changed the Kennedys far more than the Kennedys changed them.
On the morning of the wedding, several bridesmaids walked out of the mansion to talk to the young Skakels and Kennedys. The men tossed the screaming women into the pool. Despite this gambit, which made the poor hairdressers’ morning even more hectic, the wedding party made it to St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich on time. There, close to fifteen hundred guests sat waiting in a sanctuary transformed into a garden of white Easter lilies, peonies, and white gladiolas. Bobby was the first Kennedy man of his generation to wed, and this was no mere marriage but an event that the families used to celebrate themselves politically and socially; in those pews sat many of the postwar American Catholic elite, along with other powerful Americans.
Jack stood quietly in the front of the church. The best man wore the same morning suit as the other groomsmen, but unlike most of Bobby’s beefy athlete friends, Jack looked like a model out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. As the wedding party prepared to proceed down the aisle, Lem Billings and the other ushers hurried late arrivals to their seats. Lem, a man of endless solicitousness, bent down to pick up some change that had fallen onto the floor. Ethel’s big brother, George Jr., introduced himself formally to Lem by kicking him full force in the behind, sending him, gray morning suit and all, falling to the floor.
Big Ann and George Sr. didn’t begrudge spending a fortune on the wedding, but it irked Ethel’s family that the Kennedys were so confoundedly cheap. When the two families went out together for dinner, the Kennedys were healthy enough when it was time to order the best food and finest wines, but by the end of the evening their arms became so weak they were unable to reach out and pick up the check. This happened so many times and in so many ways that the Skakels concluded that they were not being appreciated for their largess but played for chumps.
One of Ethel’s brothers-in-law, John Dowdle, found what he thought was the perfect device to exact some exquisite revenge. Dowdle had offered to set up the newlyweds’ six-week Hawaiian honeymoon. Bobby would be paying for this, and nobody would be there to pick up the check this time but his father.
Without Ethel’s knowledge, but with the blessing of the rest of the family, Dowdle searched through resort brochures and talked to travel agents with one goal in mind—to make the trip as absurdly expensive as possible, an endeavor with which Dowdle’s travel agent was happy to comply. A first-class hotel? Of course. A suite? Why not. The bridal suite? Definitely. The presidential suite? All the better. Flowers delivered every day? Show me where to sign. Lilies or orchids? Whichever is the most expensive.
This was a classic Skakel joke, endlessly amusing to its authors but potentially immensely hurtful to its victims. In their first weeks of marriage, Bobby and Ethel could have been embroiled in the kind of petty bickering over money that destroys many marriages. Ethel, however, didn’t get the joke, and neither did Bobby. To the bride, money poured out endlessly from a golden spigot; her honeymoon was not mindlessly extravagant but simply comme il faut.
As for Bobby, he was not much more versed in the mundane prices of life than his bride, and anyway, he was in love. He found no disparity in the fact that while his bride traveled with thirteen suitcases, he had only one. Twenty-four-year-old Bobby was still so imbued with a sense of himself as a Kennedy that after his honeymoon he planned to spend three weeks at Hyannis Port before returning to law school at the University of Virginia.
Bobby and Ethel went to live that fall of 1950 in Charlottesville, where they rented a large, comfortable old house. One evening Wally Flynn showed up at the front door for a steak dinner with the newlyweds. “Wally, come in,” Bobby said, a hangdog look on his face. “Come in. We’re all fouled up,” Bobby told his old Harvard football mate. Wally looked around and saw that the place was in a shambles. A pregnant Ethel rested upstairs in bed. Hearing the voice of Bobby’s Harvard teammate, she shuffled downstairs. “I’ve got to go back to bed,” she said and shuffled back up the stairs.
“Look, I’ll straighten this out right now.” Wally said looking at the stacks of dishes in the kitchen. “You go do what you have to do. I won’t get in your way tonight or anything else.” Bobby didn’t argue but left and shut himself away from the worst of the squalor.
Ethel and Bobby had nobody to take care of the tedious business of domestic life. Undone chores were simply piling up around them. Wally could see why nobody had washed the dishes. The sink was stopped up. He found some tools, got down under the sink, and cleaned out the whole system before putting it back together. Then he washed the dishes, took out bag after bag of garbage, spiffed up the place a little, broiled some steaks, and set the table.
“What’s going on?” Bobby asked, as he returned to the dining room.
“Nothing unusual. You wanted a steak dinner and I fixed the kitchen sink.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“My mother taught me.”
Bobby shook his head in awe. That wasn’t exactly one of the things that he had learned from Rose.
Bobby was a dogged, pugnacious young man attempting to follow the same arduous pathway that his older brothers had set out on. But what Jack performed with fluid ease and grace, Bobby managed with awkward difficulty. He had no qualms in treating much of the rest of the world as helpmates in his ascent.
One day Bobby came charging into Jack’s office holding a stack of papers in his outstretched hand. “You’re Mary,” he said to Mary Davis, Jack’s secretary. “Yes, I am,” she replied, in no doubt about her name. “You’ve got to type this up for me right away,” he said urgently. “It’s one of my papers for school.”
“I can’t do that,” Davis insisted.
“You have to,” he insisted. “I’m Bob Kennedy.” Th
at was the ultimate argument and it showed Mary’s gaucheness that he should even have to mention his name when it was so plainly obvious. The secretary still refused to type the paper and Bobby kept repeating his arguments. The woman still wouldn’t give in.
Bobby was a man trying to open a door with a key that had always worked before. But as much as he turned it in the lock, he was left standing in the cold. In the end, Mary called in Jack as the arbiter, who told his brother forcefully that his secretary had other matters to attend to besides typing his term paper.
Most of the papers that Bobby wrote during law school gave no scope to his mind and emotions, but in one major essay on the Yalta conference he wrote with the moral certainty of a man whose palette contained only two colors, black and white. “What is the rationalization of this most amoral of acts whose potential disaster has long since become for us present day catastrophe,” he asked rhetorically. “The God Mars smiled and rubbed his hands.” Bobby believed that staying “friendly toward Russia” was “a philosophy that spelled disaster and death for the world.” Even if Soviet armed might had allowed the Russians to march into Central Europe, “there would have been a great difference between Soviet stooge regimes set up by the Red Army and those strengthened by the acquisence [sic] and endorsement of the western powers. The former would have enjoyed no shred of moral authority.”
Bobby cared about politics, not law, and he took the Student Legal Forum at Virginia and turned it into a lecture series that brought in a number of important speakers, including his own father. Joe could have been a memorable teacher. He was so provocative, so perverse in his thinking, that he would have forced his students to reflect and to defend themselves.
Speaking in December 1950 during the middle of the Korean War, when a narrow patriotism had quelled most voices of discontent, he daringly said that the United States should pack up and leave Korea and all of Asia. He asked bluntly what business we had supporting “Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concept of democracy in Korea.” He seethed at the way the United States supported the French colonial regime in Indochina. And he didn’t care if all Europe became Communist. “The more peoples that are under its yoke, the greater are the possibilities of revolt.”
The Kennedy Men Page 38