Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (76 page)

According to one priest in the Boston diocese, Ted’s an- nulment was granted for “lack of due discretion,” a term which covers cases in which a person had wed in the Catholic Church but did not fully understand the nature and responsibilities of the sacred commitment. The standard is also used for purposes of annulment when one of the spouses was addicted to drugs or alcohol and could not live up to the requirements of the union. After the annulment, Ted took Communion at his mother’s Funeral Mass in 1995. Joan’s feelings about the annulment of her marriage are unknown; she simply refuses to discuss it. As a result of years of therapy, reflection, and self-examination, she says that she has managed to move from her old self through a new self, to, finally, her true self—a woman who fully em- braces who she is and the life she has lived, both the good and the bad. She has no need to explain any of it to anyone; there will be no further
People
magazine cover stories tout- ing her liberation from alcoholism and a bad marriage. In- deed, with no more false smiles needed for the purpose of Kennedy family public relations, Joan is now free to simply

not say anything at all, if that is her choice.

Joan Bennett Kennedy sees her former husband, Ted Kennedy, from time to time and reunites with him every Thanksgiving and Christmas for the sake of her children and grandchildren.

* * *

The years after Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1980 were not easy ones for Ethel Kennedy. In 1983, her son Bobby was arrested and pleaded guilty to possession of heroin. He was sentenced to two years’ proba- tion. Then a tragedy occurred in 1984 when another son, twenty-eight-year-old David, was found dead in a Palm Beach hotel from a heroin overdose. At the age of twelve, David had watched his own father’s assassination on televi- sion and, as has been repeatedly reported, never really re- covered. “Nobody ever talked to me about my father’s death,” he told Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of the book
The Kennedys: An American Drama,
a year before his death. “To this day in fact, my mother has never talked to me about it.”

In January 1998, Ethel Kennedy endured still another tragedy when her thirty-nine-year-old son Michael was killed in a skiing accident. Michael, married to Frank Gif- ford’s daughter Vicki, had been accused of improper rela- tions with his children’s teenage baby-sitter. Just as the uproar was fading, his life was suddenly taken on the wintry slopes in a perilous—and typically Kennedyesque—game of touch football on skis. Shortly after David’s death, Ethel’s brother, Jim Skakel, died from a painful kidney disease. Later that year, she was faced with the thirtieth anniversary of Bobby’s assassination. Somehow, though, her deep reli- gious convictions have continued to sustain Ethel Kennedy, which seems the greatest miracle of all.

While Jackie was supportive of Joan’s divorce, Ethel was not. No matter the circumstances, she did not understand why Joan would not want to remain a Kennedy. Ethel talked about the divorce on the telephone to friends and relatives, saying that her sister-in-law should have just been grateful

to still have a Kennedy husband in her life, despite the prob- lems he presented. “I don’t have one anymore, and neither does Jackie,” she told one confidante. Ethel claimed to not understand what it was that Ted had done to Joan that she should “treat him so spitefully.” She felt that Bobby’s brother had served Joan as well as any Kennedy husband had ever served his wife, which certainly wasn’t saying much (though no one would dare tell Ethel so). It had been enough for her. It had been enough for Jackie. Why not Joan?

Today, Ethel’s surviving children, all of whom had trou- bled childhoods, are an impressive brood who have gone on to fulfilling and respectable adult lives, some in public ser- vice: Kathleen, forty-eight, is Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland; Joe, forty-seven, after a congressional career, is now the head of Citizen’s Energy, a nonprofit organization that provides home heating oil to low-income families in Massachusetts; Bobby, forty-six, is founder of New York’s Pace University environmental law program; Mary Court- ney, forty-three, is a homemaker with her husband, Paul Hill, the Irish independence activist; Mary Kerry, forty, is presently writing a book and is the wife of HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo; Christopher, thirty-six, is vice president of the Kennedy family’s Chicago Merchandise Mart; Matthew Maxwell, thirty-five, now a teacher at Boston College, is the former District Attorney in the Juvenile Crime Unit of the Philadelphia prosecutor’s office and also the editor of
Make Gentle the Life of This World,
a book of poems loved by his father, as well as other written tributes to the late Bobby; Douglas, thirty-two, is a cable television news reporter; and Rory, thirty-one, is a documentary filmmaker.

In 1999, seventy-one-year-old Ethel Kennedy was asked,

at a ceremony marking the eightieth birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, about her ambitions at this time in her life. “A long life, to watch my children grow,” she quickly answered, with a warm smile. “I have the most precious gift of all . . . my family.”

Jacqueline Bouvier, Ethel Skakel, and Joan Bennett prob- ably would not have known each other except that they had happened to marry sons of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy. Though their relationships with each other encompassed a wide range of human emotions over the years—from jeal- ousy, compassion, indifference, and anger to joy and tri- umph—they shared a unique history, forever joined in that sliver of time and place historians would call Camelot, for- ever joined as sisters-in-law, and as Kennedys. Though they lived a privileged existence, one that many on the outside viewed as a surreal fantasy, the irony is that they were really just everyday women—sisters, wives, and mothers—who often found themselves desperately attempting to make some sense of troubled, turbulent lives.

Jackie, who always somehow expressed the appropriate sentiment, once made an observation about her life that seems fitting in describing not only her personal experiences but also those of her sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan. “I have been through a lot and have suffered a great deal,” she said, her words evoking painful memories and quick flashes of the past. “But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love and happi- ness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called
life.
You cannot separate the good and the bad,” concluded this woman of Camelot, who certainly had en-

countered her share of both. “And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.”

Sadly, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis passed away on Thursday, May 19, 1994, after a brief but painful battle with the swiftly moving cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because she had always taken such exceptional care of her- self—dieting, swimming, jogging, riding her horses—and had enjoyed good health nearly all her life, her illness seemed incomprehensible. (The worst ailment she had pre- viously faced was a persistent sinus inflammation in the winter of 1962.) She described her feelings of pride at the way she had taken care of herself as “a kind of hubris,” when she spoke to Arthur Schlesinger about her surprising sickness. She was determined to beat the cancer, however, as she wrote to friends.

The last of more than forty years of correspondence to Lady Bird Johnson is not dated, but it seems to have been written in February 1994, just after the terrible news of Jackie’s illness was confirmed to a shocked public by Jackie’s longtime spokeswoman, Nancy Tuckerman, in the
New York Times.
The years had never diminished the deep fondness Jackie and Lady Bird felt for one another, and Jackie still considered her successor in the White House a close friend; she had hosted Lady Bird at her Martha’s Vine- yard home just six months earlier. Whereas Jackie’s hand- writing was ordinarily a perfect backhand, the penmanship in her last letter to Lady Bird seemed unsteady, perhaps a re- sult of the many anticancer drugs she was taking, which were almost as debilitating as the illness itself.

The always optimistic Jackie wrote to her elderly friend that everything in her life was going well, and that she looked forward to seeing her “in the Vineyard again next

summer.” She signed the note, “Much love, Jackie.” (Ap- parently, Jackie passed to her married daughter [to Edwin Schlossberg], Caroline, her penchant for letter-writing. She would write personal notes to all of those friends of her mother who attended the funeral, including Lady Bird, whom she thanked for “coming to New York to wish my mother farewell.”)

Though the weather was gloomy and drizzling the evening Jackie died, it was a glorious, spring morning— warm and sunny—on the day of Jackie’s funeral. Seven hundred attendees began arriving at 8:30
A
.
M
. to go through a series of security checks before they could enter St. Ig- natius Loyola Roman Catholic Church at the corner of Park Avenue and 84th Street in New York. The mourners had been called by phone or had received hand-delivered no- tices.

John F. Kennedy, Jr., said the family wanted the funeral to reflect his mother’s essence, “her love of words, the bonds of home and family, and her spirit of adventure.”

(Perhaps the only blessing of Jackie’s death was that she would not have to experience the terrible grief she no doubt would have suffered when John was killed after the private plane he was piloting plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean. John and his wife of nearly five years, Carolyn Bessette [whom Jackie had never met], and her sister Lauren, were on their way to Ethel Kennedy’s home on the Cape to attend the wedding ceremony of her daughter Rory—the child with whom Ethel was pregnant when Bobby was assassinated. John, Carolyn, and Lauren were all buried at sea on July 22, 1999, which was, coincidentally, the anniversary of Rose Kennedy’s birthday.)

In accordance with Jackie’s wishes for privacy, no televi-

sion cameras were allowed in the church, though an audio feed was transmitted by speakers to the 4,000 people who waited outside behind police barriers, and to the media. The service began promptly at 10:00
A
.
M
., with John Jr. reading Chapter 25 from the Book of Isaiah. Ted gave the eulogy. Caroline read the poem “Cape Cod,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an evocative reminder of the place that was so iden- tified with the Kennedy family. Perhaps the most moving was New York diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman’s reading of “Ithaka,” a celebration of Odysseus’ voyage by the Greek poet Constantine Peter Cavafy. At the end of the poem, Tempelsman added his own personal and emotional sentiments about Jackie.

A portly, balding diamond merchant, Tempelsman had always seemed an unlikely companion for a woman who had so epitomized style and grace, yet he had been her friend and lover for more than ten years. He had lived with Jackie since the early eighties, and he and his wife of thirty years, Lily, never legally divorced. They had three chil- dren.

Sixty-four-year-old Tempelsman’s friendship with Jackie began after Aristotle Onassis’s death, when Jackie turned to him for investment advice. His astute handling of her affairs would quadruple her worth after 1975, eventually leaving her with a fortune estimated at $200 million at her death, the bulk of which would go to John and Caroline. (Interestingly, Jackie made no provision for her sister Lee in her will, “be- cause I have already done so during my lifetime.”) Jackie and Maurice began dating in 1981. “Jack was a politician, and he was busy. Need I say more?” said Paris attorney Samuel Pisar, a family friend. “With Onassis, she was a tro- phy. Tempelsman didn’t look on her as a trophy.”

“M.T.,” as Maurice was called by Jackie’s family, spoke fluent French and was also a collector of African art. He did not place any demands on Jackie, and she reciprocated. Throughout the years, Jackie’s consort treated her with re- spect and dignity. He was with her in her living room to lend emotional support when she broke the devastating news of her cancer to John Jr. and Caroline. Tempelsman was the kind of man she deserved to have in her life after so much disappointment in relationships and so much personal growth.

When asked by David Wise, author and White House cor- respondent during the Kennedy administration, if she might one day write her memoirs, Jackie said that it would proba- bly never happen. For her, a book editor at Doubleday in the last years of her life, it was a matter of perspective and ob- jectivity. People change, she noted, and the person she might have written about thirty years earlier “is not the same per- son today. The imagination takes over. When Isak Dinesen wrote
Out of Africa,
she left out how badly her husband had treated her,” Jackie observed. “She created a new past, in ef- fect.”

Now Camelot was just a distant dream, its Queen being laid to rest, her life’s history as a woman and national trea- sure left to biographers and historians to analyze and ex- plain. Ironically, if it had been left up to Jackie, she too might well have “created a new past,” much as she did when Jack was murdered. Image and fantasy had always played major roles in the house of Kennedy, and never was that more true than in the way Jackie wished her relationship to Jack be remembered.

The people who were invited to say good-bye at St. Ig- natius Loyola were a varied crowd. As well as friends not in

the public eye, there were also those present who were fa- mous enough to be instantly recognized—such as a feeble Lady Bird Johnson, using a cane and barely seeming able to walk with the help of an assistant, and the present First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton—as well as close family, such as her sister Lee Radziwill (married to stage and screen director Herbert Ross since 1988). Except for the Kennedy matriarch, Rose, who was almost 104 years old and in fail- ing health (and was never even told of Jackie’s death), the Kennedy family was all there—those who were born Kennedys and those, like Joan and Ethel, who became Kennedys by the sacrament of marriage. Even though Jackie had remarried, she was still considered a Kennedy, evi- denced by the fact that she would be laid to rest next to Jack in the immaculately tended velvet lawns of Arlington Na- tional Cemetery. The name of the late Aristotle Onassis was never mentioned by any speaker during the service. Though Ethel was a widow and Joan divorced, as far as the public was concerned they were indelibly and permanently part of the Kennedy family as well.