Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (14 page)

have the exact same outfit. Why not take that down and I’ll have a similar photo made of myself for the same space?”

“A capital idea,” Jack exclaimed. However, the poster of Marilyn remained until the day he checked out of the hospi- tal. In fact, he had it turned upside down, so that her legs were in the air.

For the next few months, Jack would suffer immeasurable pain, and would have to endure another operation as a result of an infection caused by a metal plate implanted during the first surgery. In one of her oral histories filed at the JFK Li- brary, Jack’s primary physician, Dr. Janet Travell, recalled a conversation between Jackie and Ethel at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

“Mrs. Kennedy [Jackie] was the most patient, under- standing, and brave woman,” said Travell. “At one point, she learned that she had to change the senator’s dressing. This wasn’t easy. It was a substantial wound, a gaping wound, very difficult for a layperson to deal with. Mrs. Kennedy would be the one who would have to change the dressing when he would be released from the hospital, and she did it, and valiantly.” In truth, Jackie did not have to be the one to change the dressings, therefore she must have wanted to. Certainly she must have felt it was her duty as Jack’s wife, and perhaps she also didn’t want anyone else to see his pain.

George Taylor had been Jack’s valet and chauffeur up until 1946, when Jack had become a congressman. Even after that time, he remained friends with him, and visited him at the hospital. He once recalled, “I remember the day Ethel came to visit, and she found out that Jackie was going to be changing these dressings and caring for Jack. She didn’t understand it at all. ‘How can you do it?’ she

asked her. ‘How can you bear to see him that way? I could never do it.’

“ ‘When you love someone,’ Jackie told her, ‘you do all of this and more, Ethel. All of this and more.’ ”

By 1955, Ethel Kennedy had given birth to a third child, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The next baby, David Anthony, would be born a year later. (In the course of the 1950s, Ethel and Bobby would have three more children: Mary Courtney, Michael LeMoyne, and Mary Kerry, in 1956, 1958, and 1959, respectively.)

A year earlier, Bobby had resigned his post on the Mc- Carthy Committee after only seven months, following a dispute with committee Republican majority counsel member Roy Cohn. He then went to work with his father, Joseph, as his assistant on the Commission on Reorganiza- tion of the Executive Branch (also known as the Hoover Commission, since it was headed by former President Her- bert Hoover). Bored, Bobby didn’t keep that job for long and ended up back on the McCarthy Committee, this time as counsel to the committee’s three-member Democratic minority. Bobby joined just in time for the historic nation- ally televised Army–McCarthy hearings from April 22 to June 16, 1954, which focused on allegations that the U.S. Army was harboring communists; the Army counter- charged that Roy Cohn had sought preferential treatment for Private G. David Schine, Cohn’s best friend and a re- cent Army draftee. (The question of Cohn’s possible ho- mosexual relationship with Schine was also raised in private quarters.)

As the fifties progressed, Bobby would become known for his racket-busting stance, especially as Chief Counsel to

the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (known as the Senate Rackets Committee).* By going up against thugs and mobsters as well as assorted blue-collar criminals in the Capitol’s hearing rooms, Bobby acquired his reputation as the shrewdest, most hotheaded of the Kennedy clan. Because Jack was one of the thirty-six sena- tors on the committee, Ethel and Jackie would spend much of the next two years attending the hearings. They were proud of their husbands’ work, and the time they spent to- gether—and with the Kennedy sisters—strengthened their relationship.

It was at around this time that Ethel and Bobby moved into Hickory Hill. Ethel modeled her Hickory Hill lifestyle after Big Ann’s hectic Lake Avenue estate, and the same kind of mad, hysterical goings-on would come to character- ize Ethel and Bobby’s home life.

On October 4, 1955, Ethel Kennedy received terrible news: Her parents, George and Big Ann, had been killed in a fiery plane crash near Oklahoma City. They had been on a business trip and George, an experienced aviator, was be- hind the controls. Three days later, Ethel joined her brothers, sisters, and family friends for the solemn requiem High Mass at St. Mary’s in Greenwich.

In the same way that she would take on most of the or- deals of her life—including when her brother George died in another plane crash in 1966, or when, a few months later, George’s widow, Patricia, choked to death on a piece of meat—Ethel handled the tragic loss of her parents stoically

*Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee, chaired the com- mittee’s hearings into organized crime, which set the stage for his selection, over Jack Kennedy, as Adlai Stevenson’s presidential running mate in 1956.

and with a deep sense of the Divine. After Ethel had married Bobby, a distance had developed between her and her fam- ily, who did not approve of what they viewed as the Kennedys’ amoral ways, not only with women (Ann was particularly infuriated at reports of Joseph’s philandering), but also with some of the family’s politics as well as their re- ligious convictions—or lack thereof. “Ann thought they were hypocrites,” said Skakel family friend Lawrence Alexander. “And Ethel had to choose a lot of the time. She always chose Bobby and his family. Always.”

About two weeks after Ethel returned from the funeral, Jack and Jackie paid her and Bobby a visit. Remembered Lem Billings, “Ethel was her old self, as if absolutely noth- ing had occurred. Later, Jack told me that Jackie had ex- pected to find her to be very upset, visibly grieving. Jackie arrived wearing all black, in recognition of what had oc- curred. Ethel wore pink. Jackie’s expression was so pitiful that it would have made anyone feel badly. Ethel was all smiles.”

Billings says that Jackie found Ethel’s attitude completely perplexing. It is more likely, however, that Jackie fully un- derstood the manner in which Ethel concealed her feelings because, in fact, Jackie would often do the same thing. Most people never really knew what Jackie was thinking either.

“They were there for over an hour and not one single word was said about the tragedy that had occurred. In the Kennedy family, you never addressed tragedy, and the Skakels were exactly the same way,” said Billings.

As they were getting ready to leave, Jackie approached Ethel.

“I just want to tell you how very, very sorry I am,” Jackie said.

“About what?” Ethel asked. The two women studied each other for a moment. Suddenly Ethel’s eyes began to fill with tears, her deep pain evident. She turned away, embarrassed. Two years later, Jackie’s beloved father would pass away.

In his last few years, because he had become a resentful old man who felt that life had treated him unfairly, it had be- come difficult for Jackie to continue to have Black Jack in her life. His well-regarded charm had begun to wear as he aged, and friends were no longer as eager to bail him out of his financial woes. Jack had never expected to end up with no money, yet that’s exactly what happened to him.

Whenever Jackie visited her father during his latter years, she always left with a deep sense of regret that he was noth- ing like the man she had so idolized. He was perpetually angry and expressed bitterness at having been “abandoned” by both of his daughters. In the summer of 1957, when Black Jack became ill and was hospitalized in New York, Jackie rushed to be by his side. She had arrived too late, however. His last word, according to a nurse, had been “Jackie.”

Not allowing her grief to get in the way of practicality, Jackie managed to arrange all of the details for the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, notifying only immediate family members and just a few of Black Jack’s business as- sociates. Before she closed the coffin, Jackie took off a bracelet her father had given her as a gift and placed it in his hand.

Jackie’s cousin Edie Beale recalls, “I remember that about a dozen of Jack’s old beaus [
sic
] showed up at the funeral, much to Jackie’s consternation. They just showed up, all dressed in black. And there they sat, like a fan club of Black Jack’s.

“Jackie didn’t cry at the funeral, not a drop. And when they buried him in East Hampton, no tears. Not a drop.”

After the service, Ethel and Bobby paid Jack and Jackie the requisite post-funeral visit. Mirroring Ethel’s reaction to her parents’ sudden death, Jackie acted as if nothing tragic had occurred in her life as she and her sister-in-law ate the stuffed baked peaches that had been prepared by Ethel’s cook. Before leaving, Ethel presented Jackie with a Bible.

“Hopefully, we won’t have too much more grief in our lives, Ethel,” Jackie said as she embraced her sister-in-law. Little did the two know what lay ahead for both of them. In just a few years—the Camelot years—they would know the kind of heartbreaking sorrow most people could never imag- ine. One of them would somehow weather the storm and continue with her life in a fulfilling way despite the tragedies. The other—her dreams shattered, her ambition scuttled—would never be the same.

Joseph and Jackie’s Deal

A
lways ambitious and status-conscious, Jackie Kennedy, it would seem, made a bargain with herself early in her mar- riage: Any unhappiness she felt as a result of her marriage would be a tradeoff for her position in the formidable, almighty Kennedy clan. Also, those who knew her well re- alized that she was committed to the notion of family values where her children were concerned; she didn’t want John Jr. and Caroline to come from a broken home.

Jackie hadn’t always felt this way, though. Back in 1957, after the Democratic convention, she was unhappy in her marriage and distressed that her husband chose not to be at her side when she had a stillborn child, a girl she had named Arabella. Instead, he was on a Caribbean vacation.

Ethel and Jackie had lunch a month after the tragic preg- nancy. Ethel later discussed details of the luncheon with a Georgetown friend, Mary Fonteyn.

“I don’t want to be married to a man who is so selfish,” Jackie said bitterly. “I am so miserable being married to this . . . this . . .
person
.”

Ethel was astonished. “Well, Grandpa will never let you out of that marriage, Jackie.”

“Oh?” Jackie asked serenely. “Well, we’ll just see about that.”

According to what Ethel remembered, she left the lun- cheon feeling very uneasy. For the next couple of months, the Kennedys whispered among themselves that Jack’s mar- riage was in trouble. When Washington columnist Drew Pearson printed rumors of marital discord, his story was picked up and expanded upon by
Time
magazine. After read- ing it, Joseph asked his son about the state of his marriage, and Jack said all was well.

Ethel, perhaps thinking she could win some points with the Kennedy patriarch, decided to betray her sister-in-law’s confidence. She would later say she was doing it to “help” Jackie, though how she thought she was helping was un- clear. She called Joseph and told him of her lunch with her sister-in-law and of Jackie’s contemplation of divorce. Joseph thanked Ethel, probably for being such a good little Kennedy, then he sprang into action.

Sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Kennedy, who had recently

undergone surgery to have his prostate removed, arranged to have a luncheon meeting with Jackie at Le Pavilion, an ele- gant French restaurant on East 57th Street in New York. Though he was still in a weakened state from the surgery, he wasted little time getting to business after he and Jackie sat down under bright crystal chandeliers in plush surround- ings.

Because of the damage it would do to Jack’s political fu- ture, divorce was not a possibility for her, Jackie was told as she picked at her chicken
polonaise
. Something would have to be negotiated, Joseph offered, a way to make her happy in a marriage that was no longer working for her.

According to a lawyer who worked for the Kennedys from 1957 to 1961 and who wishes to remain anonymous, Joseph and Jackie actually agreed upon a trust fund in the amount of one million dollars for any children she might have in the future. Perhaps Joseph was hoping to give her an incentive to try once again to have a baby. As far as he was concerned, even giving birth was a political act, for each new child demonstrated the Kennedys’ commitment to fam- ily values. However, according to the lawyer, it was also agreed that if Jackie didn’t have any children within five years, the million dollars would revert to her. Also—this not from the lawyer but from family friend Lem Billings— Jackie told Joseph, “The price goes up to twenty million if Jack brings home any venereal diseases from any of his sluts.” Billings says that Joseph agreed, saying, “If that hap- pens, Jackie, name your price.”

According to Ethel’s good friend Mary Fonteyn, Joseph agreed that Jackie could distance herself from the Kennedys and she would not be expected to see them as much or attend as many of their clique-ish social functions. She wasn’t in-