Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (15 page)

terested in politics, she said, and wanted to now devote her time and attention to literature and art. She wanted more freedom from the family, with only occasional dinners when at Hyannis Port.

“You should have the space you need,” Joseph told his daughter-in-law.

“I’m so happy that you can see this from my perspective,” Jackie said. The relationship these two shared had always been strong, and this meeting would only add to their deep understanding of one another.

When Ethel heard through the family grapevine that Joseph had given Jackie a million dollars to stay married to his son, she demanded to know if there was any truth to it. Ethel first asked Bobby, who said he believed it to be false. Unconvinced, she went to Rose who, in the company of Eu- nice and several Kennedy intimates, casually told her the truth: that Joseph had set up a trust fund for Jackie’s chil- dren, should she have any.

“What?” Ethel said, immediately outraged. The women had been sitting on the porch at Rose’s home in Hyannis Port. Ethel jumped from the chair. “Why would Grandpa set up a million-dollar trust fund for Jackie’s children when she doesn’t even have any?” Ethel wanted to know. “I have five babies right now, and there’s no trust fund for them. A mil- lion dollars!” she said incredulously.

“Dear heart, you know I don’t have an answer for you about that,” Rose said calmly, as everyone else on the porch froze in anticipation of how this scene would be played out. Ethel shook her head angrily. “Well, why can’t Bobby and

I have a million dollars, too?” she asked. “That seems only fair.”

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to talk to Mr. Kennedy about

this matter,” Rose said formally, then she got up and walked away.

Ethel picked up a pillow from a
chaise longue
with her left hand, shot it into the air, and punched it. “A million dol- lars!” she repeated.

“Ethel didn’t have the nerve to talk to Joseph, I guess, be- cause, from my understanding of it, she wanted Bobby to take up the matter with his father,” Mary Fonteyn said. “Ethel and Bobby fought for weeks about the matter until, finally, Bobby went to Joseph and explained the problem to him. Annoyed at the whole matter, Joseph set up a trust fund for each of Bobby and Ethel’s five children, $100,000 for each child, which each would receive at the age of twenty- one.”

Despite Joseph’s efforts, Ethel was still unhappy. She wanted an even million, just as Jackie had. Finally, Bobby told Ethel that if she pushed his father any further, Joseph would probably rescind the original offer. So Ethel let it go, but she wasn’t happy about it.

It is not known if Jackie ever learned who had betrayed her by telling Joe of her discontent, but one might presume that had she known it was Ethel, she would have been angry with her. In fact, such a breach could have caused a serious rift between them, one that might never have been smoothed over. “Or maybe not,” offers Mary Fonteyn, who remained friendly with Ethel until 1960, when the two had a falling out over Mary’s refusal to loan Ethel money. (“She didn’t need it,” says Fonteyn. “She just wanted to see if I would do it, to test me. And I refused to play her game.”) Says Fonteyn, “Jackie was the kind of woman who would weigh the pros and cons of every situation and then decide how she felt about the outcome. True, she would have been angry

with Ethel, but since Ethel’s lack of loyalty resulted in money for Jackie’s children, it’s likely she decided it was worth it.”

Sisterly Advice

F
or each of the Kennedy wives, the Camelot years would provide entirely different life experiences. For Jackie, these were the years she was granted power and prestige as First Lady of the land, the most famous, revered woman in the country. These were her glory years, and she enjoyed them to the hilt. However, there was a price to pay for them. She had no treasured privacy, she was sick much of the time, worn down by physical exhaustion, and she was in a mar- riage that was less than satisfying. Still, she was a Kennedy—in fact, with the exception of her husband, she was
the
Kennedy—and she enjoyed her life to the fullest.

These were years of frustration for Ethel, however. She was never able to fully enjoy her role as a Kennedy wife be- cause it vexed her so that she wasn’t
the
Kennedy wife—the role played by Jackie. She was proud of her husband, the At- torney General, however, and lived with a great sense of an- ticipation about his future. Everyone in the family anticipated—either openly or secretly—that Bobby would probably be sitting in the Oval Office one day himself.

For Joan, the Camelot years were the most confusing of her life in that she found herself thrust into a world for which she was completely unprepared. She enjoyed very lit-

tle of it. Married to Ted in 1958, she quickly became painfully aware that he was like his brothers when it came to the notion of being faithful to their wives: He didn’t believe in it.

While Jackie and Ethel had plenty of experience with marital infidelity—all of Ethel’s siblings had their own problems with fidelity, as did many of her relatives—Joan had none. At least to her knowledge, her father, Harry Ben- nett, had always been faithful to her mother, Ginny. Joan had not grown up in a world where husbands cheated on their wives and got away with it. “Joan had not been bred to ac- cept infidelity,” observed her former assistant, Marcia Chellis. “She was not a saint, like Rose. Nor was she a very good actress.”

“She came in as sweet as can be,” observed Secret Ser- vice agent Larry Newman, “the kind of girl anyone would want to date, the kind who would never take a drink, never be anything but cheerful and sunny. We’d be on post and see her and Ted and say, ‘What a lucky bastard he is, to have a girl like that, so perfect.’ Then, of course, as time went on . . . she got ripped to pieces.”

By 1961, Ted had grown accustomed to being unfaithful to his twenty-four-year-old wife, even bringing his current girlfriends to the White House for a swim and lovemaking after his brother was elected into office. He was often not discreet.

For instance, at one dinner-dance party Ted and Joan hosted at a Washington hall, Ted became fixated on the mar- ried blonde daughter of one of the country’s most famous in- dustrialists. Before long, the two were engaged in an erotic slow shuffle on the dance floor. Joan, who had positioned herself so that her back was to her husband and his dance

partner, carried on a lively conversation with friends, none of whom could help but stare over her shoulder and watch in dismay as Ted nibbled on the ear of his consort. When he was finished dancing, Ted walked over to his wife. “Drink, darling?” Joan asked, as she held a martini out to him. “On second thought,” she said, and then quickly downed it her- self. “As you know, I always feel so much better after I’ve had a drink,” she concluded, spitting the words out at him. Then she rose and walked away.

Joan would later explain that she blamed herself for Ted’s infidelities. “When one grows up feeling that maybe one is sort of special and hoping that one’s husband thinks so, and then suddenly thinking maybe he doesn’t,” Joan once told an interviewer, “well, I didn’t lose my self-esteem alto- gether, but it was difficult to hear all the rumors. And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough.” Joan’s view of herself as being inadequate was com- pletely different from the way her sister-in-law Jackie felt about herself. Jackie believed that she had no inadequacies to speak of and never took the blame for anything for which she wasn’t completely responsible. Inadequate? “Perish the

thought,” she might have said.

Because Ethel wasn’t a reflective person, she seemed never to give much thought to whether or not she deserved to be a part of the Kennedy family. A pragmatic as well as spiritual woman, she seemed to believe she was in her right- ful place, “or God wouldn’t have put me here.” And as for Bobby’s cheating, she probably never thought much about the reasons for that either. She didn’t want to face it as a re- ality in her life, let alone spend meditative moments dwelling on the subject. Also, she was an extremely busy mother. “Look, I have too many kids. I can’t afford the lux-

ury of sitting around thinking about how I feel about things,” she would say. However, when she did ponder Bobby’s behavior, she usually blamed his father for having handed down the legacy of infidelity. She didn’t blame her- self. “He’s like Grandpa,” she very astutely observed to one of Bobby’s sisters, “in that he thinks the only way he can be powerful is to prove he can have any woman he wants. I just ignore it.”

Jackie’s and Ethel’s kind of thinking broke a long-standing Kennedy tradition, one by which women were blamed—and accepted blame—for everything that ever went wrong in the household, be it a child having trouble in school or a hus- band who was being unfaithful. Jackie, and to a great extent Ethel, wouldn’t play that game. Joan, though, perfectly fit the Kennedy mold. She not only accepted blame when it was being doled out, she’d offer to take more if it made everyone else feel good about themselves.

As beautiful as she was on the outside, Joan Kennedy was just as lovely on the inside. Sweet and sincere, she found herself swept into the formidable Kennedy family without much preparation.

“She often cried when telling me how much she loved Jacqueline as a sister,” recalls John Davis. “She admired Jacqueline so much because—well of course they had much in common in terms of their love for art and music. But also, Jackie had qualities Joan wished she had: strength, courage, determination. Living under the pressure cooker of the Kennedy household was so unbearable it almost drove Joan to madness at times. I’d never seen such a sad woman, and neither had Jackie.”

One of Jackie’s Secret Service men recalls hearing a con- versation between Jackie and Joan while at a reception at

Jackie’s favorite restaurant, La Salle du Bois, on M Street in Washington.

Whenever she was feeling insecure, Joan fell back on her looks and sense of glamour, and tried to be as stylish, beau- tiful, and desirable as possible. For this luncheon, she wore a short, hot-pink skirt two inches above the knee with matching stockings and white high heels. She looked as wil- lowy as a fashion model, her blonde hair flowing to her shoulders in silky waves. For her part, Jackie was in virginal white: shoes, stockings, simple shift dress, and—unusual for her—a touch of typically sixties white eye shadow.

As the two glamorous sisters-in-law ate chilled mangos as appetizers, Joan asked Jackie about her perfume.

Jackie smiled. “I never tell anyone what perfume I wear,” she said with a wink. “I can’t take the competition.”

After about thirty minutes of pleasantries, Joan began to confide in Jackie about a problem: She had found a gold necklace in her bedsheets that was not hers.

Once Jackie had heard the entire story, she said that there was really nothing Joan could do about it. She advised her to “build your own life within this Kennedy world. Find those things you do best and do them.”

“But what about Teddy?” asked Joan, still an insulated and isolated Bronxville girl at heart.

“Oh, forget it! He’ll never change,” Jackie said. He was very much like his brothers, Jackie explained, each of whom had to conquer every attractive woman in his path, all in a hopeless effort to prove his masculinity. Somehow, maybe instinctively, Jackie had always been able to see right through the mystique of masculine, sexual conquest that was such a part of the Kennedy ethos. As she told Joan, “No woman is ever enough for a guy in that family.”

“And you just live with it?” Joan asked.

Jackie dragged on her Merit cigarette, one out of her three-pack-a-day habit. “Frankly, their behavior makes me sick to my stomach,” she told her young sister-in-law. “And I’ve been around it all my life.” It was true that for years Jackie had lived in the world in which the rich and powerful move. She was not at all shocked by the kinds of casual re- lationships that flourished on Capitol Hill. Moreover, her own father had flaunted his affairs in front of her, often talk- ing to her about his girlfriends and making light of his con- quests. If she could accept that kind of behavior from him, she certainly could of Jack, even if it did make her “sick to her stomach.”

Joan said nothing. Perhaps she felt that if a woman like Jackie, the First Lady, was powerless to stop her husband from cheating, she was helpless to do anything to stop hers. “I say focus on yourself, Joan,” Jackie continued. “And

your kids. Forget Teddy.”

Joan nodded. “Focus on me,” she repeated, as if the thought had never occurred to her before. “Focus on me,” she said again, as if it were a new mantra.

The Secret Service agent says, “I felt bad for Joan but had great admiration for Jackie. She was an amazingly strong and resilient woman, determined to have her own life, and not be dependent in any way on her husband. I was standing right next to her, and she looked at me as if she wanted me to hear what she was saying. Maybe she wanted me to spread the word to the other agents that she wasn’t a naïve little fool, which I later did.”