Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (17 page)

The way Ted had described Joan didn’t impress Rose. Joan didn’t come from a family Rose had ever heard of, and she was afraid that the Bennetts weren’t very wealthy.

“Oh well, if Ted is interested in her, what can I say?” she told Ethel when the two discussed Ted’s plans in front of an acquaintance.

“I don’t know if this girl has much class,” Ethel said. “I’ve met her and she seems so . . . normal.”

Rose agreed.

“Oh well,” Ethel decided. “Good-bye wine and cheese.

Hello macaroni and cheese.”

However, much to Rose’s relief, Joan made a good im- pression on her. She was beautiful, had a good upbringing, seemed well educated, and was properly respectful. The facts that she was Catholic and had attended Manhattanville were most important to Rose.

“She asked me about Bronxville, Manhattanville, the nuns,” Joan recalls, “but mostly we talked about music. [Rose] played the piano very well, and she asked me to play. I had to give a big recital in order to graduate, and I played some of that music, some Brahms. She played a Chopin étude for me. There was something that first week I met her that really connected. There was so much in com- mon.”

After Joan’s visit, Rose was on a cloud. Joan may not have been as well bred as Jackie or as wealthy as Ethel, but she was beautiful, charming . . . and Catholic. “I can’t believe our luck,” she told her daughter Eunice. Still, just to be sure, Rose called Mother Elizabeth O’Bryne, the president of Manhattanville, to verify that Joan was the kind of woman she had presented herself as being. “Oh yes,” Mother Elizabeth told mother Rose. “Joan Bennett is an outstanding young woman. Ted is fortunate to know her.”

If Joan had any problems in her life, she didn’t reveal them to Rose, which was precisely the right thing for her to do. Rose was convinced that
everyone
had problems. “She’s not a whiner,” Rose would say later. Rose realized that Joan would see only what she wanted to see: a necessary trait, in Rose’s view, for being a Kennedy wife.

Joan would spend three more weekends at Hyannis Port before September was over. During her last visit of the month, Ted proposed marriage.

As a law student in Virginia and nominal head of Jack’s reelection campaign to the Senate, Ted Kennedy was a busy man at this time. “I was young and naïve then,” Joan has re- called, “but looking back, there were warning signals. We didn’t see each other from the time of his proposal until the engagement party.”

As the November wedding date approached, Joan became concerned. “You would be amazed what you learn about a man after you decide to marry him,” she would say later. “That’s because you start sizing him up for the first time, not as a date but as a potential husband.” Joan didn’t like what she was seeing in Ted. He seemed uninterested in her, and she suspected he was still dating other women. Friends told her that they’d spotted him with different women and in compromising situations. He seemed not to want marriage, and it looked to Joan as though he was being pushed into it by his family.

Just as would be the case in years to come, Joan felt that she could not speak to Ted about her concerns. Instead, Joan spoke to her father about her worries. Then the men—Harry Bennett, Ted, and Joseph Kennedy—had a conference in Hyannis Port to determine Joan’s future. When Harry told Joseph that Joan had misgivings about the marriage, the Kennedy patriarch exploded. The engagement had already been announced, he argued. “He said they’re not going to put in the papers that my son is being tossed over,” accord- ing to Mary Lou McCarthy. “He forced this issue. He was God. The wedding was going to happen whether Ted or Joan like it or not. I told Joan, ‘You can’t cure the addicted

woman-chaser.’And she said, ‘I have no choice but to try, do I? What else can I do?’ From the beginning, she was in trou- ble, and she seemed to know.”

So the marriage was on. Ted was late for his own en- gagement party in Bronxville, where Joan was living with her parents in between the ceremonies of graduation and marriage, and he didn’t even think to give Joan a ring until the night of that party, when he presented her with a box. Inside was a ring he had never even seen; it had been pur- chased by his father. When Joan expressed her fears to her mother, Ginny, the older woman asked a litany of ques- tions: Had Joan done something to make Ted dissatisfied with her? Had she taken Ted for granted in some way? Had she grown careless about her appearance? Joan decided that she had done all of those things and that she would try harder to be the perfect mate for Ted. Ginny’s words echoed in her head: “He may be a little raw, but Ted can fi- nance a marriage, and a girl needs a man who can do just that. And he likes children, Joan. And you want children, don’t you? Keep him happy whatever you do.” Ginny’s final words of advice were to “get the ring,” as if it had some magical property.

As with Jackie’s big day, decisions on how Joan’s wed- ding day was to look would be made by Rose and Joseph. Joan had hoped to be married by Father John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame University. But Joseph had other ideas; he wanted Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York to perform the ceremony. While Joan kept her mouth shut, Ginny mentioned to Rose that her daughter had her heart set on Father Cavanaugh. “Oh, well, I’m sure he’s a good priest,” said Rose. “But he’s not a Cardinal now, is he, dear?”

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Joan would later say. “I was just a nice young girl marrying a nice young man. I was to go abruptly from a private, eminently pre- dictable life of contemplation in a windowless cubicle [at Manhattanville] to the rough-and-tumble arena of national politics.”

Joan became Mrs. Edward Kennedy on November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville in front of just a few hundred guests, including Jackie and Ethel (and five of the six children Ethel already had at that time), Jack and Bobby, and the rest of the extended Kennedy family. Whereas Jackie’s and Ethel’s weddings were at- tended by more than fifteen hundred people, Joan’s seemed oddly downsized by Kennedy standards. Joan’s father, Harry, had decided that he wanted the ceremony committed to film for posterity. However, no simple handheld camera work would do. He had the church lit like a Hollywood movie, with floodlights all about. Ted and Joan also had mi- crophones hidden in their outfits so that they could be heard on film as they said their vows.

Joan was a beautiful bride, wearing an ivory satin full- skirted gown with fitted bodice and long sleeves. Jean Kennedy was one of Joan’s four maids of honor, along with Joan’s sister Candy. In what Joe Gargan remembers as “a joyous occasion enjoyed by all,” Bobby Kennedy was one of the ushers; Jack was Ted’s best man. The next day Joan found her and Ted’s picture on the front page of the New York
Daily News
.

During their honeymoon, Ted found that his new wife had not been fibbing: She really was a virgin. “Perfect and untouched in any way,” is how Joan put it later. She de- lighted in telling her assistant Marcia Chellis that she was

the one who had “caught” Ted. “The only reason he wanted to marry me,” she said, “was because he couldn’t get me any other way.” After a three-day honeymoon, Ted went back to his law studies and Joan began her life as a Kennedy wife.

P A R T T W O

A Legacy of Infidelity

T
he story of the family into which Jackie, Ethel, and Joan married is one of the great political tales of our time, of a dy- nasty that brought forth three of the most politically savvy— and arguably most self-destructive—men of the twentieth century. It is the story of dreams finally realized and of dreams in ruin.

When people think of Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy, they often think of them as a unit—the three politician brothers. Yet each was his own kind of person. Jack, the golden boy, wore the mantle of leadership with wit and grace. Bobby, fiercely loyal, was scrappy to the point of being pugnacious. Ted, “the kid” well into his later years, was fun-loving but often unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, and his infractions had to be covered up by the family name and the money that stood behind it.

Whether or not one needs to be a great man in order to be a great leader has always been a hotly debated question, es- pecially in recent times. Arthur Schlesinger makes this point: “History shows no connection between private moral- ity and public conduct. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example,

had wayward sexual habits but was all the same a tremen- dous moral force for his people and his nation. On the other hand, Pol Pot of Cambodia was a faithful family man. All he did was murder hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.” While the story of each important American politician is unique, how his personality and morality were shaped and molded can often be traced to his family’s background—and

to his parents’ example.

The Kennedy family lived in a rarefied world, one in which patriarch Joseph had endowed each of his children with ten million dollars in trust just so that they would never have to work. Throughout their political careers, Jack, Bobby, and Ted would have a difficult time understanding poverty. Similarly, Joseph endowed each of his sons with a distinct impression of a woman’s allotted roles. His sons were brought up neither to understand, nor to be considerate of, women.

The standard for the way Kennedy husbands treated Kennedy wives was set years earlier by Joseph Kennedy, who started the legacy of rampant infidelity among the men of the family. A Harvard graduate obsessed by his pursuit of wealth and power, the dynamic Kennedy used his skill in manipulating the stock market in the early 1900s to build— or in any case preserve—his empire when the market col- lapsed. There have also been persistent stories that, during Prohibition, Kennedy made money as a bootlegger. Inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom Joseph would ag- gressively campaign, his ambition would move him from the world of high finance into politics. Joseph viewed poli- tics as a ladder of social mobility and finance, not an instru- ment of social change.

In marrying Rose Fitzgerald, the beloved oldest daughter

A Legacy of Infidelity
127

of John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston, Joseph found the ideal wife. A devout Catholic, Rose was silent, devoted to the family name, and fiercely loyal. Just as Joseph would set the stage for his sons’ future behavior, it was Rose who would act as an example of how Jackie, Ethel, and Joan were supposed to behave.

As soon as he and Rose were married, Joseph started see- ing other women, and in spite of his own Catholic back- ground, he flaunted his affairs in front of his entire family. Rose immediately started having babies—almost one after the other. A stoic woman, she believed in strict discipline for her children and ran her household as if it were an army bar- racks. She would have only limited contact with her chil- dren, however. Each time a new child was born, Rose would hire another nanny.

Rose, who went to church every morning and allowed sexual relations with her husband only for childbearing pur- poses, at first tried to curb Joseph’s unfaithfulness. Early in their marriage, she became dismayed by her husband’s phi- landering and returned to the open arms of her parents (leav- ing her three children with their nannies). Eventually, though, she went back to Joseph and learned to ignore as best she could his indiscretions.

As Mrs. Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Rose had problems other than her husband’s unfaithfulness, such as the deaths of two of her children and the mental retardation of another. Twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Patrick Jr. died when his plane exploded during war maneuvers in 1944. Twenty-eight- year-old Kathleen (nicknamed “Kick”), widow of the Mar- quis of Hartington who, after her husband was killed in action and over her mother’s heated objections, began an af- fair with the Protestant and already-married British Earl

Peter Fitzwilliam, died with him in yet another plane mishap in 1948.

Rose and Joseph’s oldest daughter, Rose Marie, known as “Rosemary,” had been born retarded, perhaps as a result of a lack of oxygen. For years, Rose denied anything was wrong. When she finally had her daughter tested, she learned that Rosemary had the mental capacity of a seven- to nine-year- old. In 1949, after doctors performed a lobotomy on her, Rosemary was institutionalized. At the time of this writing, she is eighty-one years old.

Joseph’s womanizing gradually became more brazen. In 1928 he began an almost public affair with screen actress Gloria Swanson. Rose knew what was going on between them, yet she chose to convey to the world that she believed the beautiful actress was an important business associate of her loving and entrepreneurial husband. Later, Gloria would say that Rose was either “a fool or a saint.”

Rose’s
modus operandi
throughout her marriage was sim- ple: If one doesn’t see it, one doesn’t have to deal with it. Her way of coping with a humiliating situation was to pre- tend that it was not occurring, or to blame the press for writ- ing about it.

“[I] began to accept the idea that gossip and slander and denunciation and even vilification are part of the price one pays for being in public life,” she said in her memoir,
A Time to Remember
, which was actually written by Robert Cough- lin with her approval. “But neither Ethel nor Jackie nor Joan had been brought up in a political atmosphere. I made sure to warn them in advance what they were in for: that they might be hearing and reading all sorts of scandalous gossip and accusations about members of our family, about their husbands, and for that matter about themselves, and eventu-