Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (22 page)

“Secrets Always Come Out”

O
n March 14, 1962, reporters jammed into Joan Kennedy’s small living room at 3 Charles River Square (which she and Ted had moved into in 1961) to hear her husband, Ted, make the formal announcement of his candidacy for the Senate. As the press noisily converged upon the Kennedys, their two-year-old daughter, Kara, began to wail uncontrollably in the nursery off the main hallway, and Joan appeared dis- tracted by Kara’s cries. A nurse shut the door quickly to muffle the baby’s crying, but Joan still appeared uneasy.

Ted’s political career, like those of his brothers, was really the brainchild of the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph. Ted never wanted to be a senator. Knowing that he would always be in competition with his brothers for familial as well as public acceptance in the political arena, he had told Joan that he wanted to get as far away from the confines of the Kennedy dynasty as possible—to the West Coast, in fact.

“His main reason was that in a new state, among new peo- ple, he would have to succeed or fail on his own,” Joan re- calls.

In the early sixties, however, when the young couple went to the West Coast to start looking for a home, Joseph made it clear that not only were they expected to stay in Massa- chusetts, but that Ted would run for the Senate the following year and take Jack’s seat. Joseph always believed that the family had a proprietary claim to that seat. “I paid for it,” he said. “It belongs to the family.”

Even Jack was against Ted’s candidacy, fearing that

charges of nepotism would damage his Presidency. He sug- gested to his father that Ted be allowed to live outside the public eye, that he should be the one brother with a normal family life—an idea that suited Joan just fine.

Joan almost got her wish when it was determined that Ted could not be appointed to Jack’s vacant seat because he would not have reached the age of thirty—the minimum age for a senator, as dictated by the Constitution—until Febru- ary 22, 1962. Someone would have to fill the chair for a year until a new election could be held in 1962 to complete the final two years of Jack’s unexpired term. Governor Foster Furcolo was persuaded by the White House to name Ben- jamin Smith, a former house mate of Jack’s at Harvard and a close family friend, who agreed to vacate the seat after the term so that a Kennedy could possibly move into it.

Because the boys usually did what Joseph told them to do, though, there was really no debate. Ted would run for the Senate, even though his legislative experience was nonexis- tent.

After he finally announced his candidacy for the Senate on March 14, the reaction against was immediate. The
Wall Street Journal
reported: “If a third Kennedy acquires high national office, the rest of us might as well deed the country to the Kennedys.” If he lost, the
Journal
warned, “he might find that at the next family dinner he would have to eat in the kitchen.” The
Washington Post
paraphrased Winston Churchill, saying Ted was a modest man, “with much to be modest about.” Joan was dismayed and felt that the media was “mean-minded and cynical.”

It got worse, though, at the end of the month, when a fam- ily secret was revealed: Ted had cheated on a Spanish test at Harvard eleven years earlier—he’d had another student take

the test for him—and was expelled as a result. The reason he had done so, as he later explained, was that Joseph had been banking on his son passing all his exams, and there was no way he was going to pass Spanish: As a student who always struggled through his classes, Ted had particular trouble with languages. Also, if he didn’t pass his Spanish class, he would get kicked off the varsity football team. So he did what he felt he had to do. After nineteen-year-old Ted was expelled from Harvard, he enlisted in the army for two years. Ted was later reinstated at the prestigious college, and after finally graduating from Harvard, he went on to the University of Virginia Law School.

Joan felt that Ted had made an honest mistake and that his father had been indirectly responsible by always putting too much pressure on Ted. Joan believed that it should not be held against her husband. She couldn’t fathom why “such a big deal” had been made of the matter when it had happened eleven years earlier. This would be her first inkling of what she would later call “the cruelty of politics.”

Jack called to tell Ted that he had met with reporters from the
Boston Globe
, but to no avail; the negative story would run. Joan was so anxious that she called Jackie to see if there was anything she as First Lady could do to put the brakes on this runaway scandal.

On March 26, 1962, Jackie Kennedy was in London at the town house of her sister, Lee Radziwill. She was making a two-day rest stop, recovering from a strenuous and much- publicized fifteen-day tour of India and Pakistan. (“She re- ally broke her ass on that trip,” Jack would tell Ben Bradlee.) On March 28, Jackie would dine with Queen Eliz- abeth II at Buckingham Palace. She would then return to

Washington on March 29, a day before the story about Ted was scheduled to hit the stands.

The Radziwills, Lee and her husband Prince Stanislaw, had invited a few friends for an impromptu dinner to honor Jackie on her first night in London. Together they watched the BBC’s broadcast of the First Lady’s White House tour, which was shown in England at a later date than it had been in America.

Just before the broadcast got under way, the telephone rang: It was Joan Kennedy calling from the United States.

“She was upset,” recalls Mari Kumlin, a designer friend of Lee’s who was visiting her from Switzerland. “We kept hearing Jackie say things like ‘Now calm down, Joan. It’s not that bad, Joan. Take it easy, Joan. Don’t be ridiculous, Joan.’ Apparently, this big scandal was about to break, something to do with Ted having cheated on a Spanish test and getting kicked out of Harvard because of it. Jackie hung up with Joan and placed a call to Jack to see if there was anything he could do. From what I later understood, he ap- parently told her that he had already tried to stop the story, had met with the newspaper reporters and had even sug- gested that they run the juicy tidbit as part of a bigger story about Ted, but that the reporters felt that the cheating inci- dent would get buried that way. They wanted to make it a big deal.”

As the others watched her flickering image before them on the television set, Jackie preoccupied herself with the matter at hand in Washington. She called Joan back to tell her that nothing could be done about it.

“Secrets always come out, don’t they?” she observed to Joan. “Sometimes it takes years, sometimes not. We’re lucky this one took eleven years, I guess.”

Joan said something—it’s not known what—to which Jackie, in the presence of the others in the room, responded, “Look, if I were you, Joan, I would just forget it. Act like it’s not even happening. And just go on with your life and Ted’s campaign.

“Trust me. When it comes out, it will be the biggest news in the land,” Jackie continued, “and then two days later something else will come along and that will be even bigger news. Who knows?” The First Lady laughed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone important will keel over and drop dead.”

Before she signed off, she said, “Now go and hug Kara.

That will make everything all right.”

After Jackie had hung up, she said to the others, “You know, that poor dear is not cut out for this kind of life, she really isn’t. She’s like a sister, and I worry about her because I’m afraid her troubles have only just begun.”

“Teddy cheated on a Spanish test?” Lee asked, ignoring Jackie’s opinion of Joan. She knew that Jackie’s brother-in- law had been kicked out of Harvard but she didn’t know the reason why.

“I guess so,” Jackie said, shrugging her shoulders with resignation. “Are you the least bit surprised?”

Jackie didn’t mention that when Ted was still an under- graduate at Harvard, he had asked her to write a term paper for him, and she had done it, “but only because I felt sorry for him,” she would later explain. “He just could never keep up. Never.”

The story about Ted’s cheating at Harvard broke, as ex- pected, the day after Jackie returned to Washington. As headlines screamed out his lack of judgment, Ted became

dejected. “He feels like he’s been kicked in the balls,” Jack said privately, “he’s really singing the blues.”

Jack also noted in a conversation with Ben Bradlee that Ted’s cheating “wouldn’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at some- one else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”

Jackie’s advice to Joan, however, proved to be right on the mark. After Ted had made his apologies to the public, his campaign for his party’s nomination to fill JFK’s Senate seat against his opponent, Edward McCormack,* rolled on, de- spite the humiliation. Ted would stump until early June under the slogan “He can do more for Massachusetts.” At the Democratic Party Convention in June 1962, he defeated Ed McCormack by a two-to-one margin.

*McCormack is the nephew of the late John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House from 1962 to 1971.

P A R T T H R E E

Bobby Meets Marilyn

B
obby and Ethel Kennedy first encountered Marilyn Mon- roe on February 1, 1962, at a party for Bobby hosted by Peter Lawford and his wife Pat, Bobby’s sister, at the Law- fords’ twenty-seven-room Malibu mansion. According to family friend Joan Braden, who attended the party, Marilyn was first introduced to Bobby by Pat. He didn’t seem im- pressed until Braden whispered to him that this was “
the
Marilyn Monroe, the genuine article.
That
got his attention,” she said, laughing.

In her 1989 memoir,
Just Enough Rope,
Joan Braden wrote, “Bobby turned and I turned and there she was— blond, beautiful, red lips at the ready, clad in a black-lace dress which barely concealed the tips of her perfectly formed breasts and tightly fitted every curve of the body un- paralleled. Bobby paid attention. He sat next to her at din- ner; around our table of eight were Kim Novak, Angie Dickinson, and me. Who the men between us were, I can’t remember. I can only remember the women and the dresses which showed off their bosoms.”

Years later, in an interview, Joan added: “They had an in-

stant rapport, not surprising in that they were both charis- matic, smart people. Bobby enjoyed talking to intelligent, beautiful women, and Marilyn certainly fit the bill. She was also inquisitive in a childlike way, which I think he found re- freshing. I found her to be delightful, and everyone at the party was completely enthralled by her and rather dazzled by her presence.”

At the dinner table, Marilyn proceeded to further enchant Bobby. “From her tiny black purse, she extracted a folded piece of paper, and unfolded it to reveal, in bright lipstick, a list of questions,” said Braden. “The first was, ‘What does an Attorney General do?’ There were some giggles from somewhere at the table and the man next to me whispered, ‘Don’t. She’s had a sad and lonely life and she has no self- confidence at all.’ ” Marilyn read other lipstick-written questions, each of which, Braden recalls, “was as innocent and childlike as the first, totally without guile or pretense except for the medium in which they were written. Bobby was enthralled.”

One might question how Bobby could be so openly flirta- tious at a party at which his wife was also in attendance. Ethel had grown accustomed to this sort of thing, however, and, although disapproving of it, she kept her mouth shut.

Ethel had actually been excited about meeting Marilyn. She was not immune to the power of the screen star’s charisma and personality. In fact, about a year earlier, she had said that she wanted Marilyn to play her in a movie that was being developed by 20th Century-Fox based on Bobby Kennedy’s book
The Enemy Within
. (The film was never made.)

Now, a year later, Ethel was in the same room with Mari- lyn, who seemed to be flirting with her husband. Ethel re-

Bobby Meets Marilyn
171

portedly said later to Pat Kennedy in the company of two Kennedy aides, “I just think she’s a big phony, and if I’m never around her again, that would be fine with me. Women like that make me so mad—trying to seduce a married man. I’m furious about this, I really am.”

“Oh, Ethel, Marilyn’s harmless,” said Pat.

“Harmless, my foot,” exclaimed Ethel. “This one is where I draw the line,” she said, apparently more adamant about this woman than she was about all the others.

As the evening wore on, Bobby seemed to fall further under Monroe’s spell, especially when he started coaching her in the rudiments of the popular dance craze the Twist, all under the suspicious gaze of Ethel. When Marilyn became too drunk to see herself to her Brentwood home, Bobby of- fered to drive her. Perhaps mindful of Ethel’s ever-frozen stare, he asked his press agent, Ed Guthman, to accompany them. Marilyn plopped herself in the front seat next to Bobby, leaving Guthman in the back. Following the short drive to her house, Bobby walked the wobbly Marilyn un- steadily to her door, where she was met by her housekeeper, Eunice Murray.