Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (68 page)

Ted was a frequent visitor at Hickory Hill, and his somber face after a day of meetings with his aides reminded Joan of how serious the Chappaquiddick situation still was for him, and for her as well.

A Final Gathering for Joseph

I
n the weeks after Ted Kennedy’s
mea culpa
speech, his fa- ther, Joseph, fell into a deep depression. After he lost his ap- petite, it was clear to his family that he was giving up on his life, such as it had been for the last eight long, difficult years.

One evening, Joe suffered a cardiac arrest at the Hyannis Port home while he was getting ready for bed. Hearing a ruckus, Jackie, Joan, Ted, Ethel, Rose, Eunice, Pat, and some other family members rushed to Joe’s room to find Rita Dallas pounding frantically on the old man’s chest, try- ing to bring him back to life. Ted, in particular, was horrified by the sight; Joan held on to him, tightly. Ethel stood trans- fixed, while Jackie kept repeating, “He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine” in a hypnotic litany.

Finally, Joe began breathing. Though he pulled through, the family was reminded of the sad fact that this was a very sick man. Next time, Rita warned them, he might not be as lucky.

After the incident, Joan found Rita Dallas in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee with the Norwegian cook, Matilda.

“I’m glad I found you,” Joan said. “The senator has been wanting to speak to you, but he’s still with his father. He wants to tell you how glad he is that you saved his dad’s life tonight.” (Just as Ted always referred to his brother as “the President,” Joan referred to her husband as “the senator.”)

As Rita Dallas said that no thanks were necessary, Joan crumpled into a chair. “How much more of
that
can any of

us take?” Joan wondered wearily, her hands shaking. “No wonder Kennedys don’t cry. They’re always too trauma- tized.”

During recent times, Joseph Kennedy had spent most of his days in bed watching television, his eyes fixed on the daily news broadcasts. However, that small luxury was taken from him when he began going blind. Shortly after losing his sight, his vocal chords began to atrophy. Joseph hadn’t actually spoken in years, but now he could no longer make the guttural sounds he had used for years to communi- cate with others. When he could no longer swallow, doctors realized that it was just a matter of time before he would die. Rose Kennedy, emotionally drained by having to witness the daily deterioration of a husband who was once so strong and vital, sat in a chair next to his bed and wept quietly for hours before deciding that the time had come to summon the fam- ily.

On November 15, the first to arrive was Jackie from Greece. She and Joseph had always been close, and when she came from his room after visiting him, her face was drawn and her eyes red-rimmed. “It’s really time for him to go now,” she told Rose, who sadly agreed. “This isn’t the way he would want it. He’s ready. Why must life be so hard?” Jackie wondered. “The slow decay of body, mind, and spirit—all the money we have, and we can do noth- ing.”

Joseph’s daughters arrived the next day. Eunice was first, with her husband Sargent Shriver, from Paris. Then came Pat and Jean.

Soon after his sisters, Ted arrived with Joan. Then Ethel. She had the flu and, after a short visit with Joseph, was forced to go to her own bed next door. “In some ways, I

think she’s been sick ever since Bobby died,” Rose re- marked.

The ongoing death vigil became unbearable for all the Kennedys, especially by November 17, when Joseph fell into a deep coma. That night Jackie stayed with him, sleep- ing in a straight-backed chair in his room. Early in the morn- ing, she went downstairs and found Ted sitting by a weak fire. He, too, had been up all night, while a distraught and exhausted Joan had gone to their home on Squaw Island for some rest. Jackie and Ted spent the next few hours together sitting in front of the hearth, engaged in a calm, private con- versation, the details of which are unknown.

The next morning, Luella Hennessey telephoned Rita Dallas to tell her that the end was near. By the time Dallas got to the house from where she lived nearby, Joseph’s pulse was so weak she was afraid he would expire without having any of his family members around him, as all had retired to their own homes to shower and prepare for the day. So Dal- las sounded an alarm in Joseph’s room, the awful clanging noise of which alerted everyone in the compound that the time had come.

Jackie came running out of her home next door in her bare feet, wearing just a pair of blue slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, never considering the frigid temperature. Ethel, still very ill, met her in the backyard, and the two women raced upstairs, Ethel first. Joan and Ted arrived mo- ments later, as did the Kennedy sisters, their husbands, and Joseph’s niece, Ann Gargan, who had cared for him for years. Soon, Joseph’s room was filled with his immediate family.

Almost as a matter of protocol, his children encircled his bed, while the wives (Jackie, Ethel, and Joan) and the hus-

bands (Steve Smith and Sargent Shriver) took a few steps back. It was decided not to allow Rose into the room until the last possible moment, just in case Joseph should begin to convulse in his final moments. Finally, when Rita Dallas and Luella Hennessey decided it was safe to do so, Ted left the room and returned in a couple of minutes with his el- derly mother, stooped and sobbing.

At the first sight of her barely breathing husband, Rose fell to her knees at the side of his bed and put her head down upon his deformed hand. She stayed in that position for about ten minutes, crying all the while, as the others looked on, each lost in his or her own moment of grief.

Rita Dallas thought it might be best if Rose, always a woman of great faith, had her rosary with her at this time, and so she asked that someone fetch it. Jackie, who had noticed the beads on a dresser in the room, brought them to Rose. Rose then put them gently to her husband’s lips and into his open hand, which she closed around them. Tears washed down Jackie’s face, but not Ethel’s; she re- mained stoic. Joan, standing next to them, was unable to speak.

After a few moments of heavy silence, Eunice began to say the Our Father, aloud, with Ted, Jean, and Pat each tak- ing a line.

“Forgive us our trespasses,” Ethel said when, after a pause, it seemed as if it should be her turn.

“As we forgive those who trespass against us,” Jackie added, reaching over and taking Ethel’s hand in her own.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” Rose intoned, finally, her head hanging low.

Then, from behind, in a small, barely audible voice, someone said, “Amen.” It was Joan.

In agreement, everyone else echoed Joan Kennedy’s final word, as Joseph Patrick Kennedy passed into history.

The End of Camelot

R
ose Kennedy would live another twenty-five years after her husband, Joseph’s, death, finally dying at the age of 104 in January 1995. In her later days, Rose was paralyzed on her left side, unable to walk or speak, partially blind, and had to be fed through a tube. It would be Ted’s agonizing de- cision to have his mother removed from life-support sys- tems; she had been confined to her rose-colored bedroom for years. Rose had thirty grandchildren and forty-one great- grandchildren. She would be buried next to her husband in suburban Brookline. Ethel, who, along with Rose’s children, had been at Rose’s bedside when she died, would read pas- sages from the Bible during the funeral for her mother-in- law.

However, long before the Kennedy family’s matriarch would pass away from complications of pneumonia, a con- fluence of events in the family’s history would cause the Kennedy generation of the fifties and sixties, which had so fascinated the world, denizens of Camelot, so to speak, to begin a slow and final decline. With Joseph Kennedy buried, this generation of Kennedys began focusing on their own lives, careers, marriages, and children, to make way for the next generation, which would one day include more than a few of its own politicians. Like the other family members

who began to consider their lives separately and apart from the Kennedy infrastructure, Jackie, Ethel, and Joan also began looking to the future—a future after Camelot.

While Jackie Kennedy’s life changed when she married Aristotle Onassis, one thing that remained was the public’s intense interest in her. During her marriage to Onassis—and beyond—tons of newsprint would be devoted to her and ea- gerly devoured by a world famished for the beauty and ele- gance she continued to represent. She would continue to be deified and, despite the disappointment the public had ex- pressed about her marriage, she would remain for many an object of great adoration, obsessive interest, and intense scrutiny. To the millions who would continue to read about her every move and scrutinize her every action, she would transcend human confines and become something called “Jackie O,” an appellation that she would deplore.

While some who knew them insisted that they loved one an- other, others say that Jackie and Ari wanted little to do with one another. Ellen Deiner, publicist for the Greek National Theater and a friend of Onassis, recalls a remarkable incident that said much about Onassis’s feelings about his wife. Appar- ently, Onassis had been collecting pictures of Jackie for years and by 1969 had, without exaggeration, probably over a thou- sand photos in his possession. In fact, according to Deiner, he had a secret room at his Paris penthouse that was, for lack of a better word, a “shrine” to Jackie.

Onassis himself seemed to have realized that this was a somewhat unusual tribute to his wife, because he took mea- sures to make sure his wife didn’t find out about it. Though Jackie often asked what was in the room, she was never told. One day, while at the Paris apartment working on a project

involving the theater and Onassis, Deiner heard a loud woman’s voice saying,
“What in the world is this?”
She went rushing upstairs and down the hallway, and there was Jackie standing in the doorway of the “closet,” staring at the huge, black-and-white and color framed posters of herself on the walls, and smaller photos of herself all about.

“What is all of this?” the shaken Jackie demanded. Some- how, she had found a key to the room; she was holding it in her hand.

Ellen Deiner, in a moment of panic, could do little more than shake her head helplessly. She had never seen the in- side of the room, either.

The two women stepped into the secret room and slowly took in the surroundings, moving from photo to photo, each one a documentation of Jackie’s ever-changing image through the years. It was a veritable museum of Jackie Kennedy memorabilia. (Ironically, the home of Jackie’s fa- ther, Black Jack, had also been something of a shrine, filled with pictures of his daughter Jackie.)

Jackie paused at a small silver-framed photo on an end table, picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then put it back down. It was a picture of her wedding day to Jack. On the wall was a large framed photograph of her on that horri- ble day in 1963 when she stood next to Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office. However Jackie interpreted all of this, she was visibly shaken, especially after looking at the photo of Johnson’s swearing-in. She turned and walked from the room, shaking her head in dismay.

The next day, at her direction, the room was completely cleared of all photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Ari’s reac- tion to that remains unknown.

Aristotle Onassis would die on March 14, 1974, after

catching pneumonia during recovery from an operation for gallstones. He had never recovered from the emotional dev- astation of his son Alexander’s death in a plane crash a few years earlier. Alexander’s death had changed him; he be- came embittered and filled with hopelessness. He treated Jackie poorly, according to those who knew the couple best. Jackie was not at his side when he died in Greece; she was in New York.

Neither Joan nor Ethel would attend his funeral. (“Maybe I can get out of it if I call Ted and see if he’ll represent the Kennedys,” Ethel told her assistant Noelle Fell.)

Three days after his death, Jackie’s good friend Lady Bird Johnson wrote her a lovely letter saying that Onassis’s death “sent my heart winging your way. The shadow of grief, which has pulled at your family life, seems an unendurable one,” she wrote. “I know your strength and composure has been put to the severest tests, always in the public’s watch- ful eye. I dearly hope the years ahead bring the balm of hap- pier days for you and the children.”