Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (69 page)

Jackie would contest her ill-conceived marital contract and, after much legal wrangling, ended up with $26 million. She would then go on to become an editor in the publishing world, first at Viking (which she left after Viking published a fiction book that supposed a death threat against Ted Kennedy), and then Doubleday. Her two children, John and Caroline, would become living testaments to the common sense and wisdom she, as a mother, had always demon- strated. (Jackie’s own mother, Janet, would die in July 1989 at the age of eighty-one, six years after having been diag- nosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease Jackie had always feared would be passed down to her, at least according to her step- brother Yusha Auchincloss.)

* * *

At the end of the sixties and into the seventies, Ethel Kennedy retreated to her home at Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia. In staying close to home, hearth, and family, she hoped to raise her eleven children—with the help of an army of nannies, nursemaids, cooks, and social secretaries—by drawing comfort from the familiar and embracing the past rather than running from it.

In years to come, Ethel would change little in the house; pictures of Bobby would remain where they’d always been—throughout the home, on walls, on top of the televi- sion sets, the piano, and everywhere else. In some ways, it was as if he would live on almost as large as life at Hickory Hill, his memory counseling and guiding his wife and chil- dren. Or, as Ethel put it, “Bobby is here, in every smile, in every joke . . . in every tear.”

One moment that says a lot about Ethel is remembered by Ray Springfield, a young landscaper employed by Alex Johnson (who worked for Rose Kennedy every year plant- ing flowers on the grounds of the Hyannis Port home). It was the spring of 1974 as Johnson walked about with Rose, who was dictating the kinds of flowers she wanted planted and where. As they walked up the steps of Rose’s back porch, they noticed Joan and Ethel sitting side by side on large wooden chairs. “As I walked by them, I heard a brief snippet of a conversation, Joan saying to Ethel, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time living in the past. It can’t be good for you.’ And Ethel snapping at her, ‘Well, what choice do I have? You tell me.’ That’s all I heard, as Mrs. [Rose] Kennedy and I rushed by.”

An hour later, Johnson and Rose Kennedy walked by the same spot. The Kennedy sisters-in-law had left. Rose mo-

tioned to a thick book on the porch floor between the two chairs upon which they had been sitting.

“Would you bend down and pick that up for me?” she asked the landscaper. When he did so, she looked at it for a moment, then held it to her breast as they walked back into the house. It was Bobby and Ethel’s wedding album.

Joan Kennedy’s personal life had been challenging ever since the day she married into the family. Unfortunately, it would not get better for her in the seventies, and in many ways the death of Joseph P. Kennedy would mark the begin- ning of a ten-year stretch of even tougher times. As a result of a series of difficult events in her life—Ted’s ongoing phi- landering, her mother’s death from alcoholism, and her own vast insecurities and emotional problems—Joan’s alco- holism would spin out of control for the next ten years. Though she would take Jackie’s advice and begin seeing a psychiatrist in 1971, it would be years before she would rec- oncile her emotional problems. “It’s sad to say,” she recalls, “but I think I had to suffer an awful lot and cause my family and friends a lot of trouble in coming to terms with myself.” Joan was becoming a lonely, desperate woman. The one thing she and Ted had always enjoyed together was a satis- fying sex life. However, that was long gone, according to those in whom Joan had confided. The more Ted drank, the less he was able to function. “Joan once told me she missed more than just physical passion,” said a friend of hers from Boston who is still close to her today. “She longed for sim- ple physical intimacy. She so wanted a man to be close to, to

hold, to make her feel that she wasn’t alone.”

Then, there would be Ted’s affair in the spring of 1972 with Amanda Burden, the daughter of William S. Paley,

chairman of the board of CBS. It would get to the point where Joan would be afraid to pick up the newspaper for fear of reading about this particularly well-publicized rela- tionship.

In the fall of 1973, her twelve-year-old son Teddy would be diagnosed with cancer. His leg would have to be ampu- tated, and the tragedy would drive Joan deeper into self-de- structive behavior with alcohol.

“I remember the time that Ted had a dinner party while Joan was knocked out in the bedroom,” recalled Barbara Gibson. “Ted dressed the children’s nanny in Joan’s chic clothing and had her act as hostess. The implication was ob- vious, especially given Ted’s reputation. Ethel was outraged when she showed up, demanding to know,
‘What the heck is that woman doing in Joan’s clothes?’
She wanted to see Joan, but it was impossible that evening.”

“What happens to the human spirit is like what happens to a high cliff when the waves are too strong and too high and too constant,” noted Joan’s good friend Muffy Brandon. “The cliff erodes and the underpinnings get shaky. That’s what happened to Joan. When you have two brothers-in-law assassinated, when your son has cancer, when your husband almost died in an airplane crash, when you’ve had several miscarriages—how much can the human spirit endure?”

Joan had a three-week stay at Silver Hill Foundation, a small private hospital in Connecticut, in June of 1974. Two weeks after her release, she was back for a longer stay. In October of that same year, she pleaded guilty to drunk dri- ving after slamming her Pontiac GTO convertible into an- other automobile in McLean. She was fined and lost her license.

Ted and his aide, Richard Burke, would rifle through

Joan’s bedroom in search of stashed-away liquor bottles, or “contraband,” as Burke called them. After so many years of drinking, though, Joan would be able to find relief in many ways: she would use a mouthwash, for instance, with a high alcohol content.

Meanwhile, as Joan continued giving interviews to the press about her drinking, insisting to one reporter that hers was “a recovery in progress,” the public would remain un- aware of the fact that the interviews were Ted’s idea, not Joan’s. “The senator urged her to acknowledge openly her chronic difficulties in order to stave off further innuendo,” recalled Richard Burke, “[all the while] we were spiriting more bottles out of her bedroom.”

After finally separating from Ted in 1977 thanks to thrice- weekly psychiatric sessions, Joan would move into a seven- room condominium on Beacon Street in Boston and begin doing interviews about her alcoholism and how she was working to overcome it, as well as about her terrible mar- riage. A year later, she would be back at McLean Hospital, drying out once again. Meanwhile, at that same time, her mother would die of alcoholism-related disease.

The years after Camelot would be difficult ones for Joan Bennett Kennedy. She would leave her children—Kara, sev- enteen, Teddy, sixteen, and Patrick, ten—with Ted, when she moved to Boston. She realized that she couldn’t take care of herself, so how was she able to care for her children? This is what it would come to for Joan and her children— weekend visits.

P A R T T W E L V E

Ted Hurts Joan Again

I
t wasn’t until the 1970s and the beginning of the women’s movement that things began to change for many females in this country, including two of the Kennedy wives—Jackie and Joan. Both women’s experiences, as they would unfold throughout the next decade, would prove to be emblematic of their time.

Interestingly, Ethel would choose to stay out of touch with the women’s movement. She never really understood the notion of uplifting the feminine consciousness, and be- lieved that a woman’s place was in the home, subservient to her husband—if she were still lucky enough to have one. So, while Jackie and Joan would each go on to expand their horizons, Ethel would stay home at Hickory Hill, sur- rounded by her children, mourning her late husband, and often lamenting what might have been.

By the end of 1971, Joan had taken Jackie’s advice and had begun therapy with a Washington psychiatrist. At this time, many people still believed that only those with the most severe emotional problems consulted psychiatrists. At the urging of Jackie and other friends, Joan was able to get

past that kind of archaic thinking in an effort to help herself with her “issues.”

Some of her choices—particularly her fashion choices— were often still the subject of controversy.

For instance, earlier she had worn a shimmering minidress, cut low at the neck, to a formal reception hosted by President and Mrs. Nixon at the White House to honor the country’s senators and their wives. The invitation had specified formal dress, suggesting floor-length skirts for the ladies. The next day practically every newspaper in the country ran photos of the formally attired First Lady, in a gown with white gloves to her elbows, sneaking an aston- ished look at Joan’s long legs while being greeted by her in the receiving line. Fashion reporters across the country noted that “Jacqueline would never have dressed that way.” Helen N. Smith, Pat Nixon’s press aide, later said that the First Lady was more “concerned about Joan” than she was angry because “it did seem a bit odd.” However, though Joan’s wardrobe was often eccentric—ranging from funky miniskirts to typically sixties bell-bottoms and garish flower-printed gowns—it was probably no more bizarre than Ethel’s plastic minis with their asymmetrical designs. Joan just got more attention for her clothing, probably be- cause she was known to have troubles (“poor Joan”) and the public and press were watching her for clues to her state of

mind.

Joan had wanted to speak to a mental health professional for some time, but Ted had always objected to the notion. First of all, like Ethel and many other members of his fam- ily, he mistrusted psychotherapy. Also, he may have feared that certain family skeletons would come to the surface dur- ing the course of Joan’s sessions. He actually asked Joan,

“How do we know whoever you see isn’t going to go run- ning to one of those fan magazines with everything you’ve told him?”

However, for the first time Joan didn’t care what Ted thought. She went into therapy and would become only the second family member to voluntarily do so (Bobby being the first, after Jack’s death, but for only a couple of visits be- fore Ethel convinced him to stop). “This was the first step in a long, long process,” said Luella Hennessey. “But it was a beginning.”

Finally, Joan was looking for ways to empower herself. She was now thinking about what might be best for her and how she might want to consider living her life from this time onward. As Hennessey indicated, it would be a long and sometimes torturous process, for it would be years before Joan would accept that she was an alcoholic. As Joan herself would later note, “I found that small steps add up to big strides . . . for me, though, it wasn’t one day at a time, it was more like one moment at a time.”

As it sometimes happens, Joan’s life changed in small but significant ways as soon as, during therapy, she started to re- view, recognize, and at least try to understand the reasons behind not only her perceived weaknesses but also her inar- guable strengths. “It just started rolling, like a snowball down a hill—good things,” Joan said, “all as soon as I started looking within, as soon as I started trying to figure me out.”

For instance, in late summer of 1970, thirty-four-year-old Joan received an invitation to appear as a piano soloist at an October fund-raiser for Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsyl- vania at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. During her performance, she would be accompanied by musicians from

the esteemed, sixty-strong Philadelphia Orchestra. The great Metropolitan tenor Jan Peerce would sing. The event would mark her concert debut, and before an audience of almost three thousand people. While she had narrated
Peter and the Wolf,
first in 1965 and every year since, this was a com- pletely different experience for Joan in that she would be performing as a pianist for the first time in front of such a large audience. After giving it some thought, Joan eagerly accepted the invitation, viewing it as an opportunity to chal- lenge her potential and, she hoped, grow as a woman.

It was not surprising that Ted, who would be up for re- election in November, was not happy about Joan’s decision to accept the invitation. “I’m going to need you out there stumping for me, Joansie,” he told her. “The timing for this thing, it’s not good.”

When Joan somehow assured her husband that she would be able to rehearse for her engagement and still find the time to do her part as a Kennedy wife on the campaign trail, he relented. By the fall she was on the road, wearing an “I’m for Ted” button, and hitting briefly on subjects that were unique for Joan. “Women should stick up for their rights,” she told one packed house, “but never, never become so ag- gressive that they lose their femininity.” While she was clearly sitting on the fence between a fifties’ conservatism and a seventies’ feminism, the changes in Joan Kennedy seemed profound to some observers just the same. “She’s stronger, more focused, more in charge,” wrote a political analysist for the
Boston Globe.
“She does Ted proud, even after the Chappaquiddick debacle.”