Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (70 page)

A week before her performance, William Smith, assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, joined Joan at her sixteen-room home overlooking the Potomac River in

McLean to help her rehearse her material. “She struck me as a very unconfident young lady who had to do this to prove she could do something on her own,” recalled William Smith, who said that Joan seemed a little out of place among the McLean trappings of tennis court, playing field, swim- ming pool, and servants’ quarters. “She didn’t seem as con- fident as I imagined a Kennedy woman would be. It clearly showed in her demeanor, in the way she had of wringing her hands. She had the feeling of filling very large shoes in that royal family atmosphere, where she had to prove herself or be submerged. But it was her grit that impressed me.”

After two more days of campaigning for Ted, Joan was on her way to Philadelphia, accompanied by just one family friend who would double as her publicist, Pat Newcomb (who, eight years earlier, had represented Marilyn Monroe in the same capacity).

The next evening, Joan walked onto the stage in an ele- gant, black lace Valentino gown with sloping neckline and long sleeves. As the applause rang out, she walked confi- dently to the black Steinway piano, followed by conductor William Smith. For her performance, Joan had selected the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, which was more popularly known at the time as the theme to the motion picture
Elvira Madigan.
She would fol- low that selection with Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1.

As the lush strings came up behind her, Joan played beau- tifully, her hands moving adroitly over the keys, her head tilted back, her eyes sometimes closed as if in a meditation. As she played she would weave back and forth, seemingly in a musical trance, surrendering herself to her music.

A private woman who had, for the last twelve years, lived her life in crowds, Joan Bennett Kennedy had always

seemed alone in a serene world of her own choosing when- ever she played piano. Now, on this stage, as she would later recall, the music carried her away to private places in her soul, “places only I could know or understand.” At the end of her first number, the applause rang out loud and strong. Bolstered by the enthusiastic reaction, she began the next song. After it was over, she stood and took her bows to a rousing standing ovation.

Of course, the theater that evening was filled with friendly Democrats, but it didn’t matter to Joan. Even though the marquee outside the theater read “Mrs. Edward (Joan) Kennedy—World Piano Debut,” the audience appre- ciated her not because she was Ted’s wife but because she had proven herself as a musician and, as a performer with limited experience on the stage of such a prestigious venue, a courageous woman as well. Overwhelmed by the moment, Joan walked off into the wings in tears, only to be brought back on for three curtain calls. During the last, she was pre- sented with a large bouquet of red roses. A smile spread across her face as she cradled the flowers with her right arm and dabbed at her eyes with her left hand.

While cheers continued to ring out, a beaming Ted made his way down to the backstage area to greet his wife. Joan’s eyes immediately zeroed in on his ruggedly handsome face when she finally walked offstage. She ran over to him, giddy as a schoolgirl, and reached out to her husband. Flashbulbs popped all around her.

Rather than lovingly embrace his wife and congratulate her for her stellar achievement, Ted put his arm around her shoulder as if she were a pal and not a lover. “Well done, Mommy,” he said. “Well done.” Joan glanced downward, the color rising in her face. Suddenly she looked gloomy.

It was a humiliating moment, and not only for Joan but for Ted as well. He had made his dismissive appraisal of her accomplishment in front of a reporter, who then passed it on to the public the next morning in the
Philadelphia Daily News.
“ ‘Well done, Mommy’? For God’s sake!” wrote Tom Fox. “This is the way the Irish talk when they have made it to the drawing room. He should be ashamed of himself.”

In his defense, Ted Kennedy—like his brothers Jack and Bobby—had always been incapable of expressing un- abashed affection for anyone in public, even for his wife. Still, for the sake of the newspeople and cameras he might have at least tried. Ordinarily his actions would have been crushing to Joan, but not this evening. She recovered quickly. Judging from the smile on her face as she greeted well-wishers, even Ted could not dampen Joan Kennedy’s sense of achievement on that victorious October evening in 1970.

Ethel’s Troubled Brood

W
hile Joan Kennedy battled alcoholism and fretted about her marriage, Ethel Kennedy had her own personal prob- lems, many of which must have seemed overwhelming at times.

By the early seventies, Ethel’s sons Joe and Bobby along with some of their brothers and cousins had begun using drugs and rabble-rousing about the Cape Cod area—shoot- ing BB guns, racing cars, and mugging other youngsters—to

the point where the Kennedys’ neighbors had actually begun to fear for their safety. Once, three of her children tied the family cook to a tree and threatened to set her on fire. “Look, I’m just a single mother trying to raise all of these kids,” Ethel explained to her by way of an apology. “I’m sorry for your trouble, but I can only do what I can do.”

When the cook threatened to press charges, Ethel said she would welcome the police intervention, saying, “Maybe
they
can do something about these boys, because I can’t.”

At one point, when Ethel needed a new governess, she called Ted’s assistant Richard Burke to ask him to find one for her. He suggested hiring a woman who had worked as a nurse at Georgetown University. Ethel agreed. A month later, the governess telephoned Burke, crying. “She was hysterical because the kids had planted a big snake in her bed,” said Burke. “I drove to Hickory Hill and spirited her away from the madness. Ethel wasn’t really concerned, would never discipline the kids over something like that. Bigger things, yes. I think she had to pick and choose her battles, but to say she was an effective parent would be, I think, a mischaracterization.”

It’s true that with all of her suppressed anger and heartbreak over her beloved Bobby’s murder, Ethel wasn’t as available to her children as she may have wanted to be. For instance, when her sixteen-year-old Bobby and Eunice’s sixteen-year-old son, also named Bobby, were arrested for possession of mar- ijuana, Eunice and her husband, Sarge, sat down with their boy and tried to reason with him. They finally convinced him to curtail his friendship with his cousin.

Meanwhile, Ethel chased her Bobby around the yard with a broom stick, yelling, “I’ll beat the daylights out of you if I ever get my hands on you!” The youngster ran to Jackie’s

home, rushed in and began pleading to her for protection. “Look, Jackie, you can keep him,” Ethel told her sister-in- law when Jackie tried to talk to her about Bobby. “I don’t want him. Maybe you’ll have better luck with him.”

The teenager stayed with his Aunt Jackie for a few hours before Ethel finally retrieved him.

“Please promise me you won’t kill him,” Jackie told her, perhaps only half-jokingly.

“I can’t promise you that,” Ethel answered.

“Well, I guess I can’t blame you,” Jackie said, trying to keep the mood light for fear of further antagonizing her sister-in-law. “If John ever smoked marijuana,
I’d
be the mother chasing her boy around the yard.” (Little did Jackie know that John often smoked pot . . . and that he got it from Bobby!)

“One summer, we started realizing that we were missing a lot of food from our basement where we stored canned goods and other nonperishables,” recalls Kennedy neighbor Sancy Newman. “When we looked into it, we found that our children were harboring a bunch of Ethel’s kids whom she had kicked out of the house. They were living in our base- ment! When they were found out, the boys refused to go back home to their mother. Instead, they dug a hole in the woods, covered it up, and began living there.”

In 1972, a real tragedy occurred when Joe, his brother David, and David’s girlfriend, Pam Kelley, went on a joyride in a jeep on Nantucket that resulted in an accident leaving Pam paralyzed from the neck down. The Kennedys would take care of Pam’s medical costs, and provide for her as well, for the rest of her life.

“Ethel broke down when she heard about that accident,” says Leah Mason. “She was inconsolable. ‘My own boys are

responsible for this,’ she said, ‘which makes
me
responsible. If Bobby was still here, none of this would be happening. Why did God do this to us? I tried to live a good life,’ she said, crying. ‘Why punish me further?’ ”

Mason says that Ethel often tried to reason with her re- bellious children, “but there were simply too many of them, and they all had their own agendas as to how to get into se- rious trouble. They looked at her as the enemy. It was her against them. ‘I’m outnumbered,’ she used to say, ‘and it’s hopeless.’ The boys, especially, were as angry on the inside as their mother was about what had happened to their father, and so they acted out terribly.”

Sometimes, the monkeyshines pulled by the boys were humorous. For instance, teenage sons Joe, Bobby, and David spent one summer selling what they called “Kennedy Sand” for a dollar a bag to fascinated tourists parked outside the gates of Hickory Hill. For an extra quarter, they would even answer “Kennedy Questions.” One day, when someone asked the name of Jackie’s favorite designer, Bobby ran into the house and called his cousin Caroline for the answer. Car- oline said she would ask her mother the question for him. When Jackie later telephoned Ethel to ask why Bobby needed the information, Ethel laughed and said, “Oh, I guess he’s trying to make an extra buck out at the front gate again.”

At other times, the pranks got out of hand. Once, one of Ethel’s teenage sons pulled a knife on Leah Mason and de- manded money. When she handed over her purse, he laughed, threw it back at her and said, ‘I don’t need your money, bitch. I’m a Kennedy. You’re a
secretary
!” Then he ran off. To him, it had all been a joke. However, Mason was “frightened half to death,” she recalls. “When I told Ethel

about it, she looked at me squarely and said, ‘Don’t tell me. Tell a cop. Here’s the phone.’ And she handed me the tele- phone! I shook my head and thought to myself, ‘Oh my God.’ ”

Mason adds, “There was a time when Rose asked Jackie to talk to Ethel about the children. Apparently, the boys had shot holes into all of the windows at the Catholic church that Rose regularly attended. She was mortified, and had gotten nowhere with Ethel when she brought it up to her. I was standing in the room with Jackie and Rose and heard Jackie say, ‘Grandma, why would you think, after all these years, that Ethel would ever listen to a word I have to say about anything?’ Rose looked at her with an astonished expres- sion. ‘Why, Jackie, she has always respected you more than anyone else in the family. Don’t you know that?’ Jackie seemed stunned by that observation. ‘Still in all,’ she said, ‘I think it would be assumptive for me to tell another woman how to raise her children.’ ”

With Ethel’s hidden rage and great remorse over the way her life had turned out, to have so many misbehaving chil- dren under one roof was more than she could handle. She would often be seen on the rocker on her porch at the Hyan- nis Port home, rocking back and forth for hours while star- ing out at the panoramic ocean view. “She would have such a look of sadness on her face that any person would have felt compelled to hug her,” Barbara Gibson said. “But she didn’t want to be hugged. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. ‘I can handle it,’ she would say.” Or, as Ethel also often said, “God is my partner in this ordeal.”

Will Ted Run? The Joan Factor

I
t was spring 1979. After nine difficult years, during which she had battled her alcoholism in the glare of a very public spotlight, forty-three-year-old Joan Kennedy found herself sitting on a couch in a hotel suite being scrutinized and judged by an assembly of family members and doctors.