Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (52 page)

Later, in the spring, Joan would have an opportunity to distinguish herself as more than another Kennedy wife when asked to do something she enjoyed that had little to do with

politics: narrate
Peter and the Wolf,
by the Russian com- poser Sergei Prokofiev, for a fund-raiser. With her back- ground in music, perhaps Joan had an advantage over most narrators; her work in this regard was touted by some Wash- ington critics. She would be so successful at this new en- deavor—at a lectern at the front of a stage with an eighty-member orchestra playing behind her—that she would be asked to narrate
Peter and the Wolf
several more times over the years.

Still, Joan was conflicted. While she may have appeared to be comfortable with crowds, it was all an act. The truth was that, except in fleeting moments, whenever she put her- self in the public forum she was doing something she didn’t enjoy.

“You need to bring her out more, like Ethel,” Bobby told Ted at a New York charity event in front of a group of Kennedy aides. “She’s too shy, too quiet. No one knows what to make of her.”

“I’m lucky to get her out of the house,” Ted replied. “But why?” Bobby asked. “She was great when you were

flat on your back, she was great in Europe. She needs to con- tinue in that vein, like a Kennedy.”

It seemed as if almost everyone around her—Jackie, Ethel, Bobby, Rose, and even the Kennedy sisters, Pat, Jean, and Eunice—saw the great potential in Joan Kennedy to do anything to which she set her mind. However, it seemed that because she could not win her husband’s approval, nothing she accomplished meant anything to her. So, rather than be energized by those accomplishments, she appeared ex- hausted by them, possibly because they did nothing to in- gratiate her to Ted. Perhaps she saw each achievement as really just another failure.

During one cocktail meeting with political allies in New York at the 21 Club, Joan and Ethel seemed to be the focus of attention of every person in the club. In typically sixties’ outfits, the two sisters-in-law were a sight: Ethel was in a vinyl dress with large black-and-white squares and spaghetti shoulder straps made of rhinestones, and Joan was in a short miniskirt of a silver fabric, with enormous plastic bubble earrings. Recalls Jerry Summers, one of the security guards on duty that night at the club, “Everyone wanted to stare. It was like having major movie stars in the place.”

At one point, the two Kennedy wives got up to go to the ladies’ room. Suddenly at least thirty women rose to follow them, all headed to the small bathroom. As soon as they saw the stampede, Bobby’s security men leapt up to run interfer- ence, attempting to pull the fans away from the Kennedy women. Ethel helped by screaming at the women, “Get back right now. Can’t a woman even go to the bathroom? What’s the matter with you people? My God, you’re
animals.
”

Joan, who had enjoyed a few drinks, looked terrorized. Her hair was mussed, and mascara tears ran down her face as she spun about in the same spot, being pushed and pulled from all directions. She was a Raggedy Ann doll in a bad miniskirt. One of the guards grabbed her by the arm and practically dragged her to safety. When she finally got back to her table, she broke down crying. She and Ted left, quickly. Ethel and Bobby stayed behind, however, signing autographs, smiling, and shaking hands.

P A R T N I N E

The Rumor Mill

W
as Camelot’s Guenevere having an affair with Lancelot now that King Arthur was dead and buried?

As soon as Jackie Kennedy had settled in Manhattan, ru- mors began anew about the nature of her relationship with her dead husband’s brother Bobby, giving the East Coast gossip columnists something new upon which to focus in welcoming Jackie to town. Throughout the years, and in many biographies of the two Kennedys, just such a “ro- mance” has been confirmed by people who claim to have had intimate knowledge of it.

Kenny O’Donnell once told of an instance in the spring of 1965 when Jackie called Bobby in tears. “She was in her apartment with her kids, and the police were scouring the place with the bomb squad,” said O’Donnell. “Someone had apparently phoned in a bomb threat. Jackie was frantic, Bobby said, crying on the phone that she was going to be blown to bits with her kids, and asking what she had done to deserve this fate. It was a terrible thing.

“She was a prisoner in that place. They were afraid to get her out of there because the caller said there was a sniper

waiting for her to leave the building. She was going to be picked off as soon as she walked out. It was a night of terror; she was trapped like a caged animal. Bobby took the next plane to New York and was there in a few hours. By the time he arrived, though, the scare was over . . . no bomb was found. Jackie was so upset, Bobby spent the night at her place.

“That’s where rumors got started,” said O’Donnell. “If he had been seen leaving there, then there would have been sto- ries.” O’Donnell, who knew both Bobby and Jackie well, doesn’t believe the stories. “How could anyone be romantic after a hysterical scene like that one? She needed him, he was there for her. But as a close friend, a protector, which is what she needed, believe me.”

The rumor of an affair between Jackie and Bobby has also been fanned by people whose relationship with both parties had been somewhat strained over the years. Gore Vidal wrote derogatorily in his memoirs,
Palimpsest,
that “the one person she [Jackie] ever loved, if indeed she was capable of such an emotion, was Bobby Kennedy.” However, Vidal’s animus for Bobby was well known.

Another writer of note, Truman Capote, was quoted as having said that he was surprised “that the Jackie-Bobby love affair remained under wraps as long as it did.”*

“Such a hurtful rumor,” observed Joan Braden, “but so

*Jackie and Joan were once discussing Truman Capote when Joan asked, “Is it true, Jackie, that he’s queer?” Jackie, who was al- ways amused by Joan’s naïveté, acted as if she didn’t know what her sister-in-law meant by “queer.” Joan persisted, “You know, Jackie, gay.
Gay!
” Jackie had to laugh. “Oh, Joan, you are too much,” she said, kidding her. “Gay? He’s as gay as
paint
! We’ll never be able to corrupt you, will we?”

typical of the kinds of stories that floated around about the Kennedy women, started up by people who didn’t think of them as real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Besides the ob- vious fact that Jackie was so devastated and would never be able to have a man in her life at that time, look at how be- reaved Bobby was! People can’t just push all of that hurt and anger aside and jump into bed together. Maybe on a TV soap opera they can, but not in real life. It was so demeaning a rumor, to everyone concerned.”

“Rubbish,” concurs Bobby Kennedy’s former spokesman, Frank Mankiewicz. “In people’s fantasy world of what the Kennedys were like, yes. In the real world, no.”

Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson, adds, “It’s just absurd and the kind of thing that people whispered about because it was such a juicy bit of speculation. Untrue, I am sure of it.”

Also underscoring the rumors over the years has been the slow release of classified Secret Service documents that have indicated that Jackie and Bobby were in each other’s constant company throughout the last six months of 1964. “Considering the way J. Edgar Hoover felt about Bobby Kennedy, is it any wonder that he would attempt to turn his relationship with Jackie into something tawdry?” said Frank Mankiewicz.

However, one person who apparently did believe the sto- ries was Ethel. According to George Smathers, “Though there was no affair, I believe Bobby’s wife thought there was one.”

Ethel seemed to find it difficult to accept that her husband was spending so much time with his attractive sister-in-law. It is interesting to note that in the late forties, Bobby first fell in love with Ethel’s older sister, Pat Skakel. After his first

few dates with Ethel, the shy and moody Bobby had slowly drifted to her sister, who better matched his temperament. Soon, Pat and Bobby were seriously involved. “They fell in love and dated for two years,” Ethel admitted some two decades later, but added that she didn’t like to talk about that “terrible period.”

It was Pat whom Bobby first seriously considered marry- ing. However, Pat wasn’t in love with Bobby and, in time, broke it off with him. Bobby, on the rebound, began dating an alluring young actress named Joan Winmill.

But the ambitious Kennedy boys, with their sights set on politics, were brought up to be practical in their decision- making. Every move they made, from the schools they at- tended, to the wives they chose, was a choice made with a careful eye to the future marks they would leave in the politi- cal arena. The women they married would have to be excep- tional in many ways and provide more than just temporary infatuation. The athletic, competitive Ethel, with her deeply held Catholic beliefs, fitted in perfectly with the Kennedy clan. Ethel, like Bobby and his mother Rose, attended Mass every day; she was intelligent and loyal, and what she lacked in glamour she made up for in devotion. Her offbeat humor and boisterous behavior also melded in effortlessly with the rowdy Kennedy clan; she made the perfect Kennedy wife.

At the time of her great concern about her Bobby’s al- leged affair with Jackie, Ethel subscribed to a magazine called
Photoplay,
a movie fan magazine that was a popular monthly at the time. Jackie and Ethel enjoyed reading about themselves in such silly fan magazines, even though much of what they read was completely untrue. Says Leah Mason, who worked at Hickory Hill as an assistant to Ethel, “Ethel always had a huge stack of these magazines, and one of my

jobs was to clip out the articles about her and the other Kennedys, and keep them for posterity.”

The three Kennedy wives were written about more than any other political wives of the sixties and seventies, sharing covers with Hollywood stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. While reading about themselves in such mag- azines, the women would privately marvel at how journal- ists would create pure fiction around innocent photographs. Ethel, however, was prone to believe that the stories about other family members were true.

Said Leah Mason, “Ethel would call up Joan and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were angry at me?’ and Joan would say, ‘What in the world are you talking about?’ Ethel would reply that she had read about the ‘feud’ in a movie magazine, and believed it. She just assumed that Joan would speak to a reporter about it before she would speak to her. Then, after hanging up with Joan, she would say to me, ‘Cut that article out and file it. I may need it for future reference.’ Sometimes she would have me send an offending article to someone, like Andy Williams, and tell me to write in the margin something like, ‘We must be more discreet!’ Once, Andy called and said, ‘What is she
talking
about?’ ”

Jackie and Ethel—not Joan, who couldn’t even bear to read what was being written about her, let alone save the sto- ries—would spend hours writing letters and making tele- phone calls to friends, pleading with them to completely disregard some untruth that had been printed. One odd letter from Ethel to Andy Williams explained that an article im- plying a romance between Bobby and Williams’s wife, Claudine Longet, was “inaccurate as far as I know.” One might assume that famous women, so accustomed to this kind of publicity, good and bad, would not be concerned

about what was written in cheap magazines, but that was not the case. It’s also interesting to note that they would even have the time to devote to such pursuits.

For her part, Jackie loved to gossip, and always had. However, when the gossip was about her, she didn’t much like it. She would read the fan magazines and circle the names of the sources for the articles, and then write them off forever, never speaking to them again. If one of those sources happened to be someone with whom she was friendly, she would clip the article, circle the offending pas- sages, send it to the sinning friend, and then she would never speak to that person again.

She, like her sister-in-law, often feared that others would believe what they read in these publications. For instance, while stories had persisted that Jackie found Lyndon John- son to be offensive, there is little evidence in their corre- spondence over the years—more than seventy-five letters in all—that Jackie and LBJ shared anything but a friendly, re- spectful relationship; he was very solicitous.

Yet, during the holidays of 1966, Jackie was disturbed by the reprinting of an article by William Manchester in a fan magazine called
Modern Screen
with the headline: “Jackie Hates LBJ—She Thinks He’s a Dirty Old Man!”*

*Jackie had filed a highly publicized lawsuit against William Manchester to prevent him from using, in his book
The Death of a President,
highly personal material he had gotten from her in an in- terview. In the end the material was deleted from his work, but not until it was reprinted in newspapers and magazines everywhere as the result of reports about the lawsuit, all much to Jackie’s dismay. “I am so dazed,” she wrote during the litigation, “I feel that I will never be able to feel anything again.”