Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (13 page)

11

Still Herself

If the year that followed Bobby’s death was difficult for
Ethel,
she did everything in her power to conceal it. The concessions she did make to grief were strangely formal: For the year after his death, she observed the old-fashioned convention of wearing only black and white; and there were no public events at Hickory Hill until May of 1969, when she held a charity pet show. But in general, she made a concerted effort to carry on as before Bobby had died. Friends were constantly around, and Ethel stayed active with tennis and swimming. The children were expected to carry through on plans they made before their father’s death—Kathleen, for example, continued with her plan to work for the summer on a Native American Indian reservation in Arizona. Ethel also traveled by herself and with the kids on a few occasions.

She took a short trip to Aristotle Onassis’s private Greek island, Skorpios, in August, and met up again with Jackie and Ari in Nassau in early 1969. She took the kids on skiing trips that winter. She poured significant energy into raising money: $10 million for the Robert Francis Kennedy Memorial Foundation, and another $3.5 million to settle Bobby’s campaign debt. She remained as rambunctious as ever until the middle of October, when she experienced labor pains two months prematurely. She endured bed rest (reading, watching TV, being visited by her kids—even planning Thanksgiving) until December 12, when Rory, her last child, was delivered via C-section.

“Ethel Year After: Still Herself,” read the headline on Betty Flynn’s May 1969
Boston Globe
article. “Ethel is the same person she was before
Bobby’s death,” an “intimate friend” is quoted as saying. “And her house is run the same way, almost as if he wasn’t gone.”

Even in a resolutely light and sunny piece, however, a “frequent visitor to Hickory Hill” said, “I am afraid to see Ethel’s face in repose. With the kids around and all her friends, she does fine. . . . When things quiet down, you can see the sorrow there.” And indeed, Ethel’s anguish, no matter how well submerged, found its way out in other ways.

In February of 1969, a Gallup Poll named Ethel the most admired woman in America. (“I got it because of my cooking,” she quipped.) Still, “Ethel’s mood swept from deep private despair to manic irritability to frenetic highs of ceaseless activity,” author Laurence Leamer wrote. The children saw some of her mood swings, but more of it was taken out on the help. The turnover for maids and cooks and other household staff at Hickory Hill was remarkable and it was the rare exception that stayed more than a few months.

Money was also a source of tension at Hickory Hill. Ethel’s riotous spending—on food, on clothing, on
everything
—continued at its usual pace, and she became well known in Washington as perennially delinquent on bills. She most often had outstanding bills sent to the Kennedys’ New York office for payment, where Stephen Smith—Jean’s husband and administrator of the family fortune—tried in vain to curtail Ethel’s spending. He pleaded with her, asked for intervention from other Kennedys, even threatened to cut her off. Nothing worked. More than a decade after Joe had first hectored her about her wastefulness, it remained an issue.

And it wasn’t just Ethel’s spending that created so much expense for the Kennedys. Increasingly, Ethel’s brood was incurring damages. A rowdy bunch, they destroyed condos in Aspen during ski vacations, becoming so notorious in the town that Ethel took to using an alias when trying to secure lodging for their visits.

Ethel struggled to keep her children in line. Her three eldest boys, in particular, gave her trouble. In Hyannis Port, Joe II and Bobby Jr., often with the help of David and cousins Chris Lawford and Bobby Shriver, created havoc all over town. “They untied boats from the docks and took perverse pleasure in seeing them lying beached at high tide,” Laurence Leamer wrote. “They sent water balloons soaring high into the
sky, landing on the top of moving automobiles, preferably police cruisers. On the Fourth of July the youths were accused of knocking on the door of an eighty-two-year-old neighbor, and when the old woman opened the door they threw lit firecrackers into the house.”

Unfortunately, the boys did not restrict their shenanigans to mere pranks. In the summer of 1970, Bobby Jr. and Bobby Shriver were arrested for pot possession. In Nantucket, Joe II took his little brother David and David’s girlfriend, Pam Kelley, for a joyride in a friend’s Jeep. Spinning the vehicle in circles, Joe lost control and crashed in a ditch. He and David escaped with minor injuries, but Pam Kelley was paralyzed from the neck down. Bobby Jr. and David’s drug use grew to include heroin, and while Bobby was able to pull himself together enough to attend Harvard, David became increasingly alienated from the family as he struggled with addiction. He would die of an overdose in 1984, his body discovered in a Palm Beach hotel room. He’d been in town to visit Rose.

There were a number of men in Ethel’s life in the decades after Bobby died. Through the late sixties and seventies, she was most frequently seen with singer Andy Williams, who had been friends with Bobby as well. It’s a matter of some debate whether their relationship was romantic—some sources report them holding hands at charity events while others dismiss the idea out of hand—but he was clearly the main gentleman in her life. There would be others throughout the seventies and eighties: Warren Rogers of
Look
magazine, liberal New York attorney William vanden Heuvel, even sportscaster Frank Gifford. But Ethel never remarried. After all, none of the men was Bobby Kennedy.

Years later, her children appreciated the way in which Ethel had formed them. “There have been so many times in my life,” Rory told Courtney in her 2011 documentary,
Ethel
, “where people have said, ‘I want to introduce Robert Kennedy’s daughter—’ ”

“It makes me so mad!” Courtney interrupted. “What about the one who delivered us, and carried us for nine months, and then has been with us for the last forty years?”

However hidden her grief over Bobby, Ethel worked through it on her own terms and raised her children the best she could. The paces that she put herself through to keep Bobby’s legacy alive in the years just after his death—raising money for the grape pickers of California, sitting on the board of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation, campaigning for Democratic politicians throughout the country—became causes dear to her own heart. And that passion was transmitted to her children. Ethel became an activist in her own right, with her own moral authority, and remains so to this day.

Though David’s story would end tragically—and another son, Michael, would die in a skiing accident in 1998, at the age of thirty-nine—Ethel’s children have, for the most part, thrived and joyfully carried forward their parents’ ideals. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend became an attorney, author, and the first female lieutenant governor of Maryland. Kerry Kennedy has worked in the human rights movement for decades and in 1988 established the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. Both Kathleen and Kerry share their mother’s Catholicism, and they work for reform within the Church. Joe Kennedy II served as the congressional representative for Massachusetts’ eighth district from 1987 to 1989, and afterward he went to work for a charity providing heating oil to low-income families. Bobby Kennedy Jr. became an environmentalist, author, and radio host.

Ethel herself avoids the media spotlight and denies requests for interviews. It’s telling that the only person for whom she has been willing to make an exception was her daughter, Rory, whose loving documentary portrait,
Ethel
, was released by HBO Films in 2012. When asked why she agreed to sit for an interview after so many years, her answer was simple and pointed: “Because it was Rory who asked.”

1

Black Jack and Janet

Jackie Bouvier adored her father. And her father, John Vernou
Bouvier III, had much to commend him.

Dashingly handsome in the Clark Gable mold, his year-round tan and Byronic charisma earned him the nickname Black Jack. He doted over his daughters, Jackie especially, and was irresistible to scores of women, his wife Janet occasionally among them. He and his family split their time between Park Avenue and East Hampton. He was athletic, impeccably dressed, rakishly charming—and rich.

Well, he
had
been rich. Black Jack’s father, Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr., was a former trial lawyer who enjoyed living well—first off of his wife Maude Sergeant’s family fortune, later off a sizable inheritance from his uncle. Black Jack used some of this family money to make a chunk of his own as a stockbroker. But less than a year and a half into his marriage to Janet Norton Lee, in October of 1929—only three months after Jackie was born—the stock market collapsed, commencing the Great Depression and the rapid decimation of Black Jack’s personal fortune. His father’s fortune never recovered either, though that didn’t stop “The Major,” as he liked to be called, from maintaining his extravagant lifestyle.

Though Black Jack borrowed (and borrowed some more) to keep his family living in style, his financial instability provided an ominous hum beneath Jackie’s early life. According to Jackie biographer Sarah Bradford, it would give “Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, a sense of insecurity and fear of poverty that was to last almost all their lives.”

Like Black Jack, Jackie’s mother, Janet, came from a wealthy Wall Street family. But that’s where their similarities ended. Janet was a more
formal, inhibited, and brittle person. Sixteen years younger than Black Jack, the petite, fine-featured, dark-eyed brunette was barely twenty-one when they were married in July of 1928, much to the dismay of both families. While Janet’s mother and father disapproved of the union—they thought Black Jack an adventurer and a cad—their authority was diminished in Janet’s eyes: They had already very ably modeled a loveless marriage and were living apart by the time Janet and Black Jack wed.

Just over a year after the East Hampton wedding—on July 28, 1929—Jacqueline Bouvier was born. Her sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, forever known as Lee, was born four years later.

Black Jack may well have been broke, but his marriage to Janet kept the natural consequences of this at bay, at least for a while. They lived rent-free in an eleven-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue—Janet’s father built and owned the building—and rented an East Hampton cottage every summer. Jackie’s early life revolved around Central Park, East Hampton, and horses. Janet was herself an accomplished equestrian, and Jackie was put on a horse as early as age two. She was competing in equestrian events by the time she was five.

Jackie and Lee would both cherish memories of their childhood summers in East Hampton, and Jackie would recall her parents, from the era of her early childhood, as a very glamorous couple. But cracks were already beginning to show in their marriage, which by the time Jackie was age seven was on a clear downward trajectory. Black Jack was a compulsive and quite open—to the point of viciousness—philanderer, and as the 1930s progressed, debts began closing in from several sides: the estate of his great uncle, his father-in-law, the Internal Revenue Service. Black Jack was clearly the scoundrel in the relationship: A photo of him holding a mistress’s hand while standing next to his wife appeared in the
New York Daily News
, much to Janet’s humiliation. Just as clearly, Jackie and Lee preferred his company to their mother’s. Janet deeply resented this. A neurasthenic woman with a nasty temper, she occasionally hit the girls, which only reinforced Black Jack’s position as the preferred parent.

In a 2013 interview, Lee, her childhood wounds vivid after decades, spoke bitterly of her mother’s “almost irrational social climbing” and glowingly of Black Jack. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “He had
such funny idiosyncrasies, like always wearing his black patent evening shoes with his swimming trunks. One thing which infuriates me is how he’s always labeled the drunk black prince. He was never drunk with me, though I’m sure he sometimes drank, due to my mother’s constant nagging. You would, and I would.”

In September 1936, Janet asked for a six-month trial separation, and Black Jack moved into the Westbury Hotel. Despite a brief réchauffé in East Hampton the next summer, the marriage never recovered. Thereafter, the split was deeply acrimonious, and once Janet filed for divorce in 1940, very public. The
New York Daily Mirror
reported on the divorce, publishing details of Black Jack’s extramarital dalliances, along with photographs. “There was such relentless bitterness on both sides,” Lee said. “Jackie was really fortunate to have or acquire the ability to tune out, which she always kept.”

Very early on, Jackie became the master of appearing serene no matter what roiled inside of her. But such a nasty and public divorce must have left a mark. “It was like for the years from ten to twenty never hearing anything [from your parents] except how awful the other one was,” according to Lee. It’s easy to see, in Jackie’s later life, the effects of Black Jack and Janet’s tabloid divorce. It’s in the fierce approach she took to guarding the privacy of herself, her family, and their legacy. It’s in her lifelong caginess with the media. And it’s in her absolute insistence, wherever possible, on controlling the narrative. She sought out journalists who would be pliable to her will, such as Theodore White, who dutifully printed the Camelot myth that she pretty much invented in the week after Jack’s death.

She also fought with journalists—most notably William Manchester, author of a book on her late husband titled
The Death of a President
—who wanted to print things of which she did not approve, regardless of their veracity. And she became famous for excommunicating intimates and employees who committed the sin of writing or talking about their time with her family, no matter how benign their accounts. (Maud Shaw, Caroline and John Jr.’s beloved governess, was to learn this very suddenly after Jackie discovered that she’d secured a book deal.) These are but a few of the examples of the lasting sting of Jackie’s early public humiliation.

In the midst of all this family strife, Jackie attended to the business of growing up. She was, despite whatever sorrows she was repressing, a charismatic, bright, and mischievous child. In 1935 she began attending the Chapin School for Girls—Miss Chapin’s—in New York. It was there that she made several lifelong friends, including Nancy Tuckerman, who would go on to attend high school at Miss Porter’s with Jackie and become the White House social secretary under President Kennedy; she would remain Jackie’s confidante until the end of her life.

Jackie was soon known at Miss Chapin’s for her intelligence and restlessness. In
America’s Queen
:
The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
, biographer Sarah Bradford notes:

Jackie was already a rebel, unsubdued by the discipline at Miss Chapin’s. She was brighter than most of her classmates and would get through her work quickly, then was left with nothing to do but doodle and daydream. All the teachers, interviewed by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer twenty years later, remembered her for her beauty and, above all, her mischief. “She was the prettiest little girl,” recalled a Miss Affleck, “very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil.”

Outside of school, Jackie’s joys were books and horses. She shirked naps by reading
Robin Hood
,
The Jungle Book
,
and
Gone With the Wind
on her bedroom windowsill. Balancing her mischievousness was a retiring bookishness, and throughout her life the world of literature would offer her a quiet and a nourishment she couldn’t find anywhere else.

Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jackie was winning blue ribbons at equestrian events in the Hamptons. By June 1940, when her parents’ divorce became final, she’d developed a special kinship with one of Janet’s horses: Danseuse, whom Jackie nicknamed Donny. Despite his increasingly limited resources (he’d had to move out of the Westbury and into a smaller apartment on East 74th Street), Black Jack paid for the horse to be stabled at Durland’s livery on West 66th Street, enabling Jackie to ride in Central Park.

In June 1942, Janet remarried. Jackie and Lee’s new stepfather was the “dull” (Lee’s adjective) and extraordinarily wealthy Hugh D. Auchincloss II,
known to all as Hughdie. Hughdie was the heir to the Standard Oil fortune, with palatial homes in McLean, Virginia (just outside of DC) and Newport, Rhode Island. Gore Vidal, whose mother had earlier been married to Hughdie, portrayed him as a bit of a dope in his memoir,
Palimpsest
. “My amiable, long-suffering stepfather,” Vidal called him, “known as Hughdie or, more often, poor Hughdie.” He credited Hughdie with making him “permanently susceptible to the charms of the born bore.” Hughdie and Janet’s son, Jamie, held a more moderate view. He told Sarah Bradford, “He was a kind man and he was a gentle man but he was a man who stayed in the nineteenth century in many ways.” He was never a match for the fierce-tempered Janet, who generally ran the show, with his acquiescence.

Hammersmith Farm, Hughdie’s Newport “cottage,” was a twenty-eight-room nineteenth-century behemoth. “A house more Victorian or stranger you cannot imagine,” according to Lee. “Oh, I longed to go back, to be with my father.” (“There was the ocean,” Lee said. “But naturally my sister claimed the room overlooking Narragansett Bay, where all the boats passed out. All I could see from my window was the cows named Caroline and Jacqueline.”) Lee’s description was apt: originally built by Hughdie’s great-grandfather, the furnishings were heavy and somewhat eerie: the “deck room” featured “dark, musty upholstery, bear-, tiger-, and leopard-skin rugs and, hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed pelican caught by [Hughdie’s] grandfather around the turn of the century.” It wasn’t all gloom and doom, though: Jackie enjoyed the gardens (laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for designing Central Park) and the view of the sea. Jackie did not share her sister’s feelings about Hammersmith Farm, having by all accounts loved spending her summers on its ninety acres with her dogs, her horses, and the aforementioned cattle.

Similarly, Jackie quickly fell in love with Merrywood, situated on the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, a “large brick neo-Georgian house” overlooking “the lawn and the woods beyond the lawn and the milk-chocolate-brown Potomac River far below.” Jackie also made a deep connection with her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchicloss III, known as Yusha, the eldest son from Hughdie’s first marriage. Only two years older than Jackie, the fourteen-year-old Yusha was quite taken with his
stepsister-to-be when they first met in December 1941 on a sightseeing trip to Washington. They shared a bookishness, an inquisitiveness, and a fascination with history. Snippets from their later correspondence give great insight into Jackie’s sweetness, her sly wit, and her curiosity about the larger world. “I always love it so at Merrywood,” she would later write to him. “So peaceful—with the river and the dogs—and listening to the Victrola. I will never know which I love best—Hammersmith with its green fields and summer winds—or Merrywood in the snow—with the river and those great steep hills.”

Jackie did her best to become integrated into the new family. “Jackie never once spoke of step-this or half-that,” a cousin told Sarah Bradford. “To Jackie they were all her brothers and sisters.” Though she was bored by Hughdie, she recognized his essential kindliness and what his wealth meant for her, Janet, and Lee; and though she disliked her mother’s rigidity and temper, Jackie appreciated more and more, as she got older, how much Janet sacrificed for the sake of her girls—from braving the world as a divorcée in the 1930s to marrying for money in the 1940s.

Janet’s remarriage must have been a huge blow to Black Jack. The hypersolvency of her new husband aside, the union greatly decreased the amount of time Black Jack was able to spend with his daughters. The only sustained time they spent with him was every August in East Hampton, and holidays were now split with his ex-wife. “I think he counted on us so much,” Lee said. “We were his
raison d’être
—sports, perhaps, came next and the stock market after that. But we always came first. I think the big responsibility we felt was ours. Mainly because he was so alone and counted on us totally.”

In 1944 Jackie and her horse Danseuse won shows in East Hampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton, and Smithfield, an extraordinary accomplishment at any age, much less fifteen. That fall, Jackie entered Miss Porter’s boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, for three years of college prep. It took only a little pleading with her grandfather, The Major, for him to agree to have Danseuse stabled in Farmington so that Jackie could ride him while away at the homogeneous WASP enclave.

According to historian Barbara Perry, Miss Porter’s “had begun to concentrate on academics, rather than ‘finishing’ young women, but the
norms continued to emphasize elite manners.” There Jackie continued her interest in drawing and poetry and became more interested in art history, French, and literature. She connected to Wordsworth, Chekhov, and of course Byron, “the prototype of the dangerous, risk-taking, heartbreaking men she was drawn to.” Her father visited frequently on the weekends, raising eyebrows every time he zoomed up in his Mercury convertible.