Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (28 page)

10

Still a Kennedy

Joan’s life after Ted has been as storied and volatile as any
other divorcée’s. Granted, hers has been more in the public eye than most. The Kennedy name, and its associations with a glamorous moment in the national memory, are not easily shaken off and don’t disappear with the finalization of a divorce. But her youngest son Patrick says the public quality of Joan’s struggle has been more blessing than curse for millions of people. “She didn’t pick being a silent warrior for recognition of mental health and addiction, but she was that face for a generation of people who didn’t talk about these issues the way they talk about them today,” he says. “She knows it’s real and she’s made a huge difference in so many people’s lives who come up to her on a daily basis and thank her for giving them a sense that they weren’t alone.”

Joan “had a number of good years when she and my dad were separated,” he continued. After the divorce, both parents made extra efforts to spend time with each child alone, to make sure they knew how important they were. “My mom took me overseas on a number of trips,” Patrick recalls. “She took me to the Holy Land, throughout Israel, to Masada. We went to midnight mass in Bethlehem. We stopped at Rome and went to St. Peter’s, visited all the churches. In London, there were more churches and castles.” While Ted focused on more physical activities—fishing, camping, and sailing—Joan exposed her children to culture and traveling.

Her valleys have been many. In 1988, with several drunken-driving arrests under her belt already, she crashed her car into a fence and lost her license for forty-five days. Three years later, she was arrested for drinking vodka straight from the bottle while weaving as she drove her car. Then,
in the spring of 2005, a passerby spotted a blonde woman sprawled on a sidewalk on Boston’s Beacon Street. A streak of blood ran down the woman’s face as she tried to hoist herself up. The passerby, Constance Bacon, didn’t learn that the woman she was helping was Joan Kennedy until the next day. “She was conscious,” Bacon said. “She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and tried to get up and she couldn’t. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who it was, that it was anything special.” Though Joan didn’t appear drunk to Bacon, family friends told reporters that she tested well above the legal limit and had taken to secretly drinking mouthwash and vanilla extract. Her street fall—which left her with a concussion and broken shoulder—made headlines again, and Patrick, by then a member of the US House of Representatives, decided he’d shelve the United State Senate run he’d been considering so that he could join his siblings in helping their mother. After a brief-but-publicized legal struggle, the children reached an agreement with Joan: Two financial professionals would watch over her estimated $9.5 million in assets while a guardian would monitor her and guide her medical decisions. The agreement stipulated that if Joan abused alcohol or endangered herself again, more control would be shifted away from her. Any rift caused by the legal proceedings had been long repaired by 2009, when Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer in the Hyannis Port home his family had owned since the 1920s. His new wife, Vicki, was by his side, as were his children. Joan quietly attended his funeral, her presence evoking a quarter-century of his life—both the highs of the long-lost Camelot days and the lows of two assassinations, a near-fatal plane crash, a son’s battle with cancer, and a political life nearly derailed.

In 2011, her daughter, Kara, died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty-one while working out in her Washington, DC, gym. She’d survived lung cancer a decade earlier, despite having been initially told that the illness was inoperable. Ted stepped in and helped her find a surgeon, who removed part of her right lung. The surgery was followed by aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that might have weakened her heart.

For Patrick, so much of his childhood was spent watching his mother struggle. It meant she wasn’t always there for him and his siblings, despite her best intentions and efforts. “Her disease sidelined her in a pretty
fundamental way,” he says. “She did everything she could given the circumstances. This is a powerful disease.” But whatever weaknesses she had as a mother, she’s worked hard to make up for them as a grandmother. “It is great to have a second chance with her, so to speak,” says Patrick, who married schoolteacher Amy Petitgout in 2011. Amy had a daughter from a previous marriage, and she and Patrick had two more children, one in 2012 and one in 2013. Stepdaughter Harper is so enamored with Joan that she gave her a treasured gift—her favorite stuffed animal. “I was aghast that she would part with this pink seal,” Patrick recalls. “My mom put it right on the top of her bed. She has it there all the time, not just when we come over. It clearly means something to her. Having my mother back to dote on my babies is great, and they love her.”

1

A Different Type

Victoria Reggie was a stunning woman with high cheekbones,
an inviting smile, and brown hair. Attractiveness aside, she did not remotely seem like Ted Kennedy’s type of woman—at least not the type that Ted had been well known to chase in his decade divorced from Joan. First, Vicki was smart, a successful partner in a Washington law firm. Second, she wasn’t a party girl. As a recently divorced mother of two, she was the furthest thing from one. And third, she had no trouble saying “no” to the senator. So when she opened her door and invited him into her home as a dinner guest to celebrate her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary on June 17, 1991, there was no reason to think the two might hit it off.

Vicki had been told the Commander—as her parents had nicknamed Ted—would be bringing a date, but there he stood alone. She teased, “What’s wrong? Couldn’t you get a date?”

“I thought you’d be my date,” Ted responded.

“Dream on, Kennedy,” Vicki shot back.

Vicki’s mother overheard the dialogue and was horrified. “Oh, don’t talk to men that way,” she told her daughter, implying she’d never get another man talking like that, Vicki later recalled.

In truth, few women probably did talk to Ted that way. Ted had earned for himself an embarrassing reputation as a drunken, womanizing, out-of-control mess. Gone were the days of the press kindly refraining from writing about Ted’s skirt chasing and booze guzzling. His exploits were regular fodder for not just gossip rags but also mainstream press pieces. Gone, too, were his chiseled good looks. There was still the Kennedy glint
in Ted’s eye, but decades of partying had ravaged his once-handsome face. As Michael Kelly vividly wrote for
GQ
magazine in 1990:

Up close, the face is a shock. The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks. The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip. Deep corrugations crease the forehead and angle from the nostrils and the downturned corners of the mouth. The Chiclet teeth are the color of old piano keys. The eyes have yellowed, too, and they are so bloodshot, it looks as if he’s been weeping.

Just three months before Ted arrived on Vicki’s doorstep, he’d hit the town one night with his son Patrick and nephew William Smith Kennedy, and the result had been disastrous: William would be charged with raping a woman he picked up at a bar and took back to Ted’s home in Palm Beach, Florida. A criminal investigation—one that would lead to Ted’s testimony being aired on national television, and William’s ultimate acquittal on the charges—was under way. Ted’s approval ratings were abysmal, sinking into the 40s. Not much was going his way. But as Ted chatted with Vicki in her kitchen, where she grilled steaks and cooked vegetables she’d picked from her garden, he felt more relaxed and lighthearted than he had in years.

This wasn’t the first time the two had met. In fact, Vicki’s family knew the Kennedys well. Edmund Reggie, Vicki’s father, had started campaigning for Jack in the mid-1950s, though the first Kennedy he’d met was Bobby, whose serious eyes Edmund remembered. As for the president-to-be, Edmund was an immediate fan. His loyalty began during the Democratic National Convention of 1956, where Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson won the nomination and Jack had lobbied unsuccessfully to win the vice presidential nomination. Edmund, a lawyer by training who by then had become a Louisiana judge, was a delegate. “There was a film made about the Democratic Party, narrated by Jack, who made such a good impression,” Edmund later recalled. He was so impressed
that he and a colleague decided that they would try to deliver the Louisiana delegation to him. “I was really taken with him completely,” he said. “When we got back, every member of my family, including my mother’s household . . . every meal said the Hail Mary three times a day, praying for [Jack’s] success,” he said.

Edmund headed up campaigning in his state for Jack in 1960, for Bobby in 1968, and for Ted in 1980. Edmund’s wife, Doris, was a party chairwoman who had cast the only Louisiana floor vote for Ted at the 1980 Democratic Convention—the rest went to Jimmy Carter. “I could never vote for anyone but Teddy,” she had declared then. Back when Jack won the office, Edmund had considered joining the administration but decided against it because, he said at the time, “I have six children and I have a fairly decent living here.”

Victoria, Vicki for short, was one of the six children, raised in the small city of Crowley, Louisiana, population fifteen thousand. The town is a three-hour drive west of New Orleans, and its slogan—“Where Life is Rice and Easy”—was a nod to its nickname, “Rice Capital of America.” At one time, the city bustled with rice harvesting and milling—Jack and Jackie attended the town’s annual International Rice Festival in 1959; photos of the event show Jack wearing a rice-studded fedora.

Vicki’s home was nice, “but it wasn’t a sprawling mansion on five acres of land,” recalled Harold Gonzales, longtime managing editor of the
Crowley Post Signal
. “And going to parochial schools, you had to wear uniforms, so you couldn’t tell her by her clothes, and Vicki didn’t wear a bunch of jewelry or have a car. She borrowed a car from her parents, just like the rest of us.” Then he said plainly, “if I had a daughter, I’d want her to be just like Vicki Reggie.”

Edmund wanted a home that would keep the six children close by keeping them entertained, so he designed a house with a swimming pool, a big lawn for football, and a nineteen-seat, big-screen theater. “There was a jukebox and pool table and pinball machine and in that big movie theater with no adults and plenty of popcorn, we thought we were in heaven,” Lila Lambert, a high-school friend, told a reporter.

The Reggie family was of Lebanese descent and very religious, especially Edmund’s mother, who attended mass and took communion every
day. Vicki was raised Roman Catholic, like Ted. But, big families and religious upbringing aside, they seemed more different than alike, with Vicki hailing from a distinctly different era. Twenty-two years Ted’s junior, she graduated Notre Dame High School in 1972; by this time Ted had been married to Joan for fourteen years, had three children, and had served in the Senate for a dozen years.

Lillian Campbell, who had been on staff at Notre Dame for twenty-four years, remembered Vicki as “very sweet and very polite and a very smart girl, except that sometimes, she’d say she was sick and want to go home, although I don’t think she was sick at all, just bored, but if Mommy and Daddy say it’s OK, what can you do?” In the Kennedy household, children didn’t take sick days even when they were truly ill. Even Ted has admitted that he never knew just how serious Jack’s health problems were while he was alive. “There were conversational boundaries in our family and we respected them,” Ted wrote. “It would never have occurred to us to discuss such private things with each other.”

Despite some missed classes, Vicki was valedictorian of her class. For a stint, she also regularly donned a Daniel Boone costume as the school’s mascot and danced around the cheerleaders during football games. Cheerleader Georgette Johnson recalled, “What I remember about her is not just intelligence, but her warmth and sincerity. She was genuine, not like a smart person who was above you. She was down to earth.” Gonzales echoed this: “[She wasn’t] bratty smart, if you know what I mean. Vicki has always been a confidante, like an Ann Landers. She has a good ear, a good knack for sitting down and listening. I bet she was the go-between for more little spats to keep the peace in high school than anybody else.” Some friends noted that they didn’t realize how much richer Vicki’s family was until they all got out of school.

Vicki was close with her father, who had a firm handshake and silver, neatly trimmed hair. “In a blue pinstripe suit with pocket hankie, he makes the models in
GQ
look frumpy,” wrote reporter Jack Thomas. Edmund’s office felt like a memorial to Democratic politics; photos of Adlai Stevenson and most of the Kennedys were on display. One picture showed Jack Kennedy at a Louisiana yam festival in Opelousas, Louisiana. Vicki grew up vaguely aware of these influences in her parents’ life, but, like most
high-school kids, was more focused on school than her father’s friends. After high school, she attended H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans, graduating as an English major in 1976. That year, she interned in Ted’s Senate office, working in the mailroom. She met Ted just once during that job. “I met him for the photo the last day of work,” she later told biographer Adam Clymer. “In fact, I’ve had the picture, it got stuck to the glass. . . . So that’s our evidence of it.”

Unlike Ted, Vicki’s life by no means had been mapped out for her. After college she found herself at a crossroads, feeling dispassionate about what to do next. She fumbled around until she settled on going to graduate school for English, and she made the life-altering decision to ask Gardner B. Taplin, an eighteenth-century British Literature professor, to write a recommendation letter. Taplin was a brilliant man who had once written a book on the life of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He wore three-piece tweed suits even in the sweltering New Orleans summer, Vicki later recalled. Vicki approached and asked him for his grad-school endorsement. He refused, and she was baffled.

“No?” she asked.

“No, you shouldn’t go to graduate school in English,” he said.

Vicki stammered. “Why?”

“Are you willing to bask in the reflected light of some man’s glory for the rest of your life?” Taplin asked.

I don’t know
, Vicki thought.
Who you have in mind?
But what she said out loud was, “Why are you asking me that?”

Taplin launched into a talk about Carla Hills, who had been appointed by President Gerald Ford as the first woman to serve as US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She was just the third woman in the country’s history to hold a cabinet position. Vicki had never heard of her. After schooling Vicki on Hills, Taplin told her that she should set her sights higher: He told her that he envisioned her as a lawyer.

“I’d never considered it,” Vicki told a crowd gathered by the Harry Walker Speakers Bureau. “My father was a lawyer. My father was a
judge.
Why hadn’t I considered it? I think it was because I was a girl. Really. It just didn’t dawn on me. I feel foolish when I say that to you now, but it didn’t dawn on me.”

With Taplin’s encouragement bolstering her ego, Vicki was accepted to Tulane Law School and graduated summa cum laude in 1979. Years later, she would credit that uncomfortably dressed professor with pushing her to be more than she’d ever envisioned and sending her down the path to become a lawyer.

“There is nothing good that happened in my life since then that would’ve happened without that decision,” she said.

Afterward, she moved to Chicago, where she clerked for Judge Robert A. Sprecher in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. After two years, she moved to Washington to join the law firm with which she’d later become partner: Keck, Mahin and Cate, where she specialized in savings and loan matters. Along the way, she married Washington telecommunications attorney Grier Raclin in 1981, with whom she had two children, one boy and one girl. Vicki and Grier divorced after nine years of marriage. Divorce papers showed that they led a comfortable life, if nowhere near as extravagant as the Kennedys were accustomed: Vicki won the couple’s Washington home, valued at nearly three quarters of a million dollars. She also got their Nantucket vacation home and about sixty thousand dollars a year in support from her ex.

In June 1991, Vicki was still healing from the divorce when she planned to honor her parents for their anniversary. Everything was to be “very casual,” she later recalled. Certainly, she thought nothing of the invitation extended to her father’s best friend. Ted had been to her home for dinner before, in fact, and no sparks had flown. Ted later wrote:

But as much as Vicki and I had seen each other at various events over the years, I think that anniversary dinner party night was the first time I really saw Vicki. I helped her as she took the place setting away for the date I didn’t bring, and I hung out with her in the kitchen as she prepared dinner. We shared easy conversations about issues of the day and spent a lot of the evening laughing.

When dinner was over, Ted asked if he could call her for dinner the next night. Vicki said he could, but Ted later learned that after the door closed, she thought, “Did I just say
yes
?
Have I lost my mind?” Ted called
the next day as promised. It turned out to be one of the first steps on Ted’s road to redemption.