Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (7 page)

1

A Love Story, with Detours

Ethel Skakel was a skinny, loud-mouthed tomboy with sparkling
eyes and an ever-present tan when she jubilantly began to conspire with her friend Jean Kennedy. Roommates at Manhattanville College—Rose’s alma mater, then located in Harlem—the two girls were good friends with reputations as troublemakers. They came from similar backgrounds, as daughters of wealthy and large Irish Catholic families, into which they each were born second-to-last. They both had rambunctious and revered older brothers who hogged most of their parents’ attention. They were both athletic and attractive and, as good Manhattanville girls, were on the lookout for possible husband material. Jean, in fact, was already engaged to a young man named Stephen Smith. As she and Ethel grew closer, she became certain that Ethel would love her older brother Bobby and wanted desperately for Ethel to meet him. Ethel was just as eager.

They plotted, Ethel later recalled, and in 1945, they succeeded: Ethel and her parents joined the Kennedys on a family ski trip to Mont-Tremblant in Canada, where she was formally introduced to Robert Francis Kennedy. Just as Jean had predicted, the two had a competitive sort of chemistry, exchanging an immediate wager over who would ski down the mountain the fastest. Ethel would later say it was love at first sight on her part when she spotted the toothy, five-foot, nine-inch-tall Bobby standing in front of a roaring fireplace.

Less so for Bobby.

Actually, it was Ethel’s older sister Pat who first caught Bobby’s eye. A disappointed Ethel could only concede defeat. Patricia Sistine Skakel was prettier, quieter, with more book smarts and certainly more feminine
appeal. She was even named after a piece of Renaissance art. The sisters were opposites on many levels, right down to the states of their bedrooms: Ethel’s was always a mess, like a typical boy’s, but Pat’s was “soft and refined: French Provincial furnishings, white satin on the headboard, wall-to-wall white fur carpeting in her private bathroom.” Pat dated Bobby for two long years. Decades later, Ethel would wince at the recollection: “Ouch . . . That was a black period.”

Though there are differing accounts of just how serious Bobby and Pat were—Pat would later refuse to answer when asked if the future attorney general had ever proposed marriage to Pat—by all accounts, it was a heartrending time for Ethel, who was forced to watch from the sidelines as the Kennedy boy with the serious eyes would swing by the house to pay Pat a visit. When he’d spot the little sister, he’d call out a friendly “hi,” and she’d respond in kind, “but he never knew how she felt inwardly,” journalist Lester David wrote in 1971. “It was a bleak and unhappy time for Ethel and she does not like to talk or even think about it.”

In 1947, the cloud would lift and Ethel would get an opening. Bobby left for Israel to write about the War of Independence for the
Boston
Post
. While he was away, Pat fell for another boy, Luan Peter Cuffe, and when Bobby returned, it was Ethel’s turn to catch his attention. The two were about as opposite in personality as possible: Bobby had trouble finding the right words, so he often just didn’t speak. In contrast to his outgoing brother Jack, Bobby rubbed some as uncommunicative. Ethel, on the other hand, was tough to shut up. “She talks and talks: bubbly, informal, slang-larded talk on anything that happens to fascinate her—children, sports, doctors, parties—spoken rapidly in a low, somewhat breathy contralto,” wrote David. But soon after the two started to date—which, by proper Skakel-Kennedy standards, largely meant spending time together with other members of their enormous broods—Bobby grew increasingly smitten with the outspoken prankster. Then, in true teenage-girl fashion, Ethel swung the other way, not sure about him. Like her sister, she also had someone else on her mind.

Bobby learned, much to his exasperation, that the woman he wanted to marry was considering becoming a nun.

“How can I fight God?” he asked Jean.

2

The Rise of the Skakels

Ethel perhaps seemed an unlikely candidate for a nun. She had
been raised in a home without much discipline, alongside brothers who were known to shoot from their windows with air rifles at passersby. But if the seven Skakel children lacked rules while growing up, they certainly didn’t lack religion.

The family patriarch was George Skakel, born in Chicago in 1892. His mother, Grace Mary Jordan, was from a slave-owning family in Mississippi. His father, James Curtis Skakel, was a Canadian-born Protestant who didn’t care much for Catholics or Jews. Curt, as the father was known, was an alcoholic whose drinking served as catalyst to physical and verbal abuse. “Skakel’s temperament was volatile,” wrote biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, “and he had a contemptuous air about him and a certain roughness of manner.” Gracie, George’s mother, had a dark side as well: “Though sweet, refined, petite, and with a lovely drawl and a beautiful command of the English language, Gracie was a racist who railed against the freeing of the slaves and exuberantly supported the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote Oppenheimer.

As a young man, George got his first job as a freight-rate clerk on the Sioux City Line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, earning eight dollars a week. His parents were not at all rich, but George was destined to have money line his pockets. After a few years of railroading, he joined a coal-producing firm in Chicago, working as a traffic manager, before serving as an ensign in the US Naval Reserve during World War I. In the early 1900s, George helped establish the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Company in Chicago, which grew to become one of the largest
privately held companies in America, making George a multimillionaire. His wealth insulated his family from the crippling market crash of 1929 and the following Depression.

George married Ann Brannack, a chubby woman with a sweet smile and long, lustrous blonde hair. She came from a poor, uneducated family, whose ancestors had left Ireland during the 1840s potato famine. She’d been working in the office at William Howe Co., a coal distributor, where George briefly worked, when the two met. Ann was a tad taller than George and a bit heavier as well, but George liked the cute, boisterous “Liverpool Irish” girl who lived in the blue-collar South Side. He liked less her religion. Ann was a devout Irish Catholic. Her mother, Margaret Brannack, had converted from Episcopalian to Catholicism at her husband’s request when Ann was ten years old. As latecomers to faith tend to be, Margaret became die-hard in her religion, and Ann was required to attend early morning mass every day, even if it meant trudging through Chicago in a snowstorm.

“It was a very religious environment that Ann lived in,” her lifelong friend, Florence Ferguson Kumpfer, later said. “We used to go to church together every day. The nuns were very strict. Ann was a Catholic’s Catholic. Her mother instilled that strong, strong religion in her.”

Ann’s father, Joseph Brannack, seemed destined to fit an unfortunate stereotype: the hard-drinking Irishman. “He was rarely around,” Oppenheimer wrote, “and offered little security for the family, jumping from one menial job to another—hotel worker, night watchman—supporting his family as best he could.” Like Curt Skakel, Brannack had issues with drink—a hardship that would lead him and his wife to separate.

Despite George’s misgivings about Ann’s religion, he courted her, and she believed in him. She was certain he would someday be a success, and so they were married on November 25, 1917, by a Catholic priest. They moved into a house in a Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, and within three months, Ann was pregnant. With each pregnancy, Ann seemed to keep the weight she’d gained, eventually reaching nearly two hundred pounds. In all, she had seven children—four girls and three boys—which she initially raised in a large home on University Avenue in Hyde Park. The first child was Georgeann—a merging of the parents’ first
names—followed by brothers George Jr., Jim, and Rushton. Next came Patricia, then Ethel—named after her mother’s sister and born April 11, 1928, in Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital—followed finally by Ann (known as “Little Ann” to her mother’s “Big Ann”).

The children were young when the family moved east to New York in 1933, hopping from one high-end rental home to the next. For a while they settled in the well-to-do suburb of Larchmont in Westchester County north of Manhattan, renting a mansion on twelve acres of land. The house was impractically huge—so enormous that the family didn’t even use many of the rooms. “It was a fabulous place, so big none of us could believe it, and mind-bogglingly beautiful,” Rushton Skakel would later recall.

George used the home often to entertain business associates, and Ann was an admirable host. “The parties were always impressive, with a hired staff to serve the finest foods and liquors—especially liquor,” wrote journalist J. Randy Taraborrelli. Sometimes the parties lasted all day, beginning when George had breakfast meetings in the morning, and ending after dinner, cocktails, and more drinks at night. George used the house as an extension of his business, and he considered his children—unruly bunch though they were—assets. They weren’t ordered to their bedrooms; rather, they were on full display for guests. Potential business partners and clients seemed to embrace the vision as proof that George was a wholesome, happy family man. He became so reliant on the image that it extended outside of the home. “My father practically never went to a business meeting without one of us,” Rushton Skakel said. “We’d go into major board meetings at the big companies and we’d be sitting there with all these industrialists and moguls. You’d be the only child in the meeting, and it made a difference with those people. It impressed them and made the meeting a personal, beautiful thing, in their eyes.”

As fun-loving a scene as it appeared, “the parties literally every day” had devastating effects, Rushton said:

I was 10 years old when we moved to the house on Larchmont. Dad was establishing his company in New York, so my parents had parties,
parties, parties. That’s when Dad started drinking. Dad’s alcoholism hit him when we were in Larchmont because of all those parties and all of the drinking that went on. . . . And that’s when we started drinking.

Ann loved the Larchmont home for more than the parties. She loved that it was right across the street from the Dominican Day School, a private academy founded by Sister Rose Alma. Ann enrolled then five-year-old Ethel in kindergarten there, and her brothers and sisters in their respective grades. Rose Alma attempted to provide children from families like the Skakels with order and discipline—the exact opposite of what they were getting at home. George and Ann weren’t much for imposing rules on their brood; they traveled so much that Georgeann had earned the nickname “the little mother,” and she often was burdened with watching over the younger six children alone.

The Skakels stayed in the Larchmont mansion for about two years, settling briefly in another huge house a few miles north in a small town called Rye. The boys enrolled in Canterbury, a monastic Catholic boarding school across the border in Connecticut, and, like a young John F. Kennedy before them, hated it and its impossible rules. Jack, who received “poor” and “fair” assessments in his Latin, science, and religion classes, asked to transfer to another school; the rowdy Skakel boys were asked to leave.

Eventually, the clan headed a few miles north to Greenwich, Connecticut. There, George bought a twenty-five-room mansion that he got for a bargain because of the struggling economy. The three-story brick home had belonged to Zalmon Simmons, one of the richest men in town —impressive status in one of the richest towns in the country. Simmons, who had made his fortune developing the country’s first mass-produced mattresses, had built the home on a 164-acre estate known as Rambleside that became famous for its elm trees, azaleas, and countless iris bulbs. The mansion interior “featured hand-painted chinoiserie wallpaper, black marble floors with inlaid copper, and a study paneled with pine that had been stripped from a venerable mansion in London.” The library measured almost sixty feet long and had a black marble fireplace, teak floors,
recessed bookcases, Corinthian columns, and bay windows that looked out on grounds of stately elms and boxwoods. Inside the main house were six double bedrooms, three staff bedrooms, two single bedrooms, a master suite with its own sitting room and fireplace, a glass-enclosed sleeping porch, a billiard room, six baths, and a playroom for the children. Outside the main house, there was a guesthouse, a teahouse, two servants’ houses, a stable for horses, and a garage built for six cars.

After Simmons died in 1934, during the Great Depression, his wife began selling off the estate in chunks. The mansion sat idle for a while, as most people in the midst of the economic downturn simply couldn’t afford such a luxurious home. But then, most people weren’t George Skakel. He paid Simmons’s widow less than $160,000 for a ten-acre chunk of the estate that included the main house. For another forty thousand dollars, George got all the Simmonses’ furnishings, too. After George moved his family in, he added a seventy-five-foot swimming pool to the property.

There, the wild parties would continue. The children would play football on the lawn and set off firecrackers during dinner. Fully dressed guests would end up drenched in the pool. Ann would adopt an absolute menagerie that would roam the acreage and greet amused visitors: dogs, cats, turtles, lizards, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, and goats. Years later, Ethel would re-create these scenes in every sense at Hickory Hill, the house she shared with Bobby and their ever-growing family.