The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  After a pleasant drive in the country, Skakel and Kennedy passed through the large wooden gates of Father Martin’s Ashley center (which is today known as Ashley Addiction Treatment) and then down a long, winding driveway to an enormous brick-and-wood estate in the middle of about 150 acres of lush, green solitude. As the two men walked into the lobby, the polished marble floors, the winding staircase, the sparkle and gleam of it all made it appear more like a deluxe five-star hotel in the country than a rehabilitation center. On the other side of French windows in the distance was a spectacularly gleaming view of the Chesapeake Bay. Michael took a look around and exclaimed, “Okay, now this is how Kennedys detox. This is how we fuckin’ detox.” Skakel was upset. He reminded Michael that this wasn’t some sort of vacation, that it was serious. Michael laughed, told his cousin to lighten up, and suggested that they seek out the restaurant; he was “starving.” At that moment, two women appeared in starched white uniforms with clipboards, followed by a couple of men who looked like nightclub bouncers. As he was being forcibly rushed off, a wide-eyed Michael Kennedy turned around, looked in dismay at a surprised Michael Skakel, and screamed out just one word: “Fuck.”

  After getting his cousin settled at Father Martin’s Ashley, Michael Skakel spent the night in Maryland. Early the next morning, Monday, January 24, he attended the wake for Rose Kennedy, where he congregated with his many cousins. He couldn’t help but notice that Ethel was preoccupied, no doubt fretting about her son. She’d heard that Skakel had secreted him into rehab early, and the fact that she couldn’t get a straight answer about it from anyone had driven her to distraction. She didn’t know anything about her daughter-in-law finding Michael in bed with Marisa—not yet, anyway—all she knew was that the plan they had all agreed to in their so-called “intervention” had not been followed.

  “As soon as she saw Skakel, she rushed over to him,” Benedict F. Fitzgerald Jr., Rose’s attorney, once recalled, “I remember it well. He was sitting down and he jumped to his feet. She was upset. She had real fire in her eyes.”

  “Where is my son?” Ethel demanded. What a sight these two presented. Picture it: Skakel was about six-two, Ethel maybe five-five. According to Fitzgerald, she drew herself up to her full height and lifted her head even higher. Standing an inch from Skakel, she looked up with a face of fury. “He’s okay, Aunt Ethel,” said her nephew as he tried to back away from her. However, every step he took backward resulted in a quick step forward from his menacing aunt. “I took care of it,” he stammered. “Don’t worry.”

  “Without consulting me?” Ethel asked. “What gives you the right? That is my son. You do not have the right.” She told him that the family had a good plan in mind for Michael; they had all agreed he was going into rehab on February 1. It was a strategy, she said, they’d come to after much deliberation and one that should never have been altered without first consulting her. They had a lot to lose, she said, by rushing things and making mistakes. “But you don’t have the whole story, Aunt Ethel,” Skakel protested. “Let me explain.” Ethel shook her head. She was angry now and didn’t want to hear another word from him. Maybe they could talk later, she said; if so, she’d let him know. He started babbling something anyway. In response, Ethel took both her hands and put them right in front of Michael’s face as if she might slap him. Instead, as was her custom, she clapped loudly three times just inches from his nose—clap! clap! clap! “Michael! Stop talking,” she shouted at him. “That’s enough. I will not listen to this.” She then stared at him with hard eyes for a moment before she turned and walked away.

  “This House Can Have No Secrets”

  It didn’t take long for the story to start spreading throughout the Kennedy family that the reason Michael’s rehabilitation had started earlier than planned was because Vicki had found him with the teenaged babysitter. It was a close family; word traveled fast. As the story spread over the course of the next three weeks, most people automatically assumed Michael had been caught being intimate with the girl. If Vicki was being truthful about what she’d seen, why else would he have been in bed with Marisa? He was a Kennedy male who’d cheated on his wife in the past, and everyone knew it. Most had long ago accepted infidelity as just another facet of Kennedy culture. So maybe some were a little surprised because of Marisa’s age, but they had little to no doubt about what had occurred.

  On February 15, 1995, John Kennedy Jr. paid his cousin Michael a visit at Father Martin’s Ashley. He took his friend Stephen Styles-Cooper with him, trusted by John to maybe advise Michael since Styles-Cooper had once had a similar problem; his marriage had ended over an affair with a young woman of eighteen. Like John, he was now thirty-four. They drove out to the rehab center and met Michael on a patio with a view of the bay. He looked terrible, sleep-deprived and unshaven. If he thought rehab was going to be a piece of cake, he was mistaken. The counselors were brutal. “I’d say pleased to meet you,” he told Stephen, “but I’m not pleased to meet anyone these days.”

  The three sat down at a small table overlooking the serene water, John right next to Michael. Someone brought over a silver carafe of iced water and poured it into three glasses. “Let me see a picture of this girl,” John said. Michael told him he didn’t have one. John didn’t believe him. After some prodding, Michael reached into his pants pocket and extracted a dog-eared photograph of a young woman. He nervously placed it on the table. John took a look at it and shook his head. He expressed amazement that the facility’s staff would actually allow Michael to keep a picture of Marisa. However, Michael sheepishly explained that the counselors had checked his wallet for such mementos, but that he’d hidden it in his sock. John then picked up the picture and studied it.

  “This is the girl you’re going to hell for?” he asked. Michael explained that he liked Marisa, that he got a lot out of being with her. She wasn’t judgmental of him, he said. She was kind. She was also innocent. John looked at his cousin as if he were out of his mind. “But she’s just a kid,” he exclaimed. “You don’t want people to think you’re a pedophile, do you?”

  “She’s seventeen, John,” Michael protested. He explained that the picture was an old one and that Marisa was now a lot more adult-looking, all this according to Stephen Styles-Cooper. “I know people think I’m a sick fuck,” Michael allowed. “But I’m not.” He lowered his head. “No one gives a shit about me now, anyway,” he concluded pitifully.

  “That’s not true, Michael,” John said, putting his arm around his cousin. “I give a shit.” He reminded him of what RFK used to always say: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems in the moment.” He also talked about the fact that when they were kids, it was always Michael who would break up the cousins’ little fights. “That’s why we always called you the Peacemaker,” he reminded his cousin with a smile.

  John then asked Michael if he’d thought about what might happen to him if Marisa’s parents decided to press charges for statutory rape. Again, Michael protested, saying that the two hadn’t become intimate until Marisa was sixteen, legal age in Massachusetts. John said he felt that was still too young, no matter the law. “Michael then explained that he felt his entire life had always been out of his control, that, as a Kennedy, he’d always had to please people and toe the family line and live up to unreasonable expectations,” recalled Stephen Styles-Cooper. “Finally, this was one circumstance, he said, where he got to choose, where he was in control—and it had to do with his decision to be with Marisa. John listened intently. Later, he would tell me that while he completely disagreed, in a weird way he sort of understood.”

  “But how could you do this to someone you love?” John asked, speaking of Vicki. Finally—a question to which Michael didn’t have a ready answer. “Gimme that,” an exasperated John finally said as he took the picture of Marisa and thrust it into his pocket. “This is mine now.”

  John then noted that Michael should have more consideration for his mother. After all, Ethel had been through enough in her lifetime
, he said, and the last thing she needed was more heartache. Michael didn’t seem too concerned, though. He reminded John that it had been Ethel who was the strongest advocate for Bobby to run for the presidency, that she had constantly warned him that if he didn’t capture this moment in time for himself, he would live to regret it. It was true; as Michael’s brother Bobby Jr. would later recall of his mother, “She knew he [RFK] would never be happy on the sidelines. Knowing his thoughts better than anyone, my mom goaded him with a piece written by his friend Jack Newfield in the Village Voice, which she carried in her purse for that purpose: ‘If Kennedy does not run in 1968, the best side of his character will die.…’”

  “Maybe Daddy would still be alive if she hadn’t pushed so hard,” Michael said. How, John must have wondered, did his cousin develop such a cynical view of what most people in the family viewed as Ethel’s unequivocal support for Bobby? Surely he must have recalled the times he and his siblings went from town to town alongside their tireless mother campaigning as hard as they could for their father. John was unable to disguise his surprise. “My God, Michael,” he exclaimed. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “Since the day he was shot,” Michael admitted. Moreover, he said he’d always been filled with such shame that he felt this way about his mother. It had been one of his darkest secrets ever since he was a child. Even now, he couldn’t believe he’d revealed it. He said he felt he was losing control of everything. “Then, Jesus Christ, Michael,” John exclaimed. “Take it back.”

  John said he never wanted to hear Michael speak about his mother in that way again. Then he got up, stood behind his cousin, wrapped his arms around his chest, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “We didn’t say a word to each other on the almost four-hour drive back to New York,” recalled Stephen Styles-Cooper. “John was preoccupied and didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, hurt, sad, confused … or what. He just shut down. When he finally dropped me off, we shook hands and he looked at me and said three words I never thought I’d hear coming from him: ‘Fuckin’ Kennedy curse.’”

  * * *

  BY THE END of April, Michael Kennedy was out of rehab and back to work at Citizens Energy. Despite the fact that he’d recommitted himself to his job and was supposedly sober and also regularly attending AA meetings, he still wasn’t willing to stop seeing Marisa. It was maddening to his friends. Because he was so proficient at what he did at Citizens, the passion he felt for helping the poor so evident to everyone, they just wanted him to focus on his work and stop obsessing over this teenager. It was as if he were under some sort of spell, though.

  During more camping trips between May and July, Michael and Marisa openly conducted their relationship in front of friends and family. To say, though, that his siblings were upset about it would be untrue. It actually didn’t seem to bother them much. Most figured that Michael and Vicki had some sort of unconventional understanding that was none of their business.

  Meanwhile, Marisa had moved out of her parents’ home and into that of one of her friends. Paul and June still had no real influence over her. She didn’t want to talk to them about Michael, and there wasn’t much they could do to force her. She was seventeen and felt she knew what she was doing, and that was the end of it for her. Meanwhile, because June was still battling alcoholism, it was all Paul could do to cope with her. Therefore, it was easy for both to be avoidant.

  While Paul and June chose avoidance as their way forward, Ethel Kennedy wasn’t inclined to handle much, if anything, in her life quite that way. Though the family, especially her sons, had tried to protect her, by the summer of 1995, she knew everything. A political strategist going way back, she was conscious of all the ramifications, not just the personal. Of course, she was worried about Joe’s and Kathleen’s careers, but she was also concerned about the future of those in the next generation who might want to serve. She feared Michael’s actions were going to make it difficult if not impossible for them.

  “Who knows, Mrs. Kennedy?” Leah Mason mused as she and Ena Bernard tried to calm Ethel down one morning. Ethel had earlier explained the problem to Ena, and then Ena told Leah. However, Ethel wasn’t aware that Leah knew; the two employees decided it best that she be kept unaware. “Whatever it is, Mrs. Kennedy, maybe no one will ever find out about it,” offered Leah. Ethel looked with suspicion at Leah, at Ena, and then back at Leah. Then, with annoyance, she said, “Not likely. Obviously this house can have no secrets.”

  From a more personal standpoint, Ethel was not only troubled about Michael but also quite angry at him. However, the obvious problem she faced was that Michael was a grown man in his midthirties with a son and two daughters of his own; there was only so much his mother could do to control him. Though she tried to reason with him, she got nowhere. “I swear to God, nothing wrong is going on,” Michael promised her, according to one account. “Well, you must not think much of God,” she shot back, “because that’s a lie.”

  Ethel considered calling the parents of the girl—she always called Marisa “the girl”—and arranging a meeting with them to come to some resolution. She attempted to recruit Joe to help her in that regard, too. However, Joe said no; Michael and Marisa weren’t disobedient high school teenagers whose folks could sit down together and hash things out. In the end, it would have to be just a matter of handling each difficult moment as it came their way.

  One such moment occurred when Michael announced that he was bringing Marisa to the compound for Labor Day. As it did for most Americans, that holiday held special significance for the Kennedys as the symbolic end of the summer season; as usual, there were sporting events planned, dinners, parties … or, as John Kennedy Jr. used to put it, “the whole nine Kennedy yards.” One of Michael’s siblings recalled of Labor Day 1995, “Ultimately, Mummy made the decision that if Michael was going to bring the girl, they couldn’t stay in our home. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ve no problem with that.’ So they stayed elsewhere; I don’t remember where. As I recall it, Vicki and the kids didn’t come to the Cape for the holiday.”

  That Labor Day, September 4, Marisa was photographed at the compound by the Associated Press wearing blue jeans, a black jacket, and a white blouse, her dirty-blond hair falling to her shoulders. “Wow. This is really something else,” John Kennedy reportedly said when he saw the picture. “Aunt Ethel must really be on the warpath.”

  PART V

  The Caretakers

  The Comforter

  As a young widow, Ethel Kennedy was matriarch of a big family full of rowdy children. Luckily, she had help in raising them. There were two memorable people who were most influential in the lives of the third generation of Kennedys, and the first was a woman whose time with them as their full-time governess, their occasional cook, and sometimes even as their makeshift therapist would span an incredible forty-four years. Even after her employment was over she would remain close to all of them, especially to Ethel. Her name was Ena Bernard, sometimes lovingly known in the family as “Mimi.”

  Ena Bernard, a black woman who was descended from African slaves, was born in Costa Rica on June 18, 1908. After the death of her four-month-old second baby, Petronila, she fled an abusive husband, leaving her other child, a seven-year-old daughter named Josefina Harvin (known as “Fina,” and born in January 1938) with a friend in Costa Rica while she pursued employment first in the capital, San Jose, and then in the United States. She then paid for Fina’s care with wages she earned in America, but wouldn’t see her again for nine years, just before her sixteenth birthday.

  Ena’s first job was as a domestic at the United States Embassy for Joseph Flack, the ambassador to Costa Rica. The salary was too meager, though, so she left after less than a year. An employment agency in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., then gave her two job opportunities. She settled on the Robert Kennedy household.

  “It was freezing cold when my mother, who was forty-three, arrived at the Kennedys’ home in October of 1951 to be inter
viewed for a job as their governess,” recalled Fina Harvin. “Mrs. Kennedy—Ethel, who was just twenty-three—was immediately impressed with the way my mom took off her coat, folded it very neatly, and put it with great care on the banister. She thought that little gesture said a lot about her. ‘I have to say, I love that dress,’ Mrs. Kennedy said of my mom’s red-and-white skirt. ‘You know, I saw the exact same one at Peck and Peck,’ which was an exclusive, very expensive store in Manhattan. ‘Oh, please! This is a copy, Mrs. Kennedy,’ my mother said. ‘Do you really think I shop at Peck and Peck? I bought this thing on Fourteenth Street in Washington,’ which was a predominately black shopping district. Mrs. Kennedy liked that a lot. ‘Well, good for you, then,’ she said. ‘I like a woman who’s frugal. Just because you have money doesn’t mean you have to spend it.’ My mom laughed and said, ‘Well, since I don’t have it, I guess I don’t have to worry about spending it.’

  “‘I have the one girl, Kathleen,’ Mrs. Kennedy said as they got to know each other. She and Bobby had just married a little more than a year earlier; he’d just graduated from law school. ‘She’s three months and a real handful,’ she said. ‘But I have a feeling there’ll be more on the way. Would you be open to taking care of more than one child?’ ‘Of course,’ said my mom. ‘I love children.’”

  Ethel thought for a moment. “You know what? I like you,” she said confidently. “You’re hired.”

  “Um … no, I don’t think so,” was Ena’s response. “Why don’t we sleep on it and talk tomorrow. By then, we should both know if I’m hired or not.”