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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  By 1981, everything in Lem Billings’s life had become exaggerated, all the good taking on a weird, eccentric, and fanatical turn. Now his home appeared like some sort of disorganized Kennedy Library, with family mementos strewn all about: framed photographs of Lem and Jack, letters they’d exchanged in glass cases, not only Jack’s to him but, somehow, even his original letters to Jack. Everything Lem could put his finger on had some kind of compelling Kennedy backstory, some hidden Kennedy meaning, some anecdote that only Lem could tell. It was a real mess, though, not organized or well-kept.

  A one-two punch of tragic episodes of gun violence really threw Lem at this time. The first was the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 by Mark David Chapman in New York. It was followed just months later, in March 1981, by the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. Both events stunned a nation fearful of gun violence yet also unwilling to do much about it in terms of legislation. For Lem, these two incidents brought back the horrors of Jack’s and Bobby’s murders. He became consumed with wanting to know more about both Chapman and Hinckley, digging into their backgrounds and trying to discern why these men had been compelled to such violence. He couldn’t stop talking about them as he attempted to frame them into some sort of historical context and grasp at straws of any psychological parallels they might have had to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

  When he was in his right mind, one still couldn’t ask for a better instructor of Kennedy history than Lem Billings. However, when he was high, he would become incredibly sad and morose. In those moments, he would fall into great despair. He would complain that he’d never really lived his own life. Instead, he’d devoted all his passion and energy to the Kennedys, and he had to wonder whether it had ever been truly appreciated by them. After all, they’d gone on to marriages and children and even grandchildren, but he hadn’t enjoyed any of those experiences. He’d hidden from everyone all aspects of his personal, private life … his longings … his dreams. He knew that most of them figured he was probably gay, but they didn’t know for sure because he never confirmed it.

  Allan Burke says he dropped in on Lem once and, since the front door was cracked open, he went into his home. He looked around but couldn’t find his friend. He called his name; there was no response. He walked down the hallway and peeked into the bedroom, and there he found Lem tangled up in the arms of a man, someone they all knew from the Village. “Lem shrieked, jumped from the bed naked, and slammed the door shut,” recalled Burke. “Five minutes later, the guy bolted from the room and out the door.

  “I waited in the living room feeling so sorry I had ever seen anything at all until, finally, after about an hour, Lem came out of the room. He was emotional. ‘Please don’t tell the Kennedys,’ he said. I said, ‘But Lem, I think they would understand.’ Deep down, though, I knew they wouldn’t. This was the 1980s; they were devoutly Catholic … the boys all macho. No, they wouldn’t have understood, and neither would Ethel or Jackie or any of the older ones, either. They would’ve thought he’d been keeping this secret for years and probably would’ve reevaluated every single waking moment they’d ever spent with the poor guy. That was just the way it was back then. ‘Not a day has gone by I don’t wish Bobby was here,’ Lem said, crying, ‘until today. Today I’m glad he’s not here. To see this.’ That made me think, did Jack know? I asked, and he nodded. It made sense that it wouldn’t have impacted their friendship. JFK was so inclusive in his thinking and had many gay friends. I wondered why Lem felt this kind of understanding wouldn’t have also been Bobby’s way. ‘Only Jack ever understood me,’ he said. I promised him I would never tell anyone. He thanked me and calmed down. I felt terrible because I figured everyone, on some level, already knew. I was only twenty-five at the time. It seemed to me that poor man had spent his entire life hiding, but the only thing he’d been truly successful at hiding was just how lonely he was.”

  Maybe the Kennedys didn’t really know, after all. All they knew was that when Lem was a young man, he’d asked Kathleen (“Kick”) Kennedy to marry him. “I never saw any evidence that Lem was gay,” Bobby Kennedy now says. “To the contrary, he almost always had a steady girl. Nor did I hear even the hint of a rumor to that effect. If Lem had a secret gay life, it occupied very little of his time and energies and, in any case, that fact would in no way have diminished our friendship or the intensity of the love that I and my entire extended family felt for him.”

  The fact that, in light of Bobby’s engagement, Lem feared that their bond would somehow weaken just seemed to make things worse for him. “You can do what you want with Emily, fuck if I care,” he told Bobby one drug-infused night, this, again, according to Allan Burke. “You never wanted me to be happy,” Bobby responded, crying. “I don’t know what you’ve wanted for me since Daddy died, but it’s not to be happy.”

  “But why ruin your life, Bobby?” Lem asked. “We could have it all.”

  “Let me set this in a more understandable context for you,” Bobby said angrily. “We can’t have anything. There is no we, Lem. I’m not my uncle Jack. And I’m not my father, either. How many times have I told you that?” He then rushed away. Bobby, possibly because of his immaturity, could be incredibly unkind to his old friend. Somehow along the way, it seemed as if he’d begun to resent Lem, much as a son resents a father who can never be truly pleased. Allan Burke felt bad for Lem. “I’m sorry, Lem. He didn’t mean that,” he told him. “It’s all right,” Lem said sadly. “That’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said to me.”

  Crushed

  On May 27, 1981, Lem hosted Bobby’s brother Michael Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, at his home for dinner. Lem had just bought a new fondue pot at Macy’s and couldn’t wait to use it. He and Vicki spent an hour in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Later, Lem, Michael, Vicki, and a few other friends sat around a coffee table in front of the television and dipped the veggies into hot cheese while watching the sitcom The Facts of Life. “It’s so interesting, this older woman in charge of all of these young girls,” Lem said of the show’s premise, “and she’s so devoted to them. They appreciate her so much,” he concluded as Michael and Vicki looked at each other knowingly. After the show was over, they switched to melted chocolate, dipping cubes of fruit into the gooey confection. As they spoke, it became clear that Lem was more conflicted than ever about Bobby.

  Harvey Blake Fleetwood, a good friend of Lem’s, was present that night and recalled that Lem was eagerly expecting Bobby to arrive from Charlottesville the next morning. However, Bobby called to cancel, explaining that he decided he wanted to be with Emily. Lem was crushed. “‘I think I made a terrible, terrible mistake,’ he said, crying,” according to Fleetwood. “‘I took drugs with Bobby. It was wrong. I let him down. How could I have done that to him?’”

  Stunned, Michael and Vicki didn’t know what to make of Lem’s confession. All Michael knew was that he didn’t want to have a discussion about it in front of his wife. So he suggested they all get out of the house and go see a Sean Connery film called Outland. When they got home, Lem was still in a deep depression. “Michael, be a dear and get me a G and T with three ice cubes,” he told young Kennedy—meaning a gin and tonic. Michael fetched him the drink—then three more like it in rapid succession.

  Lem began talking about how much he missed Jack, what a good man he’d been, and how unfair it had been that he was taken from them. “Oh, dear Lem, you’ve got to stop living in the past,” Vicki said to him, putting her hand on his. “Let us help you. Let’s get rid of some of the stuff around here that keeps you in the past,” she said, looking around at all the Kennedy memorabilia.

  Lem nodded, saying she was absolutely right. “I think we should just get rid of all of it,” he said. Michael suggested they donate it to the JFK Library and Museum in Boston. “What an exquisite idea,” Lem exclaimed, suddenly brightening. “Why, we’ll have to take a complete inventory of everything,” he decided, “and we’ll have to make sure we
know when each and every photo was taken … and exactly who is in it … and we should write all of that down in a ledger … and then maybe we should talk to the people in the photos … and even record their memories … and … and…”

  Michael and Vicki couldn’t help but smile. They’d given Lem a new project, and it had to do with the Kennedys. He felt a lot better.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, May 28, the lifeless body of Kirk LeMoyne Billings was found in his bed. He’d had a heart attack just one day before what would have been JFK’s sixty-fourth birthday. Lem was sixty-five. All the Kennedys were filled with grief, of course. Andy Williams, who had been a best friend of RFK’s, came by Lem’s house that day and saw Bobby sitting in a corner, weeping. “He was just crushed,” Andy recalled. “‘Lem was my true, true friend,’ he kept saying. ‘He’ll always be with you,’ I told him. ‘Just as your daddy is still with me.’”

  Lem’s death would mark an inflection point in the life of Bobby Kennedy Jr. In the years to come, he would sometimes be filled with overwhelming regret about Lem, wishing he had been more considerate of him, lamenting his treatment of him, and just hoping that Lem knew how much he’d meant to him. He came to understand that, toward the end of Lem’s life, their drug taking had twisted everything and had made them say things to each other they really didn’t mean. Now Bobby just wanted to live a better life. He wanted to change. He wanted to be a better man … and he wanted to do it for Lem.

  Bobby’s Victory

  At the beginning of March 1982, Ethel Kennedy walked into the servants’ dining room at Hickory Hill during the evening meal. The staff all jumped obediently to their feet. Ethel motioned for them to be seated. “I just wanted you all to know that my Bobby is getting married next month to Emily Black, who I’m sure you’ve seen around here,” she said. “So the month ahead will be busy.” She explained that there would be parties being planned at Hickory Hill as well as other festivities designed specifically to celebrate the couple and to hopefully lift the general mood after Lem’s sudden death. “It’s been difficult for all of us,” Ethel said, according to Leah Mason, who was one of those present. “Lem was a good friend of ours, as you know. But he would want us to soldier on.” She then said that Noelle Bombardier had a list of duties for each staff member and that they should take direction from her. “Now, go back to your meal,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I thought you’d like some good news.”

  “She seemed exhilarated and revitalized, as if things were looking up,” recalled Leah Mason. “But we all knew that Bobby Jr. still had serious drug problems. I would say we knew a lot more about his personal problems than probably we should have. Everyone on staff was always talking about it and worrying about it.”

  On April 3, 1982, Bobby, now twenty-eight, finally married Emily Black, twenty-four. After the wedding in Emily’s hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, and the many celebrations later at Hickory Hill, the newlyweds moved to New York and into the home of Lem Billings, which he had bequeathed to Bobby. Bobby then got a job as an assistant district attorney (he’d failed the bar the first time he took it but passed on the second try), earning about twenty thousand dollars a year, while Emily, also now an attorney, began work as a public defender, earning an equal amount. However, it would appear that the marriage was troubled from the start.

  Emily was a pleasant enough, well-meaning young woman, but extremely naive and ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of marriage to a troubled Kennedy. She couldn’t deal with his wild mood swings, which tended toward deep depression, and most certainly his drug abuse was something with which she couldn’t contend. Bobby’s grief over Lem seemed even worse than the sadness of losing his own father. At the end of the day, he would come home from the office for dinner and then, two hours later, disappear with friends intent on scoring drugs in Harlem, three miles north of where they lived. Meanwhile, Emily would sit at home, scared for his safety. Then she would call her mother-in-law back at Hickory Hill, frightening Ethel and causing her more than a few sleepless nights.

  Eventually, Ethel decided to send a trusted family attorney—a gentleman who asked not to be identified because still, all these years later, he said he didn’t want to betray Ethel’s confidence—to see if he could influence Bobby. During his visit, he found that Emily was in distress because Bobby wasn’t home most of the time. One night, after she went to bed, the attorney sat and waited for Bobby to get home. He showed up after four in the morning, looking terrible, with dirty clothing, his hair unwashed. “Why are you doing this to yourself, Bobby?” he asked him. Apparently, Bobby didn’t have an answer. He slumped into a chair, seeming ruined. “If I go into rehab and it gets out that they’re treating Bobby Kennedy Jr., how will that look?” he asked. “My mother will kill me.” The attorney said, “That’s as good an excuse as any, I guess.”

  Because he’d known him almost since birth, the lawyer felt he could be honest with Bobby. He observed that the deaths of Bobby’s uncle, father, and now Lem had troubled him to the point where he’d lost all hope. Bobby agreed. He added that he was tortured by the way he had treated Lem. The attorney pleaded with him to get help, adding that this is what Lem would want for him. He then reached into his vest pocket and pulled a rosary from it. “This is your mother’s,” he told Bobby. “Take it. Pray.”

  Bobby took the rosary and, his head bowed, began to weep.

  * * *

  A WEEK LATER, on September 9, 1983, Bobby decided to get treatment at a facility in Rapid City, South Dakota, “as far off the beaten path as possible,” he said, “so as to not be recognized.” On the way, in a jet twenty thousand feet in the sky, he secreted himself into a restroom for one last fix of heroin—and it was there that he overdosed. An ambulance and two police cars met the plane when it landed; the ashen and sick Kennedy was then taken to a nearby hospital.

  Shortly thereafter, Bobby checked into Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, for rehabilitation. He would eventually plead guilty to drug possession and be sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service and two years of court-enforced probation. Throughout the ordeal, Emily would stick by her husband’s side. In September 1984, the couple welcomed a son, Robert Francis Kennedy III. Four years later, in April 1988, they had a daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Alexandra Kennedy.

  As part of his community service, Bobby would volunteer at an environmental organization dedicated to eradicating the pollution of the Hudson River. It was here that he would find his calling as an environmentalist and, eventually, an environmental attorney. Bobby had read the activist Robert Boyle’s The Hudson River and became enchanted by the locale, dedicated to preserving it. “You know, you can put your past behind you and find a new life,” Boyle told him. “A lot of people go through addiction. But the Hudson River is your salvation, if you will, from the horrible life you have led. You can seek a new life through the river, and through ecology.”

  Bobby began work with the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association—soon to be known as Riverkeeper—and while fishing and camping on the river banks, he says, he began to appreciate the beauty of nature “and the responsibility we all have to keeping it alive for generations to come.” He and Emily bought a home in Mount Kisco, outside New York and not far from the Hudson.

  “Once I realized and accepted that higher office—meaning the presidency, I guess—was not for me, once I truly reconciled that I was not cut out for it, that’s when my real life began,” he observed. “When that pressure was off, I began to see more clearly that I could contribute in other ways, in cleaning up the planet, in being of service that way. I don’t blame the stress of hopelessly trying to be what people wanted me to be for my addiction. That would be a cop-out, and besides, there were other issues. But once I was drug-free, I never looked back.”

  The happy arc of this story is that, finally free of the hold of addiction, Bobby would go on to his true calling as an environmentalist and, in the process, become a great influencer
in the field, someone who could put the power of the Kennedy name to good use. With the passing of time, everyone in his life began to understand that Bobby really didn’t belong in politics, that he could do the world a lot of good in his own way and in a way that would have made his father and Lem proud. He had done it, all right; he’d turned his life around after a fourteen-year drug addiction. It was a true victory. Never again would Robert Kennedy Jr. ever do drugs—and he remains clean to this day.

  Willful Daughter

  While Bobby seemed to be out of the woods, his brother David was still in the thick of it. Rather than be inspired by Bobby’s victory, he resented it because it just made him look bad to his family, all of whom now wanted him to be more like his older brother. “I don’t know what we can do, short of locking the guy in his room,” Joe Kennedy told Fina Harvin. “It’s like a slow death, isn’t it? I can see that he’s not going to make it.”

  Of all his siblings, David seemed to be the most open to his sister Kathleen’s reaching out. She seemed able to connect with him in a different and maybe more meaningful way than other family members.

  Born on July 4, 1951, Kathleen Kennedy, as earlier stated, was the oldest of Bobby and Ethel’s children. An accomplished, award-winning equestrian at a young age, when she was fourteen she was thrown from a horse during a competition. “Bobby once told me that she was unconscious and bleeding internally,” recalled Frank Mankiewicz, RFK’s former press secretary, in a 2000 interview. “She was apparently rushed to a hospital in Cape Cod. It took hours for Bobby and Ethel, who happened to be en route to Hyannis Port, to be reached. I’m sure they were frantic. She eventually did recover, though I understood it was a long, tough road.”