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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Somehow, even with the disparity in the number of team members, Maria’s side would always end up the victors. That was mostly because Eunice had always been extremely athletic, as much so as any of her male siblings. In true Kennedy tradition, she was also unbelievably competitive. It was one of the first things Sargent realized about her when he started dating her in the fifties. “She would never allow any team on which she was playing to lose,” he recalled. “‘You have to win. That’s what Kennedys do. We win,’ Eunice would say. The way we raised our kids, that spirit, that same tradition was passed to them, for better or worse.”

  “If we ever played a game, someone was going to win,” Bobby Shriver confirmed in a joint interview with his sister, Maria. “Then, the first thing when you got home, you were going to be asked by Mummy, ‘Okay. Who won? Did you win? You didn’t win? Anything? Nothing? Goodbye, shut up.’ That’s the way we grew up. Today they don’t teach competition. In school today, everyone on the soccer team gets a trophy. We didn’t get a trophy: ‘You didn’t win? No trophy? See ya.’”

  Maria noted, “I once said to my son Christopher, ‘You always used to get so upset when you lost playing the board games Sorry or Trouble.’ He said, ‘But Mom, that’s because you had to beat me. I was a three-year-old kid. What kind of mom always has to beat her three-year-old kid?’”

  “You should have said, ‘The one I had,’” Bobby told his sister, laughing.

  “I said that,” Maria exclaimed.

  “That’s the way we grew up, ladies and gentlemen,” said Bobby, laughing, “Fifty years from now, we’ll all be dead, but we’ll want you to know something. That’s the way we grew up. So, any psychotic things you think about us or have ever heard about us or have seen about us, it’s all because of … that.”

  The Kennedy Test

  Arnold Schwarzenegger first became acquainted with the Kennedys in August 1977 at the annual Robert F. Kennedy Celebrity Tennis Tournament in New York. Ethel was the first of the family members to introduce herself, followed by Ted. Since Arnold had come to the event alone, it was Ted’s idea to have him meet his niece Maria Shriver. At twenty-one, Maria was young and gorgeous, with long dark hair, hugely expressive eyes, and an energetic personality; Arnold was immediately intrigued. Soon after meeting her, he was introduced to her mother. Since he was the kind of man who liked to take strangers by surprise and test their limits, the first words out of Arnold’s mouth to Eunice were: “Wow. Your daughter sure has a great ass.” Eunice came from a family of four brothers, so she wasn’t easily shocked by anything any man ever had to say. “Yes, she certainly does,” she told Arnold. “However, Mr. Schwarzenegger,” she added with an arched eyebrow, “one might find inappropriate any commentary from “you about it.” Later, Arnold would recall of Eunice, “She had me at ‘inappropriate.’ I liked her immediately, and her daughter, too.”

  Maria was as taken by Arnold as he was by her. At eight years her senior, he was a muscular, good-looking guy with a contagious smile and a winning personality. Caroline Kennedy, nineteen at the time, was also present at the tournament. Thinking he was, as she put it, “a good prospect,” Caroline soon became one of Maria’s coconspirators—along with their cousin Kara, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Ted and Joan—in a plan to hustle Arnold back to Hyannis Port. They cornered him and asked if he might be interested in going to the compound. If so, they said, they had to leave immediately. Could he be that spontaneous? This would be Arnold’s first test; the Kennedy girls knew he’d never fit into the family if he couldn’t be as impulsive as the rest of them.

  Arnold had never been to Hyannis Port; he didn’t even know how to find it on a map. Of course, the Kennedys had a private jet at their disposal for the trip. There was no time to waste, he was told, not even time for him to return to his room and change out of his tennis clothes and put some money in his pocket. “No problem. You’re staying at our house,” Caroline told him. “You don’t need money.” The girls, by this time excited about their plot, also told Arnold that his room would be paid for by the Kennedy Foundation. They promised to have him back at his hotel by the next night.

  Arnold wasn’t sure if he should go, but something told him he was being tested, and, a competitor from way back, he liked nothing more than a good test. Plus, he’d been hearing about the Kennedys’ hideaway his entire life, and he wanted to see it for himself. So he would throw caution to the wind. Kara would, many years later, recall, “It was kismet. There was something about this guy, and Caroline and I knew he was right for Maria. As usual, we were persuasive. Arnold didn’t know what hit him.”

  “Arnold had always been fascinated with the Kennedys,” recalled Janet Charlton, a popular gossip columnist who dated him in the 1970s. “He was intrigued by the way Joe Kennedy had a dream and saw it come to life with his sons’ rise to power. Arnold was someone with his own dreams, someone who came to America from Austria in search of greater opportunity. To him, the Kennedys represented an America where anything was possible, where you could make all the money you needed, take care of yourself and your family, and even be of service to others. He told me he wanted to be President one day, even though he knew that was impossible because he wasn’t born in the States. ‘Things’ll change by then,’ he said. He was that kind of man, a dreamer like the Kennedys.”

  “First a planeload of the ‘grown-ups’ flew up,” Arnold would recall. “Ethel, Teddy, and that older generation. Then, at nine o’clock, the younger generation went up and I tagged along. I remember landing at ten thirty or so at night, and we were soon at the so-called Big House. Now, Maria was really showing off. ‘Let’s go for a swim,’ she said. ‘What do you mean, go for a swim?’ I asked. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ she told me. ‘Let’s go.’ So we went out. We swam to a boat a long way out. She was a regular water rat, climbed on board to catch her breath then swam back in, racing me like an Olympic swimmer. I barely outswam her. Barely. I later figured out that all of this was part of the test,” he would add. “The cousins dragged people up to the Kennedy compound all the time and then challenged them to see what they were made of and play tricks on them. That was how Kennedys gauged the measure of a man.”

  The next morning, the family was scheduled to attend Mass with the matriarch, Rose. Of course, Arnold only had with him his tennis shorts, T-shirt, and the sneakers he’d worn the previous day. Joe gave him a shirt to wear, which didn’t fit and in which Arnold looked ridiculous. It was embarrassing—which, of course, was the whole point. Arnold remembered lots of Kennedys pointing and laughing at him: “This is hilarious. Look at his pants! Look at his shirt!” Could he handle being the butt of a joke? He’d better if he wanted to be accepted.

  The rest of that day was spent with everyone huddled over hot bowls of the family’s favorite Cape Cod clam chowder—a special recipe handed down over the years made of quahogs (which are large, hard-shelled clams) with salt pork and potatoes—and then competing in sports events, with Arnold proving his mettle. As an athlete, he was tough to beat, even for the Kennedys. The day culminated in a long walk with Rose, during which she spoke to Arnold in fluent German and asked him questions about physical fitness. Before he knew it, he was leading exercise classes on the beach at sundown—and showing sixty-nine-year-old Ena Bernard how to do better sit-ups.

  In short, Arnold met each and every Kennedy challenge with great aplomb. Maria was sold. One last test would cinch the deal. Because he had no money to get back to New York, Maria offered him sixty dollars. Now, that was really humiliating. He had no choice, though; he took the money with a humble and gracious smile, which only ingratiated him even more to Maria. “He was game, for sure,” she said of Arnold many years later. “We put the poor guy through hell, and he was still smiling. That was a good sign.”

  A Shriver in a Kennedy World

  Like so many Kennedys of her generation and those before it, Maria Shriver had the drive and determination to make sure she’d always get exactly what she wanted out of
life. From an early age, she was clear about those goals, too. First of all, she wanted a husband who was not in politics. She’d seen so much disappointment in her family relating to the aspirations of her father, Sargent Shriver, she wanted nothing to do with Democratic politics.

  “I wanted to make a name for myself way outside the family business,” she recalled. “My goal was to be a network news anchor.” She first became passionate about broadcast journalism back in 1972 when her father was running for Vice President. After volunteering to help with the effort, she found herself traveling in the back of the campaign plane with the press corp. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she would later say. “Soon after, I started my career in broadcasting at WJZ in Baltimore and KYW-TV in Philadelphia. So many people would come up to me and say, ‘Which Kennedy are you?’ At a very young age, I thought, You’re going to know which one I am. I decided that I was going to be the Kennedy who makes her own name and finds her own job and works like a dog, but as far away from politics as possible.”

  Maria’s disregard for politics was ironic considering that Eunice was the most politically minded of the three Kennedy daughters. Eunice’s father once famously stated that if she were a male, she probably could have been President. She was a real character in her mismatched clothing—fashion definitely not her forte—her hair always in wild disarray while sucking on a fat cigar and going toe-to-toe with the men in the family in debates about cultural issues.

  Eunice, who was eighty-two in 2003, was best known for founding the Special Olympics in honor of her developmentally disabled sister, Rosemary. Though she accomplished a lot in her life—her résumé includes many of our country’s most important charitable foundations—some might argue that her contributions paled in comparison to her husband’s.

  Robert Sargent Shriver, eighty-eight in 2003—“Sarge”—had a long and distinguished history. Not only was he pivotal in getting President Kennedy elected, he’d been chiefly responsible for staffing his cabinet. He’d also founded and served as the first director of the Peace Corps and launched Head Start, VISTA, and other programs directed at President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty. He also served as Johnson’s ambassador to France. “The problem was that Sarge had become a part of the LBJ administration after JFK’s death, and if there was one person the Kennedys had animus for, it was LBJ,” explained Hugh Sidey in 1999; Sidey covered the Kennedy administration—and that of many other Presidents—for Time. “When Sarge didn’t give up his post as LBJ’s ambassador to come home and campaign for Bobby, that was pretty much it for him as far as a lot of Kennedys were concerned. It was as if they’d forgotten that when LBJ asked Sarge to be his Vice President, the first thing Sarge did was confer with Bobby—and then turn down the position.”

  “For most of his political career, the Kennedys went out of their way to stand in Sarge’s way, his loyalty to the family rarely reciprocated,” noted Jamie Auchincloss, Jackie’s half brother. “History shows one incident after another of Sarge being overlooked, of being disrespected and not allowed to meet his goals. Why? Because of Kennedy pecking order,” said Auchincloss. “Ted was next in line for the golden ring after Jack and Bobby—and no one else could seize it before Ted. Since Ted was never able to grab it either, it was denied Sarge.

  “He stood his ground, though, and never stopped trying to serve. It’s no surprise, then, that his children grew up feeling the sting of Kennedy recrimination. ‘It wasn’t easy being a Shriver in a Kennedy world,’ Sarge’s son Bobby would often state, and I daresay he was right about that.”

  “Somehow Sarge resisted becoming embittered by his difficult relationship with the Kennedys,” recalled Hugh Sidey. “I found that remarkable. Maybe it was because he was such a deeply religious man who attended Mass daily, always carrying rosary beads in his pocket. He was the purest of men, someone who had real forgiveness in his heart, and he passed that on to his children.”

  Despite any closely held personal feelings about the Kennedys, Sarge always encouraged his children—Bobby, born in 1954; Maria, born in 1955; Timothy, born in 1959; Mark, born in 1964; and Anthony, born in 1965—to campaign for the Kennedys whenever necessary, and they always did just as they were told. That said, the Shriver parents also made certain their offspring had their own family pride: they never thought of themselves as Kennedys, always as Shrivers. Of course, not surprisingly, they also insisted that their brood find some way to be of service

  When Maria chose journalism as a profession and her way to give back, it was fine with her parents as long as she dedicated herself to being a “truth-teller,” as Sarge put it. Maria promised him she would always work toward that ideal. Actually, though, the fact that her rejection of politics also informed her ideas about the kind of man she sought as a husband was a little more disconcerting to her parents than her chosen career. They believed she was limiting herself. After all, what was wrong with a respectable politician? However, Maria feared that if her spouse was in the family business she, too, would somehow end up getting dragged into it—and that wasn’t what she wanted for herself or for any children she might one day bear. She said she wanted to “pick a husband way outside my family’s expectations of me. They wanted Washington, politician, Democrat. So I picked Austrian, bodybuilder … Republican.”

  American Dream

  Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger was born in Thal, Styria (Austria), on July 30, 1947, to Gustav and Aurelia Jadrny Schwarzenegger. He had one brother, Meinhard, who died a young man, the victim of drunk driving. The Schwarzeneggers were practicing Roman Catholics.

  As a kid, Arnold suffered through a distant and difficult relationship with his father, a police chief and a member of the Nazi party. In the past, Arnold has talked about the abuse he suffered at the hands of this strict father: “Many children were broken by their parents, which was the German-Austrian mentality. They didn’t want to create an individual. But I was one who didn’t conform, one whose will could not be broken. Every time I got hit—and every time someone said, ‘You can’t do this or that’—I said, ‘This is not going to be for much longer, because I’m going to move out of here. I want to be somebody.’” When Gustav died in 1972, Arnold didn’t attend his funeral.

  Though the family had its financial struggles, they got by. However, Arnold wanted more than to just barely make it in the world. “I was never one to be satisfied with a mediocre lifestyle,” he said. “I always knew that money was freedom and power. I wanted both.”

  At about the age of fourteen, Arnold, who excelled at several sports as a youngster, decided to become a bodybuilder. Within a few years, he began to compete, determined to emulate bodybuilding icons Reg Park and Johnny Weissmuller and especially Steve Reeves, the highly paid actor who’d starred in epic screen adventures such as Hercules and Goliath. Arnold cites his “need to be the best in the world, to be recognized and to feel unique and special” as the primary reason for his interest in bodybuilding.

  In 1967, at the age of twenty, Arnold’s dedication and tenacity paid off when he became the youngest ever Mr. Universe. At twenty-one, he fulfilled a dream he’d had since the age of ten, which was to move to the United States and settle in Los Angeles. Three years later, he won the Mr. Olympia title; he would go on to capture that title five more times. In 1977, his autobiography, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, became an international bestseller. He then attended Santa Monica College and later earned his BA in business administration from the University of Wisconsin–Superior.

  Arnold began his film career in 1970, parlaying his success as a bodybuilding champion into acting. For the next seven years, he appeared in a number of films before Pumping Iron, in 1977, brought him great international acclaim. “He was just so self-assured,” recalled Janet Charlton, who was dating him at this time. “I was impressed with his German work ethic and discipline. He was highly organized and smart, not some dumb brute. He planned his every move, buying real estate early on, for instance, with his fi
rst money. He gave me money for business school at UCLA, but all I cared about was getting tires for my car. I wish I had listened to his guidance more closely.”

  When Arnold first started dating Maria, he found navigating terrain having to do with her ubiquitous family challenging. He was surprised, for instance, especially given how strong-minded and independent she was, that Maria was so dominated by familial duties and responsibilities. There was always a wedding, a birthday, a graduation, some family event at which her presence was required. “We practically don’t have a private life,” Arnold recalled complaining to Maria. However, no matter how much he protested, she—they—would still have to be present whenever called, house-hopping from one home on the compound to the next, breakfast here, lunch there … dinner somewhere else—rarely with outsiders, save a few weary guests.

  As they got closer and shared their goals, Maria told Arnold that she wanted to be taken seriously as a TV anchor. He said he hoped to one day become a leading man in movies. That was fine with her, she told him—“anything other than a politician.”

  “In 1980, Maria moved to Los Angeles to work on my dad’s [Ted Kennedy’s] presidential campaign when he challenged Jimmy Carter within his own party,” recalled Ted’s son Patrick. “Of course, it was all hands on deck. Maria campaigned hard for her uncle, visiting Hollywood power brokers like Norman Lear to try to garner their support.”

  Unfortunately, Ted would have to drop out of that 1980 campaign when he failed to galvanize traction, in large part because people still hadn’t gotten past his role in the tragedy of Chappaquiddick. When he did so, Arnold felt the decision was instructional. “It had to do with timing more than anything,” he would say. “I watched and I thought, Okay, there is a time for these things. You have to know your time. I felt, at least back then even with the early films, that my time was still to be in competition. I also thought that maybe there were some other things in store.”