“Cancer had an enormous impact on how I approach my everyday life,” says Kennedy. “It sensitized me to a lot of issues for people facing cancer, and not just the psychosocial issues but the legal issues as well. That is why I’m a health advocate. I also learned to pay attention to my body, not in a hypochondriac way, but to listen to what my body tells me. I think anyone who has faced a life-threatening disease really has a chance to reflect on his or her life. For me, I am incredibly grateful for everything today.”
In closing, he says, “I have to credit my parents with my recovery. They really came together when it mattered most. They had their problems, as everyone knows. But when it came to their kids, they would come together and make it work… and make us a real family.”
Hickory Hell?
I don’t care. That woman is fired!” Ethel Kennedy exclaimed. “She’s out of here! I want you to get rid of her, now!”
It was a stressful March day in 1974 at Hickory Hill, with various adolescent Kennedys running wild all over the property, as usual, while Ethel attempted to pack suitcases in her third-floor bedroom. She had just gotten back from an Aspen vacation with her children and was now preparing to take another trip, this time with Eunice and Sargent Shriver to New York City, to attend a benefit gala for the Peace Corps. As she and her assistant, Noelle Bombardier, raced about the huge, cluttered bedroom in search of a specific pair of designer shoes, Ethel asked a maid named Connie to fetch a jar of face cream she wanted to remember to pack for the trip. Apparently the maid had difficulty understanding English and, minutes later, presented Ethel with a box of tampons. Though it was a simple—and maybe even comical—misunderstanding, Ethel became instantly enraged. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded to know of the maid as she stood up and faced her. One thing led to another, angry words were exchanged, and suddenly Ethel hauled off and slapped the employee right across the face. For a second, the three women—Ethel, her assistant, Noelle, and the maid, Connie—stood staring at one another with wide-eyed astonishment, as if in complete shock. But then the maid broke the silence by bursting into tears and fleeing from the room, with Noelle Bombardier following her. Meanwhile, Ethel sank into a nearby chair and began to cry. It was quite a scene.
By the beginning of 1974, Ethel Kennedy’s fragile emotional state seemed to be getting no better, and in fact, it could be said that it had only gotten worse. Maybe because she’d never really dealt with her feelings of anger and loss where Bobby was concerned, the dark rage that had been bubbling under the surface since 1968 with only occasional eruptions had now become a dominant part of her personality. The only person who could really reach her was Ted. However, it had gotten to the point where Ethel refused to allow anyone to call him on her behalf. “He has enough to deal with,” she would say. “I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.” Maybe so, but this occasion hadn’t been the first time she had slapped a person—in the same week!
Just a few days earlier, Ethel’s assistant, Noelle, heard a ruckus in front of Hickory Hill while she was taking a landscaper around the property to freshen it up for spring. She walked down to the front entrance and saw a taxicab parked there, with Ethel and the cabbie standing outside of it arguing, Ethel gesturing wildly. As the assistant approached, she heard Ethel scream, “I don’t care what the meter says. I know you have overcharged me and you’re not going to get away with it.” To which the driver responded, “Look, just don’t tip me then, lady. But you have to pay what the meter says.” Ethel glared at the cabbie, asked, ‘Did you just call me lady?” and—crack!—slapped him. Alarmed, Noelle ran to Ethel’s side to calm her down and convince her to go with her back up to the main house. After getting Ethel settled, she then ran back down to pay the cabbie. “That woman is crazy,” he told her. “She’s lucky I don’t have her arrested!”
Now, just days later, Noelle was trying to solve yet another problem as she stood before the sobbing maid. “I have never been struck before,” Connie said through her tears, “and I don’t like it one bit. I quit!” Noelle asked her to just stay put for the time being, “and let me talk to Mrs. Kennedy.”
“Mrs. Kennedy, she really is the best maid we have here,” Noelle, minutes later, said to Ethel, who was now sitting on the bed, staring straight ahead and showing no emotion. “She’s here when she’s supposed to be and she does her job well. I really don’t think we can afford to lose her.”
“Too bad,” Ethel said. “I don’t like her. She’s finished.”
The heated debate went on for fifteen more minutes, until finally Ethel relented. “Fine,” she said. “I don’t care if she stays or goes. If you want her to stay, fine. Just keep her away from me.”
“Perhaps you might consider apologizing to her, Mrs. Kennedy?” Noelle suggested. The way Ethel’s face darkened again, it was clear that no such apology would be forthcoming.
“I know she felt badly about the incident, though,” Noelle Bombardier would recall many years later, “because about a week or so later, Connie injured herself in the kitchen right in the middle of a dinner party that Mrs. Kennedy was hosting. I slipped into the dining room to whisper into Mrs. Kennedy’s ear what had happened and to tell her that I needed to take Connie to the emergency room. I truly didn’t know what her reaction would be, given what had happened earlier with this same maid. But Mrs. Kennedy said, ‘No, let me. I want to do it myself.’ She then stood up and said to her guests, ‘One of my maids has just hurt herself badly. I have so many valuable people working for me, but she’s one of the best. So I hope you don’t mind, but I really must take her to the hospital.’ Everyone agreed. Mrs. Kennedy then left her party to tend to the maid. After the night was over, I said to her, ‘Mrs. Kennedy, that was a very nice thing you did for Connie.’ She just smiled and nodded. We always had an understanding, she and I. There was just something between us from the very first moment we met.”
Ethel Kennedy and Noelle Bombardier (then Noelle Fell) met in late 1973 when Noelle—thirty-three at the time—applied for the job of Ethel’s personal assistant. After she heard about the opening from Ethel’s interior decorator, Bombardier called Hickory Hill to make an appointment. Days later, she found herself at 1147 Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia, walking the ten steps up to the enormous red door that gave entry to the main four-story house of Hickory Hill. After she was let into the house by a uniformed maid, she walked through the high-ceilinged entryway past a massive library on her right and then, to her left, the spacious Victorian-influenced living room, decorated in colors of burgundy and gold—always referred to by Ethel, she would later learn, as “the drawing room.” There, in the middle of the room, on a silver pedestal and enclosed in a glass box, was perhaps the strangest souvenir Noelle had ever seen displayed in any person’s home: a pope’s mitre, gleaming and gold, an enormous version of the chess piece it inspired. Noelle stood in front of it, transfixed. She’d never seen anything quite like it up close, and she couldn’t help but wonder which pope it had belonged to and how in the world it ended up at Hickory Hill. Her eyes then searched the room for a couch to sit on, but there wasn’t one. Instead there were several round red oak tables and enormous matching chairs with red velvet cushioning situated here and there as individual separate conversational areas. Perhaps the best way to describe the room would be to say that it looked royal, not necessarily comfortable. As she sat down near a grand piano, she heard a voice say, “Hello!” It was Ethel, coming down an elaborate staircase wearing blue flared knit leisure pants and a pink top with a small red heart at its center. A gold chain with a cross on it hung at her neck. She also had on her wedding ring. With her short blonde hair and lively bright eyes, she at first seemed quite outgoing, but the downward-sloping way she extended her hand in Noelle’s direction definitely suggested a certain formality. Noelle bolted up from her chair. “Very happy to meet you,” Ethel said as the two women shook hands. She then turned to a maid who had followed her into the room. “Do get us a pot of tea, won’t you?” Eth
el said to her. “And some of those lovely butter cookies, too. That would be nice.”
“My first impression of her was, ‘My God! What royal presence she has!’ ” Bombardier recalled. “When she came down those stairs, honest to God, I felt like saluting. I also think that she carried so much baggage in terms of American imagery, it was impossible to not be impressed.”
“Noelle is such a pretty name,” Ethel said. “Andy’s daughter is named Noelle,” she added, referring to Andy Williams. As the two women chatted away, Ethel learned that as a youth Noelle had attended a boarding school and nunnery for eight years. “That’s very interesting,” Ethel said. “You know, I am very religious. I go to church every day. In fact, I start each day at seven in the morning at church.” After they talked for about an hour, Ethel said, “Okay, you’re hired.”
“But don’t you want to see my résumé?” Noelle asked.
“Nope,” Ethel said, “I have a good feeling about you.”
The two women did seem to have an instant affinity for one another. Ethel would later say that she sensed it would be easy to open up to Noelle, and as it turned out, she would do so often in the seven years that they would work together.
“Let me take you on a tour of this place,” Ethel said. “It’s called Hickory Hill,” she said as the two women walked through the dining room with its large mahogany table that could seat at least thirty people, and then out the sliding glass doors that faced one of the swimming pools. “But you may end up thinking of it as Hickory Hell,” Ethel continued with a chuckle, “because trust me when I say that this place can be a real madhouse. But I don’t like that word, hell,” Ethel cautioned, “so let’s not use it.”
Ethel Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate sat majestically atop a grassy knoll on six sprawling and green acres. The house itself was exquisite, a grand Georgian edifice with high ceilings, gleaming chandeliers, thirteen bedrooms, and an equal number of bathrooms. It became immediately clear to Noelle that despite the formality of the surroundings, the environment was also perfect for children, with two swimming pools for water sports, tennis and basketball courts, and all sorts of athletic equipment everywhere for football, baseball, and soccer. As the two women walked along a manicured pathway and chatted, Noelle noticed a sign that said “Trespassers Will Be Eaten.” “My boy, David, put that there,” Ethel said, laughing. “It’s pretty funny, don’t you think?”
Jacques Lowe, the esteemed photographer who documented much Kennedy history over a forty-year period, once recalled of Hickory Hill, “It was a place that had to be seen to be believed. It wasn’t just the Kennedy kids overrunning the place, it was all of their friends and all of their cousins, too. And there was Ethel running around chasing after them while hollering at them and nursing their bruises. In the midst of all of this were so many servants working there, I couldn’t keep track. It was beautifully landscaped and the interior was quite austere. On one hand, you felt you were standing in a royal palace, but paradoxically there was all of this craziness going on there at the same time, lots of kids, lots of chaos, people getting thrown into the pool fully dressed. One’s senses were definitely on high alert the entire time.”
“My impression was that Mrs. Kennedy had created a hectic environment around her as, perhaps, somewhat of a distraction,” said Noelle Bombardier. “Of course, there were a lot of children and their friends and cousins, but it really didn’t always have to be what she called ‘a madhouse.’ It seemed to me that she wanted this kind of chaos around her at all times. She did not want any alone time. She did not want to eat lunch by herself, or dinner, or any meal, in fact. There were times when I felt she could use some private time, but no, that wasn’t her. ‘Where are the kids? Where is everyone?’ she would ask. I would tell her that I’d just got them all settled somewhere else so that she could have a few moments of downtime to relax, and she would say, ‘I don’t relax, Noelle. When have you ever seen me relax? Bring me my kids. I want my kids.’ ”
Bombardier would have many unusual and memorable experiences as Ethel Kennedy’s personal assistant, but what stands out in her mind all these years later is her former employer’s ongoing—and at times even somewhat troubling—devotion to the memory of her late husband, Bobby.
“In many ways, the house was a shrine to RFK,” Bombardier recalled, “in the sense that there were photos and posters of him everywhere. Truly, you could not walk into a room, even the bathrooms, without seeing his smiling and handsome face. The walls of Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom and the tops of bureaus and chests there were fairly covered with photographs of her and her husband, all in elaborate frames, all in specific places, which Mrs. Kennedy did not want moved. It was vitally important to her that every picture be in its rightful place. In time I began to feel that she, in so many ways, felt a certain powerlessness about the way her life had turned out, so she would try to organize her life in a way that made her feel in control of what was at her immediate disposal, namely her private environment.
“Every summer when we were getting ready to relocate to Hyannis Port, it became my job to gather up all of the photographs in Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom and take them to her home at the compound. I would then place the pictures in the exact spots in that bedroom as they had been in her Hickory Hill bedroom. She wanted both rooms to look as much the same as possible. It made her comfortable and feel in control. However, not that it mattered, but it made me feel very, very sad. It was just so… upsetting. Many a time, I would find myself sitting on the bed, trying to compose myself, trying not to cry. The more I got to know and care about Mrs. Kennedy, the harder it was to accept that she was always in such sorrow, that she had not reconciled her husband’s murder.”
One day, as Ethel and Noelle sat in the kitchen at Hickory Hill going over the scheduling of the children’s events that day, they began to talk about Bobby Kennedy. “Oh, he so loved it here,” Ethel said wistfully. “You know, we bought this place from Jack and Jackie fully with the intention of living here until we were both very old. That was the dream, anyway. It didn’t turn out quite the way I expected…” Her voice trailed off. “Do you want to know something?” Ethel then asked. “For a moment, I actually thought he would live after he was shot. Why, he opened his eyes, Noelle, and he looked right up at me. And I thought, ‘My God! He is going to live! He is going to live!’ But then he closed his eyes. And that was it. He never opened them again.”
“Maybe you should have a little distance from it,” Noelle told her boss, taking a leap and hoping to not offend. “I know how much you miss him. I worry about you, that’s all.”
Ethel nodded with a sad smile. “I know what you mean, Noelle,” she said. “But I have found a way that works for me. I just have to do it my way. I have all of these kids. I’m sure you understand.”
“I do, Mrs. Kennedy,” said Noelle as she reached for Ethel’s hand.
PART NINE
Poor Ari
Onassis’s Many Problems
But this isn’t what I want, Aristo,” Jackie Kennedy Onassis told her husband, Aristotle Onassis, in front of his lawyer, Stelios Papadimitriou. It was spring 1974 and the three were at the Onassis home on Skorpios, in the library.
“But it’s what I want,” Onassis told her.
“But it doesn’t look like you want to divorce me,” Jackie said, approaching him. She took both his hands in her own and looked at him intently. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Don’t you love me anymore?”
Onassis looked downward as if he couldn’t bear to meet her gaze. Then he just shook his head and pulled away from her.
“If there is nothing I can do to prevent this,” Jackie said sadly, “then I guess I’ll just have to accept it. But I’ll never forget the wonderful times we had,” she said. “Please tell me you won’t either.”
Onassis had no response.
Jackie kissed two of her tapering fingers and then gently touched Onassis’s lips with them. With that, she turned and walked away from him.
/> Actually, it had been coming for some time. Onassis hadn’t been himself for more than a year since the death of his twenty-four-year-old son, Alexander, back in January 1973. Alexander had been in a terrible plane crash in Greece while piloting a small aircraft. As soon as they heard about it, Ari and Jackie left New York to be at his side. Though Onassis and his son had a stormy relationship, the two still had a deep and abiding love for one another. “In my life, there is no one like my son,” he often said. “A Greek father and his son have a bond that can never be explained, nor can it ever be broken.” Alexander was bright, charming, and smart, though much more withdrawn and moody than his father. Jackie liked him very much. “Jackie, I want you to pray to Saint Rita of Cascia,” Eunice Shriver told her when she called the hospital to see how Alexander was faring. “She is the patron saint of all that is impossible. Sarge and I are praying to her and we invite you to do the same, Jackie. Please promise me that you will.” Jackie said she would. Unfortunately, Alexander died the same day, on January 23.*
Of course, no one knew Onassis’s heartbreak more intimately than Jackie. In the last year, she had done everything she could think of to help him recover from the loss of his son, but to no avail. The couple had gone on many cruises, had taken many vacations, and had spent a fortune trying to escape his sadness, but it was impossible. Even his business dealings had suffered, and in fact he had lost a great deal of money in the last year because he had become a less astute and intuitive businessman than he had been for all of his adult life. With his airline, Olympic Airways, facing bankruptcy and his wealth now cut in half from a billion to a still staggering five hundred million dollars, Onassis began to feel like a failure. Worse, he had somehow decided that his turn of bad luck was not only his own fault as a result of his own poor decisions in life, but Jackie’s too. His vengeful daughter, Christina, had planted that seed in his head years earlier—that along with Jackie Kennedy would come great misfortune. Cruelly, she had cited the murders of Jack and Bobby as evidence. Now inconsolable in his grief, Ari decided that Christina had been right. “I was a happy man before I married her,” he would often say. “Then I married Jackie and my life was ruined.”
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