Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  At the altar stood the handsome twenty-four-year-old groom, Bobby. Next to him was his best man, older brother John

  As the two thousand guests, hundreds of whom were uninvited, crammed into the church, waiting for the ceremony to begin, the pipe-organ music began. In the pews, waiting amidst the gorgeous floral arrangements for the bride’s entrance, sat the well-heeled, well-known guests, including diplomats, politicians, entertainers, and socialites. The bridesmaids entered, followed by Ethel, who appeared to be an ethereal cloud of white in her beautiful wedding finery. It was a memorable ceremony.

  “What I want for you is to have a life with Bobby as happy as the one I have had with his father,” Rose told Ethel afterward as she embraced her new daughter-in-law during the lavish reception at the Skakels’ Lake Avenue mansion. “Lots of children, Ethel. Have lots and lots of children. They’ll keep your marriage strong, as strong as mine.”

  From the start, Ethel and Bobby were devoted to one another. Neither would ever seem to regret their decision to wed; the differences in their personalities meshed together to create what many of their peers considered to be the perfect couple. “The best thing I ever did was marry Ethel,” Bobby would later comment of the woman who was his partner, his supporter, his friend.

  “Whatever they did, they put their whole hearts and souls into it,” observes Mary Francis “Sancy” Newman, a neighbor of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. “They were ideal in that way and seemed to have the kind of marriage most people of that time wanted. You could see in the way they looked at one another that they adored each other.”

  As she would later tell friends, Ethel was a virgin when she met Bobby—not a surprise, considering her strict Catholic upbringing and education. In fact, the word “sex” was never uttered in the Skakel home because Big Ann was so puritanical. Women weren’t even allowed to wear pants in the Lake Avenue home, because Big Ann found them amoral. Short tennis dresses were deemed acceptable for sports activities, but a woman had to change into something more appropriate as soon as she got off the court. Bobby later told friends that he didn’t know Ethel was a virgin until their wedding night, though he certainly must have suspected as much. He didn’t dare ask, and she wouldn’t think to tell him.

  Years later, at a Hyannis Port luncheon with Jackie, Joan, Jean, Eunice, and some close friends, Ethel admitted that her wedding night had been “a disaster.” She said that her inexperience had been obvious, and that she had been intimidated by Bobby. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I think Bobby was finished before I got into the room… or at least that’s how it felt to me.”

  Joan laughed. “Well, really, whose honeymoon has ever been anything but terrible?” she asked.

  At that moment Rose walked into the room. Immediately, the women stopped talking. Discussing such matters in front of the family matriarch was considered inappropriate. Ethel instinctively put a hand over her mouth.

  “Now, just what are you ladies talking about?” Rose asked.

  “Oh, we were just saying how well Bobby sleeps at night,” Jackie said quickly.

  “That he does, dear heart,” Rose said. “That he does,” Then she added, “He gets that from me, you know.”

  After honeymooning in Hawaii and a drive back east in Par Kennedy’s convertible, which the newlyweds picked up in Los Angeles, Bobby went back to his final year of law studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, while Ethel began her life as a Kennedy wife. The couple settled into a small one-and-a-half story colonial home—much simpler surroundings than Ethel was accustomed to, but it was an environment in which she seemed content. Ethel surrounded herself with friends who knew how to cook—because she didn’t—and domestics who knew how to clean—because she didn’t. “A girl has to have some help, after all,” Ethel explained to Rose, who was already harping on her daughter-in-law to cut back on her spending, a running theme throughout their relationship.

  For the next year, Ethel focused her attention on getting to know her husband’s personality. He could be explosive at times but was for the most part gentle and retiring. She assisted him with his studies in any way she could and, as she would later recall, she set about “doing what newlyweds do, try to learn all you can about your spouse before the children come along and completely ruin any time you may have with him.”

  On spring and summer weekends the couple would fly to Hyannis Port to be with Bobby’s parents and in fall and winter they flew to Palm Beach, Florida, for the same purpose. Ethel spent much time poring over books, encyclopedias, and almanacs, in an effort to learn as much as possible about every subject so that she could, as she put it, “keep up with those Kennedys.” Parlor games such as Twenty Questions were especially popular in the Kennedy household, and competitive Ethel wanted to be certain she was not embarrassed by all of those erudite Kennedy offspring.

  Dorothy Tubridy, a friend of the family’s from Ireland, understood Ethel’s predicament. In an oral history for the Kennedy Library, she once recalled, “They all read the newspapers every day, and at dinnertime somebody might come out with a name, or something that happened that had been written about, and if you didn’t contribute to the conversation, you’d be immediately pounced on and asked why you haven’t read one of the twelve newspapers! It was frightening. I would feel so stupid if I couldn’t follow the conversation.”

  In 1951, three years after Bobby had graduated from Harvard, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He and Ethel departed for the Skakel estate in Greenwich to await the arrival of their first child, Kathleen (named after Bobby’s late sister), who was born on Independence Day.

  “It was a difficult pregnancy,” recalls the Kennedy family nurse, Luella Hennessey, who tended to Ethel at Greenwich Hospital. “Ethel was depressed, upset. She was too small to have a baby as large as Kathleen, and it caused her to have certain female problems, very severe internal problems. [Her perineum was damaged during the birth.]

  “She was embarrassed about it. She told me that none of the men in the family should ever know. For her to not have an easy pregnancy was a sort of defeat. She hated to be defeated. I don’t think Bobby ever really knew how much pain she was in, how she suffered. When he would walk into the hospital room, she would have a full face of makeup on and a smile on her face. Then when he would leave, she would absolutely collapse in tears. Already, she had that Kennedy stiff upper lip in a time of great stress.” Luella concluded that “Ethel was hand made for the Kennedy family.”

  “I won’t be having any more children,” a choked-up Ethel told Luella as she held her newborn in her arms.

  “Oh, yes you will, honey,” said the nurse, trying to comfort her. “You’ll forget the pain. All women do. I promise.”

  “Oh no I won’t,” Ethel countered. “A smart woman would never forget this kind of pain.”

  After the baby’s birth, Ethel and Bobby moved into one of the Skakel family guest houses, and in less than six months Ethel was pregnant again—just in time to start stumping for Jack’s senatorial campaign (of which Bobby was campaign manager) in Massachusetts. Though she was afraid of the pregnancy because of how difficult her first one had been, Ethel was expected to help campaign for Jack’s election through the summer of 1952, just as all of the Kennedy women did: Rose, Jean, Pat, and Eunice. “They expect a lot of you in this family,” she told one friend. “And I can’t let them see me as weak. That would be the worst thing possible.”

  On September 24, Ethel gave birth to a boy, Joseph Patrick (Joseph after Bobby’s deceased brother). Two months later, in November, Jack won his senatorial campaign.

  In January 1953, Ethel and Bobby moved their small family to Washington, D.C., where Bobby had just taken a job working for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, known as the McCarthy Committee for its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Ethel found a modest four-bedroom home in Georgetown, which the couple would rent. While the surroundings in their new
home weren’t opulent, Ethel couldn’t help but hire a staff of servants, who wore different color uniforms every day to work. It was a happy time for Ethel, Bobby, and their small family. Their life together was just beginning, and although they didn’t know it at the time, they would soon devote themselves to the most important of all family goals: getting a Kennedy elected to the White House.

  Not One to Feel Sorry for Herself

  On a blustery Sunday in January, three days after JFK’s inauguration, Bobby Kennedy was sitting behind blonde movie star Kim Novak, his arms crossed in front of her. After somebody gave them a shove, the toboggan on which they were sitting went sliding down a snow-covered hill. Kim squealed in delight as Ethel Kennedy, who was leaning against a nearby tree, watched with an unhappy expression on her face. She had heard rumors of an affair between her husband and Kim, and—from what she told friends—she didn’t believe the stories, yet found them troubling just the same.

  Bobby had invited a group of friends, including Dave Hackett and Samuel Adams, chums from the Milton Academy he had attended as a youth, to Hickory Hill for a day of tobogganing. Four inches of snow remained on the ground from a recent blizzard, the air was cold and crisp, and Bobby was relaxing for the first time in a long while. Among the invitees was the actress Novak, who had been at the Sinatra party on the night of the inauguration.

  Bobby and Kim walked back to the top of the hill, giggling and laughing all the way, before getting back on their toboggan.

  “Bobby, don’t you want to play football?” Ethel hollered out at him.

  “Not now, Ethel,” he answered, as he and Kim positioned themselves on the sled for another trip down the hill.

  Ethel finally went back into the house alone.

  About an hour later, Ethel’s assistant, Leah Mason, found her employer in the kitchen with Pat Kennedy Lawford. (The divorced Mason, who lived near Hickory Hill and now lives in Europe, would work for Ethel on and off for many years; she says that she was dismissed and rehired “at least a dozen times” over a ten-year period.) As soon as Leah walked into the room, Ethel snapped at her about something. She seemed upset. It was Leah’s feeling that the presence of Kim Novak in her home had made Ethel very uncomfortable.

  “Don’t be mad, Ethie,” Pat said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ethel responded, as she put dishes into a cabinet. “Everything is fine. Bobby’s just having fun.”

  Just then Ethel dropped a plate onto the floor. It shattered into pieces. “Oh, no! That was one of my mother’s best dishes.” Ethel crumpled into a chair. “And now it’s broken. Oh, my God.”

  When he heard the dish break, Bobby and some of the other guests ran into the kitchen, to find Ethel sobbing. Bobby got on his knees in front of her and asked her to tell him what was wrong. Tearfully, Ethel said that she was distraught, that the campaign, the inauguration, and the many before- and after-parties had completely worn her down.

  “I know,” Bobby said, patting her on the back softly. “I know.”

  Ethel looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, dear Lord,” she said, as Bobby continued to comfort her. Then, after about five minutes, she composed herself, perhaps feeling self-conscious about her outburst. “Well, enough of that.” She stood up and began wiping away her tears. “I’m not one to sit here and feel sorry for myself. You know me, Bobby,” she added. “I have all the energy in the world.”

  Bobby grinned at her as he got up off his knees. “That’s my Ethel,” he said to the others in the room. “Never one to let anything get her down.” Everyone agreed. Then, as Bobby, Leah, Pat, and the others left the room, Ethel hollered after them, “We’re going to have dinner soon… so don’t think you’re gonna be stayin’ out there too long.”

  White House Infidelities

  During the Camelot years, the Kennedys’ home and family were unlike most others. Because of their power, money, and influence, Jackie, Ethel, and Joan had different concerns and pressures from most young women. While family values were important to them, power, prestige, and money were also meaningful to Jackie and Ethel. Joan was much less interested in being powerful or famous.

  Just by virtue of their prominence in society, the Kennedys and others of their class lived by different rules. In Washington and especially in its tony Georgetown section, they lived in a world in which one code of behavior applied to the middle class and another to the wealthy upper class. Infidelity was an accepted transgression if the players had wealth and status. Perhaps it was thought that these privileged philanderers were better equipped—just by virtue of their worldly experience—to handle emotional ambiguities than were everyday married couples living in the heartland.

  “In the Kennedy world, infidelity wasn’t supposed to matter,” noted the prolific author Gore Vidal, who was obliquely related to Jackie through marriage (his mother had been married to Hugh Auchincloss before he married Jackie’s mother, Janet). “In the rest of the world, yes, heterosexuality, marriage, and children were—are—ideals. But the Kennedys moved in a world of money and power. Women who cared about money and power knew how to strike a balance between what they had and what they didn’t have. Someone like Joan Kennedy, I can understand why she never fit in. If she wasn’t interested in money and power, what was she doing in that family, anyway?”

  Divorce was a complex matter in the fifties and sixties, especially among Irish-Catholics like the Kennedys. To say that it was “frowned upon” would be an understatement. It was unacceptable. “You just had to live with it,” is the way Joan once put it.

  Some of the Secret Service agents who protected Jackie during her White House years recall a marriage that, at times, seemed ideal. “From the way it appeared on the outside, it seemed to be an excellent relationship,” says Anthony Sherman, who served two years on presidential detail, “I was with them a lot, and I saw what seemed like a genuine love there. I never heard any yelling or anger between them. I was with them many times where they had the children at the beach, or they would go to get ice cream at the local parlor in Hyannis Port, holding hands, being loving. I think that they were best together when they were with the children.”

  President Kennedy’s risk-taking and infidelities have been well documented over the last three decades by everyone from mainstream journalists and academic historians to muckrakers and tabloid reporters. Even his friend and Kennedy loyalist Arthur Schlesinger now says, “His sexual waywardness does not constitute John Kennedy’s finest hour.” (He hastens to add, “But exaggeration is possible.”) As George Smathers put it, “I’ve shaken hands with eleven presidents in my lifetime, and the only two who were one hundred percent totally faithful to their wives were Harry Truman and Richard Nixon. Those were the only two. The rest, at some point or another, slipped.”

  It would seem that once John F. Kennedy got into office, with an army of Secret Service men to protect his privacy, he more than just “slipped.” Joseph Paolella, an agent who worked at the White House from 1960 to 1964, recalls, “His womanizing was one of those things you didn’t talk about to anyone except other agents. You just accepted it as a part of the job.” Paolella notes that an important part of his job during the Kennedy administration was to prevent Jackie from stumbling upon the President’s indiscretions—not because she didn’t know about them but, rather, to save the couple from an embarrassing situation.

  “Jackie was full of love, and full of hurt,” said Lindy Boggs, who succeeded her husband, Hale Boggs, as a Louisiana congresswoman. “When she really loved something, she gave herself completely. But I don’t think he could love anyone too deeply. They were two private people, two cocoons married to each other, trying to reach each other. I think she felt that since he was so much older than she was, that it was up to him to reach more than she did. But he couldn’t.”

  Jackie was a smart woman who had made a choice to remain with an unfaithful husband. She was not only standing by her man, she was standing by her political party, her job as First Lady, h
er country, and, of course, her children. Try as she might to ignore it, though, her husband’s unfaithfulness had to hurt. Her cousin John Davis referred to it as “Jacqueline’s festering wound, one which remained for a lifetime.” Her longtime friend Joan Braden, the wife of columnist Tom Braden and a close friend of all of the Kennedys since having worked as an aide to Jack in the 1960 campaign, called it “the cross she didn’t have to, but chose to, bear.”

  Even though she had decided to accept it, Jackie sometimes lashed out at Jack for his behavior, especially if he seemed to be flaunting his unfaithfulness. A source close to the Kennedy administration tells this story: One afternoon while taking inventory of White House furnishings, Jackie walked into the Lincoln Room, where Abraham Lincoln held many cabinet meetings and where his large bed was now kept. There she found her husband and a secretary—not in a compromising position, but suspiciously alone just the same. Jackie discreetly closed the door. When Jack emerged from the room, he found his wife’s clipboard on the floor, propped up against the opposite wall. On a blank page was written in Jackie’s handwriting two words: “See Me.”

  Later, Jackie confronted Jack in an argument loud enough for some of the Kennedy staff to overhear, which was very uncharacteristic of the First Couple. Jack denied that anything inappropriate had transpired in the Lincoln Room and explained that he was merely showing it to a new secretary who had never seen it. Jackie, exasperated by his feeble excuse, demanded to know if he was “some [expletive deleted] little tour guide or the [expletive deleted] President of the United States.” It would seem that she could live with his unfaithfulness, but she could not accept it when he treated her as if she was completely naïve.