Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Because the boys usually did what Joseph told them to do, though, there was really no debate. Ted would run for the Senate, even though his legislative experience was nonexistent.

  After he finally announced his candidacy for the Senate on March 14, the reaction against was immediate. The Wall Street Journal reported: “If a third Kennedy acquires high national office, the rest of us might as well deed the country to the Kennedys.” If he lost, the Journal warned, “he might find that at the next family dinner he would have to eat in the kitchen.” The Washington Post paraphrased Winston Churchill, saying Ted was a modest man, “with much to be modest about.” Joan was dismayed and felt that the media was “mean-minded and cynical.”

  It got worse, though, at the end of the month, when a family secret was revealed: Ted had cheated on a Spanish test at Harvard eleven years earlier—he’d had another student take the test for him—and was expelled as a result. The reason he had done so, as he later explained, was that Joseph had been banking on his son passing all his exams, and there was no way he was going to pass Spanish: As a student who always struggled through his classes, Ted had particular trouble with languages. Also, if he didn’t pass his Spanish class, he would get kicked off the varsity football team. So he did what he felt he had to do. After nineteen-year-old Ted was expelled from Harvard, he enlisted in the army for two years. Ted was later reinstated at the prestigious college, and after finally graduating from Harvard, he went on to the University of Virginia Law School.

  Joan felt that Ted had made an honest mistake and that his father had been indirectly responsible by always putting too much pressure on Ted. Joan believed that it should not be held against her husband. She couldn’t fathom why “such a big deal” had been made of the matter when it had happened eleven years earlier. This would be her first inkling of what she would later call “the cruelty of politics.”

  Jack called to tell Ted that he had met with reporters from the Boston Globe, but to no avail; the negative story would run. Joan was so anxious that she called Jackie to see if there was anything she as First Lady could do to put the brakes on this runaway scandal.

  On March 26, 1962, Jackie Kennedy was in London at the town house of her sister, Lee Radziwill. She was making a two-day rest stop, recovering from a strenuous and much-publicized fifteen-day tour of India and Pakistan. (“She really broke her ass on that trip,” Jack would tell Ben Bradlee.) On March 28, Jackie would dine with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. She would then return to Washington on March 29, a day before the story about Ted was scheduled to hit the stands.

  The Radziwills, Lee and her husband Prince Stanislaw, had invited a few friends for an impromptu dinner to honor Jackie on her first night in London. Together they watched the BBC’s broadcast of the First Lady’s White House tour, which was shown in England at a later date than it had been in America.

  Just before the broadcast got under way, the telephone rang: It was Joan Kennedy calling from the United States.

  “She was upset,” recalls Mari Kumlin, a designer friend of Lee’s who was visiting her from Switzerland. “We kept hearing Jackie say things like ‘Now calm down, Joan. It’s not that bad, Joan. Take it easy, Joan. Don’t be ridiculous, Joan.’ Apparently, this big scandal was about to break, something to do with Ted having cheated on a Spanish test and getting kicked out of Harvard because of it. Jackie hung up with Joan and placed a call to Jack to see if there was anything he could do. From what I later understood, he apparently told her that he had already tried to stop the story, had met with the newspaper reporters and had even suggested that they run the juicy tidbit as part of a bigger story about Ted, but that the reporters felt that the cheating incident would get buried that way. They wanted to make it a big deal.”

  As the others watched her flickering image before them on the television set, Jackie preoccupied herself with the matter at hand in Washington. She called Joan back to tell her that nothing could be done about it.

  “Secrets always come out, don’t they?” she observed to Joan. “Sometimes it takes years, sometimes not. We’re lucky this one took eleven years, I guess.”

  Joan said something—it’s not known what—to which Jackie, in the presence of the others in the room, responded, “Look, if I were you, Joan, I would just forget it. Act like it’s not even happening. And just go on with your life and Ted’s campaign.

  “Trust me. When it comes out, it will be the biggest news in the land,” Jackie continued, “and then two days later something else will come along and that will be even bigger news. Who knows?” The First Lady laughed, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone important will keel over and drop dead.”

  Before she signed off, she said, “Now go and hug Kara. That will make everything all right.”

  After Jackie had hung up, she said to the others, “You know, that poor dear is not cut out for this kind of life, she really isn’t. She’s like a sister, and I worry about her because I’m afraid her troubles have only just begun.”

  “Teddy cheated on a Spanish test?” Lee asked, ignoring Jackie’s opinion of Joan. She knew that Jackie’s brother-in-law had been kicked out of Harvard but she didn’t know the reason why.

  “I guess so,” Jackie said, shrugging her shoulders with resignation. “Are you the least bit surprised?”

  Jackie didn’t mention that when Ted was still an undergraduate at Harvard, he had asked her to write a term paper for him, and she had done it, “but only because I felt sorry for him,” she would later explain. “He just could never keep up. Never.”

  The story about Ted’s cheating at Harvard broke, as expected, the day after Jackie returned to Washington. As headlines screamed out his lack of judgment, Ted became dejected. “He feels like he’s been kicked in the balls,” Jack said privately, “he’s really singing the blues.”

  Jack also noted in a conversation with Ben Bradlee that Ted’s cheating “wouldn’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”

  Jackie’s advice to Joan, however, proved to be right on the mark. After Ted had made his apologies to the public, his campaign for his party’s nomination to fill JFK’s Senate seat against his opponent, Edward McCormack,* rolled on, despite the humiliation. Ted would stump until early June under the slogan “He can do more for Massachusetts.” At the Democratic Party Convention in June 1962, he defeated Ed McCormack by a two-to-one margin.

  PART THREE

  Bobby Meets Marilyn

  Bobby and Ethel Kennedy first encountered Marilyn Monroe on February 1, 1962, at a party for Bobby hosted by Peter Lawford and his wife Pat, Bobby’s sister, at the Lawfords’ twenty-seven-room Malibu mansion. According to family friend Joan Braden, who attended the party, Marilyn was first introduced to Bobby by Pat. He didn’t seem impressed until Braden whispered to him that this was “the Marilyn Monroe, the genuine article. That got his attention,” she said, laughing.

  In her 1989 memoir, Just Enough Rope, Joan Braden wrote, “Bobby turned and I turned and there she was—blond, beautiful, red lips at the ready, clad in a black-lace dress which barely concealed the tips of her perfectly formed breasts and tightly fitted every curve of the body unparalleled. Bobby paid attention. He sat next to her at dinner; around our table of eight were Kim Novak, Angie Dickinson, and me. Who the men between us were, I can’t remember. I can only remember the women and the dresses which showed off their bosoms.”

  Years later, in an interview, Joan added: “They had an instant rapport, not surprising in that they were both charismatic, smart people. Bobby enjoyed talking to intelligent, beautiful women, and Marilyn certainly fit the bill. She was also inquisitive in a childlike way, which I think he found refreshing. I found her to be delightful, and everyone at the party was completely enthralled by her and rather dazzled by her presence.”

  At the dinner table, Marilyn proceeded to further enchant Bobby. “From her
tiny black purse, she extracted a folded piece of paper, and unfolded it to reveal, in bright lipstick, a list of questions,” said Braden. “The first was, ‘What does an Attorney General do?’ There were some giggles from somewhere at the table and the man next to me whispered, ‘Don’t. She’s had a sad and lonely life and she has no self-confidence at all.’ ” Marilyn read other lipstick-written questions, each of which, Braden recalls, “was as innocent and childlike as the first, totally without guile or pretense except for the medium in which they were written. Bobby was enthralled.”

  One might question how Bobby could be so openly flirtatious at a party at which his wife was also in attendance. Ethel had grown accustomed to this sort of thing, however, and, although disapproving of it, she kept her mouth shut.

  Ethel had actually been excited about meeting Marilyn. She was not immune to the power of the screen star’s charisma and personality. In fact, about a year earlier, she had said that she wanted Marilyn to play her in a movie that was being developed by 20th Century-Fox based on Bobby Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within. (The film was never made.)

  Now, a year later, Ethel was in the same room with Marilyn, who seemed to be flirting with her husband. Ethel reportedly said later to Pat Kennedy in the company of two Kennedy aides, “I just think she’s a big phony, and if I’m never around her again, that would be fine with me. Women like that make me so mad—trying to seduce a married man. I’m furious about this, I really am.”

  “Oh, Ethel, Marilyn’s harmless,” said Pat.

  “Harmless, my foot,” exclaimed Ethel. “This one is where I draw the line,” she said, apparently more adamant about this woman than she was about all the others.

  As the evening wore on, Bobby seemed to fall further under Monroe’s spell, especially when he started coaching her in the rudiments of the popular dance craze the Twist, all under the suspicious gaze of Ethel. When Marilyn became too drunk to see herself to her Brentwood home, Bobby offered to drive her. Perhaps mindful of Ethel’s ever-frozen stare, he asked his press agent, Ed Guthman, to accompany them. Marilyn plopped herself in the front seat next to Bobby, leaving Guthman in the back. Following the short drive to her house, Bobby walked the wobbly Marilyn unsteadily to her door, where she was met by her housekeeper, Eunice Murray.

  After this party, Bobby and Marilyn apparently began seeing one another socially whenever he was on the West Coast.

  Peter Dye, a frequent guest at the Lawford home, recalls, “I know Marilyn was nuts about him because she told me as much. She was fascinated by him. I also think she was scared to death of him because he gave off an air about himself.”

  Max Block, a former president of the Meat Cutters Union, says that he and one of Bobby’s enemies, Jimmy Hoffa, were told about meetings between Bobby and Marilyn Monroe at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas by the manager of the hotel, Wilbur Clark. “He told me he checked them in every few weeks into a suite of rooms on the seventh floor,” says Max Block. “One day I was sitting with him, and Bobby passed by and said, ‘Hello, Wilbur.’ Clark said, ‘Hello, Bobby. This is my friend Max Block.’ Kennedy said, ‘Oh, I know Block from New York.’ And he kept going. I asked where he was going, and Clark said, ‘He’s going to see Marilyn upstairs.’ When I mentioned to Jimmy about Bobby and Marilyn Monroe, he said, ‘I know all about that.’ ”

  “Life’s Too Short to Worry about Marilyn Monroe”

  In the spring of 1962, the President of the United States would celebrate his forty-fifth birthday on May 29. Peter Lawford came up with the idea of having Marilyn sing “Happy Birthday” to Jack at a huge birthday salute being planned at Madison Square Garden. Many other celebrities would be performing at the gala, which was thrown by the Democratic Party to raise money for the next presidential campaign; performers would include singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Maria Callas, and Peggy Lee. The notion of the sexy movie star serenading the President might have been an example of Lawford’s warped sense of humor; friends insist that having Marilyn as the show’s finale was his idea of an in-joke.

  At this time, Marilyn Monroe was causing problems for her studio, 20th Century-Fox, during production of her latest film, Something’s Got to Give. Pleading illness, she had missed so many days of principal photography that the movie was behind schedule. Naturally, the studio heads were adamantly opposed to her taking more time off to attend the President’s birthday celebration.

  On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy was just as determined to have Monroe present. Upon learning that Fox was threatening a lawsuit if she left the set to attend the gala, Bobby personally telephoned studio head Peter Levathes in Hollywood to ask that Monroe be permitted to fly to New York without penalty. He explained that her performance would be “very important to the President of the United States.” When Levathes turned him down, Bobby became exasperated.

  Bobby then went over Levathes’s head to the most powerful man at Fox at the time, financier Milton Gould, to whom he explained that Marilyn’s appearance was “of critical importance to the current administration.” Gould recalls Bobby as having said, “The President wants it, and I want it.” When Gould’s answer was emphatically negative, the Attorney General threatened him, telling him that he would be “sorry for this” and reminding him that he was “dealing with the First Family in America.”

  Bobby Kennedy needn’t have worried. With or without the studio’s permission, Marilyn Monroe was determined to perform at the event. She announced that she would not be available for work and then made plans to leave for New York. (Her decision would result in an eventual breach-of-contract lawsuit from Fox.)

  Famous for her revealing wardrobe, Marilyn had designer Jean Louis create what was probably the most daring gown of her entire career—one made of the sheerest flesh-colored netting. With the fabric covered by hundreds of rhinestones, Marilyn appeared to be wearing nothing but beads speckled over luscious flesh. (In October 1999, at an auction of Marilyn’s belongings at Christie’s, in New York, this gown commanded more than a million dollars.)

  By her own choice, the First Lady would not be present for the Madison Square Garden birthday party. She had heard about Marilyn Monroe’s planned performance despite the fact that the chairman of the Democratic Party had called one of the show’s organizers, Richard Adler (who wrote the music to The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees), to demand that Marilyn be removed.

  It would seem that Jackie suspected trouble ahead. “I’m not going to sit and watch that,” she told her Secret Service agent in an unusual moment of candor. “If you ask me, I think this administration is completely out of control with all of this Marilyn business.”

  When the agent did not respond, Jackie may have realized the inappropriate nature of her comment, because she said, “Forget I ever said that, please.”

  Nunziata Lisi, a friend of Lee Radziwill’s who lived in Italy at the time, says, “According to what Lee told me, Jackie did not have a fight with Jack about the Madison Square Garden matter, or even a discussion about it. Her position, from what I gathered, was that if Jack actually approved of such a thing, knowing full well that she would be unhappy about it—and maybe even humiliated by it—then it wasn’t worth a big brouhaha. It was just not worth going. Or, as Lee told me Jackie put it, ‘Life’s too short to worry about Marilyn Monroe.’ ”

  As she always did when she wanted to get away, Jackie took the kids to Glen Ora, outside Middleburg, Virginia, two hours from Washington. She and Jack rented this four-hundred-acre, seven-bedroom estate as a weekend retreat. Jackie always savored her time there, referring to Middleburg as “home” and Washington as “the White House.”

  By 1962, Jackie was spending as many as four days a week at Glen Ora with her children, her horses, and other animals, living what she called “a good, clean life”—which, more often than not, did not include Jack. Jack hated Glen Ora. While Jackie had a strong affinity for horses, the President was allergic to them.

  While at Glen Ora during this particular May, Jackie participated i
n the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show, taking a third-place ribbon. “It was very simple there at Glen Ora,” Eve Four, a friend of Jackie’s from Middleburg, recalled to First Lady historian Carl Anthony. “The press would poke around, usually when there was a big event going on. Sometimes, someone would call me and tell me more about what we had just done than even I knew. Jackie said, ‘Look, if I worried about what people said about me every day, I couldn’t get up in the morning. I learned very quickly.’ ”

  Eve Fout further recalled that at Glen Ora, Jackie “lived like everyone else. Wait in line at the store, go right into any of the shops. She always had meals at home. Only four times in all those years did she go out to eat, two times at a restaurant, two times at friends’ homes. She said that if that was antisocial, then that is what she was, and should be, at that period in her life.”

  On May 19, 1962, approximately twenty thousand Democrats celebrated the President’s forty-fifth birthday at massive Madison Square Garden (even though Jack’s birthday was still ten days away). Jack, Bobby, Ethel, Rose, Pat, and Eunice were all present.

  Backstage, Monroe was buckling under the pressure and was jittery at the prospects of such an important appearance. Up close, her ivory face makeup and heavy eyeliner gave her an almost Kabuki-like appearance, adding to her aura of fragility. After all the other performers had done their numbers, Peter Lawford finally brought her onto the stage. A gasp from the audience greeted her as she trotted delicately out like an oriental empress. The $12,000 Jean Louis beaded gown was so tight, she could take only the tiniest of mincing steps at a time. Hugh Sidey of Time magazine, who was present at the gala, recalls, “There was a feeling of euphoria mixed with a sense of astonishment that this scene was actually taking place, and that it was for the benefit of the President of the United States, who seemed to go limp. When I say ‘limp,’ I mean that he was visibly affected. His mouth was wide open, as if he didn’t know whether to be shocked, excited, appalled, or what.”