Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Joan’s Many Faux Pas

  Jackie and Ethel Kennedy both seemed to enjoy the public eye, and even though they often complained about the constant attention, in truth they thrived on it because they felt in control. Jackie and Ethel both had the kind of relationship with the press in which reporters knew which lines of privacy they could not cross.

  “The reporters all loved her,” recalls newsman James Brady of Ethel. “She chewed gum and called us ‘kiddo,’ and helped us get hold of Bobby for a quote when he was closeted with more important people. She also invited us out to the house in Virginia to play football and get thrown in the swimming pool and meet the famous jocks and pretty girls who always seemed to be hanging around. She was lively and unspoiled, suntanned and athletic—no great beauty and no intellectual, but she was everything else the Girl Scout oath requires.”

  Look magazine’s Laura Bergquist Knebel once noted that she would edit her material when writing about Jackie and Ethel so that the two women and their powerful husbands would not be offended by anything that was published. Besides being good business for the magazine, it also prevented Knebel from having to endure the wrath of the two wives should she publish something they felt was too much of an invasion. Jackie, the “letter-writer” of the two, would be the first to make her feelings known in a stinging note.

  Joan, however, was such a congenial person that reporters like Bergquist Knebel felt a more casual relationship with her. They could “chat” with her—tape recorder running—and every word she said was on the record, even the ones that could prove embarrassing. She was a private person living a public existence.

  “I felt sorry for Joan,” says Helen Thomas. “I thought she was so gentle, so beautiful and so fragile, and being thrown into the situation she was in was difficult—not only for her to deal with, but for us to watch her do it, firsthand. She was always very gracious to us and very nice. I think she was really a tragedy. You wanted to protect her, which wasn’t always possible under the circumstances.”

  Jackie and Ethel knew how to censor themselves in interviews. It somehow came naturally to them to say only that which they would not later regret reading. However, when Joan had to give interviews to magazine and newspaper reporters because her husband or one of his handlers asked her to do so, she couldn’t help but panic. After being burned by a few embarrassing articles, it was as if every word she uttered had to be so carefully selected that she was almost afraid to speak at all.

  For instance, in one interview, she said, “You know, Jackie talked me into wearing a wig. She has three of them, and she wears them a lot, especially for traveling. I tried one, but it just felt silly.”

  Apparently, Joan wasn’t aware of the fact that much of the media had been speculating that Jackie wore wigs from time to time, a speculation that Jackie’s spokespeople had said had no validity whatsoever. “The First Lady in a wig?” Letitia Baldrige said, outraged. “Why, never!”

  When Joan made her comments, a resounding “Ah-ha!” could practically be heard en masse from a suspicious media. One of Jackie’s handlers telephoned Joan to tell her that the First Lady would appreciate it if she did not give away any of her grooming secrets in the future. “The First Lady is livid,” Joan was told. “She guards her privacy with her very life, and you should know that.”

  At that time—not only because of Joan’s occasional faux pas but also because it was a politically correct thing to do—many publications would send completed stories to the Kennedy camp for approval prior to publication. This practice—regarded as unethical by some reporters—assured that cooperative magazines would be on the Kennedys’ “approved list” for future stories and that writers from the magazines would have “access” when such cooperation was necessary to complete a feature.

  Magazines such as Time and Newsweek would always publish unauthorized features rather than jeopardize their reputations as unbiased, credible sources of news. But many—in particular the women’s magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, which appealed to a large cross section of female voters—would happily send their stories to the Kennedy camp before publication, in order to ingratiate themselves with the family. This practice always proved to be problematic for all three Kennedy wives because whatever they said in interviews for these magazines would be picked apart by their husbands and their husbands’ attorneys and publicists prior to publication. As a result, they would often be berated for not having had better judgment in expressing themselves.

  An excellent example of the extremes to which the Kennedys went to make certain that the wholesome, spit-and-polish image they wished to feed their constituency remained intact is the way a simple “puff-piece” story about Ted in the women’s magazine Redbook was handled. Ted had encouraged Joan to consent to an interview for the story, and prior to its publication, the feature was gone over repeatedly by Bobby and Ted, as well as attorneys and publicists and other Kennedy handlers, each word scrutinized for its impact and meaning.

  The twenty-eight-page manuscript for Redbook, titled “What Makes Teddy Run” and written by William Peters, was submitted to the Kennedy camp by Peters for its approval on December 1, 1961. The feature was sent to Ted’s office. Ted then sent a copy of it to Bobby for his approval as well, along with a memo (not dated, but found in the Kennedy Library).

  Ted noted in his memo to Bobby that the first half of the article was favorable, but that his greatest concerns included a comment from Joan about her youth in Bronxville in which she was quoted as having said: “The entire community is so highly restricted that I actually never met a Jew as I was growing up.” He was also concerned about Joan’s description of the amenities found at the Kennedys’ Cape Cod compound: “Besides all of the sports equipment—boats, water skis, tennis courts, riding horses, nearby golf courses, and everything else—they have their own projection room for movies. If you want a steam bath, they have that, too!”

  Ted also noted Joan’s comment that even when the adults are playing “hide-and-seek and kick-the-can with the children, they play as though they were adult games of wits. They play hard, and to win.” There were other problems as well, having to do with the writer’s references to, as Ted put it, “my emotional detachment and insensitivity” when it came to segregation issues at the University of Virginia, where he attended school.

  In response to this memo, Bobby wrote a six-page memorandum to Ted, dated December 14, 1961. In it, he suggested that Ted speak directly to the author, William Peters, about his concerns, rather than go above his head to the magazine’s editor.

  “You will want to have them eliminate the quote on what Joan said about never meeting a Jew,” Bobby wrote. And regarding Joan’s enthusiasm for the luxuries found at Cape Cod, Bobby suggested that Ted ask Peters to “leave out the projection room and the steam bath. I would just say to him that you don’t think it adds anything and it might appear that it shows our bragging about being more fortunate than others.” Bobby also suggested, “Peters should straighten out the fact that you did know there had been Negroes at the law school.” Bobby pointed out other passages in Peters’s article that he wanted to change.

  All of the changes that the Kennedys hoped would be made to the Redbook story were made before the magazine went on sale.*

  Joan would continue to cause problems with her candor. A size eight, she was always a clothes horse, enjoyed fashion, and often wore gowns that had been designed by Oscar de la Renta and Galanos, as well as Zuckerman suits and dresses by Mollie Parnis and Adele Simpson. In 1962, she would tell an interviewer that she appreciated Oleg Cassini’s clothes “because he gives me fifty percent off, which I think is terribly nice.” Cassini wasn’t happy that Joan had announced that she got a discount to wear, and advertise, his creations, and he sent the magazine’s editor a letter saying that Joan was “mistaken.” (“Why, I don’t recall that at all,” Oleg Cassini says today. “I know that I didn’t design anything for her specifically. But if she ever wore
my clothing, I’m sure I was honored.”)

  “Ted is the favorite uncle,” Joan also said to the same reporter when talking about the Kennedy offspring. “He’s so big, he can roughhouse with all the children. The President is the same way. But now his back is a problem. He can barely pick up his own son.”

  The White House was extremely sensitive to reports about Jack’s bad back, which had become an issue in the 1960 election. Ever since the 1954 spinal surgery, the Kennedy handlers were careful to never mention his back as a problem. Dr. Janet Travell regularly administered Novocain injections just to get Jack through the day because he was so crippled by his back, and the White House did all it could to keep the truth of his condition under wraps. Then, in one interview, Joan blew years of public relations strategy.

  “What is wrong with you?” Ted asked Joan after reading the story. “Are you crazy? Look at the mess you’ve caused.”

  Joan burst into tears and apologized.

  The matter became such a Kennedy camp scandal that Bobby told Ted, “We’re going to have to just make sure Joan doesn’t say a word about anything to anybody. What else can we do? Tell her to issue a denial. And tell her not to say a single thing about anyone’s health ever again.”

  So, doing her Kennedy duty, Joan issued the required denial, saying, “My remarks were taken completely out of context.” The media jumped all over Joan, making her out to be either a liar or an idiot. “Personally, I think she’s doing the best she can,” Ethel said to a secretary of hers, trying to be charitable. “I mean, we’re talking about Joan here, aren’t we?”

  When Jackie heard about what had been happening, she telephoned Joan to put her mind at ease. According to what Joan later told family friend Joan Braden, Jackie said not to worry about what had occurred. “Look, you’re only human,” she told Joan. “My goodness, they are overreacting, those guys.” Jackie said that it was obviously true that Jack had a back problem, and the fact that he could still run the country despite it should be considered “admirable, not controversial. So don’t give it a second thought, Joan,” she concluded.

  Joan later said that she was so grateful to Jackie for trying to put her mind at ease, “I couldn’t stop crying for three days about the whole thing.”

  Of the three wives, Joan was still the best liked by reporters, despite—or maybe even because of—her blunders with the press. Her brand of thoughtfulness was rare on Capitol Hill. For instance, a fashion reporter from a Washington daily once telephoned her to ask what she intended to wear at a charity fashion show. The writer explained that she wanted to put her “piece to bed” on the day of the show rather than wait until after the show had occurred to write about it. The fashion reporter was unethical, perhaps, but Joan empathized with the woman when she said she wanted to spend some extra time with her children.

  “I’ll be wearing a lovely white chiffon gown,” Joan said, before giving details of the designer and exact description.

  However, that night at dinner before the show, Joan spilled red wine on herself. Some of the other senators’ wives who were not modeling offered to switch dresses with her, but Joan wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I promised a writer I’d be wearing this dress, and she already wrote her story,” Joan explained as she frantically attempted to remove the stain with seltzer water. “I can’t embarrass her. So I’m going to wear this darn dress if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Joan did wear the gown, wine stain and all.

  Pat Finds Jackie “So Insecure”

  By mid-July 1962, the President had ended his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. In fact, Jack had so quickly distanced himself from Marilyn that, according to close associates, he referred to the actress, his relationship with her, and Jackie’s concern about it as “The Monroe Matter.” However, Marilyn was still not entirely out of the picture. Jackie was now apparently aware that Bobby also had some involvement with the actress, though she was unsure to what extent. In Jackie’s view, Marilyn Monroe was probably like a bad headache that wouldn’t go away.

  It was Lee Radziwill’s idea that Jackie meet her in Italy for a vacation to take some time away from “The Monroe Matter.”

  Nunziata Lisi, the Italian friend of Lee Radziwill’s who lived in the small, picturesque Italian resort village of Ravello, on the southern coast of Italy, now says, “Lee told me that she wanted to take Jackie’s mind off a big problem having to do with the President and a famous movie star, whom she did not name.

  “She said that Jackie was completely worn out by the whole business and, for some reason, thought that it was all going to come out, be made public, because there was so much carelessness involved in it,” says Lisi. “She didn’t want to be around for the fallout. She was exhausted. Lee suggested that she spend a couple of weeks in Ravello—where Jackie’s stepbrother Gore Vidal would later live—so I made all of the arrangements for her to arrive on August 6. Lee was in France and would be meeting Jackie in Italy. Most of all, I was looking forward to meeting the much-beloved Jackie Kennedy, and was hopeful that she would forget all of her troubles while in the lovely town of Ravello.”

  Before leaving for Ravello, Jackie had decided to rent her summer home at Hyannis Port to her sisters-in-law, Eunice and Pat. Though she didn’t say so at the time, it seemed clear to people that she planned to be gone all summer.

  Preparing the house for Eunice and Pat was no easy task. The home was furnished simply but in good taste, with a lot of white-painted rattan furniture and large, stuffed, floral-printed sofas and chairs. Jackie asked her secretary to make certain that recently purchased cushions for the furniture on the porch—where Jackie did many of her watercolors—were stored out of sight in the basement. They were replaced by a much older set, there and also outside on the patio. Not trusting that her nieces and nephews would be as considerate of the furniture as her own children, Jackie ordered old, worn, green chintz slipcovers put on the indoor furniture over the flower-patterned cushions. All of her expensive glass and china was to be stored, and only the cheap pieces left on view. All towels and other linens, including sheets and pillowcases, were to be packed away in the basement. John Jr.’s and Caroline’s toys were to be stashed away as well, lest any of their rowdy cousins break one of them. “But you can leave the croquet set,” Jackie said. “I don’t see how they can break a croquet set.”

  After the house was ready for them, Jackie met with Pat there to talk about the terms of the rental, according to Beverly Brennan. “As I recall it, the plan was that the two sisters-in-law would rent the place for the months of July, August, and September, at $1,800 per month,” said Brennan. “But the problem was that Jackie wanted all of the money up front—$5,400. Pat had a check prepared for only $900 for the first month. Jackie was adamant. Grudgingly, Pat tore up the original check and wrote another for $2,700, telling Jackie she would have to get the rest from Eunice.”

  At that meeting, according to what Pat Lawford later told Beverly Brennan, Jackie took this opportunity to discuss the Marilyn Monroe problem, and she asked Pat to talk to Marilyn. Jackie may have been just as concerned about Bobby’s relationship with Marilyn at this time as she had been about Jack’s. It’s not known what Jackie asked Pat to say to Marilyn.

  Pat, always determined to maintain her privacy, did not discuss many details of her talk with Jackie about Marilyn, but she did later tell Brennan that she thought Jackie was being “ridiculous.” She told her, “Jackie is the First Lady. What does Marilyn have that she doesn’t have? Why is Jackie so insecure? I don’t get it.”

  “Jackie probably left the meeting feeling that Pat was completely useless to her,” said Brennan. “She accepted Pat’s money and took off with her Secret Service agent to her home on Squaw Island. Later, I was at a party with Pat and Peter, and Pat said, ‘You know, Jackie is still upset about this Marilyn thing. What do you think about that?’ And Peter said, ‘With all she has to worry about, she’s still worried about Marilyn? I think that’s absolutely priceless,�
� to which Pat said, ‘I agree. Isn’t it?’ Then they shared a laugh. It seemed to me that they both rather enjoyed the fact that Jackie was annoyed, as if she was somehow getting her comeuppance for some transgression that I didn’t know about.”

  Marilyn Monroe’s Death

  Marilyn Monroe’s actions during the last day and night of her life have been studied and documented by dozens of biographers and historians in seemingly countless books about the tragic movie star. It is known that on her last day of life Marilyn Monroe was greatly distressed. Dr. Ralph Greenson, who saw her late that afternoon, observed that she seemed “somewhat drugged and depressed” and, as a precaution, asked Marilyn’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, to spend the night with her.

  Alone in her bedroom with her pills, Marilyn Monroe took her phone with her, put on a stack of her favorite Frank Sinatra records, and closed the door. She made a series of phone calls to reach out to friends such as Peter Lawford and Sydney Guilaroff, her hairdresser. She often called people to tell them that she was thinking about committing suicide. In fact, she had tried to kill herself on numerous occasions in the past, and had been saved just in time by the people she had warned of her intentions.

  Whether she had actually intended it to happen or whether it was purely an accident, on this evening Marilyn Monroe slipped under the complete control of the many pills she had taken. Some time later in the evening, in the stillness of her locked bedroom, alone, naked, her hand still clutching the phone, she closed her eyes for the final time.