Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  On August 6, Bobby and Ethel were with their San Francisco host John Bates when they heard the news on the radio: Marilyn Monroe was dead. Bates recalls, “To tell you the truth, we didn’t treat it that seriously. Bobby said something like, ‘Wow. Imagine that. Marilyn’s dead.’ It was taken lightly by both him and Ethel.”

  Ed Guthman, Bobby Kennedy’s press representative, was also in San Francisco, where Bobby was set to address the American Bar Association. He says that Bobby had a slightly more emotional reaction. “We talked about the terrible tragedy,” Guthman said. “He said, ‘How terrible. How truly terrible.’ That was about it.”

  “I believe it was Monday morning when I heard from Ethel,” says her assistant, Leah Mason. “Bobby was going to give his speech to the lawyers that day, and I believe she said they were headed to Seattle after that for the World’s Fair. Then they were going fishing on the Washington coast before camping on the Olympic Peninsula with Justice [William O.] Douglas. She called me at Hickory Hill specifically to tell me that if anyone called to ask about Marilyn’s death, they should be told to contact Mr. Kennedy’s office. That I shouldn’t have any comment. Nobody called, though. I didn’t get one call…. Mrs. Kennedy sounded upset,” says Mason. “She said, ‘That poor woman, she actually killed herself. Can you believe it? I’m sure she must have overdosed. How terrible.’ ”

  Ethel knew virtually nothing about Monroe; it appears that she considered reaching out to any survivors Monroe might have had. “I wonder if she has a mother living, or any children,” she said to Mason. “I don’t know a thing about her. You find out.”

  Later that day Mason did some research and found out that Marilyn had died childless, that her father was unknown, and that her mother was in a mental hospital somewhere. The next day Ethel called Mason. “I then told her what I learned about Marilyn’s family,” Mason remembers. “Ethel was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘How awful,’ and hung up the phone without even saying good-bye.”

  Jackie Kennedy flew to New York from Virginia with four tennis racquets, a golf bag, and eleven suitcases in preparation for her trip to Ravello for the vacation suggested by her sister, Lee Radziwill. The trip had been specifically designed to help Jackie forget her Marilyn-related problems. Ironically, on that same day, while in New York, Jackie heard about the movie star’s death from news reports—and almost canceled the vacation.

  Nunziata Lisi, who had helped organize and plan the trip and was anxious to meet the First Lady, recalls, “I received a telephone call from Lee telling me that she had just heard from Jackie, and that Jackie wanted to cancel the trip because Marilyn Monroe had died. I was shocked. This was the first I had heard of her death. She said that Jackie was ‘bloody distressed’ about it.

  “Then that’s even more reason for her to come,” Lisi remembers having told Radziwill.

  “That’s what I think,” Lee told her. “But Jacks [Lee’s nickname for her sister] is very distraught, and she wants to go back to Virginia now. She said she’s in no mood for a vacation.”

  “But I don’t understand why she cares so much about a death of this movie star,” Lisi said. “I know it’s terrible, but—really!”

  Lisi recalls that there was a pause on the line, after which Lee said, “What can I tell you? She had great empathy for this person. I don’t know why… I don’t even know that she’s met her.”

  Two hours after her first conversation with Nunziata, Lee called back.

  “Guess what!” she said, brightly. “Jackie’s coming after all. I talked her into it. Thank goodness. I think the trip will do her a world of good.” Jackie would be accompanied by her daughter, Caroline, Maud Shaw, and three Secret Service agents. Her son, John, would stay behind, sick with the flu.

  It would seem that she never openly discussed it, so it’s not known exactly why Jackie Kennedy was so upset about Marilyn’s death, only that she most certainly felt great anxiety over it. In the end, Jackie’s specific feelings about Marilyn Monroe remain as much a mystery as the movie star’s death. However, unlike what has been assumed for decades, Jackie most certainly was impacted by Monroe’s death, as was made clear to observers before and during her trip to Ravello, which was described by a White House press release as “a private vacation.”

  As distressed as she was about Marilyn’s death privately, in public Jackie remained remote and detached from it. She released a simple statement to the media: “She will go on eternally,” the release said. With that impersonal statement, Jackie Kennedy closed the subject of Marilyn Monroe, refusing to ever discuss her again publicly.

  Jackie Goes Away to Think

  The picturesque clifftop village of Ravello, Italy, some twenty-five miles south of Naples on the Gulf of Salerno, must have seemed to Jackie a million miles away from her marital woes. El Episcopio, the twelve-room villa that Lee Radziwill had rented for her sister, was perched like a swallow’s nest on top of a steep, eleven-hundred-foot cliff. The sixteenth-century villa, with its own private beach across the bay, had been inhabited by the last King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuel III, and his wife, Elena. It was the perfect place for the kind of isolation Jackie seemed to require after the death of Marilyn Monroe. This was actually Jackie’s second time in Ravello; she had visited a decade earlier when she was a student in France, but only for a night.

  From her room, Lee’s view was a spectacular panorama of ice-blue sky and deep aqua water. As she opened her window, a cool sea breeze filled the room. “After breakfast, I’ll introduce you to my sister,” she promised her friend Nunziata Lisi. “She’s so troubled these days. Her husband is making her crazy, you know?”

  As they gossiped about Jackie’s troubles, the two women stared out the window at the thrilling scenic view. Lowering their gaze, they noticed a lone figure perched on one of the jutting rocks below.

  “Why, that can’t be her, can it?” Nunziata said.

  Nunziata recalls that Lee went to a dresser, opened a drawer, and pulled from it a large pair of binoculars. She then went back to the window and began peering through the glasses at the scene below.

  “Oh, my God,” she exclaimed. “That is her.” She handed the binoculars to Nunziata.

  “Why, she looks like the loneliest woman in the world, doesn’t she?” Nunziata said.

  Lee sighed deeply. “That is so like her to be sitting down there by herself,” she said sadly. “My poor, poor sister. She has it all, but she has nothing.”

  “But that’s just not safe,” Nunziata said, ignoring Lee’s comment about Jackie and still looking through the glasses. It had been a long, steep walk for Jackie to get to the coast, three hundred uneven steps ending at a small rocky landing. Alone with her thoughts, Jackie was so still that she seemed at one with the scenery, as if she were a statue. “She shouldn’t be sitting down there,” Nunziata said, alarmed. “Why, one good wave, and America will have lost its First Lady.”

  “Oh, let’s just leave her,” Lee said after a moment’s hesitation. “She’s thinking. That’s why I brought her here, anyway. To think.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t worry,” Lee said. “I guarantee that there’s a Secret Service man somewhere.”

  Lee took the glasses from her friend and scanned the area. “See, right over there, behind that rock, there’s one,” she said, pointing.

  Then, after a beat: “And there! Look—another. And over there—look, still another.”

  Because of the way Jackie had reacted to Marilyn’s death, Lee wanted her sister’s vacation to be special. The spot had been recommended to her by millionaire Gianni Agnelli who, with his brother Umberto, manufactured the Italian Fiat automobile. (Gianni had met Jack and Jackie earlier, in 1955, on board Aristotle Onassis’s yacht.) Lee had decided that the usual chef employed by the villa was not suitable and instead hired a sophisticated French chef she knew in London. She also organized a ten-car procession with police motorcade to pick up Jackie at the airport.

  Mayor Lorenzo Mansi an
d practically the entire population of Ravello (2,500 people) were on hand to greet Jackie at the bottom of the hill leading to the resort. A troupe of sixteen children, wearing traditional Italian costumes, performed a tarantella dance, much to Jackie’s delight. Meanwhile, all of the quaint shops in Ravello had been decorated by the owners in carnival colors to celebrate Jackie’s visit.

  Paolo Caruso, head of the tourist bureau at that time, recalls, “It was like the arrival of a saint, the way she was treated by the Ravellesi. She looked beautiful in white harem pants and white top, with black belt and matching bag and gloves. She had on a white scarf, tied around her neck, which she took off after a while. She smiled, waved, and was very gracious.”

  “Privately, I found her to be a very quiet, very sad person when I finally got to meet her,” Nunziata Lisi said. “She, the Prince, Lee, I, and a bunch of others went on Gianni’s [Agnelli] yacht, The Agnelli, on her first evening at the resort. We sailed under the stars to Capri, which was about twenty miles. We ate spaghetti and piccata and drank the local wine. It was an evening of almost intolerable sweetness and melancholy.

  “Irene Galitizine-Medici, who was one of the country’s top designers, was also aboard with her husband. I remember that Jackie didn’t like her at all. At one point, Irene said to her, ‘My dear, I would love to design some little frock for you to wear to one of those fabulous White House balls.’ Jackie stared at her rather coolly and said, ‘Dear, I don’t wear little frocks, and I already have a designer, thank you.’

  “She was in a bad mood the entire trip, very preoccupied,” recalls Nunziata Lisi. “As if things couldn’t get worse, she had just gotten a wire from her secretary that her cat (Tom Kitten) had died. The poor dear was upset about that as well. So we were on the yacht, drifting on the Mediterranean, and some person said, ‘Have you heard this awful news about Marilyn Monroe?’ and I noticed Jackie immediately become very rigid. Lee interrupted quickly and said, ‘Oh, please. Nothing unpleasant while on the way to Capri.’

  “ ‘But the poor dear committed suicide, haven’t you heard?’ the person said, continuing on about Marilyn. ‘They found her dead, lying nude in her bed.’ At that, Jackie suddenly turned and snapped, ‘Isn’t it tragic enough without all of us sitting here under a full moon and gossiping about it?’ When she said that, everyone stopped and stared at her, stunned.”

  Jackie got up from her chair and walked to the other side of the yacht. There, with a faint smile, she watched as a couple of mandolin players and an Italian singer performed “O Sole Mio.”

  The next day, the same party and some other friends of Lee’s and Jackie’s went to a nightclub in Ravello called Number Two. Wearing green Capri pants and a matching blouse, Jackie had to be coaxed by Lee to dance the cha-cha with Count Silvio Medici del Vascello. “She did not want to dance,” said one reporter who sneaked into the night-club. “She was in a dour mood. Something was bothering her. Lee Radziwill was going around to everyone and apologizing for her sister, saying she was under the weather.”

  The next morning, Sunday, Jackie attended Mass at the local Catholic church. When she got there, she discovered that the pastor, Father Francesco Camera, expected her to sit on an ornate, sixteenth-century prie-dieu with red velvet pillows. Because this seat was usually reserved for the visiting Bishop of Amalfi, Jackie felt uncomfortable about using it and instead sat in one of the wooden pews, next to Mayor Mansi. Later, the Mayor would recall overhearing Jackie say to Caroline in Italian, which she spoke well, “Caroline, preghiamo per papa.” (“Caroline, let us pray for father.”)

  PART FOUR

  The Kennedy Women Do Men’s Work

  In the Kennedy world, politics was a man’s game—or at least that’s what the men liked to think. It did not appear that they had much tolerance for their wives’ opinions. “[Jack] Kennedy could not be swayed by any woman,” said Myer Feldman, who was Deputy Special Counsel to JFK. “He might be called a chauvinist today. He did not think most women were his equal.”

  In fact, though, the wives were not just silent partners. They did have opinions, and they did make them known—whether their husbands were interested or not. Going all the way back to Rose and her relationship with Joe in the 1930s and ’40s, Kennedy wives often influenced the course of events.

  Rose, who had a fine ear for politics and a keen sense of the right thing to do, was in her glory when Joe was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James. His position was a huge honor, especially for an Irish Catholic, and the Kennedys were generally approved of in England. They were a breath of fresh air, and the children—especially the older girls, who were popular with London society—made a favorable impression.

  Sometimes Joe’s democratic ways of doing things were well received, but just as often they were not. Joe had become known for his unusual habits, acting in a less than distinguished—and less than British—manner by greeting people with his feet on his desk, chewing gum, swearing and losing his temper. While Rose was charmingly behaved, Joseph was often crass and undignified. He believed that the British were weak and could not be depended upon in a military conflict, and he made many enemies as a result of his outspokenness.

  Even worse was Joe’s growing isolationism on the eve of World War II. Rose tried to get him to tone it down because FDR was about to be reelected and he needed the country behind him if he was going to send help to Great Britain. However, Joe was loud in his opposition to the President he supposedly served. When he went to Washington, he chewed out Roosevelt as though the President were an underling. Furious with him for his insolence, and confused by Joseph’s seeming support of some of Hitler’s actions (“I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to go to war to save the Czechs,” he said when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia), Roosevelt saw to it that Kennedy resigned and he made sure his political career was at an end.

  Rose was extremely upset. Yet if she had tried to talk to Joseph about any of it, he wouldn’t have listened. He and his sons had always been a stubborn bunch and, like a lot of men of their time, they had to be pushed into thinking of women as more than just the mothers of their children. It was especially ironic, then, that private poll soundings by the Kennedys always indicated that more women than men favored the family and its politics.

  In 1946, when Jack ran for the House of Representatives in his first campaign, Rose and Eunice hosted a successful reception for 1,500—mostly women—at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge. It had been anticipated that Kennedy’s primary opponent, Mike Neville, would take Cambridge by a landslide, but in the end he barely won. Neville would later cite the Kennedy women’s luncheon as “the clincher” that made it such a close race. In the end, Jack would defeat a field of ten in the primaries and go on to an overwhelming victory in November over his Republican opponent, Lester Brown.

  Five years later, in 1951, one of the factors that contributed to John Kennedy’s surviving the Republican landslide that swept Dwight D. Eisenhower into the Presidency was Rose’s involvement in the campaign. The family patriarch was completely perplexed when political strategies suggested that the Kennedy women—Rose in particular—be recruited to campaign. When John Powers, leader of Boston’s Democratic drive, wanted Rose to speak at a series of rallies for her son, Joseph roared, “But why? She’s a grandmother, for heaven’s sake.”

  “She’s also a Gold Star mother,” John Powers said, “the mother of a congressman and a war hero, the beautiful wife of Joseph P. Kennedy and the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald—which means she’s hot stuff in Boston. I need her and I’ve got to have her.”

  Rose loved campaigning and, as the daughter of a legendary mayor of Boston, knew exactly what she was doing when she was on the trail. She became a valuable asset to Jack’s senatorial campaign of ’51. On a typically busy day, she would change her clothes in the back seat of a car—wearing a glamorous gown and expensive jewels to give one speech to a formal gathering, then a simple skirt and blouse at
another function at a union hall. Dave Powers recalls, “She wowed them everywhere.”

  Rose, Eunice, Jean, Pat, and Ethel—who was the only Kennedy wife at the time—appeared all over the state during the senatorial campaign, at women’s clubs, street-corner rallies, and on front door steps after ringing doorbells. It was once calculated that more than 75,000 women attended coffee and tea parties hosted by the Kennedy women during that campaign. In the end, Kennedy ended up beating his opponent, the incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., by 70,737 votes.

  Jackie’s participation in the family’s politics can be traced back to the Democratic Convention of 1956, in Chicago. As expected, most of the Kennedy women found a way to participate, except for Pat, who was eight months pregnant, and Rose, who was on vacation with Joseph in France. Jackie, expecting her own child in about a month, probably shouldn’t have gone either, since she’d already suffered one miscarriage. However, as the dutiful wife, she didn’t want to miss so important a moment in Jack’s life. Besides, Ethel was nearly eight months along herself, and she wasn’t letting that stop her from participating.

  So, even though her doctors strongly suggested that she stay behind lest she jeopardize her health or the baby’s, Jackie was adamant that she be in Chicago to campaign with her husband. Adlai Stevenson was the likely Democratic candidate for president but the vice presidential spot was an open field, and the notion of a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket seemed a distinct possibility.

  For his part, Jack also wanted his wife in Chicago, but not because he needed her emotional support so much as because he needed her for purposes of public relations. The divorced Stevenson would need a married running mate, and Jackie was the perfect, poster-board wife—not only married, but pregnant. She was also attractive, and since the convention was to be televised, Jack figured that once America got an eyeful of Jackie, he’d have a strong asset in her.