Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  For the next two months Ted would remain out of the public eye, mostly in the home he shared with Joan and the children in McLean, Virginia. It was easy to isolate himself within these glamorous trappings—tennis court, football field, swimming pool, servants’ quarters, and a French chef who cooked for the Duke of Windsor. If it were up to Joan, he would never leave.

  Much thought was given to the children at this time—eight-year-old Kara, six-year-old Ted Jr., and year-old Patrick, all of whom came down with chicken pox right after the funeral—in terms of how to protect them from jumping to the conclusion that since both of their beloved uncles had been murdered, their father might be next. Joan refashioned some of Kara’s fairy tales, for instance, so that they would be completely happy and nonviolent. “Have you ever noticed how awful fairy tales are?” she said after Bobby’s death, “what with poisoned apples and mean stepmothers. There’s enough pain in the world without exposing my children to that.”

  True to Kennedy form, though, Ted kept his emotions inside and asked the same of Joan so that even employees were unaware of the turmoil they felt in their lives. Frank Corsini, who along with his twin brother, Jerry, worked part-time for the Kennedys, saw them two weeks after the assassination to see if they needed help. “Joan was in the pool when I drove up,” Frank says. “To look at her and talk to her, you would have thought the only worry she had in the world was arranging for a caretaker to keep the pool and tennis courts.”

  At just thirty-six, Ted had become the effective head of an extended family, responsible in part for the welfare of fifteen children—Jack and Jackie’s two, Bobby and Ethel’s ten, and his and Joan’s three. Along with that personal responsibility, he carried the political burden foisted upon him by being next in line, whether he liked it or not. One person who most definitely did not like the notion of her husband as savior was Joan.

  “Why must it be my husband?” she asked writer Barbara Kevles. “Why must he be the one to carry these terrible problems of the world on his shoulders?”

  “It had been a difficult summer,” Joan remembered. She was the one to tell the children about what had happened to their Uncle Bobby. “Ted couldn’t do it,” she remembered. “It was too painful for him. I often wondered how he managed to stay sane.”

  Joan’s sanity never seemed to be anyone’s concern, though it should have been. No one—especially Ted—saw her cry after Bobby died. Determined to provide a cheerful atmosphere for her family, she always kept their home gay and bright. Eager to support Ted in his hour of need, Joan would stay up long nights with him, trying unsuccessfully to encourage him to open up to her, share his emotions, his misery. On the many nights when he couldn’t sleep, she would stay awake, too, out of sympathy and a sense of duty. The next morning it was her responsibility, she believed, to look refreshed for the sake of the children, while Ted slept into the late afternoon hours.

  One day, when Ted suggested they charter a yacht and cruise Cape Cod, to “get away from it all,” Joan dutifully packed hampers of food, rounded up a dozen Kennedy children (her own, some of Bobby’s, and John Jr.), and sailed off with him as if it were just any pleasure excursion, casually undertaken. On that trip, she and Ted never once talked about the tragedy or about anything that was bothering anyone. In ignoring their dilemma, there was not much else to discuss. So they were distant toward one another, focusing on the children at play.

  “I began to drink alcoholically,” Joan recalls. “But at the time, I didn’t know it. No one really ever does know. I mean, sure, once in a while you have too much to drink and you wake up the next morning and you have a hangover and you think, ‘Oh, I’m not going to do that again.’ A week or two goes by… and then you go and drink too much again. It becomes a pattern that starts to creep up on you.”

  Dazed and dizzy, there were nights when Joan Kennedy would fall asleep sitting at the kitchen table, her head on the table. Ted would be infuriated when he’d find her there, passed out.

  “You think this helps me?” he would bellow at her. “Seeing my wife out cold? How does that help me, Joan? How does that help?”

  Out of a deep sense of shame, Joan Kennedy would then retire to a guest room and do the only thing she could do to make the world go away—she would drink. Ted’s ongoing grief became Joan’s personal failure. If only she were smarter, if only she understood what to do, if only she could be there for him.

  Ethel—Just a Shell

  After Bobby’s assassination, Ethel Kennedy retreated to her home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Virginia, where she would continue to raise her soon-to-be eleven children with the help of two horses, three ponies, one donkey, four dogs, one kitten, ten ducks, five chickens, two roosters, one goose, five rabbits, four pigeons, several sparrows, a parakeet, a cockatoo, three secretaries, two cooks, and a governess. (A sea lion named Sandy, which was kept in the swimming pool, had recently escaped when he learned how to climb out of the pool. Soon, he was flipping down the road on his way to downtown McLean. He was later given to the Washington Zoo.)

  For the first couple of days it was difficult for anyone who visited to notice much of a change in her. She seemed to be her old self as she read and responded to the condolence letters she received, and had even mellowed somewhat—especially in her opinion of the Johnsons. In a letter to LBJ, which Ethel had hand-delivered to the White House on June 19, she wrote that she was especially grateful to him for the manner in which he had made Air Force One available to transport Bobby’s body back to New York from Los Angeles. She also thanked the President for meeting Bobby’s funeral train in Washington and escorting the family to Arlington. “Your kindnesses, both known and unknown, were many but they were all surpassed by the feeling of personal human sympathy which you and Mrs. Johnson gave to my children and me and the entire Kennedy family. We shall always be grateful to you, Mr. President.” She signed the letter, “Love, Ethel.”

  (On the day he received the letter, LBJ sent a quick response back to Ethel: “Practical assistance of the kind I could give is necessary, but it is never enough to assuage the loss. Only time and faith can do that, and the support of people who love you.”)

  Ethel also made plans to take Bobby’s place on the planning board that had been attempting to find solutions to poverty in the Bedford-Stuyvesant slum in New York—as well as tending to the many responsibilities of her household. Pregnant with her eleventh child, she seemed eager for the birth. She enjoyed being a mother, and patiently consoled and comforted her children if any of them were having a particularly difficult day dealing with their father’s death. In fact, she would be so exhausted by the end of her busy day that she would sleep straight through the night.

  “For Ethel, the sun rose and set on Bobby,” said his aide Frank Mankiewicz. “Without him in her life, we all wondered what would be left.” It’s true that Bobby, his goals and his political ambitions, had been the focal point of Ethel’s life for years. They shut out the world. To forget others’ needs, to finally give way to personal sorrow, was what people expected of Ethel at this time. At first Ethel refused to give in to those understandable reactions. She said she was a Kennedy, not only in marriage but also in spirit. She insisted that she would not give up on life. Her religion gave her a sense of peace, she said, and she was determined to rebuild her life upon faith.

  Joan was amazed. “How does she do it?” she asked.

  Jackie was not convinced. The former First Lady knew the emotional devastation she had endured when the President was murdered—she was still carrying the heavy weight of grief, and she also knew Ethel’s temperament and personality. “She’s the type who doesn’t deal with human conditions,” Jackie so accurately observed in a conversation with Roswell Gilpatrick. “She never was. She wouldn’t even be around Joe when he had his stroke. When Patrick died, I didn’t hear a word from her. If she doesn’t crack now, I’m going to be afraid for her,” Jackie added. “It’s not normal. Believe me, Ross,” she said, “I still am not over Jack. How can
she be okay? How can she be?”

  To most of the Kennedys, Bobby’s widow seemed to be the same “Ethie” as always. However, because these were people who were accustomed to stifling their feelings, they couldn’t recognize when someone else was doing the same thing. Only Jackie, who went through the gamut of emotions when her husband was murdered, could see that what Ethel was portraying as her true self was not organic—it was fake. She was doing an imitation of Ethel Kennedy—the Ethel people expected to find when they visited Hickory Hill, and not the one left in the wake of her husband’s assassination—and Jackie saw through it. “I’m telling you here and now, she’s in trouble,” Jackie told Jean Kennedy Smith after visiting Ethel one day and eating soft-shell crabs with her for lunch. Jean blithely responded by saying, “Well, I don’t know, I think she’s doing remarkably well.”

  In the mornings, Ethel would awaken early and play tennis with fierce conviction until completely exhausted, as if exorcising demons of grief, even though she was pregnant. “I refuse to let this get to me,” she said of Bobby’s death. “I know that God has a plan. I just don’t know what it is.”

  “She wouldn’t allow herself to feel the grief that would have been understandable,” said Lem Billings, “which is so typically a Kennedy trait.”

  “It was disturbing,” concurred Rita Dallas. “At least, to me, as a nurse, it was. The rest of them [the family] didn’t seem to recognize it.”

  Ethel bottled up her emotions—her fear, her anger, her pain—just as she had done all of her life during times of great tragedy, such as when her parents were killed in the plane crash. In fact, the only memory anyone had of her breaking down in public was when Jack died and a weeping Ethel had to be consoled by Jackie at the small birthday party Jackie had hosted for her children at the White House. No doubt Ethel had her moments of wrenching emotion in private, but those were times she did not share with anyone. However, it would seem that the stress of putting on a happy face for friends and family was having an effect on her, or as Barbara Gibson put it, “She was never a great actress.”

  “She would snap at her children, smack them, and be very impatient,” said Leah Mason. “In the months, and even years, after Bobby’s death, it got so that it was actually hard for Ethel to put her arms around her children and kiss them. She would hate herself for it. ‘How can I be like this?’ she would ask. ‘What kind of terrible mother am I? It’s not their fault Bobby died.’ Then she would push herself even harder to be a good mother to them, and in doing so seemed to resent them even more. She was a single mother with all of these kids. It was so unfair. She was never the same. She lost her spirit, her fire, that spark that was always Ethel’s that you either loved or hated was gone, never to return.

  “She wanted nothing to do with Jackie and Joan, Eunice, Pat, or Jean. She had her circle of friends, but these were people in whom she did not have to confide, people who didn’t expect her to reveal herself. She knew that if she had lunch with Jackie, it would be all about, ‘How do you really feel?’ And she didn’t want to discuss how she really felt about anything and, really, she never discussed anything, ever, with anyone that I ever heard about.”

  Barbara Gibson adds, “It was as if she had just internalized it all, the hurt, the pain, the loss… and then, it no longer existed. To me, it was like she had hollowed out all of her insides and now she was just a shell.”

  One Secret Service agent recalls the weekend in the fall of 1968 when Ethel telephoned Ted to tell him that she believed she had nothing left to live for and that she was considering suicide. She had been drinking heavily. Even though everyone who knew her thought it inconceivable that Ethel would do such a thing, Ted was alarmed enough that he and Jackie and two Secret Service agents decided to go to Hickory Hill for the weekend, ostensibly to watch over her. However, Ethel refused to come out of her bedroom, locking herself in and not emerging the entire weekend. Instead, she slipped a handwritten note under the door that said she was humiliated by her threat, would never actually go through with it, and apologized to both Ted and Jackie “for being so ridiculous.” Though she pleaded with them to leave from the other side of her bedroom door, they decided it was best if they stayed.

  “So Ted and Jackie and the two of us ended up spending the weekend taking care of all those kids, and supervising all of those servants,” said the agent.

  In the months after Bobby’s death, the Kennedys’ New York office (run by Stephen Smith, where most of the family’s business was conducted) forced Ethel to sell off art, horses, and other assets, and insisted that she dramatically reduce her staff, explaining that her expenses at Hickory Hill were so high that she would have to learn to economize. Just as it was with Jackie, Ethel wasn’t left with the millions the public assumed she would have after Bobby was buried. In fact, she was advised by one callous family member to marry a wealthy man, “and as soon as possible.” When there was a delay in the Kennedy office in setting up an account from which Ethel would now draw for expenses, three months went by without any money for Ethel from the Kennedys. Jackie was appalled at the way Ethel was being treated. “With all of those children?” she said. “This should never happen.”

  Jackie knew what Ethel was up against; the Kennedys had put her on a strict budget as well after Jack died. It was an ongoing annoyance in her life that the Kennedys’ New York office constantly questioned her expenses, and it was especially embarrassing when Rose involved “the help.” Rose’s chauffeur, Frank Saunders, recalled that just a year earlier (in 1967), Rose had a discussion with him about Jackie’s expenses.

  “Are you doing food shopping for Jacqueline?” she wanted to know. Her tone was one of great suspicion. She had heard a rumor that her chauffeur was shopping for Jackie and charging the Kennedys’ account for the former First Lady’s groceries. Frank explained that he wasn’t actually doing any major shopping for Jackie but that when her maid needed “a few things” he would go to the store and fetch them. Perhaps, all told, it added up to about fifty dollars a week.

  “And you’re then charging that to the Kennedys’ account?” Rose asked, her temper rising.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, I want a stop put to that immediately,” Rose said with controlled rage. “I don’t want Jacqueline putting her food on our bill.”

  Frank said he would do as he was told. “We must keep these things separate,” Rose reminded him.

  Now Rose—who routinely ran around the Hyannis Port home shouting at the servants, “Lights out! Lights out!” in an effort to save on the electric bill—was on a roll about her former daughter-in-law’s spending ways. “And Jacqueline is going to have to cut back on her personal staff, too. This cannot continue. She’s just going to have to learn to manage within a budget. Mr. Kennedy’s [Joe’s] office cannot pay for every whim of Jacqueline’s, you know. And, by the way, those people are always wanting raises,” Rose continued, speaking of Jackie’s staff. “And they always want overtime. The maid and her secretary. Overtime! Can you imagine?”

  It’s always been reported that Jackie spent the Kennedys’ money freely and without regard after Jack’s death, but it would seem that she only did what she felt she must to live the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, without gouging the family—and the country—for every cent she could get. For instance, on January 12, 1967, Jackie wrote a letter to the President about the financing of her office space in New York. She had it delivered to LBJ from Ted’s office, by messenger.

  In her letter, Jackie noted that for the previous three years, “Congress has been most understanding and generous in granting me the funds to maintain an office for my official business.” She explained that this office had made it possible for her to handle the volume of mail that she received after Jack’s death. “As you know, in the fall of 1965, I felt that the volume of business and mail was such that my staff and expenses could be cut back,” she wrote, “and I asked that the appropriation be reduced accordingly. Now, the work at my of
fice, although still considerable, has diminished enough so that I can personally assume the burden of my own official business. Therefore, I no longer wish a government appropriation for this purpose.”

  “She basically only wanted what she felt she needed when it came to financing,” said George Smathers. “No more. No less. She spent a lot, don’t get me wrong, a whole hell of a lot—which was always a problem for JFK who thought she was out of control. But after his death, she wasn’t inconsiderate about it, as has been painted in the past. The Kennedys were pretty cheap.”

  In order to assist Ethel during this troubling time, Jackie lent her $50,000. Though she signed a promissory note, Ethel never paid back the loan. Many years later, in 1974, Jackie’s attorneys demanded payment in a strongly worded letter to Ethel, to which they attached a copy of the promissory note. Ethel refused to remit, however, saying that she did not have the funds. When Jackie learned that her lawyers had confronted Ethel without her authorization she was extremely angry with them.

  “It’s completely uncalled for,” she wrote to one of them. “Please do not allow this matter to become an issue between me and Mrs. Kennedy. It is now my direction to you to write her back immediately and tell her that the loan I gave her in 1968 is now a gift. Also, please send me a copy of the correspondence to Mrs. Kennedy, so that I may be sure that it is properly worded.”

  PART TEN

  Ted Negotiates Jackie’s Nuptials

  “You know, Mrs. Kennedy is not just an ordinary woman,” Ted Kennedy said, thoughtfully. “In fact, you might say she’s saint.”

  Aristotle Onassis looked at Ted from the other side of an imposing mahogany desk. “A saint?” he repeated, bemused. “Like the Blessed Mother.”