Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Joan acknowledged that Jackie had always been one of the few people she could depend upon when she needed help. But Jackie said that she now wished she had advised Joan to divorce Ted years earlier instead of telling her to learn to live with his unfaithfulness, “then maybe you wouldn’t have gotten so sick.” She was apparently referring to Joan’s alcoholism.

  “I couldn’t have done it, anyway,” Joan observed. “Times were so different. We did the best we could back then, though, didn’t we?”

  “We sure did,” Jackie agreed. “With what we had to work with, anyway.”

  The two former sisters-in-law shared a laugh. Then the ever-practical Jackie recommended that Joan be represented by her New York attorney, Alexander Forger. Joan took her up on the offer.

  Before she hung up, Jackie said, “My wish for you, Joan, is that you are always surrounded by people who love you, no matter what—without hesitation or condition.” Jackie’s words so touched her sister-in-law that Joan cried upon hanging up the phone.

  Later Joan would recall, “Back then, I probably couldn’t have taken Jackie’s advice if she had suggested divorce, which she never would have done. There was so much to consider. The times were different, I was Catholic, we had children, not to mention Ted’s career. Nowadays, women have choices. Back then, we had few.”

  Longing to expand her horizons, Joan continued her education and later, in 1981, received a Master’s in Education from Lesley College. “I didn’t know after all that drinking if I had any brain cells left,” she joked to one writer. Her estranged husband was present for the ceremony, as were her three devoted children, and, much to the amazement of many observers, he seemed proud of her. “I want the personal credibility that little piece of paper gives me,” Joan said at the time. “Now that I have that, I’m no longer just Joan Kennedy.”

  For Joan, as for many alcoholics, her sobriety would not be easy to maintain. Joan would have several relapses in the years after the 1980 campaign, including a particularly embarrassing setback in the summer of 1988 when, while vacationing in Hyannis Port, she crashed her Buick Regal into a chain-link fence, narrowly missing a woman crossing the road. Russell Goering, who was vacationing at a rented house, witnessed the accident: “When I approached the car, she was slumped down against the door on the driver’s side. She was very thin and looked sick. Her face was deathly white and her pupils were really dilated. She looked like a whipped dog, with no spirit at all.” After seeing what occurred, five local youngsters came to Joan’s aid. One of them locked her keys in the car’s trunk so that she wouldn’t be able to do any further driving. Joan, whose license was suspended following a similar offense in 1974, was arrested for drunk driving.

  All throughout the 1980s Joan would find herself in a series of drug and alcohol abuse centers as she waged her battle against alcoholism, with the media as her watchdog, nipping at her heels every uncertain step along the way.

  Joan’s last relapse was in 1992. With floundering times then behind her, she began building block by block a sturdy foundation for her future, as she once explained. Some of the blocks were marked “I’ll never drink again,” others, “I’ll live a good and fulfilling life.” They interlocked; they were interdependent. Never again, she believed, would one stand without the other. Never again would she waste another moment under the influence of anything other than the exhilaration she felt at finally overcoming her illness. “I couldn’t believe how hard it was to stop,” says Joan, who has not had a drink in eight years. “Alcoholism is a baffler. God knows, toward the end of my drinking, talk about being enslaved.”

  Today, sixty-two-year-old Joan Kennedy writes in a letter dated November 8, 1998, of the joy she experiences daily, “spending a lot of my time with my four grandchildren and enjoying my part-time job as chairperson of Boston’s Cultural Council and serving on the board of directors of four great Boston institutions. I am blessed with many dear friends whom I have known since my college days, and I still play the piano or narrate with orchestras for a favorite charity,” she concludes. “Fortunately, I am well and happy in this present stage of my life.”

  Joan remains close to her three children, Kara, now thirty-nine, Ted Jr., thirty-seven, and Patrick, thirty-two. Patrick went on to follow his father’s example in becoming a politician, as a congressional representative from Rhode Island. With a note of facetiousness, Joan says she will write her memoirs when “I’m about ninety years old, because only then will I feel safe about writing everything turthfully. I don’t want to speak about a lot of what took place. I have to think about my children.”

  Ted Kennedy is, as of this writing, in his sixth full term as a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. A passionate advocate of liberal causes such as universal health care and gun control, Ted has, over the years, earned great admiration as a leader in the United States Senate. He is credited with raising the minimum wage and reforming campaign finance laws. “He’s one of the most effective senators of this century,” observes Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

  In July 1992, Ted married the former Victoria Reggie, a Washington, D.C., lawyer eighteen years Joan’s junior. In what some observers felt was a cruel twist of fate, considering all that Joan Kennedy had endured as a Kennedy wife, Ted had their twenty-three-year marriage annulled so that he could marry Reggie in the Catholic Church. In effect, he invalidated his very union to Joan Kennedy in the eyes of the Church, so that he could move forward with his life.

  According to one priest in the Boston diocese, Ted’s annulment was granted for “lack of due discretion,” a term which covers cases in which a person had wed in the Catholic Church but did not fully understand the nature and responsibilities of the sacred commitment. The standard is also used for purposes of annulment when one of the spouses was addicted to drugs or alcohol and could not live up to the requirements of the union. After the annulment, Ted took Communion at his mother’s Funeral Mass in 1995.

  Joan’s feelings about the annulment of her marriage are unknown; she simply refuses to discuss it. As a result of years of therapy, reflection, and self-examination, she says that she has managed to move from her old self through a new self, to, finally, her true self—a woman who fully embraces who she is and the life she has lived, both the good and the bad. She has no need to explain any of it to anyone; there will be no further People magazine cover stories touting her liberation from alcoholism and a bad marriage. Indeed, with no more false smiles needed for the purpose of Kennedy family public relations, Joan is now free to simply not say anything at all, if that is her choice.

  Joan Bennett Kennedy sees her former husband, Ted Kennedy, from time to time and reunites with him every Thanksgiving and Christmas for the sake of her children and grandchildren.

  The years after Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1980 were not easy ones for Ethel Kennedy. In 1983, her son Bobby was arrested and pleaded guilty to possession of heroin. He was sentenced to two years’ probation. Then a tragedy occurred in 1984 when another son, twenty-eight-year-old David, was found dead in a Palm Beach hotel from a heroin overdose. At the age of twelve, David had watched his own father’s assassination on television and, as has been repeatedly reported, never really recovered. “Nobody ever talked to me about my father’s death,” he told Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of the book The Kennedys: An American Drama, a year before his death. “To this day in fact, my mother has never talked to me about it.”

  In January 1998, Ethel Kennedy endured still another tragedy when her thirty-nine-year-old son Michael was killed in a skiing accident. Michael, married to Frank Gifford’s daughter Vicki, had been accused of improper relations with his children’s teenage baby-sitter. Just as the uproar was fading, his life was suddenly taken on the wintry slopes in a perilous—and typically Kennedyesque—game of touch football on skis. Shortly after David’s death, Ethel’s brother, Jim Skakel, died from a painful kidney disease. Later that year, she was faced with the thirtieth anniversary of
Bobby’s assassination. Somehow, though, her deep religious convictions have continued to sustain Ethel Kennedy, which seems the greatest miracle of all.

  While Jackie was supportive of Joan’s divorce, Ethel was not. No matter the circumstances, she did not understand why Joan would not want to remain a Kennedy. Ethel talked about the divorce on the telephone to friends and relatives, saying that her sister-in-law should have just been grateful to still have a Kennedy husband in her life, despite the problems he presented. “I don’t have one anymore, and neither does Jackie,” she told one confidante. Ethel claimed to not understand what it was that Ted had done to Joan that she should “treat him so spitefully.” She felt that Bobby’s brother had served Joan as well as any Kennedy husband had ever served his wife, which certainly wasn’t saying much (though no one would dare tell Ethel so). It had been enough for her. It had been enough for Jackie. Why not Joan?

  Today, Ethel’s surviving children, all of whom had troubled childhoods, are an impressive brood who have gone on to fulfilling and respectable adult lives, some in public service: Kathleen, forty-eight, is Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland; Joe, forty-seven, after a congressional career, is now the head of Citizen’s Energy, a nonprofit organization that provides home heating oil to low-income families in Massachusetts; Bobby, forty-six, is founder of New York’s Pace University environmental law program; Mary Courtney, forty-three, is a homemaker with her husband, Paul Hill, the Irish independence activist; Mary Kerry, forty, is presently writing a book and is the wife of HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo; Christopher, thirty-six, is vice president of the Kennedy family’s Chicago Merchandise Mart; Matthew Maxwell, thirty-five, now a teacher at Boston College, is the former District Attorney in the Juvenile Crime Unit of the Philadelphia prosecutor’s office and also the editor of Make Gentle the Life of This World, a book of poems loved by his father, as well as other written tributes to the late Bobby; Douglas, thirty-two, is a cable television news reporter; and Rory, thirty-one, is a documentary filmmaker.

  In 1999, seventy-one-year-old Ethel Kennedy was asked, at a ceremony marking the eightieth birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, about her ambitions at this time in her life. “A long life, to watch my children grow,” she quickly answered, with a warm smile. “I have the most precious gift of all… my family.”

  Jacqueline Bouvier, Ethel Skakel, and Joan Bennett probably would not have known each other except that they had happened to marry sons of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy. Though their relationships with each other encompassed a wide range of human emotions over the years—from jealousy, compassion, indifference, and anger to joy and triumph—they shared a unique history, forever joined as sisters-in-law, and as Kennedys. Though they lived a privileged existence, one that many on the outside viewed as a surreal fantasy, the irony is that they were really just everyday women—sisters, wives, and mothers—who often found themselves desperately attempting to make some sense of troubled, turbulent lives.

  Jackie, who always somehow expressed the appropriate sentiment, once made an observation about her life that seems fitting in describing not only her personal experiences but also those of her sisters-in-law Ethel and Joan. “I have been through a lot and have suffered a great deal,” she said, her words evoking painful memories and quick flashes of the past. “But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love and happiness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called life. You cannot separate the good and the bad,” concluded this woman of Camelot, who certainly had encountered her share of both. “And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.”

  Sadly, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis passed away on Thursday, May 19, 1994, after a brief but painful battle with the swiftly moving cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because she had always taken such exceptional care of herself—dieting, swimming, jogging, riding her horses—and had enjoyed good health nearly all her life, her illness seemed incomprehensible. (The worst ailment she had previously faced was a persistent sinus inflammation in the winter of 1962.) She described her feelings of pride at the way she had taken care of herself as “a kind of hubris,” when she spoke to Arthur Schlesinger about her surprising sickness. She was determined to beat the cancer, however, as she wrote to friends.

  The last of more than forty years of correspondence to Lady Bird Johnson is not dated, but it seems to have been written in February 1994, just after the terrible news of Jackie’s illness was confirmed to a shocked public by Jackie’s longtime spokeswoman, Nancy Tuckerman, in the New York Times. The years had never diminished the deep fondness Jackie and Lady Bird felt for one another, and Jackie still considered her successor in the White House a close friend; she had hosted Lady Bird at her Martha’s Vineyard home just six months earlier. Whereas Jackie’s handwriting was ordinarily a perfect backhand, the penmanship in her last letter to Lady Bird seemed unsteady, perhaps a result of the many anticancer drugs she was taking, which were almost as debilitating as the illness itself.

  The always optimistic Jackie wrote to her elderly friend that everything in her life was going well, and that she looked forward to seeing her “in the Vineyard again next summer.” She signed the note, “Much love, Jackie.” (Apparently, Jackie passed to her married daughter [to Edwin Schlossberg], Caroline, her penchant for letter-writing. She would write personal notes to all of those friends of her mother who attended the funeral, including Lady Bird, whom she thanked for “coming to New York to wish my mother farewell.”)

  Though the weather was gloomy and drizzling the evening Jackie died, it was a glorious, spring morning—warm and sunny—on the day of Jackie’s funeral. Seven hundred attendees began arriving at 8:30 A.M. to go through a series of security checks before they could enter St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church at the corner of Park Avenue and 84th Street in New York. The mourners had been called by phone or had received hand-delivered notices.

  John F. Kennedy, Jr., said the family wanted the funeral to reflect his mother’s essence, “her love of words, the bonds of home and family, and her spirit of adventure.”

  (Perhaps the only blessing of Jackie’s death was that she would not have to experience the terrible grief she no doubt would have suffered when John was killed after the private plane he was piloting plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean. John and his wife of nearly five years, Caroline Bessette [whom Jackie had never met], and her sister Lauren, were on their way to Ethel Kennedy’s home on the Cape to attend the wedding ceremony of her daughter Rory—the child with whom Ethel was pregnant when Bobby was assassinated. John, Caroline, and Lauren were all buried at sea on July 22, 1999, which was, coincidentally, the anniversary of Rose Kennedy’s birthday.)

  In accordance with Jackie’s wishes for privacy, no television cameras were allowed in the church, though an audio feed was transmitted by speakers to the 4,000 people who waited outside behind police barriers, and to the media. The service began promptly at 10:00 A.M., with John Jr. reading Chapter 25 from the Book of Isaiah. Ted gave the eulogy. Caroline read the poem “Cape Cod,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an evocative reminder of the place that was so identified with the Kennedy family. Perhaps the most moving was New York diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman’s reading of “Ithaka,” a celebration of Odysseus’ voyage by the Greek poet Constantine Peter Cavafy. At the end of the poem, Tempelsman added his own personal and emotional sentiments about Jackie.

  A portly, balding diamond merchant, Tempelsman had always seemed an unlikely companion for a woman who had so epitomized style and grace, yet he had been her friend and lover for more than ten years. He had lived with Jackie since the early eighties, and he and his wife of thirty years, Lily, never legally divorced, though his wife did grant him an Orthodox Jewish divorce. They had three children.

  Sixty-four-year-old Tempelsman’s friendship with Jackie began after Aristotle Onassis’s death, when Jackie turned to him for investment advice. His astute hand
ling of her affairs would quadruple her worth after 1975, eventually leaving her with a fortune estimated at $200 million at her death, the bulk of which would go to John and Caroline. (Interestingly, Jackie made no provision for her sister Lee in her will, “because I have already done so during my lifetime.”) Jackie and Maurice began dating in 1981. “Jack was a politician, and he was busy. Need I say more?” said Paris attorney Samuel Pisar, a family friend. “With Onassis, she was a trophy. Tempelsman didn’t look on her as a trophy.”

  “M.T.,” as Maurice was called by Jackie’s family, spoke fluent French and was also a collector of African art. He did not place any demands on Jackie, and she reciprocated. Throughout the years, Jackie’s consort treated her with respect and dignity. He was with her in her living room to lend emotional support when she broke the devastating news of her cancer to John Jr. and Caroline. Tempelsman was the kind of man she deserved to have in her life after so much disappointment in relationships and so much personal growth.

  When asked by David Wise, author and White House correspondent during the Kennedy administration, if she might one day write her memoirs, Jackie said that it would probably never happen. For her, a book editor at Doubleday in the last years of her life, it was a matter of perspective and objectivity. People change, she noted, and the person she might have written about thirty years earlier “is not the same person today. The imagination takes over. When Isak Dinesen wrote Out of Africa, she left out how badly her husband had treated her,” Jackie observed. “She created a new past, in effect.”

  Now Camelot was just a distant dream, its Queen being laid to rest, her life’s history as a woman and national treasure left to biographers and historians to analyze and explain. Ironically, if it had been left up to Jackie, she too might well have “created a new past,” much as she did when Jack was murdered. Image and fantasy had always played major roles in the house of Kennedy, and never was that more true than in the way Jackie wished her relationship to Jack be remembered.