Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (9 page)

mother often played host to the most pious of nuns and priests. So zealously did mother and daughter proselytize that some of Ethel’s friends were actually forbidden by their parents to play at the Skakel home.

“How can I fight God?” Bobby asked his sister Jean when he learned that he was competing with the Lord for Ethel’s devotion. Ethel was unsure whether she wished to marry any man. She didn’t feel the passion for Bobby she had read about in the fan magazines and seen on the screen in movie theaters. Her friends from school shared with her stories about their romances, and even though they were Catholic girls, well aware of certain limitations in a relationship, their experiences may have seemed more intense, more romantic, more loving than Ethel had known in her time with Bobby—or with any man, for that matter. “She thought, ‘Maybe I’m just not cut out to be married, to be anyone’s wife,’ ” recalled a friend of hers from Manhattanville. “She was confused, but back then we didn’t address such confu- sion as we would today. In our circle, you either got married, or you became a nun. Those were your choices.” In the end, Ethel opted for marriage to Bobby.

Once Bobby and Ethel became engaged, Ethel couldn’t wait to get out of Manhattanville. With her major in English and her minor in history, she was only an average student when she graduated in June 1949.

Soon afterward, a tray holding a wide variety of diamonds from which Ethel would choose arrived at the Skakel home, sent by Bobby (an unusually generous gesture for a member of the thrifty Kennedy clan). Ethel chose an exquisite, large- sized, marquis diamond. Unlike most grooms-to-be, Bobby was not with Ethel when she made her selection. (At least Ethel had the opportunity to select her own ring. Future

father-in-law Joseph would select Jackie’s engagement ring, as well as Joan’s!)

Big Ann was delighted with her daughter’s decision to marry Bobby. She realized that Ethel’s marriage into the rich and famous Kennedy clan could raise the Skakels to the top of Catholic society. From the time the engagement was an- nounced, Ann took charge of planning the various pre- wedding parties and other family gatherings. Ann sent out twelve hundred invitations, forcing employees at the small Greenwich post office into overtime work.

The day of the wedding started in typical madcap Skakel fashion. Years before, Big Ann had equipped her home with a beauty salon, believing that it would be cost-effective and convenient to have one in a household inhabited by so many females. The room was fully appointed with chairs, hair dry- ers, sinks, and an array of beauty products. On the day of the wedding, the bridesmaids had their hair and makeup done in the home salon by hairdressers brought in especially for the occasion. After their hair was perfectly coiffed, the young ladies went out on the grounds to mix with the male mem- bers of the bridal party, many of them Bobby’s hulking football-playing chums from Harvard. As unexpected high jinx got into full swing, several maidens ended up in the pool, their hairstyles ruined. “So typical of a Big Ann wed- ding,” one guest remarked to the press later.

On June 17, 1950, twenty-two-year-old Ethel Skakel stood in the rear of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich on the arm of her father, George Skakel, about to marry Bobby Kennedy and forever join the ranks of the elite Kennedy family. In this well-planned and tastefully exe- cuted affair, she would be the first woman since Rose to take a Kennedy husband. All of Ethel’s attendants wore white

lace over taffeta dresses with wide-brimmed, eggshell-white hats delicately trimmed with pink and white flowers. Ethel looked lovely in a white satin wide-neck gown with pearl- embroidered lace overskirt. The same lace held her fingertip- length tulle veil. Around her neck she wore a tasteful single-strand pearl necklace. In her arms she held a bouquet of lilies, stephanotis, and lilies of the valley, matching the white peonies and lilies that decorated the church. Also waiting to make its entrance was the Skakel-Kennedy bridal party, filled with young and promising relatives and friends, including Ethel’s and Bobby’s siblings.

At the altar stood the handsome twenty-four-year-old groom, Bobby. Next to him was his best man, older brother John.

As the two thousand guests, hundreds of whom were un- invited, crammed into the church, waiting for the ceremony to begin, the pipe-organ music began. In the pews, waiting amidst the gorgeous floral arrangements for the bride’s en- trance, sat the well-heeled, well-known guests, including diplomats, politicians, entertainers, and socialites. The bridesmaids entered, followed by Ethel, who appeared to be an ethereal cloud of white in her beautiful wedding finery. It was a memorable ceremony.

“What I want for you is to have a life with Bobby as happy as the one I have had with his father,” Rose told Ethel afterward as she embraced her new daughter-in-law during the lavish reception at the Skakels’ Lake Avenue mansion. “Lots of children, Ethel. Have lots and lots of children. They’ll keep your marriage strong, as strong as mine.”

From the start, Ethel and Bobby were devoted to one an- other. Neither would ever seem to regret their decision to wed; the differences in their personalities meshed together

to create what many of their peers considered to be the per- fect couple. “The best thing I ever did was marry Ethel,” Bobby would later comment of the woman who was his partner, his supporter, his friend.

“Whatever they did, they put their whole hearts and souls into it,” observes Mary Francis “Sancy” Newman, a neigh- bor of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. “They were ideal in that way and seemed to have the kind of marriage most peo- ple of that time wanted. You could see in the way they looked at one another that they adored each other.”

As she would later tell friends, Ethel was a virgin when she met Bobby—not a surprise, considering her strict Catholic upbringing and education. In fact, the word “sex” was never uttered in the Skakel home because Big Ann was so puritanical. Women weren’t even allowed to wear pants in the Lake Avenue home, because Big Ann found them amoral. Short tennis dresses were deemed acceptable for sports activities, but a woman had to change into something more appropriate as soon as she got off the court. Bobby later told friends that he didn’t know Ethel was a virgin until their wedding night, though he certainly must have sus- pected as much. He didn’t dare ask, and she wouldn’t think to tell him.

Years later, at a Hyannis Port luncheon with Jackie, Joan, Jean, Eunice, and some close friends, Ethel admitted that her wedding night had been “a disaster.” She said that her inex- perience had been obvious, and that she had been intimi- dated by Bobby. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I think Bobby was finished before I got into the room . . . or at least that’s how it felt to me.”

Joan laughed. “Well, really, whose honeymoon has ever been anything but terrible?” she asked.

At that moment Rose walked into the room. Immediately, the women stopped talking. Discussing such matters in front of the family matriarch was considered inappropriate. Ethel instinctively put a hand over her mouth.

“Now, just what are you ladies talking about?” Rose asked.

“Oh, we were just saying how well Bobby sleeps at night,” Jackie said quickly.

“That he does, dear heart,” Rose said. “That he does.” Then she added, “He gets that from me, you know.”

After honeymooning in Hawaii and a drive back east in Pat Kennedy’s convertible, which the newlyweds picked up in Los Angeles, Bobby went back to his final year of law studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, while Ethel began her life as a Kennedy wife. The couple settled into a small one-and-a-half story colonial home—much sim- pler surroundings than Ethel was accustomed to, but it was an environment in which she seemed content. Ethel sur- rounded herself with friends who knew how to cook—be- cause she didn’t—and domestics who knew how to clean—because she didn’t. “A girl has to have
some
help, after all,” Ethel explained to Rose, who was already harping on her daughter-in-law to cut back on her spending, a run- ning theme throughout their relationship.

For the next year, Ethel focused her attention on getting to know her husband’s personality. He could be explosive at times but was for the most part gentle and retiring. She as- sisted him with his studies in any way she could and, as she would later recall, she set about “doing what newlyweds do, try to learn all you can about your spouse before the children come along and completely ruin any time you may have with him.”

On spring and summer weekends the couple would fly to Hyannis Port to be with Bobby’s parents and in fall and win- ter they flew to Palm Beach, Florida, for the same purpose. Ethel spent much time poring over books, encyclopedias, and almanacs, in an effort to learn as much as possible about every subject so that she could, as she put it, “keep up with those Kennedys.” Parlor games such as Twenty Questions were especially popular in the Kennedy household, and competitive Ethel wanted to be certain she was not embar- rassed by all of those erudite Kennedy offspring.

Dorothy Tubridy, a friend of the family’s from Ireland, understood Ethel’s predicament. In an oral history for the Kennedy Library, she once recalled, “They all read the newspapers every day, and at dinnertime somebody might come out with a name, or something that happened that had been written about, and if you didn’t contribute to the con- versation, you’d be immediately pounced on and asked why you haven’t read one of the twelve newspapers! It was frightening. I would feel so stupid if I couldn’t follow the conversation.”

In 1951, three years after Bobby had graduated from Har- vard, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He and Ethel departed for the Skakel estate in Greenwich to await the arrival of their first child, Kathleen (named after Bobby’s late sister), who was born on Independence Day.

“It was a difficult pregnancy,” recalls the Kennedy family nurse, Luella Hennessey, who tended to Ethel at Greenwich Hospital. “Ethel was depressed, upset. She was too small to have a baby as large as Kathleen, and it caused her to have certain female problems, very severe internal problems. [Her perineum was damaged during the birth.]

“She was embarrassed about it. She told me that none of

the men in the family should ever know. For her to not have an easy pregnancy was a sort of defeat. She hated to be defeated. I don’t think Bobby ever really knew how much pain she was in, how she suffered. When he would walk into the hospital room, she would have a full face of makeup on and a smile on her face. Then when he would leave, she would absolutely collapse in tears. Already, she had that Kennedy stiff upper lip in a time of great stress.” Luella concluded that “Ethel was hand made for the Kennedy family.”

“I won’t be having any more children,” a choked-up Ethel told Luella as she held her newborn in her arms.

“Oh, yes you will, honey,” said the nurse, trying to com- fort her. “You’ll forget the pain. All women do. I promise.” “Oh no I won’t,” Ethel countered. “A smart woman would

never forget this kind of pain.”

After the baby’s birth, Ethel and Bobby moved into one of the Skakel family guest houses, and in less than six months Ethel was pregnant again—just in time to start stumping for Jack’s senatorial campaign (of which Bobby was campaign manager) in Massachusetts. Though she was afraid of the pregnancy because of how difficult her first one had been, Ethel was expected to help campaign for Jack’s election through the summer of 1952, just as all of the Kennedy women did: Rose, Jean, Pat, and Eunice. “They expect a lot of you in this family,” she told one friend. “And I can’t let them see me as weak. That would be the worst thing possi- ble.”

On September 24, Ethel gave birth to a boy, Joseph Patrick (Joseph after Bobby’s deceased brother). Two months later, in November, Jack won his senatorial cam- paign.

In January 1953, Ethel and Bobby moved their small fam- ily to Washington, D.C., where Bobby had just taken a job working for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, known as the McCarthy Committee for its chairman, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Ethel found a modest four-bedroom home in Georgetown, which the couple would rent. While the surroundings in their new home weren’t opulent, Ethel couldn’t help but hire a staff of servants, who wore different color uniforms every day to work. It was a happy time for Ethel, Bobby, and their small family. Their life together was just beginning, and although they didn’t know it at the time, they would soon devote themselves to the most impor- tant of all family goals: getting a Kennedy elected to the White House.

Not One to Feel Sorry for Herself

O
n a blustery Sunday in January, three days after JFK’s in- auguration, Bobby Kennedy was sitting behind blonde movie star Kim Novak, his arms crossed in front of her. After somebody gave them a shove, the toboggan on which they were sitting went sliding down a snow-covered hill. Kim squealed in delight as Ethel Kennedy, who was leaning against a nearby tree, watched with an unhappy expression on her face. She had heard rumors of an affair between her husband and Kim, and—from what she told friends—she