Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (23 page)

“Drinking Coke for a national audience isn’t exactly singing at the Met, but it had its challenges,” Joan said. “The piece of direction I’ll always remember is the stern admonition ‘Don’t you burp, young lady!’ ”

But, like most of the Manhattanville students, Joan’s college agenda was as much on getting her “Mrs. degree” as it was on getting a solid education. Her senior year, she was introduced by Jean Kennedy Smith to the youngest in the Kennedy clan: twenty-five-year-old Edward. The family had donated money for a gymnasium to the college in memory of Kathleen Kennedy, and Jack was scheduled to give a speech at the dedication. At the last minute, there was a change of plans. Recalled Ted:

It was Jack, not me, who’d originally agreed to give the talk. But when my brother showed up at the apartment and saw me there he said, “Oh! Dad, since Teddy’s here, why don’t we let him do it? I want to go to the football game.” I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea. I’d looked forward to seeing that game. Jack held his ground: it was going to be a great game, and he wanted to see it. Our father said, “Fine. Why don’t you two work it out?” We worked it out, and Jack went to the football game.

It was a fluke that Ted gave the speech—one that Joan, incidentally, had no interest in hearing. She was writing a term paper and didn’t bother attending.

“I was totally unimpressed,” she later recalled to an interviewer. She figured the dedication would be “another boring event at the castle with the nuns.” Plus, she hated politics—current affairs had been her worst subject in school.

But her roommate of four years, Margot Murray, came back to their room to warn her that she’d likely be missed and get reprimanded by the nuns if she didn’t at least swing by to the tea being held afterward. That could mean she’d be ordered to stay on campus, which she couldn’t abide.

“Then I couldn’t go to Yale the next weekend,” Joan said. So Joan hurriedly changed out of her bathrobe and into a dress before hustling to the event. That’s where Jean spotted her.

The two women had met once before the previous summer at the Skakel home in Greenwich, where George Jr., Ethel’s brother, was having a party.

“I arrived at the party with not one but two dates,” Joan recalled. One of the men had previously been engaged to Jean and was a friend of Steve Smith’s, Jean’s husband. Curious about the woman with two dates, Jean had approached and the women chatted. Now, months later, Jean made the fateful introduction to her “little brother.”

“I’ll never forget that moment,” Joan later said. “I expected to see a small boy. Instead I found myself looking up at somebody 6 feet 2 inches and close to 200 pounds. And, I must say, darn good-looking.”

Ted was immediately drawn to Joan. She had all the requisites of a potential mate, and his mother, Rose, had made it clear that her preference was for Teddy to follow in brother Bobby’s footsteps by marrying young and having many children. Ted maneuvered to get a ride to the airport from Joan and her roommate that night, allowing him to steal a few extra minutes with the attractive blonde. “I definitely wanted to see more of Joan,” Ted wrote decades later in his memoir,
True Compass
.

Joan’s sheltered life was about to change.

2

Marrying the Kennedys

Joan and Ted’s courtship was as chaste as they come. While she’d
had many boyfriends in college, Joan was a good Catholic girl and a virgin. And the Kennedy allure that perhaps worked on other girls wasn’t as persuasive with her, in part because she had no idea who the Kennedys were when she and Ted met. “I just took no interest in current events; my lowest grade in college was in current events,” Joan later told journalist Lester David. “I had never even heard of the Kennedys.”

The two went on several dates, always chaperoned. “I had to be chaperoned everywhere. Nobody slept together. Nobody spent time alone,” she said. “You were always in groups—at least if you were a Manhattanville girl.”

And Ted treated her as such, despite having a reputation of being less than patient. After all, his nickname was Cadillac Eddie. By the time he met Joan, he was twenty-five and had endured the shocking loss of both his oldest brother and older sister. Another sister had been all but lost to a lobotomy. The mortality check, matched with the freedom that came with being a wealthy trust-fund child, had infused him with an air of recklessness and impatience. Like his brothers, he chased women unabashedly, but Ted’s danger lust went beyond skirt chasing. He had a well-known impertinent side and also a lead foot, once outrunning a Virginia police lieutenant in his Oldsmobile convertible.

Ted took Joan out every time he went to New York. Getting to know each other’s friends was as important as getting to know each other. One ski trip was a double date with Margot Murray and her boyfriend. With perfect propriety, the girls roomed together and met the boys on the ski slopes.

The two got serious enough by the autumn of 1957 that it was time for Ted to take Joan home to Hyannis Port. Rose was the only family member there, and the three got cozy, eating every meal together. Rose quizzed Joan about her faith, her upbringing, her values, her plans for a family—everything was fair game. “She asked me about Bronxville, about Manhattanville, about the nuns, but mostly we talked about music,” Joan later said. “My mother-in-law played the piano very well, and she asked me to play. I had to give a big recital in order to graduate, and I played some of that music, some Brahms, and she played a Chopin etude for me. There was something that first week I met her that really connected. There was so much in common and the nuns and mostly our piano.”

Joan loved the Hyannis Port backdrop. She took long walks along the waterfront and enjoyed playing golf with Ted. It was a picturesque setting, and intoxicated by the sun-drenched affluence and windswept coastal grandeur, Joan quickly fell for Ted. He was a catch by all standards—handsome, athletic, ambitious, and from a wealthy family. He was quick-witted and charming, but with a down-to-earth element that was irresistible. He was even known to poke fun at his ever-proper mother, especially when she corrected his grammar.

Joan, too, was exceeding expectations. Rose, still protective of her youngest child, called Manhattanville to check with the headmistress, a longtime family friend, on Joan’s grades and reputation—all stellar. So the courtship continued, even without Joan meeting Joe, who was spending the summer vacationing in south France. The couple rarely was alone, but they fit in ski trips and gathered at a house party in Alstead, New Hampshire—Joan’s grandparents’ home, where the Bennetts vacationed. That visit gave Joan a glimpse of Ted’s bold, fun-seeking spontaneity. Once, they went to a square dance together, where there was a caller and a band. Before Joan knew what was happening, Ted was on stage, doing the calling, to everyone’s delight. Later during that visit, Joan’s mother bought easels for the guests to paint the view from the top of the mountain. They decided to turn it into a contest, and Ted’s painting won.

The two quickly were on a fast track for marriage. “I was keen to join my brothers as a married man, a family man,” Ted would later recall. “I certainly
wished
to be a family man.” He had his mother’s approval, at
least. She’d worried so much about him settling down that she’d started saying her rosary that he’d meet a nice Catholic girl, settle down, and start a proper family. “Apparently, he had brought other girls home, but she hadn’t approved. I guess she said something to Eunice, ‘I can’t believe
our
luck.’ I was a nice Catholic girl with a nice upbringing, upper middle class or upper class, and . . . I was gorgeous,” Joan told an interviewer.

There’s less arrogance here than it would appear. Joan was told all her life that she was a stunner, and she accepted and enjoyed the advantages her looks gave her. But her adult life revealed time after time that her beauty was a shaky foundation on which to build a sense of self-worth. When she reflects on her youth and marriage, there’s a weariness, a sadness to her pat acceptance that she was beautiful. There’s also a recognition that her beauty was a dubious virtue that was never enough to hold off her other insecurities. “It was too good to be true, that I was somebody that Teddy could be attracted to, a beautiful young woman, with the other qualifications.”

In late summer 1958, Ted proposed to Joan while the two visited Hyannis Port. It was awkward, to say the least.

“What do you think about our getting married?” he asked.

“Well, I guess it’s not such a bad idea,” Joan answered.

Ted seemed pretty matter-of-fact about the agreement. “What do we do next?” he asked.

That next step was for Joan to finally meet Joe Sr., who had just returned from his vacation in France. Joan recalled it as a formal meeting with her prospective father-in-law, something akin to an interview. Joe sat in a great wing chair with Joan at his feet on an ottoman. “Do you love my son?” he asked. Joan said she did. At the end of the discussion, Joan recalled feeling “terribly relieved. He may have been tough, but he did make you feel at ease.” Next, it was Harry Bennett’s turn to give his blessing.

“She came home and told me, starry-eyed, two feet off the ground,” Harry recalled to a reporter in 1965. “Then Ted called me at the office and made an appointment to come to ask, formally, for my daughter’s hand.” The conversation was stiff and included chitchat about the weather. “Then he asked the traditional question,” Harry said. “It was all a new experience for me so I came back with the traditional reply: I asked him if he
could support my daughter in the manner to which she was accustomed.” This quip—asked of a member of one of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful families—instantly became family legend.

With permission granted, the wedding planning commenced in a flurry. The couple was to exchange vows just three months after the proposal, and Ted had been tapped to run his brother Jack’s upcoming reelection campaign in Massachusetts for the US Senate. He and Joan didn’t have much time to spend together before the wedding. They got together once for a campaigning weekend. It was Joan’s first exposure to the political arena—“I had no idea what I was getting into,” she later said—and while fun, it wasn’t really conducive to getting to know each other. They were usually accompanied by Jack or Ted’s sister Eunice as they hit old factory and fishing towns.

“That was my introduction to politics, the basic grass-roots, press-the-flesh kind,” Joan recalled.

The only other time the couple got together before the wedding was for an engagement party at the Bennetts’ Bronxville home. Ted showed up late, sneaking into the house through the maid’s quarters so as not to embarrass Ginny.

Ted finally brought Joan a ring his father had bought, in a box that Ted hadn’t yet opened.

It was all moving too quickly for Joan, whose nerves began to rattle her. It seemed Ted wasn’t thrilled about marrying her. He didn’t make time to see her, and when he was out campaigning for his brother, he always seemed to have an entourage of attractive young women at his side. While Ted shared his worries with drinking buddies, Joan shared hers with Harry and Ginny.

“My parents thought it wouldn’t hurt to postpone it for a while,” Joan later said. So Harry approached Joe about delaying the wedding until the following year. Joe was furious at the request and insisted the wedding proceed on schedule. But not because he worried about his son’s tender heart. The wedding date had already been announced in the papers, so a retraction would have reflected poorly on the family. The invitations—very
formal, with a script so frilly as to make it illegible—were sent to nearly five hundred guests, and the wedding banns began on Sundays in early November at churches in both Hyannis Port and Charlottesville, where Ted attended law school.

Ted and Joan’s wedding events began with a prenuptial dinner on Thursday, November 26, 1958, at the elegant Hotel Pierre. The hotel had opened in 1930—“a place of Champagne bubbles and swing bands,” a
New York Times
article later described it—and quickly became “the exclusive province of high society in Depression-era New York.” In the decades that followed, the hotel’s upper floors became an opulent supper club frequented by figures such as William Vanderbilt and Walter Chrysler. Long after that club disbanded, the roof garden lived on, becoming a popular ballroom that hosted debutante receptions and rehearsal dinners, the attendees of which graced the society pages of the city’s newspapers. One hundred and twenty guests attended the Kennedys’ prenuptial dinner, where they and the couple dined on smoked salmon, anchovies, deviled eggs, stuffed mushrooms, steak burgers, and heart-shaped ice cream. Atop the tables were cigarettes in glasses for the guests. A professional photographer roamed the event, snapping candids. At Joan’s request, the Lester Lanin Orchestra played four straight hours. Noted in all caps on the orchestra’s $675 receipt was the direction: PLEASE HAVE THE PIANO TUNED TO 440 INTERNATIONAL PITCH.

The rehearsal dinner was at Le Pavillon Restaurant, where a private room was rented for thirty-two guests. And on Saturday Joan nervously stepped into her stunning, ivory satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and long sleeves. Her chin-length hair was loosely pin-curled and perfect, and from atop her head cascaded a floor-length veil of delicate rose point lace. Candy stood at her side as maid of honor at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville; Jack was the best man. Ted’s gift to Joan was a clover-shaped pin that had belonged to Rose. Harry gave his daughter away. Ginny got a glimpse of what life would soon be like for Joan when a newspaper photographer snapped her picture at the church as she wore her tea-length, bubble-skirt dress, a fur draped over her shoulders.

But as perfect as the day looked to outsiders, it contained omens. Joan had wanted to be married by John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame,
but the Kennedys insisted that they be married instead by Cardinal Francis Spellman, an American archbishop of the Catholic Church. Joan also had wanted an intimate affair for just family and friends. Her father-in-law had other plans. He “wanted to invite every political crony he’d ever met and others he wanted to impress,” she said. The couple had been fitted with microphones to provide audio for a wedding video—a gift from a friend of Harry’s. Before the ceremony, Jack and Ted seemed to forget they were being recorded, and Jack counseled a nervous Ted that being married didn’t mean he had to be faithful. Joan discovered this when she later watched the movie.

Ted’s law-school schedule was too demanding for an immediate honeymoon, so they took just three days together initially before returning to Charlottesville so Ted could focus on graduating. The couple accepted an invitation from Lord Beaverbrook to spend their brief honeymoon at his sprawling estate in the Bahamas. Beaverbrook was publisher of the
Daily Express
and other British newspapers, and Ted’s father had stayed friendly with him after meeting him in London. The honeymoon invitation, while appreciated, proved to be awkward.

“The truth is that Joan and I hadn’t expected to be quite so friendly with him on our honeymoon,” Ted wrote.

When we arrived at his estate, he didn’t seem to know quite what to do with us. He certainly didn’t make himself scarce. We ate every meal together. For him—and therefore for us—that meant a baked potato, and only a baked potato, for lunch. Dinner was not much better. We were served exactly one daiquiri apiece before dinner and then something that was definitely not standout cuisine.

In an effort to give the newlyweds some time alone, Beaverbrook shipped the couple to an isolated island. It sounded romantic, but Joan remembered it as anything but. “We were dumped there for an overnight,” she recalled. “It was the worst experience of our life. It was a little cottage, practically a shack, on this tiny island, just sand. We slept on these mats. There were bugs, and it was a nightmare.”

The couple returned to Charlottesville, where Joan’s life suddenly took a turn for the domestic. “I had to clean house, cook, do the laundry,
and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!” she recalled. After Ted graduated law school in June, they took a longer honeymoon—a five-week trip through Chile and Argentina in South America. Joan by then was in the early weeks of her pregnancy. Still, she didn’t hesitate when Ted offered to teach her to ski in the Chilean Andes, some of the most challenging skiing country in the world.