Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (75 page)

While Ted’s and Joan’s appearance at the 1980 conven- tion was one of its greatest moments, the most memorable and significant occurrence to many was the petty and divi- sive behavior Ted displayed on the podium when he ab- solutely refused to join hands with Jimmy Carter before the assembly.

In years to come, other Kennedys would share the dream and take their chances in public life. But on that evening in Madison Square Garden, the quest for the Presidency had fi- nally come to an end for the sons of Joseph P. Kennedy.

Afterward, there was a party at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the family was staying. Joan seemed happy and re-

lieved. As she spoke to supporters, Ted sidled over to her and invited her to lunch the next day. He wanted to thank her for all she had done, and maybe talk about their future. Joan looked at him suspiciously for a moment, but since she was in the company of others she smiled, reached for his hand, and said, “I would love to have lunch with you tomorrow, of course!” After a few hours, the gathering broke up and Joan retired, alone, to her suite in the hotel.

The Last Straw for Joan

T
he morning after Ted Kennedy dropped out of the race, Joan awakened to find her picture on the front page of the
New York Times,
kissing her estranged husband as they left the podium during the convention. Ethel telephoned Joan in New York that morning, as did Eunice, Pat, Jean, and a few other friends and relatives. Everyone who called compli- mented Joan on her perseverance during the campaign, even Ethel, who told her, “Kiddo, I feel so bad. But there’s always 1984!”

From Jackie, Joan also received a telegram with a decid- edly positive—and maybe even prophetic—message: “All’s well that ends well.”

“After it was over, I think Joan felt what we all felt,” said Richard Burke, “which was ‘What the hell was I thinking? What the hell did I just do?’ It had all been so unrealistic. It was like waking up from a bad dream with a hangover.”

The only one who had not said a word of thanks or en-

couragement had been the one whose opinion had always mattered, and maddeningly so, Ted.

Joan seemed lost in thought when Marcia Chellis arrived to help her dress for her lunch date with Ted. All else had failed, she realized, but perhaps she could still salvage her marriage. “She held out hope that maybe this lunch with him might be the beginning of a new relationship with her hus- band,” said Chellis. “I think that, in all of the hysteria, she had even started to believe the illusion set by the campaign that he actually cared about her. She left for lunch with Ted with a great sense of expectation.”

Accompanied by Secret Service agents, Ted and Joan lunched at The Box restaurant. One of the agents recalls, “It was a madhouse. There were reporters everywhere. Ted didn’t say two words to Joan. He barely looked at her. She sat there, picked at her salad, and tried to smile as photographers shot pictures. Afterward, as I helped push her through the crowd, she was furious. ‘That bastard,’ she said, looking at Ted. ‘He set this thing up as a photo opportunity, didn’t he?’ She looked at me as if I had an answer. I didn’t. But it sure looked like she was right. He just wanted the little wife by his side for the press.”

The next evening, Joan and Ted hosted a party at their home in McLean, and then they were to fly to Hyannis Port. “Ted and I should have a chance to talk things over on Squaw Island,” Joan told Marcia Chellis, hopefully.

The party in McLean was a success. While Joan was dancing with a Secret Service agent, Ted tapped her on the shoulder to tell her that it was time to go to the airport and catch a plane to Hyannis Port. They rushed to the airport, and while on the plane, Ted seemed relaxed and happy to be with his wife, though he never mentioned her work on his

campaign. Suddenly they were landing, much too soon and not in Massachusetts. Much to Joan’s surprise, the aircraft touched down on Montauk Point in Long Island.

“Okay, Joan, see ya later,” Ted said, kissing her on the forehead. “And, oh yeah. Thanks a lot,” he added as he got up and walked away. Joan bore the cruelty of it all without a word or sound of protest, just a look of dismay. Through the small, circular window she watched her husband disembark from the aircraft and gather his luggage. Her stunned gaze followed him as he walked to a waiting car and got in. He was driven off into the night.

Joan was flown onward to Hyannis Port, alone. Later she would learn that Ted had ordered that his yacht, the
Cur- raugh,
be sailed in from the Cape and be waiting for him in the harbor. From there, accompanied by a female guest, Ted went sailing in the Caribbean to unwind from his grueling campaign experience.

While on her flight from Long Island to Hyannis Port, as Joan would later tell it, something inside of her was “ad- justed.” As she gazed out at the vastness dotted with heav- enly stars, the possibility of her life suddenly seemed as wide open as the soft, engulfing darkness. Another world awaited her. It was not the manic, almost unnatural one in- habited by the Kennedys, but one that perhaps made more sense, populated by reasonable-thinking, “normal” people. Maybe it was for this world that she had been destined be- fore becoming derailed so many years ago, on that day when Ted came to speak at Manhattanville College. Perhaps she would be the only one of the sisters-in-law to escape by her own volition; Jackie and Ethel certainly had no choice after the deaths of their husbands, though she often wondered whether they would ever have ended their marriages had

those tragedies not occurred. Joan did have a choice—it could be argued that she had it all along, though she didn’t seem to know it—and now she seemed ready to make a de- cision.

Joan would remember years later that as she assessed her past and wondered about the future, a sense of tranquillity washed over her. Ted’s abandonment that evening in Long Island was truly a defining moment. With astonishing clarity she could now see the man she had known for the last twenty years for who he really was, not what she wanted him to be or hoped he would one day become. Clearly, the senator would never change. As a politician he had always been without peer—at least in her view. As a suitor he had been irresistible. As a lover, generous and caring. But as a husband, he’d been intolerable. It no longer mattered to Joan. There was no anger, resentment, or judgment, as she would tell it, just a certain sadness about all of the wasted years, “and a sense of relief, like exhaling,” she recalled, “because, finally, I got it.
I got it.
”

Once she landed in Hyannis Port, Joan Kennedy knew what she had to do.

Postscript: Jackie, Ethel, and Joan after Camelot

T
he official announcement was made on January 21, 1981: Ted and Joan Kennedy were divorcing. Barbara Gibson was in the servants’ dining room of the Palm Beach estate with Rose when Ted called his mother to tell her the news before it hit the press. “Oh, really?” Gibson heard Rose ask her son, with great interest. “Well, is there someone else?”

Before making her decision, Joan discussed her intention with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, which was appropriate con- sidering that she had depended on Jackie’s counsel about Ted’s unfaithfulness for more than twenty years. The two women spent four hours discussing the state of Joan’s mar- riage and her future.

“I’m so sorry,” Jackie told Joan, according to what she would later recall, “because now I feel that I should have told you to do this fifteen years ago. I just didn’t know back then what we know today.” Jackie said she felt “terrible” about the way Joan’s marriage had turned out.

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 edu- cation 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 es- tranged 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 per- sonal 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 em- barrassing setback in the summer of 1988 when, while vaca- tioning 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 oc- curred, 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 se- ries of drug and alcohol abuse centers as she waged her bat- tle 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 mo- ment under the influence of anything other than the exhila- ration 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 Cul- tural 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 politi- cian, 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 truthfully. 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 ad- vocate 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 cen- tury,” 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, consider- ing 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 in- validated his very union to Joan Kennedy in the eyes of the Church, so that he could move forward with his life.