Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (33 page)

It’s obvious that Ted and Joan shared a history of not only personal disappointments but also marital highlights, such as the births of their children. She felt that he was one of the few people who knew and understood her. “To think it

would be easy for her to end that marriage would be to min- imize her feelings for him,” said her friend Joan Braden. “No one can understand another woman’s marriage, not re- ally. The history of their relationship was so important to Joan. It gave her an anchor. She loved Ted, faults and all, whether it made sense to do so or not. I’m sure a lot of peo- ple can relate to having had such blind adoration at one point or another in their lives.”

Of course, the fact that Ted was so important to her was the very reason it hurt so much when he wasn’t with her, and when she suspected he was with another woman.

“Before I confronted my alcoholism as a disease, I had withdrawn into myself,” Joan would say many years later. “Because I looked pretty, people kept telling me I had everything: a fantastic husband, terrific kids, talent at the piano, brains. They didn’t see how much I was hurting in- side. Being a senator’s wife and a Kennedy didn’t help me. Many of my women friends later told me they didn’t call because I seemed unapproachable. So being painted as per- fect and pretending everything was terrific was a terrible burden.

“I’m fine when I’m busy,” Joan added, perhaps alluding to Jackie’s advice to focus on things other than Ted and her marriage to him. “But when I’m alone . . . well, then it’s often not so good. The darkness sets in.”

P A R T F I V E

Delighted to Be Pregnant

“
S
acred Heart alumnae, a thousand strong, are taking over the White House for a morning tour. And Mrs. Kennedy is out of town. We need someone to greet them. I promised them a Kennedy wife.”

It was May 1963 and White House Social Secretary Leti- tia Baldrige was on the telephone with the President, ex- plaining a situation she had termed “a terrible, terrible dilemma.” Jackie, now pregnant again and due in Septem- ber, was out of town, and there was no one to greet the Sa- cred Heart visitors.

“Well, call Ethel,” said the President. “She’s a Kennedy wife, isn’t she?”

“Impossible,” said Letitia. “She’s eight months pregnant and feeling big as a house. She says she won’t leave Hickory Hill.”

“Then call Joan,” suggested the President. “What about her?”

“She has morning sickness, too. She can’t even get out of bed, the poor dear is so weak.”

“Joan’s pregnant, too?” he asked, his tone incredulous. “Yes,” exclaimed Letitia. “Two months. You knew that,

Mr. President. We just made the announcement.”

“Well, I’d like to keep track,” he said with a chuckle, “but I have a country to run.”

All three Kennedy wives were pregnant at the same time: Ethel with her eighth child due in June; Joan with her third due in August; and Jackie also with her third due in Septem- ber. “We’re all delighted to be pregnant again,” Ethel had told the press when Jackie finally announced her pregnancy, five months into it. (She had decided to wait until she felt certain all would go well. Nature did its part in helping Jackie conceal her pregnancy—even in her fifth month she did not look as if she were expecting.)

“Well, what’ll we do?” Letitia asked the President. “I’ll be right down.”

When the President walked into the White House lobby, he was greeted by a thousand former students of Sacred Heart schools all across the country.

“I know you wanted to meet one of the Kennedy wives,” he told them, “but they’re all expecting babies, as you may know, and unavailable at this time. My sisters may all be ex- pecting as well,” he joked. “I don’t know. Don’t quote me on that.”

Everyone laughed.

Letitia Baldrige recalled, “He gave them five minutes of his time, mentioned every cousin, aunt, or niece who had ever attended Sacred Heart, and he said, ‘You ladies are the best-looking group of women in the world. It has been my honor and privilege to come and speak to you. I’ll tell Jackie, Joan, and Ethel what they missed.’ ”

The Deaths of Infants Arabella and Patrick

J
ackie Kennedy already had two children—Caroline, born on November 29, 1957, and John Fitzgerald Jr., on Novem- ber 25, 1960—but John’s was a particularly difficult birth and it was thought that the baby wouldn’t survive because of respiratory difficulties. “Anyone who knew Jackie knew that she loved being a mother,” recalls Jim Ketchum, White House Curator during the Kennedy administration. “I saw a mother who spent a great deal of time with her children and who made it very clear that they were a priority, from the way they were watched over by the Secret Service—she al- ways had problems with that—to the way they were taken care of on a daily basis by Maud Shaw when Jackie was busy. More often than not, though, it would be Mrs. Kennedy pushing the carriage on the South Lawn, Mrs. Kennedy taking them on pony rides, Mrs. Kennedy tending to them day and night. Before anything else, she was a mother, and whatever else happened afterward had to take second place with her time and energy. She got everything done, though. Youth had a lot to do with it, I suppose.”

Jackie had also been dealt the blow of a miscarriage early in her marriage, as well as a tragic stillborn baby. For the perfectionist that she was, the failure to carry any of her pregnancies successfully to term was devastating. Through- out her life, she had been able to work hard, give her all, and ultimately triumph—she had done everything that was ex-

pected and had always managed to exceed expectations. But having a baby was something completely out of her control. It wasn’t like mastering a foreign language, or winning a horse-riding competition, or finding the perfect husband.

The stillbirth was the most difficult for Jackie to accept. It happened in 1956, just after the Democratic Convention. Jackie’s misfortune at that time was compounded by the fact that Jack had chosen to be on a Mediterranean cruise around Capri and Elba during the final months of her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she had gone to Newport to be with her mother at Hammersmith Farm and wait for the baby there.

On August 23, 1956, a hemorrhaging Jackie was rushed to Newport Hospital. An emergency cesarean was per- formed and the baby was stillborn. When she awoke, Jackie found Bobby sitting in a chair, staring at her with tears in his eyes.

It had actually been Ethel’s idea that Bobby go to Jackie. Though Ethel was in the final stages of another pregnancy herself, her concern was with her sister-in-law. “She’s not as strong as she likes us to believe,” Ethel observed of Jackie. “I know the
real
Jackie, and she’ll be devastated.”

The first thing Jackie wanted to know from Bobby was whether the child she had given birth to was a boy or a girl. She still didn’t know that the baby was stillborn. Bobby had to break the news to her: The baby was a girl, and she was dead. In fact, he had already arranged for the infant’s burial. Through a flood of tears, Jackie managed to say that she had chosen a name for a girl: Arabella.

When Jackie asked if Jack knew what had happened to his daughter, it fell on Bobby to deliver more bad news: Jack could not be reached at sea, “but Eunice is trying her best to locate him.” After a couple of days, when Jack was finally

located at the port of Genoa, he claimed to be upset about the news but decided not to return immediately. There wasn’t much he could do about it, he said, ignoring the obvious fact that his wife would need his emotional support during this terrible ordeal, and causing some observers to wonder just what kind of man he really was.

Some had already been critical of Jack for not being at his wife’s side in the last days of her pregnancy. The fact that he didn’t return at once when his child was born dead was in- explicable, even to his closest friends.

Two days after Jackie’s tragedy, her sister-in-law Pat Lawford gave birth to a daughter, Sydney. Then, two weeks later, Ethel would give birth to her fifth child, Mary Court- ney. At just twenty-eight, Ethel would now be the mother of three boys and two girls, the oldest about to turn six years old.

It was difficult enough for Jackie to endure the death of her baby, but to be confronted by happy Kennedy pregnan- cies and successful births all around her made her feel even more inadequate. Making matters worse, doctors speculated that the rigors of the recent convention—which she had in- sisted on attending because she wanted to support her hus- band—had probably been “too much” for her. She actually may have lost the baby
because
of the convention, which made her feel all the more sad about her husband’s aban- donment and which also forced her to question her own re- sponsibility in the child’s death. It was a terrible, dark time filled with deep sadness, self-doubt, and recrimination, and she was alone.

In the end, Jack would be forced to return to the States when the press learned of the stillbirth. George Smathers and Joseph Kennedy convinced him that if he ever wanted

to run for President, he had better first run to Jackie, lest he lose the potential vote of every woman in the country.

Seven years later, in 1963, Jackie was pregnant again, as were her sisters-in-law. However, in May 1963, Joan suf- fered a miscarriage of a child that was due in August, a month before Jackie’s. (Joan would have another miscar- riage in June 1964, and yet another in August of 1969.) Joan had had some difficulty becoming pregnant, and her miscar- riages would affect her deeply, especially since Ted had an- nounced early in their marriage that he wanted at least ten children—and he wasn’t joking!

“It was discouraging and depressing for Joan not to see her way through her pregnancies as Ethel had,” the Kennedy’s family nurse, Luella Hennessey, once said. Hennessey had tended to the births of twenty-six children, including all of Ethel’s. She added that Joan’s self- confidence and self-esteem were further whittled because “she felt she wasn’t as healthy as the others because she had trouble carrying to full term, even though Jackie also had trouble. The problem [with Joan] was in a hormonal deficiency.”

Two months later, in July 1963, Ethel Kennedy gave birth to her eighth child, another boy, Christopher George—the second son to be delivered on the Fourth of July. Although he was born a week early, the latest addition to the ever- expanding Kennedy brood was healthy in every way. Ethel, on the other hand, was wiped out from this latest pregnancy, and took months to recover fully.

Although Ethel’s first pregnancy had resulted in deep de- pression and difficult delivery, her next five had been rela- tively easy. Being pregnant had never stopped her from

going on with her life as usual, including the heated, com- petitive tennis matches with Bobby (which she usually won). She also continued to participate in the wild games of touch football that took place on weekends at Hickory Hill. With her first six pregnancies, Ethel continued to be ex- tremely active right up to the time of delivery.

But during the birth of Kerry, her seventh child, there had been some complications during delivery and Ethel had been forced to undergo her first cesarean section. When it became clear that her eighth pregnancy, in 1963, would be troubled as well, Ethel was so determined to see it through that, uncharacteristically for her, she gave up all heavy phys- ical exertion. She also became less social, spending most of her time at home. On weekends, when the Kennedy clan gathered for their usual touch football game, Ethel refrained from joining in and instead stayed indoors, resting. On the day of Bobby Jr.’s ninth birthday, she appeared only long enough to see him blow out the candles before scurrying back upstairs to bed. She seemed nervous, even upset, dur- ing the entire time she was “expecting,” and was extremely relieved when the baby was born safely.

As for Jackie, because of her history of troubled preg- nancies, doctors were being particularly cautious this time, sharply curtailing her schedule by having her spend as much time as possible at Glen Ora or Squaw Island. But then, on a gray morning on August 7, after returning from the children’s horseback riding lessons on Squaw Island (she and Jack were no longer staying at Morton Downey’s at this time, but at another estate, called Brambletyde), Jackie went walking along the beach. Suddenly, she stum- bled and fell. Normally, she would have gotten up, brushed off the sand, and continued walking. But she couldn’t get