Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (6 page)

Joe Kennedy had donated a great deal of money for the building in memory of one of its most famous alumnae, his daughter Kathleen, and the Manhattanville nuns had made it abundantly clear that all seniors were required to attend the event. However, one of the seniors, twenty-one-year-old Joan Bennett, had chosen to skip the ceremony because she thought it would be just “another boring event … with the nuns.”
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Suddenly, her roommate, Margot Murray, burst into the room, where Joan was working on a term paper, and declared breathlessly that Joan was in trouble. Her absence had been noticed by the nuns, which would automatically result in demerits.
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“Maybe if you come down real fast,” Margot suggested, “the student government girl who gives out the demerits will see you and assume you’ve been there through the whole ceremony.”

“So,” Joan recalled, “I got out of my old bathrobe, jumped into something appropriate, and ran over. The next thing I knew I was standing with Margot, and Jean Smith, Ted’s sister, came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Joan Bennett? Remember we met last August?’

“Well, when she spotted me at this reception and came over to talk to me, I didn’t know Jean Smith was one of the Kennedys. I had never even heard of the Kennedys! I just took no interest in current events; my lowest grade in college was in current events. Jean said she’d like me to meet her little brother or her younger brother, and I’d almost expected to meet someone knee-high….”
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· · ·

J
OAN BENNETT WAS
a five-foot-eight-inch blonde who did not need any makeup to enhance her natural beauty. She was named after her mother, Virginia Joan Bennett, but her parents called her Joan so as not to have two Ginnys in the house.
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Coming of age in the prosperous 1950s, Joan appeared to lead a charmed life. Her father was a successful advertising executive and an avid amateur actor who took his two girls, Joan and her younger sister, Candace, to practically every musical that opened on Broadway.
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Her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her sister, Candy, was a popular high-school cheerleader who helped Joan master the piano. The family belonged to the Siwanoy Country Club and had a summer home in Alstead, New Hampshire.
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And their major residence—a pink-and-gray four-bedroom house in Bronxville, an affluent suburb of New York City—was filled with sunshine and music.

And yet, her close friends would remember Joan as a young woman riddled with self-doubt. For instance, she had perfect pitch and loved to receive praise for her performances on the piano, but she suffered from stage fright and did not enjoy giving recitals.
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She was self-conscious about her looks, but she forced herself to show up at auditions for TV commercials, and she became the Revlon Hairspray girl for a while on
The $64,000 Question
. She adored her mother, but she was secretly ashamed that Ginny (as she called her) was an alcoholic.
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She had many boyfriends, but none of them ever lived up to her idealized image of her father, who was also an alcoholic.

“When Joan talked about her father,” wrote Marcia Chellis, who in later years was her administrative assistant and biographer, “he reminded me in some ways of the man [Ted Kennedy] she would
eventually marry. Harry Bennett was tall, handsome, charming, an actor in neighborhood theatrical productions. Joan described herself as a compliant, sweet, shy little girl who obediently accomplished all that was expected of her…. To me it seemed that she had tried very hard to please her father, as she would later try so hard to please her husband.”
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(In this regard, Joan resembled another Kennedy wife—Jacqueline Bouvier.)

When Joan was seventeen years old—just as her braces came off, her figure filled out, and boys started taking notice—her father (whom she called Harry, not Dad) took her with him on a business trip to Florida.
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“I was working like crazy,” Harry Bennett said. “Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. I knew that I didn’t give my family enough attention, but I was so busy earning a living. I missed having time with my family, and I thought it might be fun to take my little girl [Joan] away with me and have her all to myself, just for a week.

“I decided from the moment we left the front door of our house she would no longer be my daughter, but my date,” he continued. “And I wooed her all that week, and took her out, not as my daughter, but as my sweetheart, if you want to call it that.

“Joan stayed up all night with me at nightclubs for the first time in her life, and we drank champagne together for the first time. We saw everything there was to be seen in Saint Petersburg, Tampa, and Gainesville. We went fishing, we went swimming, we did everything.

“She had the time of her life. And when we were on the plane coming home, she looked at me and said, ‘I never knew adults could be so much fun.’”
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S
HORTLY AFTER TED
met Joan on the Manhattanville campus, he called her for a date.

“I had to be chaperoned everywhere,” Joan remembered. “Nobody slept together. Nobody spent time alone. You were always in groups—at least if you were a Manhattanville girl.”
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One time, she and Ted went skiing in Stowe, Vermont, with Margot Murray, Joan’s roommate, and Margot’s boyfriend, who had gone to Harvard with Ted. Another time, Joan invited Ted to the Bennetts’ summer home in New Hampshire, where they went to a square dance and, she recalled, Ted “gave me a glimpse of how much fun he was…. Ted Kennedy was up there doing the calling…. Everybody loved him.”
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During that same visit, Joan’s mother bought paints, canvases, and easels for her guests and sent them out to paint the view from the top of a nearby mountain.

“I remember Ted Kennedy painting the best paintings of anybody there,” Joan said. “There was a contest and he won.”
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In the summer of 1958, Ted invited Joan to Hyannis Port to meet his family. By then, Rose Kennedy had done a background check on Joan with Mother Elizabeth O’Byrne, the president of Manhattanville College, who had nothing but good things to say about Joan and her family.

“I spent a whole week with Rose and Ted,” Joan said. “I remember we played the piano together a lot. I remember walking on the beach with Ted a lot. Ted would play eighteen holes. It was very cozy, I thought.”
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That Ted was less than enthusiastic about getting married was a gross understatement. He did not want to give up his life of sexual adventurism—the only area of his life that was not under his mother and father’s control. However, his father made it clear that Ted was expected to get married. Dutiful son that he was, Ted waited until the next time he and Joan were alone on the beach, then turned to her and said:

“What do you think about getting married?”

“Well,” Joan replied to this not-quite-lavish offer of marriage, “I guess it’s not such a bad idea.”

“What do we do next?” Ted asked.
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The next thing was for Joan to meet Ted’s father, who had just arrived home from his annual summer vacation in the south of France.
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Laurence Learner, author of
The Kennedy Men
, has given us one version of that meeting.

“The sixty-nine-year-old patriarch sat in his great wing chair in the far end of the living room, looking at Joan like a monarch holding court,” Learner wrote. “Joan walked tentatively into the room and sat at Joe’s feet on an ottoman. ‘Do you love my son?’ Joe asked. It was the crucial question, but it was rarely asked so boldly. This was no social chitchat but an intense interview. Joe had been home only a few hours, but he seemed to know everything about Joan and her family….”
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The scene rang true, except for one thing: Joan disputed the accuracy of Learner’s account. In an interview with the
New York Times
’ Adam Clymer, Joan cast her meeting with Joe Kennedy in far more positive terms. Joe “was a charmer,” she said, and she had not felt the least bit intimidated by his blunt “Do you love my son?” question. It wasn’t asked in a stern way. “Right from the beginning,” said Joan, “I didn’t think he was a scary guy.”
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In fact, Joe Kennedy turned out to be a vitally important surrogate suitor in Ted’s courtship of Joan. Joe wooed Joan on Ted’s behalf just as he had wooed Jackie for Jack. It would be no exaggeration to say that Joan agreed to marry Ted at least in part because of Joe. He, rather than Ted, made her feel wanted.

But despite Joe’s intervention, there was still a major obstacle to a wedding—namely, Ted’s reservations about getting married. “I was young and naive then,” Joan said, “but looking back, there were
warning signals. We didn’t see each other from the time of [Ted’s] proposal until the engagement party.”
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Ted was late for his own engagement party, which was held at the Bennetts’ home in Bronxville. “So he wouldn’t embarrass my mother, he chose to come in the back way, through the maid’s quarters,” Joan said.
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Ted had not even bothered to buy an engagement ring; he had left that task to his father, who sent a huge emerald-cut diamond engagement ring over to Harry Bennett’s office.
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Harry slipped the unopened ring box into Ted’s hand at the appropriate moment.

That night, when their engagement became official, Joan was still a virgin. “The only reason he wanted to marry me,” Joan said years later, “was because he couldn’t get me any other way.”
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H
OWEVER, IT WAS
Joan, not Ted, who got cold feet at the last moment. She went to her father and pleaded with him to postpone the wedding. But when Harry Bennett traveled to Hyannis Port and raised the subject of a postponement with Ted and Joe Kennedy, Joe blew his stack.

“He said they’re not going to put in the papers that my son is being tossed over,” according to Mary Lou McCarthy, Joe’s niece. “He forced the issue. He was God. The wedding was going to happen whether Ted or Joan liked it or not. I told Joan, ‘You can’t cure the addicted woman chaser.’ And she said, ‘I have no choice but to try, do I? What else can I do?’ From the beginning, she was in trouble, and she seemed to know [it].”
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The wedding was held on a frigid day in November 1958, at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville. At Joe Kennedy’s insistence, his friend Francis Cardinal Spellman, the spiritual leader of the New York archdiocese, officiated at the ceremony. As a wedding
gift, a friend hired a photographer to film the wedding, and Joan’s ad-man father had microphones placed around the altar.

“Later,” said Joan, “when Ted told Jack about the ‘bug,’ Jack was really embarrassed because when they were behind the altar, he was giving Ted a big-brother-to-little-brother talk about marriage!”
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Jack’s advice, Joan noted, consisted of assuring Ted that, wedding vows or no wedding vows, Ted could continue to sleep with as many women as he pleased.
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After a brief honeymoon, Joan moved into Ted’s rented off-campus house in Charlottesville, where he had one more year at the University of Virginia Law School. “I do remember,” said Joan, “that when I moved into the house, Ted dismissed the maid! I had to clean, cook, do the laundry, and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!”
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When it came time for Ted to cram for the bar exam, he told Joan that he did not want her around. “He said I would be a distraction,” Joan recalled.
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Joe Kennedy offered to take Joan off his son’s hands; he invited her to go with him to his favorite getaway, the Hôtel du Cap Eden-Roc in the south of France.

Given Joe Kennedy’s well-known penchant for making passes at his son’s girlfriends, Joan might well have had some reservations about traveling with him to Europe. But if she did, she didn’t express them to anyone. Of her time alone with Joe at the Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc, Joan had little to say.

“We would sit out under the stars,” she recalled, “and listen to the BBC concerts.”
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5

D
URING JOHN KENNEDY’S
campaign for the White House in 1959 and 1960, he assigned Ted, who was fresh out of law school, to manage his operations in eleven western states plus Alaska and Hawaii. It was a huge expanse of territory and a daunting political task, since most of the states Ted was responsible for were rock-solid Republican. “All they gave me was a two-page memorandum with about ten different names on it, plus a speech my brother made in Montana in 1957,” Ted recalled. “The rest was up to me. Lucky I learned how to fly a plane when I went to law school.”
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