The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Read online

  Shortly after Vicki’s signs went up around the house, similar ones started showing up around the Big House’s swimming pool: RESERVED FOR THE SENATOR’S IMMEDIATE FAMILY. The problem was that most of the next generation—Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smiths—had been enjoying this enormous pool since they were children. Now they weren’t allowed in it?

  As if they were still children—and by this time they were all grown men and women, most of whom had kids of their own—they started to complain bitterly to their elderly parents, asking them to intervene with Vicki. Vicki couldn’t believe it when Ethel, Eunice, and Jean pled the case for their offspring. “My God. How spoiled are these people,” she wondered to one friend, “asking those poor women to talk some sense into the wicked stepmother? It’s absolutely ridiculous.”

  The older Kennedy women asked Vicki to reconsider, but they certainly weren’t going to beg. They then reminded everyone that Grandma Rose had always believed that swimming in the freezing ocean was much more invigorating, anyway. She used to swim in the sea every single day, no matter how frigid the water. “You can’t use the Big House pool? Fine,” Ethel told everyone. “Swim in the darn ocean and stop your bellyaching, you big babies. There are real problems in the world, or haven’t you heard?”

  One day, Ethel walked past Ted and Vicki’s, and who should she see in the pool? Joan. She was splashing around the pool with Kara, playing with her two children. Did Joan count as immediate family? Maybe. But who knew for sure these days? “My God. Joansie, what are you doing in the pool?” Ethel asked, alarmed. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  Joan had a feeling Vicki probably had a good reasons for the signs. Maybe what she had told Vicki about the family during their plane ride together had something to do with it. In any case, she knew she had a rapport with Vicki; she certainly wasn’t afraid of her. “Yes, I saw the sign,” Joan hollered back. “I’m babysitting Ted’s grandchildren.”

  “Good answer,” Ethel said.

  Vicki’s actions served a bigger purpose than just keeping people in line: it was her way of addressing the fact that many of the family members had so little respect for her. She knew she would have to make a big statement to them that she was there, she was Ted’s wife, and that they would have to learn to live with her and understand her. It could be said that she pushed it to the extreme at first, but, as she put it to one relative of hers, “These are extreme people. You can’t be subtle with the Kennedys. They don’t understand subtle.” So, yes, they got the message.

  * * *

  WITH THE PASSING of the years, life with all its unpredictable twists and turns continued to unfold for the children of Ted Kennedy. Unfortunately, they abandoned their effort to get their father to stop drinking. He, in turn, eventually overlooked the insolence he felt they’d displayed during the failed intervention. As often happens in troubled families, it was all just swept under the rug and never again mentioned.

  Happily, Vicki proved to be a good influence on Ted. She somehow even got him to at least cut back a little on his cocktails. He seemed in better shape for it, too; she also kept a close eye on his diet and had ordered the chefs to prepare healthier foods for him. He also worked her into his professional life.

  “I guess he really was serious about [having a real] partner,” Vicki would recall of Ted. “Over time, I started to be a part of meetings about strategy. Then I started to be a part of prepping for Sunday shows and a part of editing his speeches. We would be talking at breakfast about something and he’d say, ‘That’s really great, could you just do a one-pager on that while I take my shower?’ Then they’d call from the office and say, ‘Do you have time for a conference call with the Senator and his staff on such and such,’ and I’d be a part of conference calls on strategy on a judicial nominee or on some other issue. It was just this seamless, total involvement in every issue he was working on.”

  “It would be untrue to say that she didn’t like being at the center of so much power,” said a friend of Vicki’s. “Her parents were powerful, as was she; she definitely gravitated toward power. Being around Ted and the Kennedys? It was intoxicating, and she would’ve been the first to admit it. The fact that they slowly began to accept her into the fold meant a lot.”

  As much as some of the Kennedys hated to admit it, Vicki was actually good for Ted. Still, his sons couldn’t bring themselves to reach out to her for a better relationship. They also rebuffed her advances in that regard. Ever loyal to their mother, as far as they were concerned, Vicki would always be an interloper. Many of their cousins sided with them. They were rarely openly hostile toward her, but an undercurrent of distrust about her would remain.

  Kara didn’t agree. First of all, she was proud to see Ted take another chance on love at his age. “Dad, anytime you open your heart,” she told him in front of some of the family, “it’s the right choice. So, good for you, Dad. Good for you.” Also, as a woman and mother, she admired Vicki’s strength and tenacity in carving out her own place in Kennedy culture. Kara now saw her as an ally in keeping her father healthy, and she didn’t feel that being friendly with her compromised her relationship with Joan, either. Therefore, the two women became good friends, especially during the time Kara’s marriage to Michael Allen ended. After having two children—Grace Elizabeth in 1994 and Max Greathouse in 1996—the Allens divorced in 2001.

  Meanwhile, about a year after his father married Vicki, Teddy Jr. married Katherine Anne “Kiki” Gershman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale. The couple would go on to have two children, Kiley Elizabeth Kennedy in 1994 and Edward “Teddy” Moore Kennedy III in 1998.

  PART III

  Being Kennedy

  The Circus

  By the summer of 1995, John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette had been together for about a year. They were now living in John’s loft at 20 North Moore Street in Tribeca. John was generally happy with the way things were going with the woman he’d called “the one,” even if the romance continued to generate headlines. For him, being a Kennedy had always meant forgoing privacy and dealing with daily intrusions—fans approaching for autographs, paparazzi taking pictures when least expected, all the sort of thing celebrities are used to, but, in John’s case, magnified tenfold because of his storied lineage. The building in which they lived didn’t even have a doorman; it was easy access for anyone.

  That John was so good-looking didn’t help, either. “Damn. If only I was slightly less photogenic,” he used to joke when complaining about the photographers who would trail him for miles. He had good humor about it. Therefore, it was difficult for him to be sympathetic to Carolyn’s angst about what he viewed as the relatively harmless act of people approaching for autographs and photographers taking pictures of her.

  Carolyn felt as if she were being hunted and, in a sense, she was right. As the woman who had captured the heart of a man viewed as America’s most eligible bachelor, she quickly became the source of great interest. Photos of her were sold to tabloids for thousands of dollars and, as she soon learned, even more if she was caught looking miserable. A sour face suggested she was unhappy, and what better story is there than the one about the woman who has it all but doesn’t appreciate it? What right does she have to be so unhappy? After all, she’s with John Kennedy Jr. “She would call me from an alley, her voice shaking,” recalled Ariel Paredes, Gustavo’s daughter. “She would say, ‘These animals have been following me all day. I’m at the end of my rope.’ I would tell her, ‘Don’t take it so seriously. They only want your picture. Just pose and forget it.’ It’s easy to give advice when you’re not the one being followed by a pack of wild dogs.”

  In response to her complaints, John was impatient with Carolyn and simply wanted her to adjust. “Welcome to the circus,” he would tell her, minimizing her feelings. “Just ignore the clowns, is all.” The closest he ever came to being proactive about ditching the press was to call the Kennedys’ wedding hairstylist, Lenny Holtzman, and ask for a disguise. “He would cal
l me from the Barnstable Municipal Airport when he got to the Cape from Manhattan and say, ‘Lenny, I need my bike and my disguise.’ So I’d have to go and meet him with his bike, his wig, and a dress. He’d go into the ladies’ room and change and get on his bike and ride right past the paparazzi. They wouldn’t recognize him; he was not an attractive woman. I used to laugh so hard, I would pee in my pants.”

  “Don’t talk those guys, whatever you do,” RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s assistant, would advise Carolyn of the paparazzi. “If they hear your voice, it’s personal. Just be enigmatic and don’t give them anything.” Carolyn protested that advice, fearing it would just make her appear bitchy. “It doesn’t matter,” RoseMarie said. “You’ll never win. Don’t react because they want a rise out of you. That makes for an even better shot.” When she could tell that she wasn’t really being helpful, she suggested that Carolyn talk to John about it. “He’s good at this sort of thing,” she said. Carolyn said she had tried to talk to him, but, she added sadly, “He doesn’t care about it at all.”

  “But John, that’s not how you were raised,” John Perry Barlow reminded him during the summer of 1995, while taking him to task about his reaction to Carolyn’s discontentment. Barlow was right; John had been brought up to respect women, not disregard their feelings. He had once admitted to Barlow that he never wanted to become “that creepy Kennedy who doesn’t care what his girl thinks about anything. I hate those guys.” Barlow now warned him that he risked becoming “that creepy Kennedy” unless he paid attention to Carolyn’s concerns. It wasn’t easy. While John was certainly brought up a certain way by Jackie, he was also a Kennedy male raised in a Kennedy culture, where the men were generally selfish and entitled. It took some real introspection on his part to fully comprehend and then empathize with the depth of Carolyn’s despair. He was eventually willing to put in the work, though, and dedicate himself to finding ways to help her cope.

  In the end, John found there wasn’t much he could do about “the circus” other than to make it clear that the clown act was no longer acceptable. Whereas the paparazzi army could once assume that John was fine with them and their intrusive ways, by the summer of 1995, those days were over. Now John wanted to at least try to protect his significant other. Therefore, when photographers approached, he would shout at them to back off, which was maybe an overreaction, but at least it was supportive of Carolyn. He’d also chastise people who jumped out at them from the shadows. Still, it took a lot out of him, just as it did Carolyn.

  At the end of a particularly bad week of being hounded by the press, Carolyn and John were at their home with Anthony Radziwill when a friend came by unexpectedly. He walked into the apartment just in time to see Carolyn doing a line of coke from the coffee table. Both she and John were feeling no pain, he recalled; Anthony didn’t seem to be indulging. “‘It’s been a bad week,’ John told me as he sat down and did a line,” recalled the intimate. “I said, ‘John, what the hell is this? This is new. Is this your thing, or is it Carolyn’s?’ He laughed and said not to worry about it. ‘Look, I’m a Kennedy. Do you think this is the first time I’ve ever done drugs? Please.’ Then he lay down in Carolyn’s lap. As she stroked his hair and kissed his forehead, they actually looked peaceful together, I had to admit.

  “An hour later John said he had the munchies. ‘You sure you want to go out there and have to deal with who knows what?’ I asked him. He smiled at me and said, ‘Sure. Bring ’em on.’ He then took Carolyn by the hand, and off we went with Anthony to get some pizza.

  “As we walked down the street a couple guys approached. I thought, Oh boy, here we go again. But John said to them, ‘You want a picture? Sure. Go for it.’ He and Carolyn then smiled and smiled and smiled and posed and posed and posed to the point where Anthony and I were like, okay, Jesus. Enough, you guys. Then they waved goodbye to the paps and we all went on our way. John turned to me and said, ‘This is not the real world we’re in right now. It’s only going to last about another hour.’”

  Cocaine actually was new for John, but not because he lived a drug-free lifestyle. In fact, he and his friend John Perry Barlow had been doing acid and Ecstasy together for almost twenty years. Though his mother would, no doubt, have been quite upset about it, the first time they dropped acid was when John was just seventeen, right after Jackie sent him to work on Barlow’s ranch in Wyoming for the summer. “John and I enjoyed LSD and MDMA for many years,” Barlow recalled. “He was cautious, though, because of what he had seen in his family. But yeah, I mean, this was something we did from time to time to blow off steam and maybe look at life in a different way. It wasn’t something he wanted a lot of people to know about, though, especially, his cousins. He didn’t want them to think he approved of their own drug use, which he viewed as excessive, so he kept his own under the radar. Coke really wasn’t his thing, though,” Barlow continued. “John told me he viewed coke as merely a mechanism for getting stoned, whereas he thought of acid and Ecstasy as a way to experience life differently, especially when things started to get out of control because of his relationship to Carolyn. At that point, anything he could do to create the space to put things in perspective was what he would want to do.”

  Brotherly Love

  As much as was known about John Kennedy Jr., one aspect of his life that he somehow managed to keep private was his relationship with his cousin Anthony Radziwill. Of course, there had always been pictures of the two published in newspapers and magazines as they grew up together, the sons of two famous sisters, Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill. However, few knew just how close they were and even fewer were aware of the private battle they waged for Anthony’s survival. “It just goes to show that even a Kennedy could have a private life if he really wanted it,” said Gustavo Paredes, “and John protected his relationship with Anthony. Though I was a third wheel at times, I was still there and can tell you they had a real, brotherly love. It was complex, though. They were competitive, whether it was sports or girls or just life. They also had a language all their own; they not only had pet phrases they used with one another, they could look at each other and say all that needed to be said. We knew that Anthony was John’s soul mate and that none of us would ever have that kind of friendship with him.”

  Anthony had suffered from testicular cancer back in the 1980s. Though it was a scary bout with a deadly disease, the family got through it and Anthony remained cancer-free for some time. Unfortunately, in January 1994, the cancer came back at the same time Jackie first started battling hers. A month later, Anthony found himself at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “We got it all,” said the surgeon after cutting a tumor from his abdomen. “Negative margins,” Anthony was told, meaning no cancer.

  John was relieved, as was everyone else. They all then went on with their lives, with Anthony asking his girlfriend, Carole DiFalco, to marry him. However, after he proposed, Anthony started getting cold feet. He said he felt it was too soon after Jackie’s death to have any kind of celebration. John, though, didn’t believe his mother’s passing was the true reason for the hesitation. In the company of two close friends at a bar, John broached the subject over beers. “John finally got the truth out of him,” recalled one witness to the conversation. “Anthony wanted to wait for another doctor’s report to make sure he was in good health. ‘I can’t do it to her,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘I can’t die on her. It would be so fucked up to do that to Carole. She’s such a good person.’”

  Everyone at the table fell silent. John put both of his hands on his cousin’s shoulders and looked at him deeply. “Listen to me. You are just fine, Tonypro,” he told him, using a pet nickname. “I want you to live your life. Look at what we’ve been through as a family. That’ll tell you that there’s no time to waste.”

  By this time, all the fellows at the table had become emotional. “Fuck,” exclaimed one of them. “If we get any softer, we’re gonna start lactating, here.”

  When Anthony confessed that he was fr
ightened about the future, John admitted that he, too, had his own fears and apprehensions, especially since the death of his mother. “But I think we have to catch this wave and ride it for all it’s worth,” he told his cousin. He reminded Anthony that this kind of optimistic outlook had been their philosophy going all the way back to when they were about ten years old and afraid to surf. He reminded Anthony that Ari took them both out into the choppy sea, surfboards in hand, and demanded, “Now surf, goddamn it. And don’t come back until you do.” Both boys were scared out of their wits. Somehow, though, they figured out how to do it, and surf they did, “and it was the best day, ever,” recalled John. So, with that childhood victory in mind, John told Anthony he should face any challenges ahead and marry his intended. “Don’t be a pussy, Anthony,” he added with a smirk. His cousin was lucky, John concluded, that he’d found someone dumb enough to have sex with him, because, as he put it, “that has to be real unpleasant.”

  Anthony then said he wanted to confirm that John was going to be his best man; apparently, he’d already asked him. “Oh hell yeah,” John answered. “After all, love is the thing that has licked him,” he added with a grin.

  “… and it looks like Nathan’s just another victim,” Anthony responded, right on cue.

  It was a line from Guys and Dolls, one of John’s favorite musicals back when he was acting in college. Anthony knew it well, but no one else in their party had the vaguest idea as to what the cousins were talking about.

  Shortly thereafter, Anthony did marry Carole in East Hampton with John as his best man. But then things took another bad turn. In the summer of 1995, Anthony’s cancer returned. He was admitted into the hospital again, and another tumor was removed from his stomach. There would then be more chemo and more upset, but again it seemed that Anthony had escaped another close call.