Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (62 page)

It wouldn’t be until after Ari’s death that Ted and Jackie’s other attorneys would scramble to try to figure out a way to pull the submerged supertanker from the drink.

Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968, in a Greek Orthodox ceremony, witnessed by several other members of the groom’s family, as well as Jackie’s own mother and stepfather, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her late husband’s two sisters, Pat Lawford and Jean Smith, who were there representing the Kennedy family. Probably the most significant two wit- nesses, however, were Caroline and John Jr., who carried lighted candles as they stood behind their mother.

Andy Williams

E
thel Kennedy was not only a Kennedy widow, but also a relatively attractive woman whose wide-set bright blue eyes and broad, winning smile were her greatest attributes. Ethel was a perfect size eight at the time of Bobby’s death, and her

consistent waistline—even after all those pregnancies—had always been the envy of Jackie. Whereas Jackie had to diet constantly, Ethel never bothered. Skating, skiing, swim- ming, sailing, shooting the rapids, and running after eleven children was all she needed. Whereas Jackie and Joan both spent hours on their hair, constantly experimenting with new styles (especially Joan), Ethel kept her light-brown hair in a short, casual style, the better to brush it back into shape after falling off a raft into the river. To the public, she was a woman of inexhaustible energy and ample charm, fascinat- ing in every way. No one outside of her private circle knew of the brooding, and often contentious Ethel, the private Ethel.

Being young, being a widow, and being a Kennedy made Ethel, in the years after Bobby’s death, prime fodder for tabloid speculation about her private life. Her biggest “ro- mance,” resulting in widespread publicity, seems to have been with popular singer Andy Williams.

Ethel and Bobby had known Andy and his then-wife Claudine Longet since the mid-sixties. Recalls Andy Williams, “The first time I ever really talked with Bobby Kennedy was in 1964 at a birthday party [Universal Studios president] Lew Wasserman gave for his wife, Edie, at the studio. I had done a TV show earlier that night and came over to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Edie. Bobby and Ethel came over to our table afterward, and my first impression— Claudine’s, too—was how young he looked. And how he looked and talked directly to you. I danced with Ethel, and Claudine danced with Bobby. The next day, I was playing golf when Claudine called and said the senator had invited us to visit with them in Palm Springs. He hadn’t had a vaca- tion in a while.”

Upon the return of Andy and his wife from their vacation, it was clear that they had fallen under the spell of Camelot. “We stayed up all night, talking and singing. That’s where our friendship really started,” recalled Williams. “It was a gradual thing, and there is no point where I can say that’s where I knew he would be one of the closest friends I’d ever have.”

Before long the couples were constantly traveling and so- cializing as a foursome. When Bobby and Ethel entertained at Hickory Hill, Andy and Claudine were always at the top of the guest list. The Williamses spent many hours with the Kennedys, skiing in Sun Valley, rafting on western rivers, playing touch football at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port. As proof of their special friendship, photos of the Kennedys and the Williamses together were positioned all over their households.

At the time they met the Kennedys, Andy and Claudine’s marriage seemed headed for certain trouble because of his hectic touring and television schedule. She was lonely, she complained, and longed for more attention from him. Then they met the Kennedys and, she now recalls, “Just being around that family changed our whole lives. Andy watched Bobby with their kids and saw how they all got involved in activities together. He got an entirely new viewpoint of what a family is supposed to be like. Bobby got him involved in doing things he would have never tried otherwise—skiing, tennis. We’d go camping and sit around the campfire and Ethel would ask Andy to start a song, and we’d all join in and sing, even Bobby, who had the worst voice in the world and, of course, sang the loudest. We’d break up laughing until our stomachs hurt. It brought Andy and me together again—at least for a time—I have no doubt about it.”

When Claudine became pregnant, Ethel sent her a box of maternity clothes that she had worn during some of her own pregnancies. While Bobby was alive, Ethel had gotten into the habit of buying maternity clothes even when she wasn’t expecting, knowing that sooner or later she’d be needing them. After his death, she decided that she’d never have that need again. Claudine said later that she sobbed as she thought of what it must have meant to Ethel to pack all of those dresses for the last time and send them off to a preg- nant friend. To one especially pretty cocktail dress, she had pinned a note: “This was Bobby’s favorite. Wear it in good health!”

But it was Bobby and Claudine who seemed to have made the most intense bond. Years after Bobby’s death, Claudine hinted that her relationship with him had developed into something deeper than the friendship the two couples shared. “We could talk in the way a girl and a man could talk,” she said, “the way women are almost never able to talk, the way I was never able to talk with Ethel . . . not chitchat. When Bobby died, I lost interest in the Kennedys. There was no one for me to talk to. I drifted away.”

Because she was a Kennedy widow, the press was natu- rally interested in Ethel’s private life, always linking her with everyone from New York Governor Hugh Carey to Cary Grant. Andy Williams’s marriage to Claudine Longet began to sour shortly after Bobby died, so Ethel began re- cruiting the entertainer to be her escort. Of course, this in- nocent coupling started a flood of rumors and speculation about an impending marriage, a story that would continue to be a headline-grabber in fan magazines all the way into the late seventies.

For Ethel the flurry of headlines her “affair” with Andy

(whom she had nicknamed “Andy Baby”) generated was just another madcap adventure which she took in stride. “She thought it was all a riot,” George Terrien once said. “She loved the attention she was getting; she loved the fact that she was suddenly considered a
femme fatale.
”

“Every week she had me cutting articles out of
Photoplay, Modern Screen, Movieland,
and all of the rest of the silly fan magazines she used to read religiously,” said Leah Mason. “Once they started writing about her and Andy, well, she loved that more than anything. ‘We’d make a good couple, don’t you think?’ she’d ask me. She would stare at the pic- tures longingly, as if she wished that they actually meant something romantic was going on in her life. I sensed she needed someone, some human contact. They went to a lot of concerts together, spent time in Hyannis Port, played sports. Andy was a lot like Bobby, small and wiry, a great smile. He was a gentler man, though, than Bobby. Not as argumenta- tive. A softy, maybe too soft for Ethel, who was used to fire- works.”

It would seem that it was actually Jackie who tried to fos- ter a more serious relationship between Andy Williams and Ethel Kennedy. “Jackie liked Andy very much,” said Joan Braden. “She wanted to see Ethel move forward with her life, not only because she, from her own experience, realized that this was best, but also because she knew that this was what Bob would have wanted. And Bob liked Andy so much. But Ethel was not the same kind of woman as Jackie. Ethel was satisfied to stay home, to live an almost cloistered life. Jackie would never have been able to deal with that. They were very different women.”

“Jackie thought Andy was perfect for Ethel,” said Leah Mason, who stopped working for Ethel in 1968 but resumed

on a temporary basis in the seventies, “and she worked be- hind the scenes to orchestrate something romantic between them.”

Trying to play matchmaker, Jackie telephoned Andy to tell him that Ethel was romantically interested in him, with- out having obtained her permission to do so. Then, as if she were a tenth-grader, the forty-three-year-old former First Lady called Ethel and told her that Andy wanted to move the relationship forward. “It was so juvenile of her, I was com- pletely amazed that she would be involved in such nonsense, but I know she was,” says an associate of Ethel’s, “because she later admitted it. It showed a side of her that people might not expect to find, one that certainly surprised me be- cause I thought she was too self-involved to have ever done such a thing. I think it worked, too . . . for a while.”

According to people close to Ethel Kennedy, Ethel and Andy stepped up their relationship in 1972 into a romantic realm. Leah Mason diplomatically concedes that there was a period of time that year when Ethel and Andy were sleeping in the same room, in the same bed. However, she adds that “it’s entirely possible that they were platonic, even in the same bed.”

These sleeping arrangements lasted for the entire year, whenever Andy would visit Hickory Hill. However, it would seem that Ethel wasn’t comfortable with even the illusion of closeness to Andy Williams, that she felt that she was some- how betraying Bobby’s memory by moving ahead with her life. Friends remember seeing Ethel and Andy together on the patio, holding hands and kissing, but they hasten to add that it did not seem like a happy, lighthearted experience for Ethel to be close to another man while still wearing her wed- ding ring—which she refused to take off—at Hickory Hill,

in front of Bobby’s children. Ethel, with one foot firmly planted in the past and the other tentatively feeling for the future, could never commit herself to Andy Williams under the circumstances.

“Andy Williams cared deeply for Ethel,” Lem Billings once told a journalist. “Maybe enough to know that she was not ready for romance in her life—and maybe never would be ready. Her devotion to Bobby wouldn’t allow it. No mat- ter how hard he tried, and I saw him try on several occa- sions, he couldn’t break through. Since he couldn’t wear Ethel down, I think he began to feel he wasn’t man enough to fill Bobby’s shoes, that he was inadequate.”

Bobby Kennedy was still the center of Ethel’s world; no one—not Andy Williams or anyone else—was ever going to replace him. One associate of Ethel’s remembers over- hearing a telephone conversation between Ethel and Jackie, during which Ethel said, “Listen, Jackie, just forget it. Andy and I tried it, and it just didn’t work. Nobody can replace Bobby. You should know that by now.” To that as- sociate’s knowledge, Jackie then abandoned her match- making efforts.

“I thought it was sweet that she [Jackie] cared,” says Leah Mason. “But Ethel didn’t. She said to me, ‘How dare she try to match me up with Andy Williams! It could never work.’ Then she shook her head sadly and said, ‘He deserves better, anyway.’ She seemed so very alone as she walked out of the room. I thought to myself, ‘Such a sad woman, with no one in her life.’ I wondered how this had happened to such a lively, effervescent person. It seemed unfair.”

(In the end, sixteen years after his divorce from Claudine Longet, Andy Williams married a hostess who was some twenty-five years his junior. Through the years it seems that

Andy and Ethel remained what they always were: good friends.)

Like Andy Williams, the gentlemen Ethel would see so- cially after Bobby’s death were all men left over from her friendships with Bobby who happened to be widowers or who were going through marriage difficulties and divorces. Ethel often needed an escort to social events, and the men with whom she felt most comfortable were naturally her choices. Such was the case with Frank Gifford, who had been a friend of Ethel and Bobby’s dating back to the days when RFK was Attorney General. During the mid- and late seventies, while he was going through a divorce with his then-wife Maxine, Gifford became a frequent escort of Ethel’s. The relationship, from all appearances, looked seri- ous enough for Maxine to cut off Ethel, a woman she once considered a friend.

But, as with Ethel’s other relationships, nothing seriously romantic developed between Ethel and Frank. (Gifford eventually married TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford. Then, in 1981, Gifford’s daughter Victoria married Ethel’s son Michael—they would later divorce—bonding Ethel and Frank together as in-laws.)

The fact is that Ethel enjoyed men simply for the sake of their company. Always the jock, she preferred playing dou- bles with her male friends and rarely hit the courts anymore with other women. “Women’s tennis bores the tears out of me,” she declared. (In the mid-seventies, though, she would become an ardent fan of female tennis pro Martina Navratilova, dubbing her “magnificent.”) She also said that she would never become involved with anyone who was not Catholic or who was divorced, though everyone who knew her well felt that this was just an excuse.

Recalls Frank Mankiewicz, “She would often joke with me and say, ‘What am I going to do if the Pope one day says that it’s okay for a Catholic to marry a non-Catholic? Or it’s okay for a Catholic to marry someone who’s been divorced? With my luck,’ she would add, ‘the Pope would say, “And guess what, everyone? It was okay all along!” ’ Seriously, though, I never felt that Ethel was interested in anyone; not that I would ever presume to know what she was thinking when it came to her personal life.”