Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (29 page)

2

The Womanizing Ends

Before Vicki, the caliber of women in Ted’s life had been so low
that Michael Kelly shared this telling anecdote in his
GQ
profile involving an ex-girlfriend in her mid-twenties whom Kelly had interviewed for the story:

As the former girlfriend and I were finishing up our talk, she told me of a big party to which she was going that night. “It’s going to be reeelly, reeelly great!” she said. “They’re going to have these drinks called sharks, which are reeelly, reeelly fun. You have this plastic shark in your glass and you also have a plastic mermaid and you push the shark and the mermaid together and then pour some red stuff over the mermaid that looks like blood.”

“Grenadine?” I said.

“I think so,” she said.

At what age does it stop being fun and start being hell on earth to spend your evenings with someone who gets reeelly, reeelly excited about novelty cocktails?

Ted—much later than most men, it must be said—seemed finally to be approaching that age.

Edmund Reggie had considered Ted a best friend since the late 1960s. He had heard the rumors and seen the tabloid covers. While Ted maintained that some of the hell-raiser tales were “so outrageous that I can’t imagine how anyone could really believe them,” even he acknowledged that others were accurate. In the hard-to-deny category fell early
1990 photographs of Ted having sex on a boat with a much-younger blonde—an exploit so widely publicized that Washington cronies nodded with a smirk to Ted’s “position on offshore drilling.” Learning that the senator had set his infamous sights on Edmund’s daughter could have been upsetting to the judge. Not so, Edmund insisted in an earnest, if unfocused, response to a reporter. “I’ve known Ted Kennedy a lot of years. . . . When does dating become womanizing? Does he exploit women? I think his record shows just the opposite. I don’t know that there’s a member of the US Senate who has ever championed the civil rights of women at all levels, married, single, mothers, unwed, wed—I think his record is the best.

“Well, if you look at Ted Kennedy’s commitment record as a senator, I don’t know of a member of the Senate who’s been there thirty years who’s more committed to a more definable or predictable position than Ted Kennedy. So he’s a person capable of the finest definition of commitment, and marriage is the ultimate commitment. . . .” It sounded as if Reggie were trying to convince himself with his comments; and his nervousness, given Ted’s dismal track record in personal relationships with actual women, was justified. But the faith he extended to Ted ended up being well-founded. Vicki found in Ted a capacity for personal commitment that no one before had been able to tap.

At first, Ted and Vicki got together for dinner once or twice a week. Their playful banter continued as the relationship blossomed. One night Ted mentioned that his approval rating had plummeted to 48 percent. Vicki quipped, “That’s a relief, because I never go out with anyone whose approval is less than 47.” Ted did well when he met Vicki’s children, Curran, then eight years old, and Caroline, who was five. Ted, a father figure not only to his own three children but also to more than a dozen nieces and nephews, had long ago perfected the art of teaching children to imitate animal sounds. He used that skill on Curran and Caroline as well, Vicki recalled.“They were a little older than the real animal sounds age, that are good for, like, two, three years old,” she said, “but he still came out with them.” Ted began keeping up on football and baseball because Curran loved sports, and he sprawled on the living-room floor with Caroline to color pictures.

Those early date nights were often interrupted by one or both of the children calling for “Mom-my.” “I remember one night, I said I really apologize. Look, I’m so sorry. It must not be a pleasant dinner for you because I have to run upstairs five times,” Vicki recalled. Ted would hear none of it. “He said, ‘No, you don’t understand, a child calling ‘mother’ is the most beautiful sound in the world.’ ”

In mid-August, after the two had been dating just a couple of months, they had their first tiff. Ted had sailed from Hyannis to Nantucket to visit Edmund and Doris Reggie at their second home. Vicki was there visiting, and Ted tried to persuade her to sail back to Hyannis Port. It was hurricane season, however, and Vicki’s response was terse: “There is no way.”

Kennedy men—for whom physical courage had totemic importance—were not used to having their gutsiness balked at. And they were especially not used to hearing the word “no.” “I won’t say that I was hurt by Vicki’s refusal to trust me at the helm of a fifty-foot boat sailing across open water in the path of a Category 2 hurricane,” Ted said. “But I didn’t call her for two weeks.”

After Labor Day, Vicki finally broke the ice and called him. Ted remembers saying at the end of the conversation, “Well, listen, I was just thinking, uh—I know you don’t want to go out a lot because of your children, so, uh—I thought I would come over to your house for dinner.” From that point on, Ted spent nearly every dinner at Vicki’s house. It was an old-fashioned courtship, both would later say. What they didn’t say explicitly was this: For Ted, he began this relationship with Vicki the way he should have with Joan—slowly, spending time to get to know each other before taking the ultimate commitment plunge.

With Joan, the marriage had been too fast, and the couple’s time together far too brief. Ted realized this. “We certainly had not spent a lot of time together during our courtship, and we didn’t spend the necessary time together in the early years,” Ted said. “Almost immediately after the wedding celebrations were over, I plunged back into law school and the moot court competition, my travels, and campaign work for Jack. And so we never benefited from that critical but fleeting interval in which a young husband and wife get to know themselves and each other as a married couple.”

Surely it helped that by the time Ted met Vicki, he’d not only played the field but had the field named after him. And his presidential hopes had long ago dissipated. He’d endured heartache and encased himself in frivolity to remove even the possibility of getting close to someone about whom he could care again. With Vicki, he decided to risk getting hurt because she was worth it.

“As the months went on, I realized that I loved this woman very deeply and that my love for her was overcoming all the defenses I’d built up in myself against the potential heartbreak of marrying again,” he said. On January 14, 1992, Ted proposed to Vicki during a performance of the opera
La Boheme
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She said yes. Just as he’d done some thirty-four years prior, Ted called the father of the woman he loved. This time, he happened to also be calling one of his best friends. Edmund wasn’t surprised to get the call. “He said, ‘You know, I love Vicki very much and I’ve asked her to marry me, and I want to ask you and Doris’—and, you know, Ted did it the proper way.”

The couple didn’t announce the engagement straight away. Instead, they waited several weeks before telling Ted’s children. Vicki told her youngsters as well. All the kids were asked not to repeat the news, but Caroline was just six and this was Washington; she shared the secret with a friend in her kindergarten class who in turn told his parents—who happened to work for the
Washington Post
. Soon, reporters descended on Vicki’s hometown of Crowley. Residents of the small town were both wary and protective. “If they’ve come to Crowley looking for dirt on Vicki, they’ve come to the wrong place, because no one’s got anything bad to say about her,” said Gonzales, the newspaper editor. “Not that anybody’s hiding anything. It’s just there’s nothing bad about her. But some reporters try to put words in your mouth because they can’t believe this good-looking, 38-year-old girl would want to be married to a 60-year-old Teddy Kennedy, with his past.”

The word was out, but Ted still hadn’t given Vicki a ring. In April, while visiting Ted’s sister Pat at a rented house in the US Virgin Islands, Ted placed a ring near a coral head under the water at Buck Island Reef. As he and Vicki snorkeled, he pointed beneath the water for her to look. “So I swam down underwater, and there was this,” Vicki said, pointing
to the sizeable diamond on her left hand, “sitting on the coral. And I thought the fish was eating something there. Teddy said he was dying. Can you imagine that fish eating the ring before I got to it?”

As storybook a relationship as theirs sounded, there were skeptics in Washington. With Ted’s approval rating so low, grumblings had started that Vicki was merely a shrewd attempt on the senator’s part to revamp his battered image. Edmund Reggie dismissed the notion. “If anybody were looking to strategize a political campaign, he would do it, I think, using easier methods . . . than committing his whole life to another woman and her children,” he said. Reggie joked that no one could know and say, “ ‘Now, Senator, if you marry Vicki, you’ll gain 10 points in the polls or 25 points in the polls . . .’ I don’t think there’s any such empirical evidence anywhere in the world, and so, for him to have landed on this idea to have undertaken a lifetime commitment to a woman without some kind of empirical evidence falls of its own weight, and it’s ludicrous.”

Vicki knew there were skeptics but shrugged them off. “I knew I was right,” she later said. “I knew the man.”

The two were married in a private ceremony at Ted’s house in McLean on July 3, 1992, with just their immediate families present. Ted gave his new bride an oil painting he’d done of daffodils as a nod to a William Wordsworth poem they had recently read together.

The union did boost Ted in the polls, incidentally. And, as it turned out, he needed all the help he could get.

3

Battling Romney

For decades, Ted Kennedy’s name on the Massachusetts ballot
seemed enough to guarantee his victory. Though the nation’s Democrats had decided resoundingly in 1980 that they didn’t want a Kennedy presidency, Ted’s victory for the Senate in his home state time and again was a given. Until 1994. By then, his reputation as a womanizer and drunk had reduced him to a national joke and paved the way for his first real opponent in years: Mitt Romney, a wealthy forty-seven-year-old businessman making his first foray into politics. The son of former Michigan governor and onetime presidential candidate George Romney, Mitt had what Ted seemed to be lacking: He was a pious family man, raising five sons with Ann, his wife of twenty-five years. He’d complained so much about the bad example Kennedy was setting that one morning, in the summer of 1993, Ann finally turned to him and said, “If you don’t stand up and do something about it, then, you know, shut up and stop bothering me.”

In traditionally Democrat country, Republican Mitt “was positioning himself as a moderate, almost an apolitical candidate,” Ted later wrote. “He was pro-choice, he declared. But efficiency was what he really had to sell: sleeves-rolled-up, businesslike efficiency, to replace the senior senator’s outdated ways.” It was to be an expensive race: Ted would take out a two-million-dollar loan against his Virginia home and spend more than six million dollars on the campaign. By Labor Day, a
Boston Globe
poll found Mitt and Ted in a virtual tie. Ted realized he was no shoo-in for the post he’d held for thirty-two years, and his campaign strategy had to be updated. In a move that highlighted just how different Ted’s union with Vicki was compared with his first marriage to Joan, Ted asked Vicki
for advice. She was not just a helper in his campaign, showing her pretty face and reading his speeches; she was a collaborator. When Mitt touted in ads that he’d created thousands of jobs, Vicki suggested to Ted and his campaign managers that they look closely at Mitt’s business record. She knew from her work as a bank lawyer that venture capitalists sometimes cut payrolls, “that there would be a lot of downsizing . . . a lot of restructuring of debts and that sort of thing.” At first, her suggestion didn’t seem to sink in with the advisers, so she even circled back to it to make sure it had registered. It did, and the campaign hired The Investigative Group, Inc., a detective firm, to probe Mitt’s company Bain Capital. The firm uncovered slashed jobs, wages, and benefits at a Bain-bought factory in Indiana, helping to bolster Ted’s campaign.

With Vicki at his side—as well as a few longtime aides, some of whom were resurrected from retirement to help—Ted was having fun campaigning. A
Boston Globe
story in June described him as “energized” and “feisty.” Taking issue with a
Boston Globe
column that questioned whether Kennedy’s charisma had waned after three decades in office, Kennedy pointed to his Senate committee’s passage of the nation’s most comprehensive health care reform measure and asked a campaign crowd, “Do I still have my charisma?”

Vicki went after women voters with vigor (or “vigah,” as the Kennedys would say). While Joan had hosted countless teas and spoken to women’s gatherings, Vicki was targeting a new woman—not just the stay-at-home mom who influenced her husband’s vote, but the working mom who balanced her professional world with her family and cared deeply about her community and its policies. “She was a natural,” Ted would recall. “As women in that group have since told me, she was one of them, swapping stories of working motherhood. . . . She listened to the stories of women who have since been her very good friends.” But Ted wasn’t the young candidate representing the New Frontier anymore, and Vicki wasn’t automatically hounded and adored the way that Joan had once been. In fact, plenty of young voters had no idea who Ted was. Some, when asked if they’d like to meet Mrs. Kennedy, replied, “No, thank you!” So Vicki would politely ask them for their vote anyway and move along.

With Mitt gaining on Ted in the polls, the senator beefed up his television commercials. Some had more bite than any he’d run previously. Ted liked to point out that in thirty-two years in politics, he’d never referred to his opponent by name. But this campaign, Ted called Mitt out, attacking his business practices and highlighting his campaign missteps. Vicki helped make that call: “It was important to talk about his opponent’s record,” she told Clymer, “because his opponent was running on his record. I mean, he put that in play. He said, ‘I’m a business man. I’ve done this, therefore I’m qualified to be your U.S. Senator.’ ”

For one commercial, Ted donned a white lab coat for a health care–related commercial. Vicki saw him and nixed it. The press reported that she thought the coat made Ted look fat, but, in reality, she said he simply didn’t look like himself. “It doesn’t ring true to me,” she said. “It looked like a costume as opposed to what he really was doing.” With Vicki’s Lebanese ancestry, Ted was able to reach out to a new ethnicity as well. One Lebanese grandmother pulled Vicki aside and quizzed her about Ted: “So, honey, is he good to you?” “Do you love him?” “Does he eat Lebanese food?” Vicki said yes to all three, and the woman said, “OK, honey, I’m gonna vote for him for the first time in my life.”

While Joan had always infused Ted’s campaigns with classical music, Vicki’s tastes could lean decidedly more contemporary. At an Aerosmith fund-raiser for Ted, the senator relied on his wife while writing a speech that managed to weave in several Aerosmith song references. The
Boston Globe
story reported a few of them, including how Ted “said he needed the help of Aerosmith because he wanted to ‘Walk This Way’ down to Washington.”

Mitt Romney failed to resonate with voters, and Ted proved impossible to beat. On Election Day, Ted won his seat by a margin of 58 percent to Mitt’s 41 percent. Later, as he and Vicki celebrated with friends and family, Ted shrugged off the toasts and congratulations being offered him and began, “Well, this victory really isn’t about me. It’s about my family, and it’s about the people of Massachusetts and their residual goodwill that goes all the way back to Grampa’s day—”

Vicki cut him off. “Please excuse my language, but BULLSHIT! This is just ridiculous!”

As Ted stared at her, she continued: “You know, Teddy, if you had lost, it would’ve been
you
that lost. It wouldn’t have been your family that lost.
You
would’ve lost. You
won.
You
won! Not your family.
You.
”