Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (8 page)

3

The Girl with the Red Convertible

Though the Kennedys and Skakels both shared nouveau riche
status, they handled it in very different ways. The Kennedys
acted
more like typical old money. They were wealthy but tempered in their spending. They didn’t just hobnob with the upper crust, they became its top layer. They visited popes and sought ambassadorships and emphasized order and structure and discipline. “Dinner was at 7:15 and it did not mean 7:16,” Ethel would later say of her in-laws. The Skakel home was hardly so orderly. “At our house, you didn’t know whether you were going to have supper at 5 or 10,” Ethel said.

Nor was Rose Kennedy’s stern emphasis on scholastics mirrored in Ann Skakel’s child rearing. Ethel, in fact, was a mediocre student, doing just enough to skate by, first at Greenwich Academy, and then at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Maplehurst. By the time she reached Manhattanville, her less-than-studious habits had long been solidified. “Every morning at college—even at college, imagine that—from 8:30 to 9, I read the odds about the racetrack,” Ethel recalled. “If only my tests would have been about the race horses instead of history. I would’ve had an A.” She added, with a laugh: “I wasn’t a very deep thinker.”

In Ethel’s senior yearbook—class of 1949—she’s described with flourish:

An excited hoarse voice, a shriek, a peal of screaming laughter, the flash of shirttails, a tousled brown head—Ethel! Her face is at one moment
a picture of utter guilelessness and at the next alive with mischief . . . The 49ers didn’t have to search very far to find in Ethel a heart of gold.

Ethel was smart and clever—her letters to family and friends were always lively and well written—but she was never considered an intellectual heavyweight. She had a native aversion to introspection and embraced her mother’s religious teachings apparently without question. And that maternal influence was strong: Inside the Greenwich home’s library stood a font of holy water and several praying chairs. Ann would drive into town every morning for 7:00 a.m. mass at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church on Greenwich Avenue, towing each child with her as soon as they turned four years old. Every day she and the children said a special prayer that George would convert to Catholicism. Ethel’s lifelong religiosity was rooted in “saying grace before every meal, of wearing a silver rosary every waking and sleeping moment, of attending mass daily no matter how late she had come home the night before.”

But Ethel’s faith was borne of more than just ritual. Ann routinely invited clergymen and educators to visit the home and gather in the ornate library—its ceiling-high shelves lined with books—and lead informal discussions on matters of religion. While hardly intellectual debates, the discussions covered a broad range of topics and lent an air of sophistication to the otherwise rough-edged home.

Still, many who grew up with Ethel in Greenwich remembered her and her brothers as irresponsible, unruly, even arrogant. Tales of the Skakel kids running amok became the stuff of local legend. The boys had followed in their father’s footsteps to become gun fanatics—George was known to always keep a loaded revolver in his bedroom nightstand—and stories were rampant about them shooting up mailboxes and streetlamps around town. “There were some forty-five-caliber bullet holes in some of those mailboxes,” childhood friend Ken McDonnell remembered. “They were using big stuff, and there was some retaliation. Some people went up there to the Skakel house and put a few holes in their mailbox.”

Then there was the time the brothers decided they wanted to build a bridge across a small lake near their home. Instead of wood and nails for the construction, they used Buicks, driving at least a half-dozen cars
into the lake hood-to-trunk, so that the boys could walk across the roofs and get from one side of the lake to the other. “All those cars ended up accordion-pleated in the water,” Pan Jacob, a childhood friend of Ethel’s, later recalled. “And that was considered lots of fun by them. No one in the house said, ‘What a horrible thing to do!’ It was just ‘Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this amusing? Those naughty boys!’ There was no punishment.”

Pan blamed the parents for a lack of discipline. “The Skakel kids weren’t spoiled so much as they were deprived. They had money but they didn’t have anything else. There was no structure.” She once said,

Most families have a way of doing things, a pattern of behavior. There was no pattern at Lake Avenue. It was an abstract painting as opposed to a formal painting, more surreal than Rembrandt; a Jackson Pollock world where everything was exploding, where there was no cohesiveness. The Skakel house had a sadness about it. It didn’t have a core. The family had no established roots. We all felt insecure. I don’t think they did. In fact, they were a mass of insecurity.

But while some people remembered the family as unstable, others remembered it as a riotous good time—including Jim Skakel, Ethel’s brother. “Our parents weren’t strict, but we didn’t do anything too ridiculous, either,” he said. “There wasn’t any pressure. The philosophy was ‘Enjoy yourself.’ ” The animals, the parties—all of it made for outrageously wild tales. And Ethel, if not disciplined at home, was certainly self-disciplined. She had a natural competitive edge to ensure she succeeded at anything physical she tried. When she was introduced to horses at a young age, she immediately took to riding and quickly excelled at competing. She’d don her jodhpurs, top coat, riding hat, and crop and spend most afternoons after school with her rotating cast of horses: There was Smoky Joe, who was black with white socks, and whom her father bought for $800; Guamada, a chestnut mare working hunter that cost $1,500; and Beau Mischief, a dark bay that she owned when she left for college. On weekends, she’d show the animals.

National Velvet
, the movie starring a young Elizabeth Taylor and her horse, was Ethel’s favorite. “She took to riding the way she took to touch
football with the Kennedys,” said Ethel’s friend Billy Steinkraus, who went on to ride with the US Olympic riding team. Ethel was so consumed by her horses that she had neither the time nor attention span to chase boys like her friends. In fact, she didn’t seem to have much interest in exploring her approaching womanhood at all. If she had a date in high school, her childhood friends couldn’t remember it. In April 1936, Ethel got her first mention and photo in the
New York Times
when a picture of her, her brothers George and Rushton, and sisters Pat and Georgeann appeared with the caption: “Five Members of One Family Ride in Same Horse Show.” It would be the first of hundreds of mentions in our nation’s paper of record.

As each child got old enough to drive, they were given a new car—and each earned their own lead-foot reputation with the Greenwich Police Department. Friends remembered the police chief routinely stationing an officer at the end of the family’s driveway, hoping to nail them for speeding before they even reached the public roadway. Access to cars prompted the boys to play a game they called “King of the Castle,” in which one would climb on top of the car’s roof while another drove it recklessly around town in search of low-hanging tree branches. The goal: to knock the roof-rider from the moving vehicle to the ground.

When Ethel came of age, she got a spiffy red convertible. Oppenheimer wrote:

Ethel drove recklessly and at high speeds, sometimes at night with her lights off. Once, coming back from a horse show, she drove her car off the road and through the woods as a shortcut home. One year, she had a car without a reverse gear and everywhere she went she caused a traffic jam and hot tempers if she had to back up, which she found hysterical. Ethel or her passengers would push the car backward.

While the kids raised hell around town, father George continued amassing a fortune. Great Lakes Coal and Coke began in 1919 when Skakel launched the business with Walter Gramm to buy coal wholesale and distribute it to retailers. Within a few years, the company expanded its interest to petroleum coke—a byproduct of the oil-refining process.
While the market crash crippled much of the nation, Great Lakes flourished, opening an office in New York City and marketing petroleum coke as a solid fuel for domestic and industrial heating. Soon, George expanded into the international market, setting up sales offices in Germany and Japan, among other countries. Eventually, Oppenheimer reported, 65 percent of the company’s income would be derived from foreign sales.

George was forever looking for ways to expand, and he was shrewdly entrepreneurial. He saw that electrochemical and electrometallurgical industries had been purifying the petroleum coke that they used in their plants, and he figured that his company could take over that process at plants situated close to the refineries. “It could sell the purified product at higher prices than the raw material, and the industries, relieved of the calcining burden, would be happy to pay them,” David wrote. The first calcining plant opened in 1935 at Port Arthur, Texas, and was a huge success. More plants followed in Illinois, California, and Wyoming, and George’s grand idea ended up making him millions of dollars. It was a long-term moneymaker, too: Calcined petroleum coke is a key ingredient in producing aluminum, and George’s company had a near monopoly on supplying it to the growing aviation industry. The nation struggled, but not the Skakels: George was one of about two dozen known millionaires in America in the early 1930s.

“In judging other men, my father’s standard was
when
those men made their fortune, not how
big
it was,” Jim Skakel, Ethel’s brother, would later say. “He was always proud he made his money in the Depression, the
worst
of the Depression.”

As World War II got under way, George partnered up with an army colonel with shipping connections. George bought several tramp steamers, a type of merchant ship, which he named after his daughters. The
Ethel Skakel,
the
Patricia Skakel
, and the
Ann Skakel
had hefty government contracts that George’s army buddy, Alfred Parry, helped procure. Great Lakes Carbon owned 75 percent of the shipping company, and Parry got 25 percent for running the business. Once the war ended, George sold off his two remaining boats—one had been sunk by a German U-boat in the war—and he got out of the shipping business.

Despite this high-profile wealth, George’s name rarely made the papers. Unlike Joe Kennedy, who courted the press, George was wary of it. As the company grew, George refused repeated requests from the likes of
Fortune
magazine and the
Wall Street Journal
to interview him for profiles.
“Whenever a colleague would advise him to talk to a journalist to get free publicity, George would scoff,” Oppenheimer wrote. “His philosophy was, ‘You can’t quote silence.’ ”

Back at home, Ann Skakel was a study in contradictions when it came to her wealth. On one hand, she let the kids chase each other, spraying carbonated soda all over the house—drenching the drapes and carpet—without a thought about the cost. Ethel once rode her horse straight through the front door and out through the back, and Ann is said to have shrugged it off. And yet, Ann had a cheap streak. She once decided that soda was costing her too much (the kids, after all, didn’t just drink the stuff), and she had heard that private schools were given a discount from the distributor. “So she telephoned the distributor, informing them that the big house on Simmons Lake was a school and could she have the discount, please?” author Lester David wrote. “She could and she did for a number of months, until the distributor found out and politely but firmly refused to grant the discount any more.”

4

Manhattanville

The nuns at Manhattanville had encountered plenty of preco
cious young women over the years, but none was quite like Ethel ­Skakel—especially when she joined forces with her roommate, Jean Kennedy. Just as the high jinks in the Skakel home lent to local folklore, so, too, did Ethel’s pranks at the pious college.

Once, the girls wondered aloud what the nuns wore to sleep. Ethel decided there was only one way to find out, so she pulled the fire alarm, and the nuns scurried into the halls in their nightgowns. Another time, after being snubbed by an Irish boy showing his horse at a New York horse show, Ethel snuck into the stables and painted the boy’s horse green with vegetable dye, in honor of his Irish roots. Then there was the time Ethel targeted Monsignor Hartigan for arriving on campus in a fancy new Cadillac. She put a handwritten note in his windshield that read, “Are the collections good, Father?”

Years later, Ethel would remember one prank above most others. She and Jean had racked up serious demerits that the nuns tallied in a dreaded book. Ethel’s offenses were many: chewing gum in assembly, disorder in the tearoom, talking during lunch. She had so many demerits that she was going to be “campused,” forced to stay at Manhattanville while the other girls were free to go to the annual Harvard-Yale football game.

“This is ridiculous to ground us at this age,” Jean complained. “We’re too old to be grounded.”

Ethel agreed, recalling that they “took the demerit book and threw it down the incinerator, and went to the Harvard-Yale game.”

Rose Kennedy worried that the high-spirited Ethel was leading Jean down a troubling path, and so she tried to separate the girls. “Mother didn’t think we were studying, and Mother thought that Ethel was a bad influence,” Jean later recalled. “I had had honors when I graduated from Noroton, and my marks went steadily down. So she put up a wall between us.” The divide didn’t last, however, and even after Bobby passed up Ethel to date her sister, Ethel still worked her way into the Kennedy clan. In 1946, as Bobby and Pat dated, she went to work on Jack’s congressional campaign, ringing doorbells, passing out literature, and telling anyone who would listen just how “terrific” a candidate John F. Kennedy was. “We’d drive up to Boston and lick stamps,” Ethel recalled. “I thought, this is so exciting! We went house to house and talked to people. And why they would listen to a 17-year-old who knew nothing, I have no idea. But it was a great experience. It was a room full of people who I had never rubbed elbows with before.”

Ethel had never paid much attention to politics before she was drawn in by Jean’s enthusiasm. In fact, her parents were conservative Republicans. Her father considered Franklin D. Roosevelt an enemy because of the president’s plan to impose new regulations on big business. “George hated Roosevelt,” Jay Mayhew, Great Lakes’ chief geologist and George’s longtime friend, would later say. “He felt that Roosevelt would run the country into the ground. He felt Roosevelt could have become a dictator.”Asked years later whether she had any consciousness of their political beliefs growing up, Ethel replied, “None whatsoever.”

Still, Ethel worked doggedly for Jack’s campaign, scurrying to sometimes six or seven neighborhood parties a day, serving cookies and pouring coffee and handing out brochures. She found the whole process invigorating, and after the campaign ended, returned to college a fervent believer in the Kennedy cause. She even wrote a college thesis on Kennedy’s book
Why England Slept
and peppered in enough firsthand research to earn an A.

After graduation, she toured Europe with Jean and Eunice and, upon her return, decided to enroll at Columbia University for graduate work. By then, Bobby was ready to settle down. Though he was the seventh born to Rose and Joe, he planned to be the first married—and he hoped to raise a family bigger than his own.