The Kennedy clan was close-knit. Mary Frances was the eldest; sisters Anne and Norah and brother David followed close behind. Their father, Rex, was the publisher and editor of the Whittier, California newspaper. Rex took leadership of the paper during Prohibition, but still kept bottles of wine and sherry hidden in the dining room sideboard. Red wine, often nicknamed “red ink,” came to the table as often as possible, usually when Mary Frances’s stern Grandmother Holbrook (who lived with the family) was away. Mary Frances noticed how much happier Rex and her mother, Edith, were when good food and a wine bottle or two were on the table.
I HAVE NO IDEA HOW OR WHEN MY FAMILY STARTED to take white wine trips, just as I don’t know where our family jokes and teasings and names came from. Perhaps it was my mother and father who started them. I don’t remember. I don’t think we took them, calling them white wine trips, until perhaps we all drank wine. But we have certainly always had them since we grew up.
Father would say, “Is there any more wine?” or “Is there any more of this white wine?” It was always white wine, for some reason. And Mother, if she sensed a little argument in the air, or even if she didn’t, would say, “I loathe arguments.” “No, it is only a little discussion, Edith,” we would say. But she would go into her room, which adjoined the dining room, always keeping the door open so that she heard everything we said, and sometimes we would hear her chuckling. In other words, she withdrew but kept an ear on everything, and we ignored her, but were all aware of her.
Father would say, “How about another bottle, Dote?”—or Sis, or whoever was nearest the kitchen. And then I or somebody would go out and get another bottle of very nice wine, and we would sit back for the trip.
It was always fun to seek ways and means of getting out of where we were into another world, or perhaps another language. I remember once when it was about midnight, Father said to me very sternly, “Dote, you go to the telephone and call the Mexican consul.” I said, “Rex, I think he is probably in bed now.” But he said, “Call the Mexican consul,” as if I had not spoken. “Call the consul and tell him we want to have passage, and a house in Guadalajara ready by tomorrow morning. Tell him we want to engage a Mexican plane to take us straight to Guadalajara. We will go from there to Chapala or Ajijic. You call him.” So of course I did.
I think Chuck and Nan Newton, my dear cousins, were there at the table. Sis was there, I’m sure, and Mother was in the next room. She knew we wouldn’t go to Guadalajara. We all knew we would never go. Rex knew that the consul would not be there. I knew when I made the call that nobody would answer. But we all waited and I did make the call and nobody answered. I went back and said, “Rex, nobody answered.” He said, “Well, goddamn! Well, let’s go on. Let’s plan anyway.” So we all went to Mexico for the next two hours and had a marvelous time.
One time Father figured that if Al Fisher and I could come over on a twelve-passenger freighter from Marseille, then he could do the same. There had been no doctor on board, of course, and Rex would have needed one by then, but he said, “We’ll take this cargo/passenger freighter and go through the canal, and go to France, and we’ll live there for a year. We’ll get off in Marseille, and go on up the Rhône awhile.” We all had different ideas about where we would go. I remembered one Christmas that Al and I had spent in Cassis, and I said, “How about staying down on the Côte?” And Rex said, “No, too many movie stars, too glamorous. We want to get away. We want to live like French people.” I said, or somebody said (Nan, or maybe Chuck, or Sis, or whoever was there), “What if we don’t speak by the end of the boat trip? What if we all hate each other?” And Rex said, “Absolutely not. That is impossible, because there is no place to go on a ship, and we have to take care of each other. The captain will be the doctor. He always is anyway, and the first mate and I will be friends and anyone who wants to can play bridge. And the crew…”
But we knew, as Rex did not know, that there are crews and there are crews. He thought that people took care of each other, and he was never much disabused of that idea—certainly not by us on a white wine trip.
I remember one time Rex and Norah and my two little girls and I were sitting at the table having a rather quiet white wine trip because Mother had died. I had decided to move to the Ranch from Bareacres because I knew I could not raise the two girls alone, and Rex needed me, and I needed Rex, and the girls needed Rex. We were sitting quietly talking at about ten o’clock, having a second bottle of good Chablis, and the dining room door swung open. There in the doorway stood my young number one nephew, the only one I had at that time, Sean Kelly, who was then about sixteen. He was going to a school in Palos Verdes and his room-mate was Ricky Bercovici, who has since become Erik, a good producer-director, and who is still, I think, Sean’s best friend.
Ricky was quite a bit shorter than Sean, who was then about six-foot-four. These two boys of sixteen were dressed in long black heavy coats down to the floor, and their faces were pale and their eyes were a little bit too bright. They both had on black felt hats, and their hands were deep in their pockets. Rex said, “Good evening, gentlemen, do come in. We’re having a little trip here, We‘re having a white wine trip.”
Ricky and Sean didn’t smile. They came into the room, went to the end in back of Rex, and stopped at the sideboard. Rex swung his chair around, as we all did, but neither of the boys smiled or spoke or even acknowledged us; they just looked intensely aloof. Father sat without a word, and we all sipped our wine and watched as Ricky took out oranges from every pocket in his long black overcoat, until there were twelve of them. And then he started juggling!
Our jaws dropped. Ricky was a wonderful juggler; I learned later that his worried mother had been told that he should juggle to keep his mind off his other jugglings, both mental and physical. He juggled at least twelve oranges in the air, and when he was finished they all fell back into the right pockets, which Sean had opened. The two of them then turned and walked out of the room and out the kitchen door. They never spoke a word. But they didn’t seem rude; it was as though they were apparitions.
When they were gone, Father swung his chair around and we all took a big sip of white wine. “Now that was a white wine trip!” he said, and indeed it was.