On Sunday night, July 1, 2012, Taylor Swift arrived at the Kennedy compound for her promised visit. She could not have been more excited; she and some of the younger Kennedys, including Patrick (Maria and Arnold’s son) and Conor (son of the late Mary and Bobby), both of whom were eighteen, spent the night on the beach, drinking, swimming, and having a good time playing flashlight tag—a favorite Kennedy pastime, basically “tag” in the dark. She and Patrick seemed to have instant chemistry, which was not so surprising. He was slim, good-looking with a smile like his mother’s, and apparently difficult for Taylor—who’d had a wide array of boyfriends in the public eye, such as Joe Jonas, John Mayer, and Jake Gyllenhaal—to resist.
On her first morning at the compound, Taylor was treated to a little taste of the Kennedys’ summer lifestyle, which in many ways hadn’t changed in the last fifty years. One thing that was different, though, was the absence of sign-up sheets for meal shifts. Now there was one meal prepared in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one for the evening.
The day started with a huge breakfast in the nook of Ethel’s enormous kitchen, prepared by her chef and served by her waitstaff. According to the menu (one was provided to guests every day), Ethel had the cook prepare his Palm Beach crab stack with poached eggs—basically, crab cakes on English muffins with eggs, tomatoes, cheese, and hollandaise sauce. There was also a side of Irish potato cakes—topped with Irish smoked salmon—as well as homemade blueberry-orange bread with marmalade butter.
The atmosphere was boisterous as always, much less formal than it would be at dinner, with Kennedy youngsters, teenagers, and young adults coming and going in their swimsuits and the older adults—on this day, including Patrick, Teddy, and Rory with their spouses and, of course, Ethel—properly seated. “Elbows off the table,” Ethel kept telling the kids; it had always been a pet peeve of hers and remains so. There was no serious discussion about politics or world affairs, though. Rather, the conversation had to do with which yacht was going to be taken out for sailing that day … who was going to be on which touch football team … where the volleyball game would be taking place … all the usual Kennedy summer concerns. As a diehard fan coming into this rarified world, Taylor Swift had to have found it all pretty exciting.
Lunch was served on Ethel’s patio—grilled lobster or mushroom gorgonzola and bacon burgers or hardwood-grilled New York sirloin steak. Joe told the chef to take the day off so that he and his twin sons, Matthew and Joseph III, could man the barbecue. They had a lot of fun serving up food for everyone.
After lunch, the entire family gathered on Ethel’s patio, where Taylor—in red shorts and a black T-shirt with white polka dots and a red polka-dotted scarf folded around her head—played guitar and performed an acoustic rendition of the tune she’d written in honor of Ethel and Bobby. It was called “Starlight,” with lyrics such as: “I met Bobby on the boardwalk, summer of ’45/Picked me up late one night at the window/We were seventeen and crazy, running wild.” (Ethel actually did meet Bobby in 1945 when she was seventeen.) Ethel was moved, her smile genuine. She said the impromptu performance took her right back to her youth and reminded her of that lovely time in her life. When Taylor then asked Ethel what her reaction had been to seeing Bobby for the first time, her eyes twinkled and she answered with one word: “Wow.”
Definitely, after hearing the moving tribute, everyone was completely taken with Taylor Swift. As far as they were concerned, she was now pretty much an honorary Kennedy.
Dinner, as formal as ever with Ethel seated at the head of the table, started with a first course of baked brie wrapped in filo with walnut glaze; the second course, barbecued cajun shrimp with melon and Midori sauce and, for the main course, Mediterranean-style halibut with clams and mussels. Afterward, there was a generous sampling of desserts, including Kara’s chocolate cake—so named because it was served at her wedding back in 1990.
Three days later, Taylor’s Fourth of July at the Kennedy compound would be a fun and memorable holiday, even sans the big party she’d hoped to host at the Big House. She and Patrick definitely seemed like an instant item; paparazzi caught them embracing throughout the day. “Had such an amazing day. Best 4th of July I could ask for,” young Schwarzenegger tweeted. “Hope everyone had a great day!”
Happily, Taylor managed to pass with flying colors the historic Kennedy tradition of being tested to gauge her mettle. Over the years, Jackie Bouvier, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carolyn Bessette, and countless others had been forced to at least try to rise to the occasion of being able to compete with the Kennedys in their athletic and competitive world. “You know what she really is?” Ethel later said of Taylor. “She’s game. She had never sailed before; she sailed. She had never dragged before. She dragged. She played everything else everyone else was doing and she was good at it, and no fuss.”
The “dragging” Ethel referred to happened on the morning of the holiday. Taylor, wearing a frilly polka-dotted bathing suit with a white bow at the décolletage, was on a boat with a gaggle of young, athletic Kennedy girls when a couple of them jumped into the water to grab a rope that would then be dragged by the yacht—“dragging.” Taylor was reluctant. Hanging on to a rope while being pulled through the waves? “No, that’s not for me,” she said. Ethel wouldn’t hear of it, though. “If you don’t do this,” she told her, according to Taylor’s memory, “you run the risk of being boring. Now, get in the water.” (It reminded some of a needlepoint Ethel has had in her home for years, which reads: IF YOU OBEY ALL THE RULES, YOU MISS ALL THE FUN.) In the end, Taylor did as the matriarch commanded and had a great time. In some ways, she says, it was even a teachable moment. “Ever since then, I decided that to really live, you have to jump in, you have to take chances,” she would later say. “You have to embrace the unpredictability of life instead of fearing it. Thank you, Ethel, for teaching me that.”