In January 1992, just six months after their first date, Ted asked Vicki to marry him. “I want you to be a part of my life in every way,” he told her, according to her memory. He added that he didn’t want to come home and report back to her about a trip he’d just taken. Rather, he wanted her to be with him. “He didn’t want a separate life,” she recalled. “He wanted a partnership for the first time in his life. He had enough of loneliness and separateness. He wanted togetherness.”
Vicki was an accomplished woman, a well-respected attorney and someone to be taken seriously; “I’ve always been a substantive lawyer who helped devise strategies for resolving complex legal problems,” she’s said. Still, stories of the Kennedys’ initial response to her have become the stuff of legend handed down in the family and, maybe not surprisingly, are specific to gender. The Kennedy men didn’t quite know what to think of her. She was articulate, elegant, and refined. She was stunning, too … which was maybe the problem.
There were a lot of snickers among Ethel’s sons about “what a looker” their old uncle Ted had somehow managed to reel in, especially after he announced his engagement to her. Some of them crassly wondered aloud what she was like in bed. They talked among themselves, saying that if Ted couldn’t satisfy her, maybe they could give him a helping hand. In other words, they were Kennedy men through and through.
“I also heard that a male attorney who’d been around the family for years said of Vicki, ‘Wow, what a vamp. I haven’t seen anything like that come down the pike since Jackie Bouvier,’” Dun Gifford once recalled. “Ethel overheard the remark and smacked the guy right across the chest,” he recounted with a chuckle. ‘“Don’t you dare be disrespectful of women in my house,’ she said. She hated that kind of thing. She was raising four daughters. If you think she liked that kind of talk, you’d be wrong.”
Ethel’s only hesitation about Vicki had to do with her age; Kathleen was three years older. Joe was two years older and Bobby Jr. the same age. Still, she said she was going to reserve her opinion of Vicki until she got to know her better.
Most certainly, one person who could best testify to some of the challenges of being a woman in the Kennedy family was Ted’s ex-wife, Joan. Vicki had heard that Ted hadn’t told Joan about his plans to marry her, and that she had to hear about it from a reporter from The Boston Globe calling for comment. Joan was so upset—at least this is what Vicki had heard—so much so that her sons had to rush to her side to comfort her. Was this true? When Vicki confronted Ted about it, he said yes, that was exactly what had happened. He had no problem with it, though. Why, he asked, should Joan Kennedy, “of all people,” have to know everything that was going on in his life? He didn’t feel the least bit compelled to run his personal agenda by her. Vicki was put off by his response. It was so utterly disrespectful to the mother of his children, she couldn’t believe the words had come from his mouth; she made a mental note of it. “Look, you’re coming in at the ninth inning of a long baseball game,” he told Vicki, according to one source. “Don’t try to figure out my relationship with my ex-wife, and maybe just keep your distance from her.”
As fate would have it, though, Vicki would accidentally meet Joan one day on an airplane to Nantucket. She didn’t know what to expect when she saw her sitting at a window seat. “No, no, no, come here and sit next to me,” Joan immediately said when she saw Vicki.
Vicki sat down with some hesitation. She then broke the ice by noting how wonderful Joan’s children were and what a good job she and Ted had done in raising them. “You should be very proud of yourself and of your family,” Vicki said, “and I’m so proud to become a part of it.” Joan smiled her gratitude. It was a nice way to start a conversation; only another mother would have known how to best lighten the mood. Even though it was only to be an hour’s flight, what Joan then had to say was definitely enlightening. She asked if she could give Vicki some advice; Vicki said she would welcome it.
“You know, I used to be beautiful once, too,” Joan began. It was a sad self-evaluation that had to have been difficult for Vicki to hear. However, Joan, who was now fifty-six, did have a sort of faded blond beauty; her face was deeply lined, and maybe she’d had a tad too much cosmetic surgery. It looked like perhaps she was trying to hang on to the past a little too hard. She told Vicki that she should watch out for the Kennedy men, that the way they viewed women was “revolting.” She also said she didn’t think Vicki knew what she was signing up for, that it was “a real men’s club over there.”
Joan had a good foundation for her opinion. “Back in the fifties, she came into the family as one of the most gorgeous women to ever marry into it,” recalled her former personal assistant Marcia Chellis. “She was blonde, blue-eyed, and had a great figure. She’d been a model and knew how to make the best of her assets. However, every time she had a viewpoint, she was either shot down or dismissed. They didn’t take her seriously simply because of her appearance. They couldn’t imagine that a woman who looked as she did could also have a brain. All of those dinners at Joe and Rose’s where everyone was supposed to chime in with an informed opinion? Each time Joan tried to do so, they snickered at her, shot her down, and moved on to another subject.”
On their plane ride together, Joan told Vicki that even after she proved her mettle by stumping for Ted when he broke his back in that plane crash in 1965, she still felt blatant sexism from the men in the family who dismissed her as empty-headed and just a pretty face. She said that the men used to call her “the dish,” as if she should be flattered. She did not consider it a compliment. Joan also recalled that Ethel used to tell her to not allow herself to be referred to that way because “she always knew I was a lot more than just … this,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face. Had it not been for her work on Ted’s behalf, Joan said—and history does show that this is true—he would have lost his Senate seat. She got no credit for it, though. Now, years later, she warned Vicki that she would have her work cut out for her if she ever hoped to gain true respect in the Kennedy family. “Those men do not respect women,” Joan concluded. “Period.”
After that little talk, Vicki couldn’t help but admire Joan. Certainly, all she’d heard about her from Ted was that she drank too much, which in and of itself seemed to prove Joan’s point. Actually, Joan was a smart woman who, even if she did have her problems, seemed to be working on them. At the end of the year, she would even become an author; her book, The Joy of Classical Music, about her greatest passion in life, was scheduled to be published by Doubleday in October. Vicki thought it was a great accomplishment, but when she mentioned it to Ted he didn’t seem impressed. She definitely began to better understand what she was going to be up against in marrying him, and now nothing would surprise her.
Like some of the other Kennedys, Ted’s daughter, Kara, also had a critical opinion of Vicki, but at least hers had to do with wanting to protect her father. After all, she and her brothers had never known Ted to be so emotionally invested in any one woman, not even their own mother. They couldn’t help but wonder if Vicki had some hidden agenda. That she seemed able to do what Joan had failed at, which was to not only captivate their father but help him to be a better person, didn’t bode well for Vicki. The speed at which she’d gained influence over Ted was disconcerting. Was their father really just searching for a soulful connection with anyone because he felt so abandoned by his children after their failed intervention?
Over the next few months, the Kennedy progeny even began to suspect a financial component to Vicki’s interest. They stood to inherit about $30 million, equally. A big question for them now had to do with how that amount might be impacted by their father’s marriage. They couldn’t very well sit down with him to discuss it, not after all that had recently happened. Therefore, in the true tradition of powerful family members who can’t openly communicate with one another, such concerns had to be addressed via lawyers and other representatives. Through these channels, the Kennedy offspring came to understand and would have to accept that there would be no prenuptial agreement with Vicki. This shock would become the subject of a great deal of heated back-and-forth between lawyers. Finally, Kara drew a line and said she was sick of the fact that every time there was a disagreement about money, the family’s pit bull attorneys had to be dispatched to settle it. That didn’t get her far, though. She and her brothers were assured by their father’s counsel that their inheritance was safe and they were told to just butt out. In their minds, it wasn’t so simple, yet what could they do? They had to hope for the best. Making things worse for everyone, Vicki was hurt by the controversy and even angry about it. Wisely, though, she decided not to allow it to affect her. She knew how to pick and choose her battles, and she had enough on her plate trying to figure out her dynamic with Ted.
“From the time we were engaged, he used to push me onstage to speak at events,” Vicki would recall. “That would just surprise me. So, my first trade union convention, it was the garment workers, we were in Florida. We weren’t married yet … I remember walking in and they said, ‘Ted! Ted! Ted! Ted! Ted!’ It was exhilarating and he got up and then they introduced me and he said, ‘Go on up, Vicki, say a few words.’ I said, ‘Ted—’ And I’m thinking he has totally lost his mind. What am I going to say? ‘Oh, tell them the story of such and such. Go on, they want to hear from you, they’d love to hear from you.’ And he used to do that to me all the time.”
Vicki looked at Ted’s coaxing her onto the stage with a little suspicion, especially given everything revealed to her by Joan. Was he just showing her off? Was she now just a little wind-up toy he could send out onto a stage to make himself look good? I can still get the hot broads, can’t I? Though she decided to give Ted the benefit of the doubt, she would definitely keep her eye on him.
Ted and Vicki married in a civil ceremony on July 3, 1992, at Ted’s home in McLean, Virginia.