Summer 1992. Victoria Reggie Kennedy, wearing a colorful sarong, her brunette hair cascading to her shoulders, was talking to a longtime Kennedy employee as the two ambled slowly along the sand-and-pebble-covered beach of the compound. “I had worked for the family for many years as a property manager,” recalled the caretaker, who’s still employed there and asked for anonymity. “I understood the way the neighborhood functioned, which was as an open space for all of the Kennedys and their many friends.”
In particular, everyone was free to visit, without advance warning, the so-called Big House, which is where the senator now lived with his elderly mother, Rose. Vicki had confided in one close friend that she felt just a little anxious whenever she walked by the wing where Rose—101 by this time—was bedridden. Would that be her one day? Still living in this house in fifty years?
“They’d congregate in the enormous kitchen and anywhere else they liked, not only there but in all of the homes,” said the caretaker of the Kennedys. “It had been that way from as far back as I could remember, when Rose lived there with Joe.”
As he and Vicki walked the coastline, she asked for some information about how the estate was run, “what sort of security was in place,” he recalled, “how paparazzi were kept off the property, that sort of thing.” Vicki also wanted to know if there were specific rules in place for visiting one another. He told her that there were none; people just came and went from one another’s homes as they pleased. Vicki stopped walking and turned to face the employee. “That really stinks,” she said bluntly. He looked at her with surprise and asked, “Excuse me, ma’am?” Vicki sat down on an Adirondack chair and beckoned him to take the chair next to hers. Then, according to his memory, she said that she refused to allow her and Ted’s home to be used as a “flophouse” for miscellaneous Kennedys and their friends. “That’s very disrespectful to us,” Vicki said. “Don’t you agree?”
He didn’t know how to respond.
After a thoughtful beat, Vicki said that she wanted the employee to change all the locks in the Big House and then make copies of the new keys not only for her and Ted but also for the many nurses and other caretakers charged with looking after Rose Kennedy. As he took notes, she continued by saying she would also need several DO NOT TRESPASS signs—maybe a dozen or so for around the property. Also, she said, there should probably be new signage around the pool that would keep everyone but her, Ted, and her children out of it except by invitation. She said she would need to think about the specific language, but that it would probably be along the lines of: FOR TED KENNEDY’S FAMILY ONLY.
“Will there be anything else, Miss Reggie?” asked the caretaker as he stood up.
Vicki rose, tilted her head back, and squinted up at the blazing sun through her large aviator sunglasses. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe some earplugs,” she added, “because once all those Kennedys figure out what I’m up to, I think I’m going to need them.” She smiled at the employee and asked if she could count on him. “Of course, Miss Reggie,” he said. He turned to leave. As he was walking away, she called out to him, “Oh, and one more thing.”
He faced her again.
“It’s Mrs. Kennedy.”
ABOUT A WEEK later, Joan, who lived down the beach from the Big House, needed a half dozen eggs for breakfast. She asked her daughter, who was visiting with her two children, to run over to Ted’s to raid his refrigerator. Kara sprinted over to her father’s house, about a half mile or so. When she got there, she found all the doors locked. This was odd. Annoyed, she raced back to Joan’s to get her keys. When she returned to Ted’s, she tried to let herself in, but her key didn’t work; it took her a few moments to figure out what was going on: the locks had been changed. Now she was angry. She stomped back to her mother’s and called her father. The specific details of that call remain unknown, but what we do know is that Ted suggested that Kara give Vicki some time to adjust to her new role in the family. He was sure it would all work out for the best, he said—and, yes, by the way, he did have eggs in the refrigerator and he would happily bring them over to Joan himself. About an hour later, when Ted brought the eggs to Joan, he ran into Kara sitting on the porch, stewing. “Are you happy now?” he asked her. “Do I look happy?” she responded. He said he didn’t want to talk about it, that if Kara had issues with Vicki she should take them up with her.
Later, according to this family account, Kara saw Vicki walking along the shore. She went up to her and asked for a word. She then told her that the compound had been run a certain way since her father was a child. She didn’t think it was fair for Vicki to just waltz in and change things around. She said that she’d gone to the Big House that morning to get some eggs for her mother and the door was locked. Vicki asked what time it had been; Kara said it had been about seven. When Vicki then asked if Kara felt that was appropriate, Kara got a little heated. Yes, she said, going to her father’s house to fetch eggs for her mother, was, in fact, quite appropriate.
Apparently, the two women then sized each other up: Kara, thirty-two, who had spent her entire life on these sacred grounds, and Vicki, a mere six years older, who was new to these shores. Vicki said she understood Kara’s concern. However, her young children were both living in the Big House now, she explained, and she felt it wasn’t safe for them to have people walking in unannounced at all hours of the day. She wasn’t as concerned about Kennedys, she said, as she was about their friends, people Vicki didn’t even know. As a mother, she said, Kara should understand. Plus, there was Rose Kennedy’s privacy to also consider. If Kara wanted eggs, Vicki said, all she had to do was call first. She just didn’t understand why this was such a big problem. In later telling this story to a friend of hers, Kara would recall, “What I wanted to say is, ‘Well, Vicki, I think maybe a better question might be: Why are you such a bitch?’ But I didn’t.”
Instead, Kara warned Vicki that she was going to make a lot of enemies in the family if she wasn’t more careful. She cautioned her that no one wanted a new sheriff in town, not after all these years. Vicki was firm in her response. All she cared about, she said, was protecting her husband, her children, and Rose Kennedy. “But from who?” Kara asked. Maybe she expected Vicki’s answer to be: “From the likes of you people.” Instead, Vicki kept her cool, held her ground, and said from anything that invaded their privacy. All she was asking was that visitors called in advance before coming over to the Big House during early or late hours. In the afternoon, she said, she would allow more latitude.
“I actually think you may want to take the high road here,” Kara suggested.
Vicki said that, unfortunately, her experience thus far with the Kennedys had shown her that “the high road doesn’t always take you where you want to go.”
According to this story, the two women stared each other down; finally Kara smiled and nodded. “Hmmm … you’re very … interesting, aren’t you?” Maybe it sounded condescending, but to hear Kara tell it later, she didn’t mean it that way at all. She meant exactly what she said: Vicki was very … interesting. “I could say the same about you,” she told Kara with a smile. The two then took a long walk together down the beach, just as Kennedy women had been doing for decades, maybe commiserating about challenges they faced or maybe just getting to know each other. Who knows what they said during their stroll? Neither ever discussed it. But it had to have been … interesting.
About a week later, Vicki’s NO TRESPASSING signs went up around the Big House. Now, instead of traipsing in front of the main house in order to get from one part of the compound to the other, Kennedys of all generations had to walk all the way down to the beach and then cross over to the other side. “This is absolute bullshit,” said Joe Kennedy, speaking pretty much for everyone. “Who does she think she is?”
From this point on, Joe would have serious reservations about Vicki. “She’s too big for her britches,” he said, sounding like a man of the fifties, certainly not the nineties. “I have to talk to Uncle Teddy about her. He needs to straighten her out.” If anyone in the family led a revolt against Vicki, it was Joe. Because he was the oldest son of the new generation, there was still a sense among some of the Kennedys that he was, at the least, the symbolic head of the family. No one wanted to cross him. No one, that is, except Vicki, who wasn’t the least bit cowed by him. When the two were in the same room, she would always be cordial, but the tension between them was palpable. Once, in front of John, Bobby Jr., and some other family members, she said to him, “You have a problem with me, don’t you, Joe?” He said, “Should I?” She looked at him with indifference and said, “Probably,” before walking away. John did a double-take. Smiling broadly, he then mouthed to Bobby, “I love her.”
“I was contacted, I won’t say by whom,” said Dun Gifford, “to see if anything could be done about Vicki. I thought it was disrespectful. I was just a family friend, having not worked with Ted for years. I called him and told him, look, you have relatives opposed to your wife. He was not surprised; he already knew. He was calm. ‘It’s going to take time,’ he said. ‘Soon everyone will agree that she’s a wonderful woman.’ I told him I’d heard she was putting up signage. He said, ‘Good for her, then. I say put ’em up if that’s what it’ll take for people to understand who’s in charge now.’ I thought, That’s intriguing. She’s in charge now? I liked Ted’s attitude. I respected him for it.”
Shortly after Vicki’s signs went up around the house, similar ones started showing up around the Big House’s swimming pool: RESERVED FOR THE SENATOR’S IMMEDIATE FAMILY. The problem was that most of the next generation—Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smiths—had been enjoying this enormous pool since they were children. Now they weren’t allowed in it?
As if they were still children—and by this time they were all grown men and women, most of whom had kids of their own—they started to complain bitterly to their elderly parents, asking them to intervene with Vicki. Vicki couldn’t believe it when Ethel, Eunice, and Jean pled the case for their offspring. “My God. How spoiled are these people,” she wondered to one friend, “asking those poor women to talk some sense into the wicked stepmother? It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
The older Kennedy women asked Vicki to reconsider, but they certainly weren’t going to beg. They then reminded everyone that Grandma Rose had always believed that swimming in the freezing ocean was much more invigorating, anyway. She used to swim in the sea every single day, no matter how frigid the water. “You can’t use the Big House pool? Fine,” Ethel told everyone. “Swim in the darn ocean and stop your bellyaching, you big babies. There are real problems in the world, or haven’t you heard?”
One day, Ethel walked past Ted and Vicki’s, and who should she see in the pool? Joan. She was splashing around the pool with Kara, playing with her two children. Did Joan count as immediate family? Maybe. But who knew for sure these days? “My God. Joansie, what are you doing in the pool?” Ethel asked, alarmed. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
Joan had a feeling Vicki probably had a good reasons for the signs. Maybe what she had told Vicki about the family during their plane ride together had something to do with it. In any case, she knew she had a rapport with Vicki; she certainly wasn’t afraid of her. “Yes, I saw the sign,” Joan hollered back. “I’m babysitting Ted’s grandchildren.”
“Good answer,” Ethel said.
Vicki’s actions served a bigger purpose than just keeping people in line: it was her way of addressing the fact that many of the family members had so little respect for her. She knew she would have to make a big statement to them that she was there, she was Ted’s wife, and that they would have to learn to live with her and understand her. It could be said that she pushed it to the extreme at first, but, as she put it to one relative of hers, “These are extreme people. You can’t be subtle with the Kennedys. They don’t understand subtle.” So, yes, they got the message.
WITH THE PASSING of the years, life with all its unpredictable twists and turns continued to unfold for the children of Ted Kennedy. Unfortunately, they abandoned their effort to get their father to stop drinking. He, in turn, eventually overlooked the insolence he felt they’d displayed during the failed intervention. As often happens in troubled families, it was all just swept under the rug and never again mentioned.
Happily, Vicki proved to be a good influence on Ted. She somehow even got him to at least cut back a little on his cocktails. He seemed in better shape for it, too; she also kept a close eye on his diet and had ordered the chefs to prepare healthier foods for him. He also worked her into his professional life.
“I guess he really was serious about [having a real] partner,” Vicki would recall of Ted. “Over time, I started to be a part of meetings about strategy. Then I started to be a part of prepping for Sunday shows and a part of editing his speeches. We would be talking at breakfast about something and he’d say, ‘That’s really great, could you just do a one-pager on that while I take my shower?’ Then they’d call from the office and say, ‘Do you have time for a conference call with the Senator and his staff on such and such,’ and I’d be a part of conference calls on strategy on a judicial nominee or on some other issue. It was just this seamless, total involvement in every issue he was working on.”
“It would be untrue to say that she didn’t like being at the center of so much power,” said a friend of Vicki’s. “Her parents were powerful, as was she; she definitely gravitated toward power. Being around Ted and the Kennedys? It was intoxicating, and she would’ve been the first to admit it. The fact that they slowly began to accept her into the fold meant a lot.”
As much as some of the Kennedys hated to admit it, Vicki was actually good for Ted. Still, his sons couldn’t bring themselves to reach out to her for a better relationship. They also rebuffed her advances in that regard. Ever loyal to their mother, as far as they were concerned, Vicki would always be an interloper. Many of their cousins sided with them. They were rarely openly hostile toward her, but an undercurrent of distrust about her would remain.
Kara didn’t agree. First of all, she was proud to see Ted take another chance on love at his age. “Dad, anytime you open your heart,” she told him in front of some of the family, “it’s the right choice. So, good for you, Dad. Good for you.” Also, as a woman and mother, she admired Vicki’s strength and tenacity in carving out her own place in Kennedy culture. Kara now saw her as an ally in keeping her father healthy, and she didn’t feel that being friendly with her compromised her relationship with Joan, either. Therefore, the two women became good friends, especially during the time Kara’s marriage to Michael Allen ended. After having two children—Grace Elizabeth in 1994 and Max Greathouse in 1996—the Allens divorced in 2001.
Meanwhile, about a year after his father married Vicki, Teddy Jr. married Katherine Anne “Kiki” Gershman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale. The couple would go on to have two children, Kiley Elizabeth Kennedy in 1994 and Edward “Teddy” Moore Kennedy III in 1998.