A Love Story, with Detours
Ethel Skakel was a skinny, loud-mouthed tomboy with sparkling eyes and an ever-present tan when she jubilantly began to conspire with her friend Jean Kennedy. Roommates at Manhattanville College—Rose’s alma mater, then located in Harlem—the two girls were good friends with reputations as troublemakers. They came from similar backgrounds, as daughters of wealthy and large Irish Catholic families, into which they each were born second-to-last. They both had rambunctious and revered older brothers who hogged most of their parents’ attention. They were both athletic and attractive and, as good Manhattanville girls, were on the lookout for possible husband material. Jean, in fact, was already engaged to a young man named Stephen Smith. As she and Ethel grew closer, she became certain that Ethel would love her older brother Bobby and wanted desperately for Ethel to meet him. Ethel was just as eager.
They plotted, Ethel later recalled, and in 1945, they succeeded: Ethel and her parents joined the Kennedys on a family ski trip to Mont-Tremblant in Canada, where she was formally introduced to Robert Francis Kennedy. Just as Jean had predicted, the two had a competitive sort of chemistry, exchanging an immediate wager over who would ski down the mountain the fastest. Ethel would later say it was love at first sight on her part when she spotted the toothy, five-foot, nine-inch-tall Bobby standing in front of a roaring fireplace.
Less so for Bobby.
Actually, it was Ethel’s older sister Pat who first caught Bobby’s eye. A disappointed Ethel could only concede defeat. Patricia Sistine Skakel was prettier, quieter, with more book smarts and certainly more feminine appeal. She was even named after a piece of Renaissance art. The sisters were opposites on many levels, right down to the states of their bedrooms: Ethel’s was always a mess, like a typical boy’s, but Pat’s was “soft and refined: French Provincial furnishings, white satin on the headboard, wall-to-wall white fur carpeting in her private bathroom.” Pat dated Bobby for two long years. Decades later, Ethel would wince at the recollection: “Ouch . . . That was a black period.”
Though there are differing accounts of just how serious Bobby and Pat were—Pat would later refuse to answer when asked if the future attorney general had ever proposed marriage to Pat—by all accounts, it was a heartrending time for Ethel, who was forced to watch from the sidelines as the Kennedy boy with the serious eyes would swing by the house to pay Pat a visit. When he’d spot the little sister, he’d call out a friendly “hi,” and she’d respond in kind, “but he never knew how she felt inwardly,” journalist Lester David wrote in 1971. “It was a bleak and unhappy time for Ethel and she does not like to talk or even think about it.”
In 1947, the cloud would lift and Ethel would get an opening. Bobby left for Israel to write about the War of Independence for the Boston Post. While he was away, Pat fell for another boy, Luan Peter Cuffe, and when Bobby returned, it was Ethel’s turn to catch his attention. The two were about as opposite in personality as possible: Bobby had trouble finding the right words, so he often just didn’t speak. In contrast to his outgoing brother Jack, Bobby rubbed some as uncommunicative. Ethel, on the other hand, was tough to shut up. “She talks and talks: bubbly, informal, slang-larded talk on anything that happens to fascinate her—children, sports, doctors, parties—spoken rapidly in a low, somewhat breathy contralto,” wrote David. But soon after the two started to date—which, by proper Skakel-Kennedy standards, largely meant spending time together with other members of their enormous broods—Bobby grew increasingly smitten with the outspoken prankster. Then, in true teenage-girl fashion, Ethel swung the other way, not sure about him. Like her sister, she also had someone else on her mind.
Bobby learned, much to his exasperation, that the woman he wanted to marry was considering becoming a nun.
“How can I fight God?” he asked Jean.