Still Herself
If the year that followed Bobby’s death was difficult for Ethel, she did everything in her power to conceal it. The concessions she did make to grief were strangely formal: For the year after his death, she observed the old-fashioned convention of wearing only black and white; and there were no public events at Hickory Hill until May of 1969, when she held a charity pet show. But in general, she made a concerted effort to carry on as before Bobby had died. Friends were constantly around, and Ethel stayed active with tennis and swimming. The children were expected to carry through on plans they made before their father’s death—Kathleen, for example, continued with her plan to work for the summer on a Native American Indian reservation in Arizona. Ethel also traveled by herself and with the kids on a few occasions.
She took a short trip to Aristotle Onassis’s private Greek island, Skorpios, in August, and met up again with Jackie and Ari in Nassau in early 1969. She took the kids on skiing trips that winter. She poured significant energy into raising money: $10 million for the Robert Francis Kennedy Memorial Foundation, and another $3.5 million to settle Bobby’s campaign debt. She remained as rambunctious as ever until the middle of October, when she experienced labor pains two months prematurely. She endured bed rest (reading, watching TV, being visited by her kids—even planning Thanksgiving) until December 12, when Rory, her last child, was delivered via C-section.
“Ethel Year After: Still Herself,” read the headline on Betty Flynn’s May 1969 Boston Globe article. “Ethel is the same person she was before Bobby’s death,” an “intimate friend” is quoted as saying. “And her house is run the same way, almost as if he wasn’t gone.”
Even in a resolutely light and sunny piece, however, a “frequent visitor to Hickory Hill” said, “I am afraid to see Ethel’s face in repose. With the kids around and all her friends, she does fine. . . . When things quiet down, you can see the sorrow there.” And indeed, Ethel’s anguish, no matter how well submerged, found its way out in other ways.
In February of 1969, a Gallup Poll named Ethel the most admired woman in America. (“I got it because of my cooking,” she quipped.) Still, “Ethel’s mood swept from deep private despair to manic irritability to frenetic highs of ceaseless activity,” author Laurence Leamer wrote. The children saw some of her mood swings, but more of it was taken out on the help. The turnover for maids and cooks and other household staff at Hickory Hill was remarkable and it was the rare exception that stayed more than a few months.
Money was also a source of tension at Hickory Hill. Ethel’s riotous spending—on food, on clothing, on everything—continued at its usual pace, and she became well known in Washington as perennially delinquent on bills. She most often had outstanding bills sent to the Kennedys’ New York office for payment, where Stephen Smith—Jean’s husband and administrator of the family fortune—tried in vain to curtail Ethel’s spending. He pleaded with her, asked for intervention from other Kennedys, even threatened to cut her off. Nothing worked. More than a decade after Joe had first hectored her about her wastefulness, it remained an issue.
And it wasn’t just Ethel’s spending that created so much expense for the Kennedys. Increasingly, Ethel’s brood was incurring damages. A rowdy bunch, they destroyed condos in Aspen during ski vacations, becoming so notorious in the town that Ethel took to using an alias when trying to secure lodging for their visits.
Ethel struggled to keep her children in line. Her three eldest boys, in particular, gave her trouble. In Hyannis Port, Joe II and Bobby Jr., often with the help of David and cousins Chris Lawford and Bobby Shriver, created havoc all over town. “They untied boats from the docks and took perverse pleasure in seeing them lying beached at high tide,” Laurence Leamer wrote. “They sent water balloons soaring high into the sky, landing on the top of moving automobiles, preferably police cruisers. On the Fourth of July the youths were accused of knocking on the door of an eighty-two-year-old neighbor, and when the old woman opened the door they threw lit firecrackers into the house.”
Unfortunately, the boys did not restrict their shenanigans to mere pranks. In the summer of 1970, Bobby Jr. and Bobby Shriver were arrested for pot possession. In Nantucket, Joe II took his little brother David and David’s girlfriend, Pam Kelley, for a joyride in a friend’s Jeep. Spinning the vehicle in circles, Joe lost control and crashed in a ditch. He and David escaped with minor injuries, but Pam Kelley was paralyzed from the neck down. Bobby Jr. and David’s drug use grew to include heroin, and while Bobby was able to pull himself together enough to attend Harvard, David became increasingly alienated from the family as he struggled with addiction. He would die of an overdose in 1984, his body discovered in a Palm Beach hotel room. He’d been in town to visit Rose.
There were a number of men in Ethel’s life in the decades after Bobby died. Through the late sixties and seventies, she was most frequently seen with singer Andy Williams, who had been friends with Bobby as well. It’s a matter of some debate whether their relationship was romantic—some sources report them holding hands at charity events while others dismiss the idea out of hand—but he was clearly the main gentleman in her life. There would be others throughout the seventies and eighties: Warren Rogers of Look magazine, liberal New York attorney William vanden Heuvel, even sportscaster Frank Gifford. But Ethel never remarried. After all, none of the men was Bobby Kennedy.
Years later, her children appreciated the way in which Ethel had formed them. “There have been so many times in my life,” Rory told Courtney in her 2011 documentary, Ethel, “where people have said, ‘I want to introduce Robert Kennedy’s daughter—’ ”
“It makes me so mad!” Courtney interrupted. “What about the one who delivered us, and carried us for nine months, and then has been with us for the last forty years?”
However hidden her grief over Bobby, Ethel worked through it on her own terms and raised her children the best she could. The paces that she put herself through to keep Bobby’s legacy alive in the years just after his death—raising money for the grape pickers of California, sitting on the board of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation, campaigning for Democratic politicians throughout the country—became causes dear to her own heart. And that passion was transmitted to her children. Ethel became an activist in her own right, with her own moral authority, and remains so to this day.
Though David’s story would end tragically—and another son, Michael, would die in a skiing accident in 1998, at the age of thirty-nine—Ethel’s children have, for the most part, thrived and joyfully carried forward their parents’ ideals. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend became an attorney, author, and the first female lieutenant governor of Maryland. Kerry Kennedy has worked in the human rights movement for decades and in 1988 established the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. Both Kathleen and Kerry share their mother’s Catholicism, and they work for reform within the Church. Joe Kennedy II served as the congressional representative for Massachusetts’ eighth district from 1987 to 1989, and afterward he went to work for a charity providing heating oil to low-income families. Bobby Kennedy Jr. became an environmentalist, author, and radio host.
Ethel herself avoids the media spotlight and denies requests for interviews. It’s telling that the only person for whom she has been willing to make an exception was her daughter, Rory, whose loving documentary portrait, Ethel, was released by HBO Films in 2012. When asked why she agreed to sit for an interview after so many years, her answer was simple and pointed: “Because it was Rory who asked.”