The Music
Atop the stairs, little Patrick Kennedy huddled against the floor. He had to position himself just right—crouched low, his head resting on the carpeted landing—so that he could peer through the railing and see the piano down below without alerting his mother to his presence. He was supposed to be in bed, after all, but the lilting music had lured him down the hall, as it did so many nights, and he held still as he listened to his mother play.
If Joan Kennedy knew that her youngest son had crept from his bedroom and was spying on her overhead, she didn’t bust him. Instead, she lost herself in the allegro that flowed from her fingers to the keys. Sometimes it was “Allegro Assai” by Rudolf Baumgartner, or maybe Fritz Reiner’s “Molto Allegro.” She loved waltzes, too, and Alexis Weissenberg’s “Clair de Lune.” Years later, she would combine these pieces as a soundtrack to a book she wrote about classical music. But for now, it’s the early 1970s, and six-year-old Patrick is defying his bedtime to listen to his mother’s music wafting from the living room.
The moment is a sweet respite, Patrick’s family is fractured. His father, Edward Kennedy, is the last living son of Rose and Joe, and his mother is a beautiful blonde, arguably the most conventionally attractive of the Kennedy wives. Ethel had the spunk, Jackie the sophistication. But Joan had the looks. Her daughter, Kara, came first in 1960, followed by Edward Jr. in 1961. It took six years and multiple miscarriages before Patrick joined them. And after, Joan and Teddy had tried for more, but there was another miscarriage, and then there were the affairs and a very public accident, and family life in their home on Squaw Island, Massachusetts, felt weighted and heavy. Patrick felt freest as a child listening to his mother play her music; it filled an ever-hollowing home.
“Those are some of my fondest memories as a child, creeping out of my bedroom and sneaking to the top of the stairs and laying on the carpet while I listened to my mom play piano downstairs,” Patrick Kennedy says. “I was always hesitant to go down. If I’d gone down just one or two stairs, she would’ve seen me and known I was out of bed.
“She played throughout my life, obviously, but those are poignant memories.”
Virginia Joan Bennett was born September 2, 1936, at New York’s Mother Cabrini Hospital. She was named after her mother, Virginia Joan Stead—known to friends as Ginny—but called Joan from birth. Her father, Harry Wiggin Bennett Jr., was an advertising executive whose family first arrived in Massachusetts in the 1600s. He was both Protestant and Republican, but his wife had been raised Catholic, and so their children would be, too. Joan was educated in Catholic schools, much as the Kennedy children were, and attended Manhattanville College, the same that Rose Kennedy attended in the early 1900s and which Eunice and Jean would attend in the 1940s.
Ginny was slender with delicate features set in a round face beneath her light brown hair. She was a solid seamstress who sewed most of the clothes Joan wore to school. Joan recalled her father as tall and handsome, an amiable and charming man whose acting talents landed him roles in neighborhood theater productions.
“My father was an avid amateur actor, and his idea of relaxation was to perform with the local Bronxville theater group, or the Westchester County Players,” Joan said. “He often had leading roles, and this normally shy man caught fire when he was inhabiting a character. I remember him as Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral when I was about ten.”
As was the case with most Bronxville families, Joan’s father would commute to Manhattan for work while her mother stayed home. Harry’s job was secure enough that the family started out in a four-room apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Bronxville; before long, they would move into a four-bedroom Mediterranean-style house. It was Joan, her mother, her father, and her sister, Candy, two years Joan’s junior. When the girls came home from school, Ginny was always there to greet them. Ginny and her music.
“If the radio wasn’t on, Ginny was singing,” recalled Joan. “It might be a tune from a Sigmund Romberg operetta (I can still hear her warbling ‘My desert is waiting’) while she straightened up the living room, or hits from the thirties—her teenage heyday—like Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ or ‘Begin the Beguine’ as she got dressed to go out in the evening.”
Music was such an integral part of the Bennett household that the radio stood in its center, visible to all who walked through the front door. It was a massive console with a turntable on top, and it was almost always on. In the living room was a piano, which Joan began to play before she turned five years old. Harry and Ginny didn’t play instruments, but their love of music prompted them to put Joan and Candy in private lessons. Candy lasted about two years, but for Joan, the weekly one-on-one lessons with gray-haired Maud Perry fostered a passion for music that would inform her college studies. Later on it would prove a unique asset as she navigated the demanding role of a politician’s wife as an adult.
“The radio and the phonograph were our at-home entertainment,” Joan said. “Television didn’t appear until I was in high school, when we were one of the first families in the neighborhood to acquire one, a tiny black and white model.”
Harry needed the TV to watch the Colgate and Palmolive shampoo and soap ads for work, but it never provided the same backdrop that music did.
“With the television . . . programming was limited, unlike music, which seemed limitless,” Joan said.
Joan grew up a daddy’s girl. She was the “apple of his eye,” she recalled as an adult, and she remembered him fondly as a nice man and a hard worker. When she was twelve, he arranged for her to play on a radio station, WVET in Rochester, that he’d bought with some other World War II veterans. Joan played George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.” Harry also took Joan to musicals, her favorite being South Pacific.
“When I heard the velvety, operatic voice of Ezio Pinza booming into the theater and wooing Mary Martin with ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ ” Joan said, “I was hooked.”
But family life in the Bennett house wasn’t always so idyllic. Ginny was a stiff disciplinarian. “I had Joan and Candy bring the hair brush to me and tell me whether they needed one or two whacks to remember not to do it again,” Ginny once told a reporter. She hung the brush on the wall with a big pink ribbon to serve as a reminder for the girls to behave. As an adult, Joan rarely talked about her mother, said friend-turned-author Marcia Chellis. “I sensed that there were unhappy memories she did not care to recall,” Chellis said. “I learned why from one of Joan’s friends, who told me Joan’s mother was an alcoholic.”
Some childhood friends remember Harry as a drinker, too; if true, the extent of it is unclear—and apparently never confirmed by Joan. Joan doesn’t tend to elaborate in interviews and, in her 1992 book The Joy of Classical Music, she talks about only the pleasant, music-centered memories of her childhood.
“Both parents were drinkers, though no one ever mentioned it, ever,” said Joseph Livingston, a childhood friend of Candy and Joan’s. “It was as if it didn’t exist, which is the way it is in many alcoholic families. It doesn’t exist.”
Childhood friends remember Ginny as icy and judgmental. She seemed capable of instantly deflating Joan with a superficial criticism of her dress choice or hairstyle.
Ted Livingston, Joseph’s brother and Joan’s boyfriend when the two were in the eleventh grade, said Ginny made him nervous.
“Just her presence in the room made everyone a little uneasy,” he said.
Joan came downstairs all smiles, beautiful and wearing a blue knee-length dress and white sweater. Mom followed, also smiling. She seemed jittery, but trying very hard to act casually. Then, just before we left, Ginny said to Joan, “I’m still not sure that that dress is the right color for you, Joan. I think it makes you look, oh I don’t know, pale, I guess. You just don’t look right.” You could just see Joan’s happiness just sort of evaporate. She deflated right in front of me. I felt terrible for her.
“It struck me as odd that the girls never referred to their parents as ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad,’ it was always ‘Harry’ and ‘Ginny,’ ” Joseph Livingston said. Explained Joan: “I called them Harry and Ginny—it was what they called each other, and they never suggested I do anything different.”
Bronxville was a small community of just a few thousand people, most of whom were white and upper-middle class. “I had as cloistered a background as you can imagine,” Joan told a reporter in 1962. “The community is highly restricted and I grew up knowing people pretty much like myself.” By the time Joan graduated from high school in June 1954, she’d led a sheltered existence.
That fall, she left her father’s home for Manhattanville, which had just recently moved from New York City to a fifteen-acre campus in Purchase, about forty-five minutes north of Manhattan. There, Joan studied for classes taught by nuns and found herself surrounded by friends and would-be suitors. It was a new world for her. In Bronxville, she’d been shy and reserved. She and her sister Candy were opposites in personalities. Candy was bubbly and outgoing, a boisterous cheerleader. Joan was studious—quiet in school, and quick to return home to practice her music and listen to records. She was also self-conscious. In her early teens, she stood a good foot taller than most of the boys in her class, so instead of dancing with them at school functions, she planted herself behind the piano and played for them instead.
“I was a loner,” she told Chellis. “I had no friends in high school. Candy was a lot more popular than I was. . . . [She] went out on dates while I went to the library. I was a late bloomer.”
In college, without the tumult of an alcoholic home to return to each night, Joan seemed to find new confidence. She was still studious, and that quiet reserve of hers remained. She majored in English with a minor in music, allowing her to bury herself in novels and notes. But she was blossoming, shedding her native reserve and opening up to new friends and experiences. She joined classmates for weekend treks to Yale and other men’s colleges and became an adept flirt with the boys from Juilliard and Columbia. In fact, she had so many boyfriends in college that it became the campus joke that she’d surprise everyone and become a nun.
On her days without classes, she got dressed up and mustered the confidence to go on modeling auditions and go-sees with her portfolio in hand. Her father had encouraged the part-time vocation and even pitched her to one of his advertising clients with a proud, “Have I got a girl for you!” Candy Jones, head of one of the country’s top modeling agencies and whose husband was Harry Conover, initially rolled her eyes. “How many times have I heard that from a proud father!” she said. “They’re all convinced that their little girls are God’s gift to the modeling business.”
Still, Jones decided to humor Harry and agreed to meet with Joan. Years later, she still remembered being floored by the introduction: Joan, the “golden girl” with a deep tan and long, wheat-colored eyelashes. “She had fine facial bone structure and a strong-looking, glowingly healthy body,” Jones recalled, “a refreshing change from the gaunt, emaciated girl, a half step from anemia, we had all been accustomed to seeing at the agency.”
Joan was booked by the Conover Agency in New York City and dyed her hair lighter. Her measurements were documented: just shy of 5 feet, 8 inches, 132 pounds with a 36-inch bust, 25-inch waist, and 37-inch hips. Jones noted that Joan “needs brows groomed slightly,” and that her lipstick shade was too dark. Her only noticeable flaw was a clunky walk that Jones could only describe as a “lope.” The agency worked to teach her how to “float a little more instead of putting all her 132 pounds on the floor at one time,” Jones said. “She became quite light on her feet.”
Joan’s first modeling assignment was in a sixty-second, national commercial for Maxwell House coffee, for which she got $2,500. Jones wasn’t surprised when the calls kept coming. Joan got jobs in print ads modeling beauty products and foods, as well as other TV spots. “She was one of those rare beauties we got infrequently,” Jones said. “I found myself comparing her to an Ingrid Bergman when she was Joan’s age.”
Years later, Joan remembered the period as an exciting time.
“Television was in its infancy, and I started doing some commercial acting,” she said. “I got a taste of show-biz frustration, but I also landed a few jobs.”
She did live in-show commercials as the Revlon Hairspray girl on the TV show The $64,000 Question before it was engulfed in a cheating scandal.
“I was also one of the gang on ‘Coke Time with Eddie Fisher,’ a fifteen-minute show,” Joan said. “He sang, and during the two or three commercial breaks, a few of us would drink Coke for the camera in our bobby socks, saddle shoes and poodle skirts.”
Joan was even supposed to do a Coke-drinking skit with Eddie, but he threw a fit when he realized Joan, at five-foot-eight, was taller than the diminutive crooner by three unacceptable inches.
“Drinking Coke for a national audience isn’t exactly singing at the Met, but it had its challenges,” Joan said. “The piece of direction I’ll always remember is the stern admonition ‘Don’t you burp, young lady!’ ”
But, like most of the Manhattanville students, Joan’s college agenda was as much on getting her “Mrs. degree” as it was on getting a solid education. Her senior year, she was introduced by Jean Kennedy Smith to the youngest in the Kennedy clan: twenty-five-year-old Edward. The family had donated money for a gymnasium to the college in memory of Kathleen Kennedy, and Jack was scheduled to give a speech at the dedication. At the last minute, there was a change of plans. Recalled Ted:
It was Jack, not me, who’d originally agreed to give the talk. But when my brother showed up at the apartment and saw me there he said, “Oh! Dad, since Teddy’s here, why don’t we let him do it? I want to go to the football game.” I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea. I’d looked forward to seeing that game. Jack held his ground: it was going to be a great game, and he wanted to see it. Our father said, “Fine. Why don’t you two work it out?” We worked it out, and Jack went to the football game.
It was a fluke that Ted gave the speech—one that Joan, incidentally, had no interest in hearing. She was writing a term paper and didn’t bother attending.
“I was totally unimpressed,” she later recalled to an interviewer. She figured the dedication would be “another boring event at the castle with the nuns.” Plus, she hated politics—current affairs had been her worst subject in school.
But her roommate of four years, Margot Murray, came back to their room to warn her that she’d likely be missed and get reprimanded by the nuns if she didn’t at least swing by to the tea being held afterward. That could mean she’d be ordered to stay on campus, which she couldn’t abide.
“Then I couldn’t go to Yale the next weekend,” Joan said. So Joan hurriedly changed out of her bathrobe and into a dress before hustling to the event. That’s where Jean spotted her.
The two women had met once before the previous summer at the Skakel home in Greenwich, where George Jr., Ethel’s brother, was having a party.
“I arrived at the party with not one but two dates,” Joan recalled. One of the men had previously been engaged to Jean and was a friend of Steve Smith’s, Jean’s husband. Curious about the woman with two dates, Jean had approached and the women chatted. Now, months later, Jean made the fateful introduction to her “little brother.”
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Joan later said. “I expected to see a small boy. Instead I found myself looking up at somebody 6 feet 2 inches and close to 200 pounds. And, I must say, darn good-looking.”
Ted was immediately drawn to Joan. She had all the requisites of a potential mate, and his mother, Rose, had made it clear that her preference was for Teddy to follow in brother Bobby’s footsteps by marrying young and having many children. Ted maneuvered to get a ride to the airport from Joan and her roommate that night, allowing him to steal a few extra minutes with the attractive blonde. “I definitely wanted to see more of Joan,” Ted wrote decades later in his memoir, True Compass.
Joan’s sheltered life was about to change.