The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [172]
While her older sister was downtown helping to integrate Schrafft’s Restaurant, Ethel stayed uptown, a prankster full of mischief to enliven the tedious regimen of learning at Manhattanville. Ethel had an endless number of friends and was blessed by a bounty of energy and impish delight in the world. Ethel might have been plain, but her sheer joy in life gave her a radiance not seen in many far prettier women.
Ethel flung open each of life’s doors that stood before her and rushed forward, fearing nothing and no one. She had the Skakel sense of humor—rude, raucous, and daring. When a handsome young rider on the Irish national team spurned her affection, she sneaked into the stable and painted his horse green. One evening she sat in her dorm room momentarily remorseful at the fact that she had so many marks in the nuns’ demerit book that she would not be able to leave campus. Suddenly she came upon the solution: steal the confounded book and throw it down the incinerator.
Ethel’s endless pranks all had an edge to them that left their victims outside the circle of gaiety and at times rendered almost as much hurt as laughter. At Manhattanville, she did not come forward and own up to her not-so-practical jokes but preferred to stand with the other students and have them punished along with her. She treated the school library like her own bookstore, not bothering with the tedious business of returning books.
Ethel might have seemed like a frivolous young woman, but she was deadly serious in her pursuit of Bobby, who was two and a half years her senior. She was a fierce competitor on the tennis court or in a horse show, and she was a doubly fierce competitor when the opponent was her own sister. That said, she still might have lost the game had she not had Jean, her closest friend and Bobby’s sister, as her co-conspirator. Ethel had no interest in politics, but she went to Boston to work alongside Bobby in Jack’s primary campaign. So had Pat, and soon afterward it was Ethel’s sister who went with Bobby to the Manhattanville senior prom.
That Christmas Bobby invited Pat to come down to Palm Beach and spend the holidays. Bobby did not invite a young woman to the Kennedy family home without the highest and most honorable of intentions. Jean and Ethel understood this full well, and they showed up together at the Palm Beach estate.
Whatever the sport, Ethel played with fierce competitiveness and a casual disregard for the more onerous rules. By the time the family left Florida, Ethel and Bobby were the couple, not Pat and Bobby. The fact that Pat did not marry Bobby probably had less to do with Ethel’s relentless maneuvering than with her own desires. Soon afterward, she married an Irishman and moved to a modest house in Dublin, a world away from the Skakel estate in Greenwich, Connecticut.
When he wasn’t playing football at Harvard, Bobby spent as many weekends as he could with Ethel, often staying at the family estate. Coming up the circular driveway on Lake Avenue the first time, Bobby was instantly confronted with the immensity of Ethel’s home. The Kennedys lived well, but nothing like this. The entrance hall had twenty-five-foot ceilings, and there were eleven bedrooms in the main house alone. The floors were of polished teak. There were enormous black marble fireplaces. The decor announced its refinement authoritatively enough to tone down even the earthiest and most vulgar of visitors, but it quieted the Skakels not at all.
George Skakel, Ethel’s father, was a self-made multimillionaire who made his fortune with what became the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. Ann Brannack Skakel, his Irish-Catholic wife, had given him seven children, four daughters and three sons. “Big Ann,” as she was known, was oversized in everything,