The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [173]
Bobby knew all about a self-styled, self-made father who was often not home, a deeply religious mother surrounded by nuns and priests, lives of endless privilege and energetic good times. But that was the end of the similarities. Bobby’s father was a man of immense social ambition. Insecurity is often the father of achievement, and Joe had propelled his sons to make their proper places in the world.
George Skakel, by contrast, didn’t give a tinker’s damn that in Greenwich his family was considered boorish, uncouth, Catholic interlopers. Unlike Joe, he didn’t have a fancy Harvard education. He taught his children that wealth was their preserve, and they could do whatever they wanted.
Joe, the son of a liquor dealer, had made a fortune in the liquor industry. He was willing to sell it as long as he didn’t have to drink much of it. He saw liquor not so much as the curse of the Irish as their pathetic cliché. Joe would no more sit around drinking whiskey than he would go out on the street carrying a shillelagh.
Joe felt so strongly about the pernicious impact of drinking that he had promised his sons one thousand dollars if they did not drink until they were twenty-one. Bobby had earned the money without regret or temptation. He might take a drink occasionally, but at social events he did not head nervously to the bar. Although Jack didn’t quite make Joe’s deadline, he did not drink much either.
The Skakels, however, considered liquor the fuel of good times, and they liked nothing more than good times. They had none of what they considered the Kennedys’ prissy, puritanical fear of liquor.
Big Ann didn’t drink sherry from a thimble but whiskey from a crystal tumbler. She did not live the corseted life of Rose Kennedy, speaking in clipped civil terms and keeping her house in such impeccable condition that at any moment she could happily have invited a prince of her church into her living room. Fancy furniture did not intimidate Big Ann. She liked dogs and gave them the run of the house. So be it if they stained the old rugs and chewed up the furniture.
For a person who preferred more than one weak drink before dinner and considered politics an unholy bore, an evening at the Skakels was far more amusing than dinner at the Kennedys. The Kennedy siblings thought that put-downs of each other were funny, but the Skakels turned their humor outward onto the world. God and laughter were the two great solaces of their lives.
They might cry when times were bad, but they attacked sadness, laughing, singing, and drinking until the blues gave up and joined the revelry. Ethel’s three brothers, excessive in everything they did, were the engines that drove these wild good times. They drove their cars at a hundred miles an hour over country roads, and they handled everything else the same way. They liked nothing more than riding around Greenwich with one of them standing on the roof of the car while the driver tried to find a branch low enough to knock his brother off his fancy perch. They drove cars into the pond on the estate and ran from the silly cornpone cops who had the audacity to think they could catch a Skakel.
On one occasion George Jr., his father’s namesake, lost control of his car running from the police and smashed into an abutment, breaking his jaw. Ethel was their sister in name and deed. Running late to a horse show at Madison Square Garden, she drove her car up onto the sidewalk in Central Park, passing the other cars moving slowly down the parkway.
Ethel, like Bobby, was lost in the midst of her family. The sixth of seven children, she struggled to compete with her big sisters or to get the kind of attention that came so easily to her pretty baby sister, Ann. Bobby and Ethel had much in common, but to those who watched them, they seemed more buddies