The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [174]
Ethel was one of the guys, and immensely popular with Bobby’s friends. “I think Ethel was great for him,” recalled Gerald Tremblay, a law school friend. “She brought him out more. He became a little more of an extrovert. He was a pretty introverted person. He never discussed his feelings with people. To my knowledge, he never had anybody, like a friend, that you might discuss a pretty intimate problem with, maybe about your love life or your relationship with your father or your mother.”
Ethel had made Bobby her life project. Bobby did not appear mindlessly, breathlessly in love with Ethel, electrified by her touch, morose when she was away. He had found in Ethel a rich commonality, but he found something different and dangerous with Joan. The two women symbolized the two directions that Bobby’s life might take. His big brother Jack had stood on an open road too, with one road pointing westward toward freedom and uncertainty, the other road heading east toward more restricted venues of power. For Bobby, the journey toward Joan led to freedom and uncharted passages. Whatever else he felt about Ethel, the journey toward her meant that he was ready to pick up all the heavy burdens of his family name and position and walk a pathway set out by his father.
Even across the Atlantic, Ethel could smell the perfumes of romance and see the smoke of betrayal. She suddenly arrived in London with Jean, ostensibly to attend the Olympic games. Bobby prided himself on his honor and honesty, but now both he and Ethel indulged in the petty duplicities that often save a romance but destroy a love. Bobby took Ethel and Jean to see Joan performing in The Chiltern Hundreds and backstage introduced them simply as his sister and a friend. Joan was the only innocent.
When Bobby went backstage each evening, he was entering an exotic world unlike anything he had known in America. In her way, Kathleen had entered a different world too, and her death symbolized just how dangerous it might be to travel beyond the parameters of the known.
Joe disdained Bobby’s foreign fling. Joe and his father had both married up. That was the Kennedy way. Joe did not believe in squandering his family’s social capital on a romance that was as likely to be a tingle in the groin as a tug of the heart. Love was an unexpected bonus, but it was not the primary reason to marry. If a man married right, he married well. The Kennedys and the Skakels were two of the wealthiest Catholic families in America. Marrying Ethel would be a mating of dynasties, a further solidifying of the family’s position in the world.
“Don’t cry,” Joan recalls Bobby saying as he left late that summer. “I’ll be back next summer. I can’t stay away from you.”
Bobby sailed back to the States and entered the University of Virginia Law School in September 1948. He would have much preferred to go to Harvard, but with his abysmal college record, he was fortunate to get into the southern school. Ethel came down to visit him often, and if his love for Joan had been less than profound, he would have forgotten the British actress. His feelings were such, however, that he kept his promise to return the next summer to England. It was perhaps even harder to say good-bye this time, and when Joan stood on the ship bidding him adieu, she recalled how he talked “about my coming over to be with him.”
Bobby was not the sort of man to invite Joan to the States for some hidden assignation. If she sailed westward, it would be only if Bobby had decided to stand up to the father who so dominated him, to take a first dramatic step away from the life that had been cut out for him so long before, and to