The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [175]
Joan did not stand on the beach looking seaward like the betrothed of a sea captain, but she waited just as loyally and just as long. Bobby wrote her love letters passionate in his devotion, and she knew that if she did not sail westward, he would at least be back the next summer, as he had the summer before. In May 1950, she received a letter that looked like all the others but announced that he was marrying Ethel Skakel, a woman whom Joan remembered only as Bobby’s sister’s quiet friend.
The force of circumstance and custom is at times stronger than that of love and honor. Bobby was a loyal soldier marching to a tune his father had composed. But then, how could he turn away from Ethel? When she descended on Charlottesville for the weekends, she was a force that nothing could deny. Bobby was a competitor, but no one played tennis the way Ethel did, as if defeat and death were roughly synonymous. And that was nothing compared to how she played the larger game of romance.
Ethel was a joyful woman who lifted Bobby’s spirits and seemed to hold them up with the sheer force of her will. That she loved Bobby profoundly nobody could doubt. There was a tantalizing quality there, of which Bobby was only too aware. “My financee [sic] followed me down here,” he wrote his sister Pat, “and wouldn’t let me alone for a minute—kept running her toes through my hair & things like that.”
14
The Grease of Politics
When Bobby married Ethel in June 1950, the Skakel brothers and their friends arrived at his bachelor party like a wandering minstrel troupe of such spirited demeanor that they made everyone dance to their song. Bobby’s old college football teammates were ready for the party too, and by the time the thirty or so guests left the Harvard Club they had consumed twelve and a half bottles of champagne, five bottles of Haig & Haig Pinch Scotch, half a bottle of rye, most of a bottle of gin, and a third of a bottle of bourbon. On their way out, one of Bobby’s friends picked up a fire extinguisher and doused the room, causing over a thousand dollars of damage, before staggering out into the New York night.
The Skakels conceded nothing to the Kennedys, considering themselves their equal in wealth and position, vastly superior in their enjoyment of life and sense of humor, and lesser only in their lack of pretense. The Skakels did not have the Kennedys’ public name, but they were an immensely powerful psychological force that changed the Kennedys far more than the Kennedys changed them.
On the morning of the wedding, several bridesmaids walked out of the mansion to talk to the young Skakels and Kennedys. The men tossed the screaming women into the pool. Despite this gambit, which made the poor hairdressers’ morning even more hectic, the wedding party made it to St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich on time. There, close to fifteen hundred guests sat waiting in a sanctuary transformed into a garden of white Easter lilies, peonies, and white gladiolas. Bobby was the first Kennedy man of his generation to wed, and this was no mere marriage but an event that the families used to celebrate themselves politically and socially; in those pews sat many of the postwar American Catholic elite, along with other powerful Americans.
Jack stood quietly in the front of the church. The best man wore the same morning suit as the other groomsmen, but unlike most of Bobby’s beefy athlete friends, Jack looked like a model out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. As the wedding party prepared to proceed down the aisle, Lem Billings and the other ushers hurried late arrivals to their seats. Lem, a man of endless solicitousness, bent down to pick up some change that had fallen onto the floor. Ethel’s big brother, George Jr., introduced himself formally to Lem by kicking him full force in the behind, sending him, gray morning suit and all, falling to the floor.
Big Ann and George Sr. didn’t begrudge spending a fortune on the wedding, but it irked Ethel’s family that the Kennedys were so confoundedly cheap. When the two families went out together for dinner,