Reluctant Celebrities: “Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot”
Reluctant Celebrities
1:11 p.m. ET (1811 GMT) February 25, 2000
By Tracey Middlekauff |
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NEW
YORK — To a biography addict,
J. Randy Taraborrelli is undoubtedly a familiar name.
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He has chronicled the lives of a host of celebs in books like Michael
Jackson: The Magic and the Madness, Call Her Miss Ross: The Unauthorized
Biography of Diana Ross and Sinatra: Behind the Legend (renamed
A Complete Life after the crooner’s death).
In his latest work, Taraborrelli tackles celebrity of a different sort.
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (Warner Books, $25.95, 528
pages) deals with the lives of the spouses of three Kennedy men: Jack,
Bobby and Ted. While much has been written about the Kennedy clan, Jackie,
Ethel, Joan is the first book to explore the dynamic among the three
sisters-in-law.
The idea first came to Taraborrelli nearly 20 years ago when he did
an interview with Coretta Scott King, the author says. King, who was on
the plane with Jackie and Ethel after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, told
Taraborrelli stories about the women he had never heard before.
Taraborrelli spoke to Fox Bookmark about his discoveries, the difficulties
of uncovering heretofore unknown information about the lives of the Kennedys,
and the empathy he grew to feel for Jackie, Ethel and Joan throughout
the course of his research and writing.
Fox Bookmark: You’ve written a lot about pop stars and celebrities.
Did you approach Jackie, Ethel, Joan in the same way, as if you
were writing about, in a sense, pop stars?
Taraborrelli: Well, the similarity of my [other] subjects is
that they all willingly and by design have lived their lives in the light
of public scrutiny, and we’ve been able to watch them win and lose and
be successful and fail and grow old. But the difference is that —
unlike … other people I have written about before, the Kennedy women
were reluctant celebrities in the sense that they didn’t know what they
were in for, and they were blindsided, in effect, by the Kennedy legacy
and the powerful family that they married into.
So, I had to approach it in a different way, because there wasn’t a
lot of so-called grapevine information out there about these three women.
This has never been written about before, and it was as if they had taken
an oath of silence to not discuss these things with other people on the
outside. And so, being a new subject and really sort of the final frontier
of Kennedy books, I had to do many, many years of serious investigation
and ask a lot of questions of a lot of people to get the complete picture.
FB: A lot has been written about Jackie, but not so much about
Ethel and Joan. What new information did you feel you could bring to the
Jackie persona?
Taraborrelli: Well, the fact of the matter is, if you look at
any Jackie Kennedy biography, in the index under ‘Ethel’ and ‘Joan’ you’re
going to see something like page 42 and page 73, and the references are
going to be ‘Ethel was also at the party,’ or it’s going to be ‘Joan was
there as well.’ And that’s the extent of what’s been written about Jackie’s
relationship with Ethel and Joan.
But they were sisters-in-law, and they had a long, 40-year history of
good times and bad times. And what this book does is, it doesn’t focus
on so much the stories about Jackie that we’ve all known about and her
spending ways and all that superficial stuff. This focuses on how she
dealt with the two sisters-in-law and how the three of them dealt with
their three unfaithful husbands in three completely different ways.
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height=250 border=0 alt=”Photo”>And then it also explains Jackie’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe
for the first time, and how she pretty much ended her husband’s affair
with the movie star — and that’s a revelation as well. But the important
thing in the book is really the interpersonal dynamics between the three
sisters-in-law.
FB: How hard is it to do a biography when you don’t have access
to your subjects? What were some of the difficulties that came up in trying
to portray certain moments when they’re alone?
Taraborrelli: It’s easy to do when you are talking to people
who you trust were closely connected to the women. What I try to do with
my book is I try to find people to quote who have not told their stories
time and time again. And I try to build my story around the memories of
people who don’t have a specific agenda. And then this often leads me
to unmined sources whose memories are perhaps more accurate and who have
more to say than just the standard party line.
And so if ‘Jackie has tears in her eyes,’ it’s because somebody was
there to either witness it, or she later explained to somebody I trusted
that this was her reaction to a specific event.
FB: I like the way the book has certain specificities like they
’sat down and ate tuna sandwiches,’ or ’she had this color scarf on.’
Taraborrelli: … That doesn’t come easy. That is pounding —
it’s pounding away at a person’s memory, you know, and often they won’t
remember something inconsequential. But I always ask. Nine times out of
10 they won’t remember. But that one time they might recall the specific
food that was being served. For instance, I interviewed a gentleman who
was Jackie Kennedy’s chef. The Greek chef.
… I found him, and I interviewed him, and he actually remembered the
menu because he kept a diary of all the foods that he cooked for Jackie
Kennedy so that he wouldn’t repeat certain foods. And he maintained this
diary, and he still has it. So I said, I need you to find out, if you
can, what was being served that day. This was an important day. This was
the day in 1968 that Joan Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy went to Jackie to
have sort of an intervention about the fact that she was dating Aristotle
Onassis.
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Ethel felt strongly that Onassis’ presence in the Kennedy kingdom was
going to be a detriment and a political liability, and so the three women
had a luncheon in which this was discussed. The meeting did not go well,
and Jackie asked them to leave, it appeared. But I was able to find —
ironically enough because Jackie didn’t know why they were coming —
it was ironic I thought and funny that she had her chef, this gentleman
I interviewed, prepare a Greek feast for the three of them. Which was
sort of the last thing I think Ethel Kennedy expected to find when she
went there.
FB: It must have been tricky trying to explain how they felt
about their husbands cheating on them. How comfortable do you feel with
the conclusions that you drew about how they must have felt and how they
must have been dealing with these things? Especially Ethel, since she
seems very hard to read?
Taraborrelli: It’s interesting that you say that because you
have a better impression of how Jackie and Joan dealt with it than you
do with Ethel, because Jackie and Joan discussed it with each other …
as well as [with] close family members, and so you have that to go by.
With Ethel, she rarely discussed it because she didn’t want to know
it existed. That was the way she handled it, whereas Jackie confronted
JFK, and Joan also confronted Teddy, but allowed it to consume her. Ethel,
generally, did not want to acknowledge the fact that Bobby was unfaithful
to her. So, there weren’t heart-to-heart discussions with Jackie about
it. And that’s why … we know a little bit less about it [Ethel's reaction]
then we do about the way Jackie and Joan dealt with it.
FB: And so was it hard to get inside her head?
Taraborrelli: The conversations that she did have with people
and the way that she acted — it was clear to me as a spectator and
as a chronic lover of human nature, that she just didn’t want to address
it. She took after Rose Kennedy in that respect. … I guess what I am
trying to say is that the fact that she never addressed it made it clear
that she didn’t want to.
FB: With Bobby and Jack in the book, there was a certain understanding
that these weren’t all bad men, and they weren’t all good men. With Ted,
it seemed like you were really just angry with him. You just really didn’t
seem to like Ted at all in the book.
Taraborrelli: At the end of the book I tried to make it clear
what an amazing politician he is. And I tried to separate myself … to
become personally involved from what Ted had done to Joan. But as a writer,
and as someone who had to live with this project for so many years, and
who feels compassion for his subjects, it was a little difficult for me
because I saw what Joan went through.
And this book isn’t really about Ted’s politics. It’s about what kind
of a husband he was. So, I have to say in Ted’s defense, that Bobby and
JFK were taken from us, and we don’t know how they would have treated
their wives had they lived. Ted had a lot longer to be abusive. That’s
what I’m trying to say, and he took full advantage of it, unfortunately.
… I think it’s an accurate image, but I don’t think it’s his fault as
much as it is background and the way he watched his older brothers act
around women and the way that his father was. And it was practically genetic
that he wasn’t going to be a good husband at that time.
In Ted Kennedy’s defense, what I understand is that he’s an excellent
husband today. It was almost as if Joan was his relationship experience,
and his present life gets all of the good stuff that Joan didn’t get because
Ted just didn’t know how to give it.
The irony is that Ted asked Joan for an annulment of that marriage in
order that he marry his second wife in the Catholic Church. And those
in the Kennedy family who felt for Joan for all that she’d been through
with Ted and had such compassion for all that she went through, found
it astonishing that Ted would have the nerve to sort of try to invalidate
all of that.
FB: When you’re researching subjects you start to get attached
or feel an affinity for them. Since you were doing these three women,
was there one in particular you felt like you were really starting to
understand or empathize with over the other two?
Taraborrelli: I’ve not been asked [that question] before. So
let me just sit here and think about it. What I really think is that I
felt that empathy for each woman as the story evolved in a different way.
For instance, how could you not feel so compassionate for Jackie Kennedy
when JFK is killed and she’s witnessed this horrible thing and she says
that her life is over and it will never be the same? And how can you not
feel compassion for Ethel when the same thing happens to her? Same thing.
… And then how can you not feel compassion for Joan when she is going
through so much in her marriage to Ted and then she comes out a winner
at the end of the book. And the interesting thing is that none of these
three women are the same women at the beginning of the book that they
are at the end. And when JFK died it was a new beginning for Jackie. As
tragic as it was, it was a new beginning for her and she went on to wonderful
things.
When Bobby died it was the end of many things for Ethel, and nothing
was ever the same for her. It was not a new beginning. It was as if her
life froze in 1968. And Joan goes through such a transformation in this
book from very much a helpless alcoholic to, by the time the book is over,
you feel very sure that she will never have those problems again and that
she learned from her experiences and that she is a stronger woman today
as a result of them.
So, I felt great compassion and passion for the three of these women
throughout the whole time I worked on this book. It’s a little difficult
for me to let them go right now. It’s a little difficult for me to just
say enough of that because it’s been a part of my life for a long time.
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