Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family by David Batcher Amber Hunt, David Batcher Page B
Authors: David Batcher Amber Hunt, David Batcher
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adopt an absolute menagerie that would roam the acreage and greet amused visitors: dogs, cats, turtles, lizards, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, and goats. Years later, Ethel would re-create these scenes in every sense at Hickory Hill, the house she shared with Bobby and their ever-growing family.
3
The Girl with the Red Convertible
Though the Kennedys and Skakels both shared nouveau riche status, they handled it in very different ways. The Kennedys acted more like typical old money. They were wealthy but tempered in their spending. They didn’t just hobnob with the upper crust, they became its top layer. They visited popes and sought ambassadorships and emphasized order and structure and discipline. “Dinner was at 7:15 and it did not mean 7:16,” Ethel would later say of her in-laws. The Skakel home was hardly so orderly. “At our house, you didn’t know whether you were going to have supper at 5 or 10,” Ethel said.
Nor was Rose Kennedy’s stern emphasis on scholastics mirrored in Ann Skakel’s child rearing. Ethel, in fact, was a mediocre student, doing just enough to skate by, first at Greenwich Academy, and then at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Maplehurst. By the time she reached Manhattanville, her less-than-studious habits had long been solidified. “Every morning at college—even at college, imagine that—from 8:30 to 9, I read the odds about the racetrack,” Ethel recalled. “If only my tests would have been about the race horses instead of history. I would’ve had an A.” She added, with a laugh: “I wasn’t a very deep thinker.”
In Ethel’s senior yearbook—class of 1949—she’s described with flourish:
An excited hoarse voice, a shriek, a peal of screaming laughter, the flash of shirttails, a tousled brown head—Ethel! Her face is at one momenta picture of utter guilelessness and at the next alive with mischief . . . The 49ers didn’t have to search very far to find in Ethel a heart of gold.
Ethel was smart and clever—her letters to family and friends were always lively and well written—but she was never considered an intellectual heavyweight. She had a native aversion to introspection and embraced her mother’s religious teachings apparently without question. And that maternal influence was strong: Inside the Greenwich home’s library stood a font of holy water and several praying chairs. Ann would drive into town every morning for 7:00 a.m. mass at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church on Greenwich Avenue, towing each child with her as soon as they turned four years old. Every day she and the children said a special prayer that George would convert to Catholicism. Ethel’s lifelong religiosity was rooted in “saying grace before every meal, of wearing a silver rosary every waking and sleeping moment, of attending mass daily no matter how late she had come home the night before.”
But Ethel’s faith was borne of more than just ritual. Ann routinely invited clergymen and educators to visit the home and gather in the ornate library—its ceiling-high shelves lined with books—and lead informal discussions on matters of religion. While hardly intellectual debates, the discussions covered a broad range of topics and lent an air of sophistication to the otherwise rough-edged home.
Still, many who grew up with Ethel in Greenwich remembered her and her brothers as irresponsible, unruly, even arrogant. Tales of the Skakel kids running amok became the stuff of local legend. The boys had followed in their father’s footsteps to become gun fanatics—George was known to always keep a loaded revolver in his bedroom nightstand—and stories were rampant about them shooting up mailboxes and streetlamps around town. “There were some forty-five-caliber bullet holes in some of those mailboxes,” childhood friend Ken McDonnell remembered. “They were using big stuff, and there was some retaliation. Some people went up there to the Skakel house and put a few holes in their
3
The Girl with the Red Convertible
Though the Kennedys and Skakels both shared nouveau riche status, they handled it in very different ways. The Kennedys acted more like typical old money. They were wealthy but tempered in their spending. They didn’t just hobnob with the upper crust, they became its top layer. They visited popes and sought ambassadorships and emphasized order and structure and discipline. “Dinner was at 7:15 and it did not mean 7:16,” Ethel would later say of her in-laws. The Skakel home was hardly so orderly. “At our house, you didn’t know whether you were going to have supper at 5 or 10,” Ethel said.
Nor was Rose Kennedy’s stern emphasis on scholastics mirrored in Ann Skakel’s child rearing. Ethel, in fact, was a mediocre student, doing just enough to skate by, first at Greenwich Academy, and then at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Maplehurst. By the time she reached Manhattanville, her less-than-studious habits had long been solidified. “Every morning at college—even at college, imagine that—from 8:30 to 9, I read the odds about the racetrack,” Ethel recalled. “If only my tests would have been about the race horses instead of history. I would’ve had an A.” She added, with a laugh: “I wasn’t a very deep thinker.”
In Ethel’s senior yearbook—class of 1949—she’s described with flourish:
An excited hoarse voice, a shriek, a peal of screaming laughter, the flash of shirttails, a tousled brown head—Ethel! Her face is at one momenta picture of utter guilelessness and at the next alive with mischief . . . The 49ers didn’t have to search very far to find in Ethel a heart of gold.
Ethel was smart and clever—her letters to family and friends were always lively and well written—but she was never considered an intellectual heavyweight. She had a native aversion to introspection and embraced her mother’s religious teachings apparently without question. And that maternal influence was strong: Inside the Greenwich home’s library stood a font of holy water and several praying chairs. Ann would drive into town every morning for 7:00 a.m. mass at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church on Greenwich Avenue, towing each child with her as soon as they turned four years old. Every day she and the children said a special prayer that George would convert to Catholicism. Ethel’s lifelong religiosity was rooted in “saying grace before every meal, of wearing a silver rosary every waking and sleeping moment, of attending mass daily no matter how late she had come home the night before.”
But Ethel’s faith was borne of more than just ritual. Ann routinely invited clergymen and educators to visit the home and gather in the ornate library—its ceiling-high shelves lined with books—and lead informal discussions on matters of religion. While hardly intellectual debates, the discussions covered a broad range of topics and lent an air of sophistication to the otherwise rough-edged home.
Still, many who grew up with Ethel in Greenwich remembered her and her brothers as irresponsible, unruly, even arrogant. Tales of the Skakel kids running amok became the stuff of local legend. The boys had followed in their father’s footsteps to become gun fanatics—George was known to always keep a loaded revolver in his bedroom nightstand—and stories were rampant about them shooting up mailboxes and streetlamps around town. “There were some forty-five-caliber bullet holes in some of those mailboxes,” childhood friend Ken McDonnell remembered. “They were using big stuff, and there was some retaliation. Some people went up there to the Skakel house and put a few holes in their
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