From PEOPLE Magazine
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At 41, Joan Kennedy has the recharged vitality and easy smile of a convert, though it has been more than a year since she went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and more than six months since she decided to move out of her McLean, Va. home. Her new apartment in Boston, a spacious, modern Back Bay condominium, has been the mise-en-scène of a full-blown midlife crisis, a place whose every fixture speaks of some small, private triumph. There are the refrigerator she is proud to be stocking herself (though she "hates" to cook) and the treasured baby grand Steinway that once was her refuge from the combative life as a Kennedy in-law. She still plays happily "for my own pleasure," often long after midnight. Scattered about the dining and living rooms are books on music and education that signify her return to life as a student. (She's also reading Marilyn French's angry feminist novel, The Women's Room.) Joan smiles with pride at the thought that "here I do my own laundry, my own cleaning—I do everything myself." No cooks, no maids.
The passage from senator's wife to living alone has been a difficult one for Joan Kennedy, and she is only now beginning to talk about it. She was—or is, as she insists, despite a year's sobriety—an alcoholic. "Everyone knew," she says now, "but no one ever asked about it to my face." She was, however, sometimes pressed on rumors of her husband's infidelities—amid speculation that her life alone in Boston was evidence of a terminal blowup. She admits the gossip about Ted helped drive her to drink (though she says she never believed it) and declares that her strike for independence is a step forward, not a retreat. "I needed the freedom to be up here to do my school and music thing," she says. "I needed to find out after that first semester, 'Yes, I can do the work.' It was an experiment. That's easier to do when you're a little apart."
The sources of that need are complicated—including the years in the background that are the lot of so many political wives, and the unsteadiness she felt after her years as an active alcoholic: "I didn't know after all that drinking if I had any brain cells left!" To friends who question the value of working two years for "a piece of white paper"—her master's degree in education—she replies evenly, "I know I won't become a fourth-grade teacher, but I want the credibility that little piece of paper will give me. Once I have that I won't just be Joan Kennedy. That's important for a lot of women my age. People listen to you if you went to grad school."
And so she continues her studies at Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., practices Bach Inventions for the first piano lessons she has taken in 20 years, frequents local meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, sees her psychiatrist once a week, copes with motherhood on weekends in Boston and Hyannis Port—and considers it all a personal victory. She vividly recalls her feelings after seeing the movie The Turning Point: "I chose to be a wife and mother. But my daughter, Kara, can get married and have a career. I've been thinking it's not too late for me either. I'm only 41 and I have another 40 years. There are a lot of things I can do."
Coming to terms with alcoholism had led Mrs. Kennedy to an earlier turning point. "I think if I hadn't had all the trouble with booze I wouldn't have had to look at me and my life," she says. The explanation reminds her of the promising November day in 1958 when she was "just a nice young girl marrying a nice young man." A former debutante and college queen, she had already established and abandoned a career as an actress in TV commercials but was still a Catholic-schooled innocent who little suspected that her brother-in-law John F. Kennedy would be President within two years. "I had no idea what I was getting into," she says. Then in 1963, at the age of 26, she became the youngest Senate wife of the youngest senator in U.S. history.
She remembers those early years as "very happy—I didn't have any trouble coping." Indeed, though Camelot's ingenue would later shock Washington with her skirts up-to-there and her sodden lapses, it was not only the great Kennedy tragedies that shattered her but more intimate family misfortunes as well. First there was Chappaquiddick. Soon afterward Joan miscarried for the third time—in her fourth month of pregnancy. Then came 12-year-old Ted Jr.'s bone cancer and the amputation of his right leg. By the time her mother died three years ago (her parents were divorced), Joan was already worried about her drinking. "I didn't know why I was drinking too much," she says, then offers an explanation: "At times I drank to feel less inhibited, to relax at parties. Other times I drank to block out unhappiness, to drown my sorrows."
She is concerned now lest confessions about her alcoholism obscure her accomplishments. "It's not like Betty Ford going into a rehab place," she says. "With me it's a whole year and what I've done with that sobriety. For once in my life I don't mind people talking about my drinking, but I know now there's a lot more to me than booze." Yet no subject makes her more animated, no success makes her happier. "I couldn't believe how hard it was to stop," she says. "Alcoholism is a baffler. I was a periodic drinker, not a daily one, but, God knows, toward the end of my drinking—talk about being enslaved!" She tried quitting on her own two or three times—once checking into chic Silver Hill in Connecticut—but the cure never took. Finally, she says, she turned to AA.
The result has meant a wholesale revision of attitude. "Life is so great when you're healthy," she exclaims, and her three children seem to appreciate the change too. Kara, 18, who recently graduated from high school in Washington, has begun taking an interest in learning more about her mother, particularly about her girlhood and life before marriage. She wants Joan to take her to college next fall (Trinity, in Hartford, Conn.) and plans to bring friends to Cape Cod on weekends. "I'm so pleased," says Joan, "that that's what she wants to do." Ted Jr., 16, a senior at St. Albans School in Washington this year, will also visit on weekends, as will Patrick, 11, who will be entering fifth grade in a private school in Virginia.
Joan's separation from her family has given her renewed confidence in her role as a mother. "Ted and I are so different," she says. "He's a super-Dad; I'm not a super-Mom. He's like a Pied Piper with our kids and all the nieces and nephews—everything's exuberance and activity. By comparison I'm quiet—good for times when the kids like to cuddle up and just visit and talk." Above all, she no longer feels driven to compete with her in-laws. "I tried to be like the Kennedys," she admits, "bouncy and running all over the place. But I could never be that. That's not me. I'd rather take long walks, sit by the fire or play the piano."
Reckoning with her differences and her problems may have taken Joan some distance from conventional notions of the dutiful wife and mother. In the process, however, she seems to have become readier than ever to take on the grueling political chores she never chose for herself and once feared would lead to Ted's Presidency. Recently, for instance, she joined her husband in co-hosting a dinner at their McLean home for 250 Massachusetts mayors and selectmen. Back in Boston, amid her rounds of Pops concerts, poetry readings, occasional parties (a recent one at Doris and Richard Goodwin's) and lunches with friends whom she cherishes for "really being there" when she needed them, she devotedly keeps up with Ted's work on a national health insurance bill and a new U.S. criminal code. She remembers how enthusiastically she campaigned for Ted in 1964, when he was laid up with a broken back after a plane crash, and how well she performed when she had to. "I had a lot of freedom," she says, "and I really felt needed. I knew I was pleasing Ted. The only situation like that would be running for the No. 1 political job, and I could see myself being a good campaigner. The only question is: Do I really want to do it?"
The answer is significantly different from the one Joan Kennedy might have given four years ago as she sat blinking back tears of relief after Ted announced he was not running for President. It comes close to a declaration of independence—one from which many wives, political and otherwise, might profit. "It wouldn't be hard to imagine campaigning for Ted if he ran for President," she says now. "I could do a good job—if I made my own rules about where I'd go and what I'd say. So much has changed in the last year. Because of my self-confidence I don't feel trapped in any role I don't want. It was hard for Ted at first because I used to say 'yes, dear' to everything, and now I can say 'no.' But I'm part of the decisions now, so I don't feel resentful. My mood is born of sobriety and everything I've tried this year—school, piano, living alone. It's given me confidence, and if I can enjoy politics again, it's because I'm happy inside."
