Last week a scandalous exposé—Living With the Kennedys: The Joan Kennedy Story (Simon and Schuster, 17.95)—hit the bookstores. The author: none other than Joan's former friend, Marcia Chellis.
The Kennedy's response has been an icy silence except for a brief expression of hurt by Joan: "I tried to talk her out of it three years ago when she told me the notes she took on the 1980 campaign would be used in a book. I told her I felt so betrayed. I think it's a real breach of confidentiality."
Chellis' waspish chronicle of her Kennedy years rivals the worst of the "betrayal books" that disgruntled friends and relatives have turned out in the last decade. Apparently willing to flaunt all the rules of discretion, Chellis washed the monogrammed Kennedy linen with gusto. Ted's infidelities grew so troublesome to Joan, according to Marcia, that she consulted former sister-in-law Jackie about the problem and was told: "Kennedy men are like that. It doesn't mean anything." Confronted briefly with the prospect of becoming First Lady, Joan is reported by Chellis to have said: "I'm figuring ways to get out of the White House because I couldn't do those boring chores if I weren't meeting a lover at 7." Indeed Joan did find comfort in liaisons of her own, according to her former friend's book.
Why did Chellis do it? "Money is one reason," she says, admitting she got a substantial advance but refusing to say how much. Chellis claims another motive was to portray Joan's courageous battle with alcoholism. In fact Joan is said to feel the book grossly violates AA's fundamental promise of confidentiality. Asks Thomas Seessel, executive director of the National Council on Alcoholism, who has discussed the Chellis book with Joan: "If you can't feel comfortable disclosing privacies to a fellow member, what do you have?"
Chellis, a perfectly coiffed and manicured woman, shows no contrition for her indiscretion and, to the contrary, feels some bitterness. "To Ted Kennedy I was an extension of Joan, and he could walk around the room in his boxer shorts because I wasn't really there," she says. "He ignored me and hurt my feelings."
Ironically Chellis, like Joan herself, was brought up to be the kind of woman who never needed money. She grew up in the affluent suburbs of Boston, New York and Chicago. At 24, after teaching school, she married Robert Chellis, now a building developer. Then came the house on Boston's South Shore as well as the birth of Dana, now 19, and Brad, 15.
Despite outward appearances of domestic serenity, Chellis found herself "aware that I was drinking like an alcoholic." One day, dressed in her nightgown, big black rubber fisherman's boots and her husband's heavy jacket, she wandered along a road carrying a jar half full of scotch. "They brought me home in a flashing cruiser," she writes. Chellis recovered, taking her last drink, she says, in 1975.
Two years later her marriage concluded in an amicable divorce, and Chellis moved with her children into Joan Kennedy's building. She met her famous neighbor at a tenants' meeting. "We were two single women trying to create new lives for ourselves," recalls Chellis. "I cared about her a lot." Joan apparently felt the same, hiring Chellis as a staff member and hand-holder when she joined Ted on the campaign trail in 1979.
After the dust settled on Ted's failed run for the Oval Office, Chellis grew unhappy with her role as social secretary and in 1982 left Joan's employ. Though Joan had reputedly promised to work with Marcia on a children's TV show, she backed out. Nor did she want to write the introduction to Chellis' proposed book on women and alcoholism. "Joan," she claims, "wanted to do something more commercial."
If that is true, she failed. Chellis, of course, did not. "In a funny way, I see this as all part of Joan's vulnerability," says Boston Globe columnist and Kennedy watcher Ellen Goodman. "She may not have used the best judgment in not recognizing somebody who might turn on her." For her part Chellis believes that if Joan reads the book she will understand she has not been betrayed. "Joan will still see my loyalty," said Chellis before hustling off on a 12-city tour, "in what I chose not to include in the book."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
