The Fall of Joan
It was the blood that caught the attention of a passerby, a streak running down one side of the woman's face in a long red tear as she tried to hoist herself off the Beacon Street sidewalk. She looked like a disoriented street person who had wandered into the Back Bay from the nearby Boston Common. "She said she was okay, but she did not look okay," says Constance Bacon, who shielded the helpless woman from the rain as they waited for an ambulance. "She was conscious. She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and she tried to get up and she couldn't. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who it was, that it was anything special." It took little more than a day for Bacon—and the rest of the world—to find out that the woman she had helped had a last name recognized across the globe, that this bloody and disheveled person was the former model once nicknamed "the Dish" by her brother-in-law, the late President John F. Kennedy. As with other members of the Kennedy clan, notoriety was nothing new to her. Her fall, which resulted in a concussion and a broken shoulder, was the latest incident in a long and very public struggle Joan Bennett Kennedy has waged against alcoholism. "No, she did not appear drunk," Bacon said repeatedly afterward. But a source close to Kennedy's three children says Kennedy's blood-alcohol level was well above the legal limit when it was tested at the hospital that night. The limits of her ability to look after her own affairs had also been exceeded, setting the stage for a battle worthy of any of the political or media skirmishes in which the Kennedy's have engaged over the years. Joan Kennedy had taken to drinking in secret in the months before her accident, and her drugs of choice were mouthwash and vanilla extract. Both contained enough alcohol to assuage her cruel thirst without producing the rank odor of hard booze. A caretaker complained that Kennedy, 68, had begun locking her out of the Beacon Street condominium where the one-time presidential in-law lives. (She also has a waterfront house in Hyannis Port.) The caretaker told Kennedy's son Patrick, a congressman from Rhode Island, about the large quantities of vanilla extract his mother was bringing home from the market. "She said she had taken up baking," the friend of the Kennedy children says. "She would tell the caretakers she would meet them somewhere and never show up. She'd try to lose them." Suspicious amounts of mouthwash vanished from the bathroom. And there were Kennedy's frequent absences from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings she attended during periods of sobriety. In the world of AA, identities are closely guarded, and the shapely older woman in the baseball cap and expensive ensembles was no different there from the homeless, disoriented drunks still reeking of alcohol who would wander in from the Park Street T station, lured by free coffee and cookies. In the meetings she was no longer a Kennedy, but merely "Joan," a fellow alcoholic with a soul-sapping disease. Booze does not discriminate. Still, Kennedy had a lot of people fooled. She cleaned up well and continued to travel in elite circles. In fact, her close friend, philanthropist Ann Gund, insists even now that Kennedy had been staying sober. Kennedy's doctors do not agree. The vanilla extract and mouthwash she apparently guzzled on a regular basis caused enough damage to her kidneys that her children say she was within a year of needing dialysis to stay alive. That, and the spill she took on Beacon Street, amounted to much more than just another embarrassing bout with the bottle. The kidney problems, the concussion, and the broken shoulder buoyed an argument Kennedy's children had been making for some time: Their mother was incapable of taking care of herself. About a day after his mother's tumble, Patrick Kennedy decided not to pursue his ambition to follow his father, Edward M. Kennedy, into the United States Senate. He and his siblings, Edward Jr. and Kara Kennedy Allen, launched a complex court case aimed at taking over their mother's life. In addition to alcoholism, at issue was her involvement of a distant relative, Webster E. Janssen, to control her $9 million estate, which includes the Back Bay condo and the house on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Janssen, a financial planner who lives in Connecticut, railed against the Kennedy offspring for hiring a "zookeeper" to scrutinize their mother's routine. "I don't know why they would put their mother through this misery," he said. That dispute would drag out through the spring as bitter Kennedy v. Kennedy lawsuits were filed in Barnstable Probate and Family Court on Cape Cod. Court papers were submitted as discreetly as possible, but one incendiary element, according to the family friend, was a reference to the bipolar disorder and depression from which the children claimed their mother suffered, in addition to her alcoholism. "The children are there for her as much as they can be, but she has no husband and no significant other, and she's someone who really needs someone to be with her," this source says. "It's been a very draining situation for the children, and they don't wish this on anyone else, but they know this is happening to families all across the country." The acrimonious battle began in July 2004, when Joan's older son, Edward Jr., cofounder and president of a New York business development and government-relations firm, was appointed her legal guardian. Barnstable Judge Robert Terry had ruled that Joan was "incapable of taking care of herself by reason of mental illness." Edward Jr. was the most qualified for the responsibility, having spent the bulk of his adult life advocating for the disabled. It was a cause he could relate to, having lost a leg to bone cancer at age 12. For a few months, the relationship was an effective one. The children took turns being with their mother as much as possible and took care of her finances. But Joan's resentment ultimately bubbled over. That fury was what Janssen, 70—a second cousin on Joan's mother's side—tapped into when he showed up on the scene. It remains unclear how Webster Janssen managed to track down and make contact with his distant cousin. He insists that he has been a part of the family all along and claims to have attended Kara Kennedy Allen's wedding. Patrick Kennedy says he does not remember meeting Janssen. Nor do any of the other children, according to the family friend. He grew up in Bronxville, New York, not far from where Joan was raised, and is a licensed securities professional, but he could not explain what benefit he would bring to Joan Kennedy's life, merely insisting in an interview that he "never took a dime" from her. Janssen quickly assumed complete control, denying Joan's children access to records of her assets, according to both Patrick and Edward Jr. He put Joan's Hyannis Port house on the market, a violation of the court order that had put her elder son in charge of her affairs. Janssen also set up two trusts, of which he was the sole trustee. Those moves were questionable enough that the Kennedy children got a court order preventing the sale of either of their mother's properties. Then they filed a complaint against Janssen. "We are contemplating other legal action against Mr. Janssen," Edward Jr. said, "for financial advisor malpractice." Janssen fired back, accusing the Kennedy offspring of ruining Joan's life. "I have been in business for 45 years and never had a client complain about me," he said. "So lotsa luck." It was not the first time Joan Kennedy had found herself mired in chaos. The alcoholism, the drama and despair that would soon become synonymous with the Kennedy name—all were a part of her life from the start. Virginia Joan Bennett was born September 9, 1936, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, a neighborhood that closely resembles the lace-curtain Irish communities in Boston where paintings and photographs of JFK still hang on the walls. She was named for her mother. Her parents, Henry Wiggin Bennett Jr. and Virginia Joan Stead Bennett, were both successful professionally but also lived with untreated alcoholism. "It's a terrible disease," says the Kennedy family friend. "Her parents were both alcoholics and it's just a disease that gets worse and worse unless you try and get some control over it." Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, was the ideal escape for Joan—close enough to home that she could drop in on her parents, but still removed from the claustrophobic environment of an alcoholic household. It was there that she met her future sisters-in-law, Jean Kennedy—JFK's youngest sister—and Ethel Skakel, who would later marry Robert Kennedy. The three women had all grown up among garrulous Irish Catholics, but Joan and Jean were the shy and reserved members of their respective families. Jean's mother, Rose, once remarked of her daughter, the second youngest of nine children: "She was born so late that she only was able to enjoy the tragedies and not the triumphs." There would be plenty of tragedies in the lives of all three women. Joan Bennett was a startlingly beautiful blonde. Leggy and coquettish, she caught Ted Kennedy's eye in 1957, when he was a dashing young law student visiting his sister's campus during a building dedication. At that time she was a part-time model and did the occasional TV ad for Revlon or Coca-Cola. After a yearlong courtship, they were married. They had their first child, Kara, in 1960. In typical Irish-Catholic fashion, the couple continued to expand their family: Edward Jr. was born in 1961, and Patrick came along five years later. There was little hint of trouble between the handsome politician and the TV model. Laurence Leamer, author of The Kennedy Women, described Joan in a recent interview as having "this incredible guileless quality. She's a total innocent even now." Then, in 1964, the Kennedys had a stillborn baby boy. That baby is buried in the Kennedy plot at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, a site that has become a sad symbol of what many now see as the Camelot curse. The baby is buried alongside Michael Kennedy, one of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's children, who was killed in a ski accident in 1997. Joan and Ted would lose three children, including a baby that was miscarried in the aftermath of the Chappaquiddick tragedy. That famous accident, which would dash any chance Ted Kennedy had to become president, occurred on a sultry July night in 1969, when the senator drove off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, at the eastern end of Martha's Vineyard. A young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne was beside him. His car plunged into a shallow waterway, Poucha Pond, landing upside down. Kopechne drowned; Kennedy swam to shore, leaving her body in the water to be found by Edgartown police. Afterward, his wife stood by her man, even at Kopechne's funeral. Already pregnant with another child, Joan would lose the baby a month later. "For a few months everyone had to put on this show, and then I just didn't care anymore. I just saw no future. That's when I truly became an alcoholic," she told Laurence Leamer. Joan's show came to a grinding halt in 1974, when she was arrested in Virginia for drunken driving and lost her license for six months. The Kennedys were all too familiar with public scandal, but even they were horrified by Joan's unraveling. Her marriage to Ted ended in 1982, two years after his disastrous run for the presidency. The divorce did not end Joan's drinking, however. In 1988, she crashed her car into a fence in Centerville on Cape Cod and was ordered to attend an alcohol education program; she lost her license for 45 days. In 1991, she was arrested after being observed drinking vodka straight from the bottle while weaving her car along the Southeast Expressway. She would go through drying-out stints, including ones at Belmont's McLean Hospital and also at New York's St. Luke's?Roosevelt Hospital Center, which has treated other celebrity alcoholics, including baseball players Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry and author Truman Capote. And with each misstep came more intense media scrutiny. "It has been hard," she said in a 1992 interview. "It is easier now. I have all this support. There's wonderful forgiveness from people." Referring to her sobriety in a July 2000 interview, she said, "It's such a relief to be free." That freedom apparently ended in the fall of 2000 with another drunken- driving arrest on Cape Cod. A motorist called 911 saying a blue Buick had been all over a road in Marstons Mills. When cops arrived, they found Joan on unsteady feet outside her car. Later she failed a Breathalyzer test at the station. It was her fourth arrest, and it was serious now. Even the Kennedy name might not be enough to keep her out of jail this time. It is not uncommon, however, for a judge to recognize alcoholism as a disease and recommend probation and rehabilitation rather than jail time, which is how matters were dealt with. Patrick then called on the media to give his mother "the room and privacy to be able to deal with this latest incident as she has handled other setbacks in her life." He added, "I love my mother very much." The 2000 arrest came just a few months after Joan told the Boston Globe she had been sober for nine years. "After that amount of time people start to forget," she said. "So I'd rather not bring it up and have people say, 'Ohh, Joan. She's the alcoholic.' Because a lot of places I go, people don't know." The duration of Joan's sobriety may have been in question, but what she accomplished during the dry times was not. While her children were busy with their own lives and careers, and with her ex-husband remarried, Joan combated her loneliness by turning to charitable endeavors and the arts. An accomplished pianist with a master's degree in education, she is well known in Boston for her support of the symphony, the opera, and the Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. She has served as chairwoman of the Boston Cultural Council and remains a fixture on the social scene, rubbing elbows with the city's movers and shakers. Shrugging off her checkered past, she wrote a family guide to classical music, and in early 2000 she hired a personal trainer and started working out at a Back Bay gym. Her children were excited that she was pulling her life back together—again. Then came the humiliating stumble in the Back Bay, and Joan found herself back in the swirling cycle of addiction. Patrick Kennedy feared the worst when he received the middle-of-the-night call. His brother's voice on the other end of the line told him only that their mother had been found on a Beacon Street sidewalk and was now in New England Medical Center. "Anyone who receives a call in the middle of the night saying a loved one is in a hospital fears the worst," he says through a spokeswoman. When Patrick arrived at the hospital, his eyes were red-rimmed with sleeplessness and he was clearly shaken as he spoke with reporters about the difficulties of helping his mother. "You want to make sure there's someone there for her all the time . . . but at the same time you don't want to encroach on her privacy too much," he said. "When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there's someone with her 24/7, and perhaps that might become necessary." It was then that Patrick added he was dropping out of the Senate race. He had too much to tend to. One such concern was a bill he is cosponsoring in Congress that proposes clear-cut laws to protect the elderly from con artists and make it easier for relatives to step in to protect their loved ones' interests. The family's public sniping finally ended in June, when all parties came to an agreement hammered out in a Barnstable courthouse a few days before Kennedy v. Kennedy would have become an embarrassingly public trial. Under the deal, the trusts established by Janssen were dissolved and the Hyannis Port house was taken off the market. Joan Kennedy agreed to strict court-ordered supervision, with a guardian to make sure she stayed away from the bottle. It was a deal she could live with. "I'm feeling fine," she said to a reporter outside her Back Bay condo a day after she signed the agreement that put her fortune in the hands of a new trust overseen by two court-appointed trustees. Joan Kennedy has essentially become a ward of the state, her every move monitored by the court. She is required to stay sober, comply with her live-in caretakers, and refrain from any slip-ups. Otherwise, her children will be granted permanent custody of her. "She's not happy with all the provisions," a Kennedy source acknowledges. "It's fine. She's not mad. She is fine. She really is." Originally published in Boston magazine, August 2005 User comments
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