third-longest serving member of the Senate in history, and earning him the moniker “The Liberal Lion of the Senate.”
And while he “picked up the torch of his fallen brothers” and continued to valiantly fight “to advance the civil rights, health, and economic well-being of the American people,” so too was he dogged by stories of his own debauchery, poor personal choices—and ironically, the Kennedy name itself. As political journalist Teddy White puts it, “Ted Kennedy had inherited a legend along with his name and he was almost as much trapped by the legend as he was propelled by it.”
PART SEVEN
The Next Generations
The Kennedy Cousins
Chapter 43
Senator Ted Kennedy wants a nightcap. It’s close to midnight, but not even the soothing sound of ocean waves lapping the shoreline next to the family’s Palm Beach mansion can compel the senator to stay at home tonight, on Good Friday, 1991.
Ted and his youngest child, Patrick—now twenty-three, and already following family tradition into politics as a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives—are down in Palm Beach for Easter weekend, at the invitation of Ted’s recently widowed sister, Jean Kennedy Smith. Also among the group of family and friends is Jean’s younger son, William “Willie” Kennedy Smith, thirty, a medical student weeks shy of graduating from Georgetown University.
The senator rustles up his son Patrick and his nephew Willie and persuades them to join him for a bachelor boys’ night out.
It’s been twenty-two years since Chappaquiddick. Ted and Joan divorced in 1983, and their oldest son, Ted Jr., now a lawyer, has long since recovered from his childhood diagnosis of bone cancer which resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Their daughter, Kara, is a TV producer working with her aunt Jean, Willie’s mother, at Very Special Arts, the international organization on arts, education, and disability that Jean founded in 1974.
In a matter of twenty-four hours, between now and Easter Sunday, another Kennedy scandal will unfold, one that will dominate national print headlines and television news crawls.
This time, a Kennedy will go on trial for rape.
But for now, the trio hits the town for a late supper, then a few drinks at Au Bar, a trendy Palm Beach watering hole known as a magnet for the nouveau riche and B-list celebrities like Donald Trump’s recent ex-wife, Ivana, or Roxanne Pulitzer, whose scandalous 1980s divorce made the front pages of every tabloid with claims she’d been kinky with a trumpet.
The fifty-nine-year-old senator orders his usual double Chivas Regal on the rocks, while Patrick chats with twenty-seven-year-old Michele Cassone, and Willie meets a twenty-nine-year-old single mother named Patricia Bowman. Willie tells her he’s about to become a doctor, and Bowman tells him about her two-year-old daughter’s health problems.
“I really felt like I could trust him. He seemed to be an intelligent man, a likable man,” Bowman says of Willie. “During our dancing he’d never laid one hand on me. He had never done anything suggestive at all.”
The Kennedys join Bowman’s friend Anne Mercer and Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, at their table. The conversation is barely audible above the pulsing music, but at some point, Mercer starts arguing politics with the senator. Ted decides to leave with Patrick, who invites Michele Cassone back to the Kennedy mansion for a drink and a million-dollar view of the Atlantic. She accepts, following Patrick and his father’s white convertible in her own car.
The Kennedy mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard is a Mediterranean-style home designed by architect Addison Mizner in 1923, and has been in the Kennedy family since 1933, when Joe Sr. bought it during the Depression for a steal at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage while vacationing there, as well as his inaugural address. The mansion is known as “La Guerida” but has been nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” ever since Jack began using it as a presidential retreat. Despite the home’s fashionable pedigree, however, most first-time visitors in the 1990s are surprised at its shabby-chic décor. “It was dark, dingy, and smelly,” recalls Michele Cassone, cracking, “If it was my house, I’d have it exterminated.”
Ted, Patrick, and Cassone chat in the living room, where Cassone switches from flutes of nightclub bubbly to glasses of white wine. Everyone else in the house is apparently asleep.
“Ted was very drunk, and Patrick and I had a nice buzz on,” she recalls.
The senator disappears from the room. Patrick and Cassone head into a bedroom the cousins are sharing for the weekend and start making