Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, two personas built on damaged foundations, casting their dark magic. People wanted to have sex with them, be them, or bask in their orbit, for however long, at whatever cost. But Marilyn had a neediness that Jack did not. She wanted two things: to be loved—a deep, full love that she believed could heal all her wounds—and to be smart. She wanted powerful and famous men to see past the sex symbol and realize that Marilyn Monroe had substance. She always carried a book with her, a serious one. A big one. Ulysses.

Marilyn said that DiMaggio isolated her and wouldn’t allow friends to their home. “I hoped to have out of my marriage love, warmth, affection, and understanding,” she said. “But the relationship was one of coldness and indifference. I voluntarily offered to give up my work in hopes that it would solve our problems, but it didn’t change his attitude.” That testimony won Marilyn her immediate freedom. She did not testify to the physical abuse she’d suffered, did not reveal that DiMaggio had left her right arm black-and-blue

The Arthur in her dream was the playwright Arthur Miller. They had first met in 1951, on a movie set, and he had made a strong impression. “Met a man tonight,” she wrote in her journal. “It was… bam! It was like running into a tree. You know, like a cool drink when you’ve had a fever.” He had captivated her by suggesting she act on the stage, that she clearly had the chops for it. When Arthur said that to her, on set in front of everyone, people laughed. But he hadn’t. He meant it.

as soon as her divorce from DiMaggio was final, they threw themselves headlong into a serious relationship, marrying on June 29, 1956. She hadn’t heeded the warnings about writers, how everyone in their world was material—fair game for their work.

Arthur and Mary had been married for sixteen years, and Mary’s humiliation was compounded by the fame, beauty, and sexual vibrancy of her rival.

the metaphorical slaying of his father by saying, without saying: I am with Marilyn Monroe and you are not.

Despite it all, she loved the playwright. She was out-of-her-mind crazy about him, ignoring the cynics who thought he’d married down and she’d married up, that he gave her class and she only gave him sex appeal. The Egghead and the Hourglass—that’s what the press called them.

“I am so concerned about protecting Arthur,” she wrote in her diary. “I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses about—but he is the only person… that I trust as much as myself—because when I do trust myself (about certain things) I do fully.”

But the playwright, like the ballplayer before him, soon came to resent Marilyn. She was too careerist, too comfortable with commodifying herself. Too beautiful for the geeky, gangly likes of him. Then came Jack Kennedy. Marilyn did not have this problem with Jack. He loved those qualities. He luxuriated in her carnality.

even as her own husband found her tiresome, uninteresting, and intellectually lacking. She knew this was true, because Arthur wrote as much and left his notebook for her to find while they were far from home, in London.

Arthur knew how insecure she was working opposite the greatest actor alive. Had Arthur subconsciously wanted her to know what he really thought?

Olivier, too, had made his disdain for Monroe clear. He was dismissive of her on set, which was bad enough as her leading man, even worse because he was also her director. He told the cast and crew that Marilyn was a trifle, a bauble, a nothing. She wasn’t an artist or a real actress. She was just a starlet with a shelf life, out of her league with all these Great Men, and Olivier knew just how to humiliate her. “Try and be sexy,” he said.

She had been so content with Arthur—until she read what he had written. One word in particular jumped out. EMBARRASSED. She embarrassed him.

He was ashamed to be her husband, especially when they were around his friends, the intellectuals.

The only one he would ever truly love, he wrote, was his daughter. Marilyn had been his wife for two weeks.

Only Marilyn’s shrinks had any inkling why she spoke that way, why some women who were abused as children sometimes adopt a child’s voice. It was a way of saying: I’m smaller than you. Please don’t hurt me. She never thought Jack Kennedy would hurt her.

Mary Richardson had been starstruck by the whole family, but no one more so than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the martyred Bobby Kennedy and nephew of the late JFK. Bobby was an alpha Kennedy, and she had won him.

The gorgeous, smart, talented Mary Richardson Kennedy—mother of four, married to the most famous Kennedy man aside from JFK Jr., living in a million-dollar house she’d redesigned in the wealthy suburb of Bedford, New York, a woman everyone wanted at their charity galas and dinner parties—was now on the verge of losing everything.

She was as comfortable talking to presidents as she was to PTA members. She was more charismatic, more coherent than her husband, especially when speaking in public.

Mary, an architectural designer, had gutted and redone the entire house after discovering mold on all three floors. Her work was masterful.

As they were being interviewed, Mary displayed her original renderings while Bobby sat back in his chair, arms crossed, frowning.

three years after that triumph, she could barely get out of bed. On the days when she summoned enough energy to take the kids to school, Mary was often in ratty pajama bottoms, her hair unkempt. “You have to pull yourself together,” the other mothers told her.

Almost every day, Mary dealt with the assumption that came not just from other women, but also from tabloids and esteemed historians: that being a Kennedy wife—especially the wife of the namesake, the eldest son of a beloved, martyred leader—meant you were special.

behind the scenes, you were the brains. The mover, the shaker, the one who got things done.

their contempt sometimes hidden but mostly not: Look at the world I brought you into, the wealth and fame and admiration handed to you on this family’s silver platter. How hard could it be? As Carolyn said every time her husband asked her that very question, “I didn’t get the fucking employee handbook.”

But he and Bobby Jr. had that male Kennedy entitlement, the expectation that their wives should be mind readers, hostesses who could throw together a dinner for twelve at the last minute—the uncomplaining Cool Girl. If her husband didn’t come home when he said he would, if he was an hour or a day or a week late? The good Kennedy wife just brushed that off. And, of course, a wandering eye, Bobby’s wandering eye, was just part of the deal. Congenital, generational, baked in—the original recipe Kennedy.

It was never a good idea to be around either Mary or Carolyn when one of them was angry; their explosive rages, often coming out of nowhere, could be terrifying. There were times when Mary hit Bobby hard, punched him in the face. She pushed him down the stairs once. But he’d always come back to her.

Mary was still deeply in love with Bobby. Sometimes she’d say she was addicted to him, and the alcoholic in her meant it.

It was 1993. Bobby was a father now, with two children both under ten, a boy and a girl. He was recently divorced from Emily, he said. Would it have mattered if Mary knew that he was lying? That he and Emily were not, in fact, divorced? Would it have mattered if Mary knew Emily’s side? That Emily loved Bobby and had stuck with him through his heroin addiction, his overdose and arrest, the rehab stint in New Jersey, the serious health issues to follow, the five-months-long hospitalization? That in 1992, after ten years of marriage and two children, Emily and Bobby had separated over none of those issues but over his constant infidelities?

This namesake son spent his formative years fairly crying out for maternal attention, but nothing could rally Ethel—not his alcoholism, not his heroin use, not his expulsion from boarding school because his friends feared he was one overdose away from dying.

On the other hand, all Mary wanted to do was pay attention to Bobby. In her way, she understood him. Bobby Jr. was nine when his father died; she was twelve when her father went into the hospital with colon cancer. His death after surgery was a shock; he was only fifty-seven. Like Bobby Jr., she’d never had the chance to say goodbye.

Bobby had whisked Mary off to Ireland, and she got pregnant. He proposed right away, and that was when Mary learned the truth, that Bobby and Emily were still married. She didn’t care. She was that much in love. Like Carolyn Bessette, her future cousin-in-law, Mary chose to ignore these blazing warning signs. Like Carolyn, she imbued her Kennedy man with all the qualities he lacked—self-awareness, humility, and intelligence. Mary was brilliant, always top of her class, a voracious reader and generator of ideas. Bobby, not so much.

His book The Riverkeepers, which he co-authored with John Cronin in 1997, was meant to burnish his reputation in a field relatively new to him. It had the opposite effect. James Gorman, deputy science editor of the New York Times, noted the book’s multiple inaccuracies, including the assertion that DDT had eradicated entire bird populations. “This is not a trivial mistake,” Gorman wrote.

But nothing could stop his ambition, his unerring belief that he was always in the right. Not even that bad review—in a newspaper that usually covered the Kennedys favorably, no less—gave Bobby Jr. pause. And Mary was always proud of Bobby.

three weeks later, in April 1994, Mary and Bobby were married on a simple boat in the Hudson River, with no frills and no celebrities. A big life awaited her as a senator’s wife, a governor’s wife, and maybe, someday, First Lady. She gave up her job, would have three more children, and six years after the wedding Mary Kennedy found herself in a million-dollar house alone.

It mattered that he mattered to the A-list Kennedys. Mary understood. It mattered to her, too. But the more her looks and smarts and elegance redounded to Bobby’s benefit, the more he seemed to resent her.

And when he did swoop in, he’d take one or all of the children off on some adventure and leave Mary behind. She was never invited. Mary had somehow become persona non grata, despite hosting all the dinner parties, the Fourth of July barbecues, the fundraisers, the celebrity-studded games of capture the flag. Uninvited, despite writing all the thank-you notes and RSVPs. Despite doing the day-to-day work of raising their children.

Mary didn’t handle it well. You could say to yourself, Who would?,

The question was never: Why can’t Bobby be faithful? The question was always: What’s wrong with Mary?

He accepted zero accountability for her anger. In fact, Bobby used it against her. “Mary is being impossible,” he wrote in one entry. “She refuses to do anything fun with me like snorkeling… and is deeply resentful when I do it myself.” She had been pregnant with their fourth child.

“Mary is continuing in her resolve to deal with anger and control… I am discovering the well of resentments I have against her.” “Mary on a rampage… She is really possessed by some terrible demon.” Not once did Bobby link her rage to his constant cheating, which was all over these pages.

“My lust demons,” he wrote, were his greatest failing.

It wasn’t just the womanizing. It was the way Bobby described being away from Mary as both respite and a constant battle to control his sex drive.

if they were to divorce, Mary would lose her entire identity—not just as a Kennedy but as person of importance. She had left the workforce when she married Bobby, and as their children grew older she found herself with entire school days to fill. What would she be without the fundraisers and the Kennedy summers on the Cape?

the harder she clung, the more he pulled away. And the more distraught she became, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the harder he turned on her.

The Bobby Kennedy Juniors weren’t nearly as well-off as people assumed. Bobby had been one of eleven siblings, and the bulk of his father’s money had been spent on the 1968 campaign for president. Bobby Jr. was augmenting his salary at the Riverkeeper Alliance with work as an adjunct law professor at Pace University, and he had his book deals and those speaking engagements, but none of it was enough to raise four children in the manner of senior Kennedys—let alone pay child support for the two children from his first marriage, or the gut renovation of their home.

When Bobby had a film he wanted to show about Earth Day, a project that was a real point of pride for him, Mary arranged for a big party at the house. “A Conversation with RFK Jr.,” she called it. Bobby would give a speech and they’d show the movie and he’d sign his books and be in his glory. If only he had bothered to show up on time. If only he hadn’t all but forgotten about it—all the work she’d done, all the luminaries and Kennedy admirers in their home. If only he had cared about how this would reflect on Mary.

When she finally got Bobby on the phone, he showed up and did what he did best: glad-handing, accepting praise, pocketing money, ignoring his wife.

Even those close to Mary—much like those close to Carolyn Bessette—would admit she could be difficult. Very, very difficult. Bobby was trying to rein in Mary’s spending, her compulsive shopping. But she was trying to fill an emotional black hole with clothes, trips, private yoga sessions with a local teacher who was becoming one of her closest friends.

It wasn’t just the cheating that had Mary so upset. She confided that after finding evidence of yet another affair, she’d become so hysterical that she’d run out of the house, gotten in her car, backed out of the driveway, and accidentally run over and killed Porcia, the family dog.