After Camelot

It was a gray, dreary, and unremarkable Saturday afternoon in Hyannis Port. Out on a stretch of pebble-covered sand and facing a dark, restless ocean stood an elderly woman wearing a black baseball cap. As she took in the endless vista, she bent down to pick up a seashell. She rolled it in the palm of her hand and then flung it into the sea. Appearing lost in thought, she pulled her white down jacket close in order to keep the chill of the Nantucket Sound at bay. To see her walk just a few steps, it was clear that she had a slight limp. Meanwhile, a young lady in a starched white maid’s uniform approached and stood directly behind her. After a few moments of hesitation, she tapped her on the shoulder. “Mrs. Kennedy,” she said, “the priest will be here at five o’clock to say Mass. He’s asked if you had any particular scripture in mind for the reading?” Ethel Kennedy turned to face the woman. With eyes reddened and face drawn, she seemed even older than her seventy-one years. Her frame was slight, shoulders slim and slightly hunched forward.

“How well I remember my own wedding,” Ethel said wistfully, not responding to the woman’s question. “We Kennedys are known for our great weddings, as you know,” she added. “Mine and Bobby’s was so beautiful.” According to the maid’s later recollection, Ethel then spoke of the formal white satin gown she wore on that special day so many years earlier when she and Robert Kennedy were wed. She also spoke of the long, diaphanous veil trimmed with delicate orange blossoms. And the elegant, dainty gloves. “But we called them mitts in those days,” she remembered. “They were satin and had pearls on them,” she added. “People don’t wear gloves so much anymore,” she mused as she reached into her pocket and pulled out large black sunglasses. She put them on. “I wonder why that is,” she continued, seeming distracted. “Gloves are so nice. Don’t you agree?” Her maid nodded.

Over the years, Kennedy weddings have been more than mere events, they’ve been the subject of national curiosity all the way back to the family patriarch Joseph’s, who wed Rose in 1914, through to Bobby and Ethel’s in 1950, Eunice’s to Sargent Shriver in 1953, and Jack’s to Jackie Bouvier, also in 1953. And there were so many more—Kennedy sisters Pat’s to actor Peter Lawford in 1954 and Jean’s to Stephen Smith two years later. Then there was Ted’s to Joan Bennett in 1958 . . . The list goes on and on, especially as the next generation took their own spouses. Who could forget the elegant wedding of Jackie’s daughter, Caroline, to Ed Schlossberg in 1986? Wedding guest Robert Rauschenberg once said it felt as if there had been “seventy-five thousand Kennedys present.” It probably felt to those in attendance that there were at least that many. But then Caroline’s brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.— only son of the slain President Kennedy—broke the tradition of big family weddings with a more intimate affair when he married the lovely Carolyn Bessette in 1996. It was a surprise not only to the media but also to many of Kennedy’s friends and even family members.

This is an excerpt from AFTER CAMELOT: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family 1968 to the Present by J. Randy Taraborrelli. Copyright © 2012 by Rose Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.