Post by Joanna on Nov 6, 2015 0:26:16 GMT -5
RFK Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream
Of all the Kennedy men – most known to be notorious womanizers – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the most wives (three) and an untold number of sexual liaisons. His sex and drug addiction problems lasted for years. In his private diary, he called his obsession with women his “lust demons.” In the first-ever biography of Bobby – a powerful environmental lawyer and activist named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” – New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer has put the namesake of Senator Robert Kennedy under a journalistic microscope. Here, in this exclusive excerpt from RFK Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, the 61-year-old Kennedy’s love life and marriages are probed.
Kennedy’s lusting after females started when he began boarding at the Millbrook School in Millbrook, N.Y. His mother, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, had stepped out of her presumed role of adoring mother and fully into the role of the grieving widow and left the maternal care of her third child to Lem Billings, a closeted homosexual who was President Kennedy’s best friend. Lem became Bobby’s “mentor and father figure”; Ethel wasn’t a part of her son’s life.
One of Bobby’s friends and fellow classmates at Millbrook who visited him at Hickory Hill told the author, “Ethel Kennedy was not the image America had of her.” There were constant mother and son battles during which Ethel would beat her eldest son with a hairbrush. The sprawling home in Virginia became known as “Horror Hill.”
Girls sneaked onto the Millbrook School campus to see the young Kennedy scion as if he were a rock star. Groupies swarmed around him trapping him on stairwell landings forcing him to jump out of a window to escape. Being a Kennedy, Bobby took advantage of the situation. At Millbrook, Bobby was “in his gawky stoner days.” When he matriculated at Harvard, he was “a gorgeous animal” and viewed as a “babe magnet” from his first day of classes. Girls were turned on when he showed them all of his scars from childhood and described how he got them. “Even straight guys thought he was sexy-looking,” writes Oppenheimer.
Bobby’s collegiate lust – and what was a jealous and competitive nature when it came to women – was underscored by an incident that occurred involving his years-younger cousin Christopher Kennedy Lawford. When Bobby was a Harvard freshman, Lawford was a senior at Middlesex, a fancy boarding school named for the Massachusetts town through which Paul Revere rode during his legendary “The British are coming, the British are coming” ride. One of the girls Bobby was seeing had heard that Lawford was planning to travel across country to look at potential colleges and she asked, and he agreed to have her accompany him. While Lawford fell for her and she for him, they didn’t have intercourse, he wrote years later in his 2005 memoir, Symptoms of Withdrawal. They returned to Boston to tell Bobby about the trip and their blossoming romance, with Lawford wondering, “How could Bobby be angry if I didn’t actually have sex with his girlfriend?” But he also noted, “I was going up against the one peer I didn’t really want to go up against.” Bobby was furious. “It didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t had sex with his girlfriend,” observed Lawford. “The fact that a female was leaving him for me really pissed him off. We didn’t speak for a year. He told me that [Bobby’s brother] Joe had said if it had been him he would have beaten the shit out of me.”
The young woman in question, who sought anonymity, told a somewhat different story to Peter Collier and David Horowitz for their 1984 book about the Kennedy dynasty. She said she had told Bobby that Lawford was more proficient at [oral sex] than he was, which apparently infuriated him. Having to “be the best at everything,” he demanded another opportunity to perform, after which she told him he was still the king of oral sex, at least with her. Bobby had been practicing the technique since he had started fooling around with girls back in his days at Millbrook, as he had once boasted to his roommate there.
Bobby finally came to a bizarre agreement with Lawford over his lost girlfriend, one of a number in his stable while he was at Harvard. “Bobby settled for a promise that he would sleep with my wife the day after I got married. A threat he didn’t have a prayer or the inclination of carrying out,” or so Lawford believed. But, as the future would tell, Bobby’s deal with Lawford said something about his mind-set regarding women.
When Bobby was in his early 20s, he fell for the exotic Italian-American looks of Valerie Duff Pacifico, a New York City travel agent he met while making arrangements for a trip. She fell for “his Kennedy charm and pedigree.” But Pacifico, who was possibly hoping for marriage, learned she had lost Bobby to another woman when he went to off to England to study – but mostly party – at the London School of Economics.
In swinging London, he fell for pretty socialite and model wannabe Rebecca Fraser, whose mother was the author Lady Antonia Fraser, “the golden lioness of London’s literary scene.” Bobby and Rebecca were introduced by his cousin, Caroline Kennedy. The Kennedy clan and Fraser family were close; Caroline had escaped injury when a terrorist had set off a bomb in Rebecca’s politician father Hugh’s Jaguar. When Rebecca came to America for a visit, she stayed with Jackie Kennedy, who mentored her as a model. In the spring of 1979, Bobby began his legal studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Rebecca took a job in New York and flew down to Charlottesville on weekends to be with him. Fraser was permanently back across the pond by the fall of 1981 where she took up writing, married a barrister and became the mother of three girls. The relationship with Bobby that she attributed to “idiotic behavior” was over. Rebecca had realized that Bobby was seeing a fellow law student, Emily Black.
Emily was in her second year at Virginia when she became romantically involved with Bobby after meeting in a popular bar and pizza place. He saw her and went over, sat down and just starting talking. She was from Bloomington, Indiana, a modest Midwesterner and petite at 5'4" to his 6'2" – but she did smoke marijuana, at least in high school, according to a former boyfriend, despite being quiet and reserved. She was also swept up by the Kennedy magnetism. Emily was studious and academic, her mother a schoolteacher, her father a lumberyard manager who died when she was just 2-years-old. She had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key majoring in political science at Indiana University in 1978 before entering law school at Virginia in the graduating class of 1981. Until she began law school, she had spent her whole life in and around Bloomington.
RFK Jr. and Mary Richardson
But no one saw the Kennedy-Black relationship becoming serious enough to one day involve marriage. To her friends it seemed like a Cinderella story come true; to others she was more like Little Red Riding Hood meeting the Big Bad Wolf. By the time Emily started seeing Bobby, she had become aware that he had a problem with drugs, one that would continue for some years. “Emily and I were well aware of his drug use, and I saw it on a number of occasions,” a close friend noted. The friend, who never used drugs, said he had on occasion accompanied Bobby to Harlem and saw him score heroin. “That was Bobby from the beginning of when I knew him in law school, but you take what you get in a friend, and I understood that.” At UVA, he said, “It was pretty common knowledge that Bobby did drugs. This was the late 70s, early 80s, so it wasn't unusual that he did drugs, and I don’t think people were shocked by it. But Bobby didn’t want it to be publicized. Emily was aware, we all were aware, and everyone offered to help him whenever they could.”
There were times when Bobby tried to go cold turkey, the pal said, and he and Emily tried to help and support him. “I spent weekends with him when he was getting off drugs, helping him with rehab,” he disclosed. “It was physically a little difficult. He had a lot of willpower, but the issue was that he had used drugs so much that it changed the physiology of his body. As I understood it, extended drug use suppressed certain glandular activity. He needed other actual drugs to restart stuff in his system. Our efforts were amateurish to say the least. He’d stop. He’d go cold turkey. He just thought, ‘I can beat this whenever I want,’ and he did for a while. But then it started again. You can have incredible willpower but that doesn't mean you can turn addiction on and off.”
Despite his drug issues, Bobby had taken a break from his law school studies and from Emily to help out in his uncle Ted’s 1980 campaign for the presidency. He was given campaign marching orders to get Alabama voters in the Kennedy corner. But it wasn’t all work. On the road, he reputedly cheated on Emily.
The young journalists Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who had signed a contract to write a biography of the Kennedys, had convinced Bobby to permit them into his life. Horowitz took advantage of the situation and joined him, and was shocked by the scenes that he witnessed. “There were women there like moths to the flame. I just know that he was fucking everything in sight, even though he was involved with Emily Black, who was just very quiet, just seemed like a nice person. By the end of the day, the rest of us were exhausted and Bobby was ill, had the flu or something, and all of us collapsed, but there was a girl waiting for him ... He had one girl who was a campaign worker, so he always had that one. At one campaign event, he just went off to screw her.”
Bobby returned to Charlottesville to finish law school after Ted’s failed presidential campaign and back into the relationship with Emily. She had dated others in his absence, but she was in love with Bobby and the couple decided they wanted to have children. Bobby was hyperactive and Emily was calm. They thought it would work out and in August 1980, Bobby told Emily’s mother he had proposed to her daughter. The two were married in Bloomington’s First Christian Church where Emily had been baptized. The glitzy wedding plans originally created for St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue were tabled. The expense was too great for the mother of the bride. Father Gerald Creedon, the Kennedy family priest from back East who co-officiated the ceremony April 3, 1982, believed Emily would be a great addition to the Kennedy family because she evoked Jackie. “She had a presence.” Reverend Terry Ewing, chosen by Emily’s mother to co-officiate, noted the Kennedy family was so mellow on the day of rehearsal and throughout the weekend “because they were all high on cocaine and booze.”
Seventeen months after marrying Emily, Bobby was headed for rehab in Rapid City, South Dakota, when he suffered what was a near fatal overdose of heroin at 20,000 feet. Heroin was found in his carry-on bag and he was charged with possession. The news devastated Emily, but she hung in there and believed he could change. They had two children during the 12-year marriage, but eventually divorced.
Mary Richardson was Bobby Kennedy’s second wife, a glamorous brunette he had known since she was 14 and a longtime friend of his sister, Kerry’s. Bobby proposed to Mary on a trip to Ireland in the summer of 1993. He told Mary he had divorced Emily, but he hadn’t. He eventually got a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic.
One year later, in April 1994, 40-year-old Bobby wed 34-year-old Mary, who was six months pregnant, aboard a boat on the Hudson River. Her marriage to Bobby was tumultuous, and the mother of four would eventually take her own life. In the months before she committed suicide in May 2012, she made a number of alarming comments to a longtime friend. She allegedly said she “feared for her life,” claimed Bobby repeatedly told her she would be “better off dead,” and that it would be “so much easier” if she killed herself. Whether her disturbing claims were true or false, no one knew for certain. She asserted she had started feeling “gaslighted [referring to the 1940s film with Charles Boyer, who purposely drove wife Ingrid Bergman mad] in the marriage” by Bobby, and that he kept telling her she was a “borderline personality.” Mary told a confidante that Bobby “was making her feel like she was crazy.”
Confidantes of Mary’s allege she became aware of his womanizing “and was furious.” Bobby “had had some big epiphany, and started divulging a lot of personal stuff that she’d never known, a lot of affairs that had happened.” Mary had actually begun to consider holidays as “nuclear events” that horrified her. According to sources, Bobby had chosen the same week as Mother’s Day in 2010 to begin divorce proceedings, and he decided to tell her about his affairs on Father’s Day. Women who apparently felt sympathy for Mary’s situation also came to her to confess having affairs with Bobby. Some of them were long-term affairs, said one source who claimed knowledge of the situation: “When he was in AA, he had multiple affairs with people.”
RFK Jr. and Cheryl Hines
This kind of behavior continued, according to a trusted friend of Mary’s. “He would be at the dinner table and his hands would go all up their legs or skirts and they just laughed. The Kennedy aura kept them from saying, ‘You’re an asshole.’”
There was other “inappropriate behavior” on the Kennedy scion’s part, such as when, on at least one occasion, he strutted around the family home with a towel wrapped around his waist, then was said to have dropped it, exposing his genitals, and embarrassing Mary and a friend of hers who was present.
At one point, Mary revealed to a friend that Bobby “wanted to bring another woman into the bedroom,” and have a ménage à trois, but Mary had adamantly refused and Bobby was said to have been furious with her for turning him down. The Mary Kennedy source who mentioned the failed ménage à trois request said that during the last six months of Mary’s life, she had talked about Bobby’s numerous affairs and that it was an “astronomical number.”
But those making the claims of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s infidelity weren’t the final word. It was Bobby himself. In his own words, in his own handwriting, he appeared to have indicted himself. In a personal diary leaked without his knowledge to the New York Post, Bobby had listed a number of alleged sexual conquests during just one year while he was married to Mary. In what seemed to be a compulsive compendium of sexual conquests, he characterized his greatest flaw as his “lust demons.” He said that after his father’s assassination, “I struggled to be a grown-up . . . I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie . . . to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”
By the spring of 2010, Bobby had decided to finally end it with Mary and he soon took up publicly with the TV actress Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Moreover, Bobby had gained temporary custody of their children in 2011, which was devastating to their mother. At the same time, Mary claimed to friends she had been banned from the Kennedy compound and cut off from the family.
All of it had caused her great anxiety. She started drinking and reportedly twice went to an expensive rehab facility in California. Mary sought out a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous and worked through one of AA’s intensive, emotionally demanding 12 steps. But her “rage and resentment” toward Bobby was barely touched upon. Mary had once told a friend she felt she was “addicted” to him, and was advised to take off her wedding rings in order to “empower herself.”
On the evening of Monday, May 14, 2012, – three days before Mary would take her own life – Bobby’s sister Kerry arrived unexpectedly at the Kennedy home in Mount Kisco. Kerry was said to have been putting intense pressure on Mary that night and in the weeks prior to sign Bobby’s divorce settlement agreement, described as a “very bitter, harsh and Draconian proposal,” limiting Mary’s custody of her children and slashing her financial support. Kerry’s visit was so disturbing to Mary that she burst into tears, and probably for the first time in the many years of their friendship, ordered Kerry to leave her home.
On Tuesday, May 15, Mary Kennedy was still in her pajamas at 10 a.m., when she usually was up and about, going off to the gym, doing her yoga, running errands. The family’s longtime housekeeper later told the police she had “noticed some changes” in Mary. “I thought something was wrong with her . . . I told Bobby about her, and I told him that she needs help . . . Bobby told me that she doesn’t want to help herself.”
On Wednesday, May 16, 2012, around 10 in the morning, the housekeeper went to check on Mary, called out for her, but there was no response. She checked the bedroom, the bathroom, the office and the kitchen, and saw that Mary’s car was still in the driveway, but the mistress of the house was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Mary’s AA sponsor, along with the housekeeping couple, began searching the house again and checking the pond. Finally, the sponsor decided to inspect the second bay in the old garage where the door was open. Inside, Mary was discovered hanging with a rope around her neck. At 1:51 p.m., an EMS medic pronounced Mary Richardson Kennedy dead. She was dressed in workout clothing and wearing sandals. Near her on the floor were three metal crates and a metal ladder, apparently used to stand upon when she placed the rope around her neck.
The toxicology report showed no alcohol in her system, but there were levels of three prescription antidepressants, one of which, Trazodonem, carried a warning that it could cause suicidal thoughts. Her psychiatrist said the drugs were Mary’s normal dosage.
The Kennedy-family-arranged funeral service was held at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Bedford, New York, Saturday, May 19, 2012, and there were no members of the Richardson family present. They privately blamed Bobby for causing Mary to end her life – aware of his philandering and her claimed emotionally-abusive treatment by him.
“Mary,” Bobby told them all, “was the most extraordinary woman I ever met. I had feelings for her I will never have for another human being.”
But he would later marry Hines, his longtime girlfriend. Sixty-six-year-old Bobby married 48-year-old divorcée Hines before a Unitarian Universalist minister at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port Saturday, August 2, 2014. Unlike Bobby's first wife, Emily, who was a Phi Beta Kappa in college, got a law degree, and served as a Legal Aid attorney in New York City; and unlike his second wife, Mary, who graduated near the top of her Ivy League class and became a talented architectural designer, Cheryl Hines’s claim to academic fame was being elected homecoming queen and as a write-in candidate for her Class of 1983 at Tallahassee’s public Leon High School.
She drove west to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. For a time she worked as a waitress and then became a personal assistant to Rob Reiner. She studied improv and sketch comedy with the Groundlings before landing her first TV roles, the biggest of which was as the perky wife of the very Jewish and neurotic Larry David character on HBO’s black-humor sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. For her role, she earned a couple of Emmy nominations and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
But her most successful role was her part in the Kennedy clan drama. “They are a lot like other families,” she once said, “except they are the Kennedys." After she married Bobby, Hines expressed her “excitement” about having the iconic Kennedy name and boasted about going to the White House with her groom to see her new mother-in-law, Ethel, receive the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As a decades-long friend of Bobby’s observed: “Any woman who gets involved with Bobby does so with her eyes open, or her brain lopped off. Any woman who thinks she’s going to change Bobby is misguided and purposefully ignorant. Women have to understand what they’re getting into when they’re with him. You can hate it, you can make excuses for it, you can do whatever you want to do; it doesn’t change the fact that he has a long history of doing certain things. And if you think, ‘Wow, I’ll be different,’ then you're fucked.”
Sources: Jeffy Oppenheimer, The Daily Mail, September 15, 2015, and Camelot Exposed.
