RFK Jr., page 22
For Kennedy, the victory in West Virginia was an important one, especially as it related to his family’s legacy. In his own way, he was following in both his uncle’s and his father’s footsteps. After all, West Virginia had been of paramount importance in his uncle’s primary campaign for president in 1960, giving him a decisive victory against Hubert Humphrey and proving that a Roman Catholic could win election in a state that was overwhelmingly Protestant. It had also been important to Kennedy’s father, who had spent six weeks there with his wife, Ethel, campaigning for his brother before the Democratic primary. “My family basically migrated into this state27,” recalled Kennedy years later. “And, you know, they claim to have shaken the hands of almost everybody in the state of West Virginia at that time.”
A few years later, after President Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy had returned as attorney general and “sloshed through deep mud28 in isolated hollows. He played with ragged children. He had visited schools to urge students not to drop out” during a visit in April 1964 to promote a federal government program to train young people for jobs and clean up impoverished neighborhoods. In doing so, he had shed light on the hardscrabble communities of Appalachia, where children often had no access to education, clean water, and food. “My father used to say West Virginia should be the richest state in the country because of the resources that are under the ground,” said Kennedy. “But it’s usually between the poorest and fourth poorest state in America.”
As he continued his crusade29 for the environment, Kennedy’s fans openly asked if he would one day consider running for president. “If you ever run for president30, I’ll set up a local committee,” said one man who had attended a speech about cleaning up Long Island Sound in Glen Cove, New York, hosted by the city’s then mayor, Tom Suozzi, in the summer of 2001. Another audience member at the same event hoped that he would consider running for his father’s old Senate seat, challenging Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato. But Kennedy wasn’t ready to campaign for public office—not yet, anyway. As one reporter for a nature magazine noted, Kennedy was more interested in the dead seagulls that they passed on a road as they crisscrossed Long Island, where Kennedy continued to give speeches, than he was in campaigning for Democratic politicians. “I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” he said following his event in Glen Cove. But he was on his way to yet another speaking engagement—a favor for another Democratic lawmaker—and there was no time to stop.
***
At home in Westchester County, Kennedy and Mary continued to fight their battle against the creeping mold. By 2005, they realized that they would have to tear down their house and rebuild from scratch if they were to get rid of the scourge for good. The mold spores had infested the heating units and were blowing mold back into the house. The children began to develop asthma and other breathing problems, many of them chronicled in Kennedy’s diary. And in order to stay true to their green principles, they were going to rebuild the house to be as energy efficient as possible. The stress of rebuilding their green mansion while raising four children virtually on her own as her husband continued to crisscross the country increased Mary’s depression. It would eventually destroy the couple’s already faltering marriage.
Mary, who had trained as an architect31 and had worked for Parish-Hadley Associates, an influential design firm in New York City, “was eager to turn her talents to greening her own crib,” said Kennedy. “I was stoked to use my home as a showcase of cutting-edge technologies and as a proving ground for the ‘new energy’ economy.”
At the time Kennedy was on the board of VantagePoint Venture Partners, the country’s largest green tech capital firm. At one point, the company paid him $340,000 for his board seat, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars more for speeches, according to court documents32. The couple took advantage of tax breaks for making the home environmentally friendly and worked with a green demolition company to recycle the scrap materials and donate them to a nonprofit in the Catskills. They harvested the roof tiles from a demolished mental institution in Wassaic. “My children, accustomed to the bedlam33 in our home, often remind me how appropriate it is that we will literally live beneath the reclaimed roof of a former insane asylum,” wrote Kennedy in the forward to a book written by Robin Wilson, an eco-designer from Texas who oversaw the Kennedy building project. “Our client was faced with building a new house, maintaining carrying costs for the original property and living in a rental home,” wrote Wilson in the introduction to the book, Kennedy Green House: Designing an Eco-Healthy Home from the Foundation to the Furniture. “Yet building had to go on . . . even as the global financial services market was imploding.”
To help the family with the cost of the new environmentally friendly building materials they needed to complete the project, Wilson created “sponsored product donation relationships” and helped them secure more than $1.3 million in goods, including dual-flush toilets, fireplaces, sinks, solid brass and zinc faucets, and even a hybrid hot water heater. “We all reduced our fees34 for this project because we believed in the premise of creating a LEED-certified home for the Kennedys,” she wrote.
Contractors and vendors donated their services35 or slashed their rates for the promise of gaining free publicity by being associated with the home of a Kennedy. There were offers of “platinum sponsorships” and talk of tours to showcase the mansion and its products. The home improvement TV host Bob Vila started filming a show chronicling the construction, Our Green House, for NBC. “He didn’t think he should pay for anything36; even the suits he wears were donated,” a source said of Kennedy. “He felt people should pay for him. He had an enormous sense of entitlement.” Kennedy had grown used to the perks of being a Kennedy, or at least a prominent board member of environmental nonprofits. Riverkeeper paid his cell phone bills, and the NRDC paid for his and his children’s travel around the world, he said in the deposition during his divorce from Mary.
The kitchen was designed for free, and the carpenter who built the bookcases and fireplace mantels charged half his regular rate. Contractor Jim Blansfield, who led the two-year building project, said that he had charged “very, very much less than what I would normally charge. I felt the project had great merit.” He said that the job had not resulted in any increase in his business.
At one point, Mary called up Franken37, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, to try to get free energy-efficient windows from Marvin Windows and Doors, a firm in his home state, which was already giving them a discount of more than $100,000. Free Benjamin Moore paint for the twelve-room mansion did not go far enough for the Kennedys; they also wanted enough paint for their vacation house in Hyannis Port and to cover a float in the village’s annual July Fourth parade, another source said.
In the end, Wilson herself was stiffed. Mary fired her just as the project was winding down and paid only part of her final bill. Perhaps as a result, Mary garnered only a fleeting mention in Wilson’s 2009 coffee table book about the transformation of the Bedford house. Only Kennedy mentioned her briefly in a foreword he wrote for Wilson’s book. Wilson referred to her only as “the client” in her book, although she did acknowledge her as “the thought leader” without ever naming her.
Perhaps Mary tried to wrest back control in at least one ad for some of the property’s free interior finishes. In a promotional video for Gant Home’s 2010 fall/winter collection, she appears serene and happy, dressed casually in red Gant boating shoes, a checkered shirt, and blue chinos, alternately strolling through her new home and sitting in the living room. At one point, she is reading a dog-eared copy of The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman military engineer and architect. The video, entitled The Home That Kennedy Built, zooms in on close-ups of details throughout the new house: pillows woven with American flag patterns, fluffy quilts, a silver bowl of hydrangeas, leather chairs, framed boards of pinned butterflies, and stationery emblazoned “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
“You learn about yourself by getting out into nature and that nature teaches us about the world that we live in and about ourselves,” reads one of the captions in the nearly two-minute-long video, which is attributed to Mary.
But perhaps Mary had already learned too much about herself and her philandering husband, who had already begun his relationship with the Hollywood actor Cheryl Hines, Larry David’s on-screen wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the spring of 2010, Hines was in the process of separating from Paul Young, her husband of eight years. The divorce petition was filed in July of that year. “Cheryl was introduced to Bobby by Larry38, and the kids were just swept up by her,” said a source who was close to Mary.
Hines was so giddy about her relationship with the Kennedy scion that she tweeted that she had become friendly with Kennedy’s sister Kerry and their family friend Glenn Close. On the day Kerry posted a photo of Hines with Kennedy, Close, and herself, Hines tweeted, “I got to tell #GlennClose what an inspiration she has always been to me.” She also boasted that she was becoming close to Mary and Kennedy’s youngest child, Aidan. “Rabid, unhinged New England zealotry by 10-yr-old Aidan Kennedy has nearly turned me into Pats fan,” wrote Hines in the series of tweets that was hastily taken down after Mary’s death.
In her memoir, Unscripted, Hines also revealed that Kyra, Mary’s only daughter, had gone to live with her in Los Angeles several months before Mary’s suicide. “I had developed a special friendship with Bobby’s sixteen-year-old daughter Kyra39,” writes Hines. “Kyra was struggling in school, and Bobby asked if I would consider allowing her to live at my house while she attended school in Los Angeles. I loved Kyra and was happy to take her in.” Kyra moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2011—a situation that left Mary “completely shattered40,” a friend said.
The Gant video appeared as Mary’s life was spiraling out of control and she and Kennedy were already separated. Perhaps it’s telling that she is largely alone in the video, with a few frames devoted to following some of her children through the model green home. Friends say that she grew to hate the stately house after it was rebuilt. “It wasn’t a private place for her and the kids41,” said a source close to the Richardson-Kennedy family. “It was like living in one of the windows at Macy’s.”
It didn’t take long for Mary’s private life42 to become very public. On Sunday, May 9, 2010—Mother’s Day—Kennedy told his wife he was going to file for divorce, the source said. A day later, police were called to the newly rebuilt home and reported that Mary was “intoxicated.” They remained for nearly an hour at the house, where Mary told them she had had an argument with family members. They also showed up during a second incident, responding to a call about a squabble among the Kennedy children.
On May 12, Kennedy filed for divorce in New York Supreme Court in Westchester County. Three days after that, on May 15, Mary was arrested for drunk driving. Bedford police officer Andrew Klein was directing traffic for a local carnival at about 9:00 p.m. when he stopped Mary in her Volvo outside a school near the Kennedy home after he saw the vehicle jump the curb. Kennedy told the officer that she had gone to the school to pick up people from the carnival. But Klein had noticed the smell of alcohol in the vehicle and later reported that her speech was slurred. A breathalyzer found that she had a blood alcohol level of 0.11 percent, police noted in their report. The legal limit is 0.08 percent. “Bobby used it all against her43,” said the source who was close to Mary. “He, of course, would complain that she was drunk and that he had to help the kids with their homework.”
Mary appeared alone in Bedford Town Court, where she pled not guilty in the last week in May. The judge suspended her license, released her without bail, and ordered her to undergo an assessment by a private agency to determine if she was struggling with addiction. The arrest was covered across the country and around the world.
For a woman who had appeared in the gossip pages of glossy magazines, photographed at film premieres and fundraising dinners with her husband and their children and before that alongside the artist Andy Warhol and other glitterati, the new level of scrutiny and notoriety was unnerving, said a friend.
At the end of her first court appearance, Bedford Town Justice Kevin Quaranta said, “Ms. Kennedy, good luck to you.” But all the luck in the world couldn’t save Mary Richardson Kennedy.
Chapter 9
Vaccine Warrior
Mary did not want a divorce, and she did not want to lose custody of her children. Following her arrests, she diligently attended AA meetings and continued with her yoga classes, but most of all she pored over Kennedy’s diaries. In many ways, she was trying to reassure herself that she wasn’t crazy and that she had been married to a chronic philanderer for nearly twenty years.
“Mary presented as someone1 who was under his thumb,” said a source who was close to her when she was going through her separation from Kennedy. “He definitely gaslit her. He told her she was crazy, that her accusations about other women were fantasies, but she learned with certainty in the diaries that that was a lie.”
It’s not clear when Mary decided to take the diaries to bolster her case against her husband or use them as leverage when Kennedy was trying to be coy about his assets during his February 2012 deposition with her attorneys. During that deposition, he admitted that he had taken out a $1 million contingent liability on the couple’s home in Hyannis Port on Irving Avenue—a transaction that, he admitted, he had not disclosed to his wife, largely because he was planning to leave the house to his oldest children, Kick and Bobby. “My older kids won’t be in the same house with her,” he said, adding that “she follows me everywhere, and she did that until the court ordered her not to.” Things got so bad, he said, that he had to leave the Irving Avenue property on the cape whenever Mary spent any time there.
The deposition revealed how much Kennedy made from his speeches each year—about $1.5 million—as well as legal fees on settlements on environmental litigation made by his law firm, Kennedy and Madonna—about $700,000 in 2011. He had also taken in $10,000 a month from the Technical Career Institutes in New York, a for-profit college that offered associate degrees in education, business, and engineering, among other disciplines. “I did a lot of lobbying for them in Washington,” he said. “I essentially saved the company. I obtained the biggest loan for them—a $1.2 million loan from the Department of Education.”
He also revealed that Cheryl Hines, now divorced from her husband, had bought him a boat valued at $55,000. In a few instances during the deposition, Kennedy claimed that he had little understanding of his own net worth or his expenses because everything was handled by the Kennedy family’s accountants, who worked for the Park Agency corporation that his grandfather Joe Kennedy had set up in New York in 1949 to invest the family’s assets. That willful ignorance was reminiscent of his mother’s encounter with the police when she had been caught for speeding and demanded that the ticket be sent to “the New York office”—the amorphous institution—that handled Kennedy matters. But it was also emblematic of his negligence. He was someone who carelessly left things lying around, from the food wrappers that he casually discarded on a conference table during a legal meeting to a volume of his diary that he lost on a train in the late 1990s. One source claimed that he was also negligent about private video calls, sometimes forgetting to turn off his phone when another person came onto the scene. It’s not clear how Mary obtained the diaries, but it’s more than likely that they were not very hard to find lying around their home.
Meanwhile, Mary was trying to keep up her spirits, even as the negotiations dragged on. She visited Nicholas Mavroleon, the brother of her former beau, to help him on what he said was “a very important project2 with great environmental implications. I could sense her sadness then and, although she alluded to it, I was not aware of the immense pressure that she faced,” Mavroleon later wrote.
“Mary was waiting and hoping for Bobby3,” said a source who had spoken to Mary daily during her struggles in the last year of her life. “She was in no shape to date. She had gained weight. She wasn’t the knockout she had been. And Bobby was cruel about her weight, telling her that she had squandered her beauty, squandered her gift. He would put his arm around her and criticize her. It was ugly.”
And she was terrified of his bullying, another friend said, especially during the negotiations for their divorce. “She was petrified of his wagging finger4,” said the friend, describing how Kennedy had violently pointed his index finger in her direction when he was making a point. But no matter what had happened between them, Mary fiercely wanted to remain married and continue to be part of the Kennedy family, her friends said. “It was the Kennedys or nobody,” said the source. “That’s where it all was for her. She couldn’t go to Hyannis, and Ethel wasn’t embracing Mary anymore. She had been so much accepted, and suddenly boom! she was yesterday’s news.”
According to the Bedford Police report5 on Monday, May 14, 2012—two days before Mary was found dead—someone (their name is redacted in the report) arrived unexpectedly6, interrupting an evening session7 with her psychiatrist Carol Weiss, who sometimes made house calls to talk to her patient. The report noted that Mary was under “a tremendous amount of pressure . . . that day.” This likely did not help her state of mind.
