RFK Jr., page 23
For his part, Kennedy leaked a sixty-page affidavit to a Kennedy biographer that outlined all the ways Mary had allegedly abused him. “She had [our youngest son] Aidan call me to tell me,” he wrote in the 2011 document8 that was sworn before a notary. “He was disconsolate and crying. I asked to speak to Mom and Mary came on the phone. She said I should come over and spend the night in my old room with the kids who were distraught. She said she intended to kill herself unless I called off the divorce and unless I promised to recommit to the marriage. She promised that if I came over she would stay in her room and wouldn’t see me or harass me.” When he had returned home, he said, his wife had been drunk. “I opened the door and she leapt out of her bed and hit me with a roundhouse punch that, had I not blocked it, would have undoubtedly broken my face,” he wrote. “Pointing to Aidan, she screamed, ‘You told this child you didn’t love me?’ and hit me again, raining blows down on me as I backed down the hall. She struck me maybe 30 more times or more.”
Mary denied Kennedy’s version of events, and her family, in a rare public statement after her death, said that Kennedy’s account was full of “vindictive lies.”
Mary, dressed in black workout clothes and sandals, was found dead on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, about 1:30 p.m., according to a police report. A rope noose was tied around her neck, and she was hanging from a beam in the garage of the newly rebuilt Bedford property. The fifty-two-year-old mother of four and devout Catholic didn’t leave a suicide note—at least not one that was ever made public. Two computers were found in her bedroom, along with her glasses, which she usually wore around her neck on a chain. A black wallet in her Longchamp bag contained $2,094 in cash, according to the Bedford police incident report. Mary, who had been cash-strapped after Kennedy had canceled her credit cards, was sometimes without cash to pay for gas. Two days before she died, she had spoken with her housekeepers who had told Kennedy about her buying a treadmill, a massage seat, and a cappuccino machine, according to the police report. “I told her that he probably found out by the credit card company,” one of the housekeepers told the police, who redacted some of the names in the report. “She looked mad, and a little upset. I think she thought that we told [Kennedy] about the purchases. . . . She asked me if I spoke to [Kennedy] about the machines and the purchases. I told her that I didn’t speak to him.”
By the time the police and Westchester EMS arrived on the scene at 1:51 p.m., rigor mortis had set in, which indicated that Mary might have been dead for several hours before she was found.
An individual who helped her in the months before she died said that she had not been talking about suicide; she had been sober and trying to resist Kennedy’s pressure to end the divorce negotiations in his favor. “It’s conceivable that she didn’t want to die,” the individual said. “It’s conceivable that it was a rehearsal. A lot of times people put a bag over their head and see what it might feel like. She stood on a chair and put a rope around her neck.”
It was Kennedy, accompanied by Mary’s friend Shannon White, who found her body in the barn after the housekeeper alerted him that Mary was missing. It was Kennedy who made the 911 call, according to the police report.
White told the police that she had received a call from Kennedy, who had been looking for Mary on the morning she died. He had arrived at the South Bedford Road property after their housekeepers had called him to report her missing. “He was worried something had happened to Mary and that she may have hurt herself.” White also said she had received a phone call from Mary, whom she described as “tearful,” two days before she had died. She told police that she had spoken to her for a half hour on Monday, May 15, a day after Mother’s Day, and said that she had had “a rough time that day.”
Still, Mary was doing well, according to White. “I told [Kennedy] I was surprised because she had been blossoming in front of my eyes with the work she had been doing with AA,” she said, according to the police report.
Hours after her death, when some of her siblings showed up at the house on South Bedford Road and rifled through her drawers, desperately searching for a suicide note—anything to explain her violent demise—they were met by Kennedy and his brother Chris. The Richardsons asked the Kennedys to leave the house, and a confrontation ensued. “You have killed my sister,” said the grief-stricken Nan Richardson.
In the autopsy report, the Westchester County medical examiner said that Mary had died from asphyxiation from hanging. No traces of alcohol had been found in her system, although the lab had found antidepressants: trazodone, o-desmethylvenlafaxine, and venlafaxine. Mary’s remains were taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office with “a beige rope around the neck” and “the knot present on this rope lying on her back with 9 loops.” Perhaps significantly, the report noted, her fingers were caught between the neck and the noose when she was found dead. “Maybe she really didn’t want to die,” Mary’s doctor said.
After her death, an ugly court battle played out in New York Supreme Court in White Plains with Mary’s siblings, led by her brother Thomas Richardson, fighting against the Kennedys, represented by Conor Kennedy, who was just shy of his eighteenth birthday, to gain control of her remains. A Westchester judge met the two sides of the warring family in her chambers and signed an order directing the medical examiner to turn over the body to Clark Associates Funeral Home in Katonah, which had been hired by Kennedy to prepare for Mary’s funeral. The Richardson siblings had wanted to bury her in Vermont but lost the battle. The judge sealed the case.
Three days after Mary’s death, a private funeral was held9 at St. Patrick’s Church, a small stone Roman Catholic church on the Bedford town green, attended by most of Kennedy’s family and high-profile friends, including Susan Sarandon, Larry David, Glenn Close, and Edward James Olmos, among others. Maria Shriver, Ethel Kennedy, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg also attended the funeral, which Mary’s six siblings and other close Richardson family and friends boycotted.
Kennedy and his sister Kerry gave the main eulogies, with both of them focusing on Mary’s selflessness and her mental health struggles. Kerry recalled a rafting trip to Colombia with Mary and other friends in 1977 during which everyone’s packed clothes had been soaked except for Mary’s. She had had the foresight to pack everything in plastic, Kerry said. She had shared her dry clothes with everyone else on the trip and continued in her own wet garments. “She didn’t care about herself; she cared about everybody else, and she loved, loved limitlessly.”
Mary, who cared deeply about her place in the Kennedy family, might have been pleased by the outpouring of grief from the part of the family she had been desperate to be a part of since she had been a teenager. “She died his wife,” said the source who was close to Mary in the final year of her life. The divorce had never been finalized.
The Richardsons held their own private memorial for Mary two days later in the trendy Boom Boom Room at the Standard hotel in New York City, owned by her friend André Balazs. The two-hour memorial featured a slide show, and guests were given memorial cards with a photo of a beaming Mary in happier times. “In celebration of her radiant life,” read the cards. On the back were words inspired by the English theologian Henry Scott Holland: “Death is nothing at all—Nothing is past, nothing is lost/One brief moment and all will be as it was before./How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”
Donations in her name were sought to establish a Mary Richardson Kennedy Award “to change the world for good and beauty” at the Putney School in Vermont, where she had once boarded with Kerry. As a measure of the hostility between the two families, the Richardsons did not invite Kennedy to the memorial, although Kerry and her brother Max crashed the event. “The mood there was quite hostile10,” said one of the guests. “The Richardsons were furious, and they were doubly furious when Bobby claimed the body. Kerry was certainly not welcome.”
Mary was originally buried in a plot at Saint Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville next to Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, but several days later Kennedy moved her remains to the edge of the cemetery, burying her in an unmarked plot of land where, he said, he was negotiating to buy dozens of other plots for the Kennedy family. The Richardsons were not informed of the move and were furious, said a lawyer representing the family.
After the funeral, the Richardsons hired a high-powered private investigation firm11 and a former homicide detective to help answer some of the “unanswered questions” surrounding Mary’s death. The firm wanted to know where she had obtained the rope used in her hanging and whether she knew how to tie a nautical knot. They also asked about Kennedy’s movements and his relationship with his estranged wife, according to sources who were interviewed by the firm.
But the probe turned up little of any consequence, and any hope of launching a wrongful death suit against Kennedy or anyone else over their treatment of Mary was dashed, according to sources. The Richardsons were clearly angry with the Kennedys, but they vowed to put everything behind them and move on with their lives. Mary’s siblings decided never to speak publicly about her death again. “Tom, who was sort of the leader of the siblings, decided they were not talking about it anymore,” said the source who was close to the family.
Two months after her best friend died, Kerry Kennedy was arrested for driving her Lexus SUV under the influence of Ambien, a sleeping pill, on Interstate 684, narrowly missing other vehicles before she slammed her car into a tractor-trailer truck. Dressed in workout clothes, she was on her way to her Westchester gym and kept on driving until she was found by a highway patrolman slumped over the steering wheel, barely able to walk, much less stand up. She failed several sobriety tests at the scene of the accident, according to police, but passed others several hours later at a police station. She told the officer that she must have mistakenly taken an Ambien instead of her thyroid medication. A couple of days later, her lawyers announced that doctors believed that she had suffered a “complex partial seizure.” No one had been hurt in the accident, and toxicology tests had revealed traces of Ambien.
In the days before her trial, which drew so much media attention that it had to be moved to a large courtroom in White Plains, Kennedy called New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, pleading for compassion for Kerry, who if found guilty of a misdemeanor could be sentenced to a year in prison and be barred from entering foreign countries where as the president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights she was desperately needed. “Kerry’s been instrumental12 in freeing political prisoners and dissidents from around the globe from imprisonment and torture,” he told Peyser.
At her trial, Kerry leaned on her family’s history, telling the jury that she had been eight years old when her father had been assassinated. A six-member jury acquitted her of driving under the influence of the sleeping pill.
Was Kerry’s reaction with the Ambien a response to Mary’s suicide, an episode of delayed grief?
As for Kennedy, friends say that the death of his estranged wife weighed heavily on him, even though he had already moved on with his relationship with Cheryl Hines. The man who was so concerned about death, never missed a funeral of his friends’ parents, and was frequently called upon to give eulogies was torn apart, said a former close friend who has known him for more than twenty years. “I know Bobby well enough13 to know that Mary’s suicide is a weight he will carry for the rest of his life,” said the friend. “That’s going to haunt him. He takes death very seriously.”
***
To the rest of the world, the Kennedys seemed to move on quickly from Mary’s death. During her funeral, newspapers and magazines were full of photos of the pop singer Taylor Swift hanging out with Conor Kennedy, who would celebrate his eighteenth birthday that summer. Swift had maneuvered her way into the Kennedy orbit when she had written “Starlight” in 2011 after seeing a photo of the young Ethel Skakel dancing with Bobby Kennedy before they were married. When she told Rory Kennedy about the inspiration for the song after one of her concerts, Rory offered to introduce her to her mother. Ethel and Swift posed together at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, and later Swift would date Conor Kennedy. They spent the summer after Mary’s death hanging out in Hyannis Port, where Swift even bought a home near the Kennedy compound, although she sold it after the romance ended.
Less than six months after Mary’s death, Kennedy put the eco-friendly home in Bedford onto the market for just under $4 million. Despite the shadow that hung over the property after Mary’s suicide in the barn, the house generated a great deal of buzz. After the house sold, Kennedy told reporters that he had decided to move to California to be with Hines. Perhaps he also wanted to leave behind the painful memories of Mary’s suicide. The move across the country would also enable him to start anew and remake himself on the West Coast, far from the negative publicity and the anger of Mary’s family and friends that surrounded her death.
Peter Kaplan’s death from lymphoma14 a year and a half later made his decision that much easier. Kaplan, fifty-nine, died in November 2013, and his funeral in Larchmont drew New York City’s literati. A year after Kaplan’s death, at a memorial for him at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Kennedy confessed how much he missed his former Harvard roommate. “The trench coat and slouched fedora was his uniform, his governing zeitgeist was angst,” Kennedy said. “Most of all he was my moral compass, and every day I feel a deep sense of loss. He was my best friend.”
Still, Kennedy was determined to be happy and embark on his new life with Hines. He said he had first met her at a ski weekend in 2002 at the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel, where Waterkeeper Alliance held an annual weekend fundraiser, hosted by Kennedy and his friend Glenn Close. That year, the star-studded event, which auctioned off a winter hunting trip to Mongolia with Kazakh tribesmen as well as Kennedy and Close and golf outings with other Kennedys, raised more than $700,000 for the Waterkeeper Alliance. Although Mary had accompanied her husband on that trip, Kennedy later claimed to have developed a serious crush on Hines soon after he had met her. He had loaned her his ski hat, said Hines, who had not been equipped for a ski vacation when she had shown up in Banff. In her memoir, Hines puts that first meeting at 2005.
Hines, who is twelve years younger than Kennedy, grew up in what Kennedy described as “total poverty” in Tallahassee, Florida. Her father lived in a trailer park, and Hines slept in the same bed with her mother until she graduated from high school. She was active in community theater and eventually earned a degree in radio and television production from the University of Central Florida in 1990, working as a waitress to pay her tuition. She drove to Hollywood in a beat-up Toyota Tercel and worked for fifteen years as a bartender and personal assistant, scoring small parts in film and television before getting her big break in the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm in the fall of 1999.
“She has an incredible career15 that she put together herself,” said Kennedy, adding that Larry David had told him that she is one of a handful of celebrities in Hollywood who is “universally beloved” in the industry. “She doesn’t have a single enemy and she has a level of professionalism—she is never late for an appointment; she always knows her lines,” said Kennedy, adding that he had sought David’s approval when he wanted to start dating her. He said he had showed up at his hotel room at the Carlyle Hotel at 11:00 p.m. one night, and “I went to basically ask Larry’s permission. Even though it was his TV wife, I needed to get square with him. It was like asking her parents to date.”
He told The New York Times that he had worried about dating a Hollywood actress, but Larry David, who had introduced them, put him at ease. “She’s the most solid person I’ve ever met,” David told Kennedy. “Nothing you ever do will rattle her.” In the article, the reporter quoted Kennedy as saying that he had started dating Hines16 while she had still been married to her first husband. Two weeks later, the newspaper appended a correction, saying in part that Kennedy had been misquoted. He had “referred imprecisely to Ms. Hines’s marital status when they began dating. While she was in fact still married, as he noted, she had filed for divorce several months earlier.”
Perhaps the correction was important because of Kennedy’s deep-seated desire to pursue political office someday in the future. He couldn’t be caught having an affair with a married woman, and precision in the date when they had first started their relationship was of great importance to him.
Still, they made plans to elope17, but Hines was promptly talked out of such a course after speaking with Kennedy matriarch, Ethel. “She said we should get married on the lawn, in front of the ocean so everyone could be a part of it,” wrote Hines in her memoir. “The more she talked, the better it sounded. It was impossible to argue with Ethel.”
On the day of their wedding in August 2014, many of their guests arrived at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port in trolleys, gingerly stepping over puddles that dotted the grounds after a heavy rainfall the day before. The couple married at Ethel’s house, and the reception, which featured a clambake and lobsters, took place at his uncle Teddy’s old home. Hines wore a white Romona Keveza Collection dress, with delicate pearl beading and a full skirt. Guests at the wedding were presented with plush white towels embroidered with “Bobby and Cheryl Tie the Knot” and the date of the wedding in sailor blue. The towels were also emblazoned with a tasteful nautical knot, which might have reminded some guests of Mary’s suicide two years before.
That same year, the newlyweds bought a Connecticut-style compound in Malibu that featured a four-bedroom main house and two guesthouses with a large pool for just under $5 million. Three years later, they put it onto the market for $6.45 million.
***
A year after his marriage to Hines, Kennedy’s life changed drastically. Not only did he trade New York for California, he began to distance himself from the environmental movement that had defined him for decades. In 2015, he joined the board of the World Mercury Project, a nonprofit whose mission was to “educate and raise awareness of the sources and dangers of mercury” and to “hold those accountable who failed to protect our planet and people.” After his fateful meeting with Sarah Bridges in Hyannis Port, Kennedy had fully embraced the growing movement to question childhood vaccines, especially the ones that Bridges believed had harmed her son Porter.
