RFK Jr., page 8
During that difficult summer, Joe was sent to Spain to live with the Guardiolas, a family recommended to Teddy by the US Embassy in Madrid. The family raised bulls for matadors throughout Spain. David was sent to a tennis camp in Austria with his cousin Chris Lawford, where they both discovered sex. Kennedy seemed to score the greatest prize of all: He was sent to Africa with the man who had already inserted himself into his life as a surrogate father.
Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings was a Kennedy family devotee who had first met John Kennedy when they had been students at Choate, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Billings, who stood more than six feet tall and was the strongest member on the school’s rowing team and a champion wrestler, formed a seemingly unlikely friendship with the frail Jack Kennedy. Lem was gay10 but kept his sex life hidden, especially as he got closer and closer to the Kennedy family. But the two became lifelong friends after meeting in the office of The Brief, the school’s yearbook, in 1933. Lem spent Christmas that year in Palm Beach and summered at Hyannis Port, where he was burned in a defective shower and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. He met Bobby when he was an eight-year-old and Teddy when he was two and was such a constant presence that the family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, soon began referring to him as a son. Four years later, in 1937, Lem accompanied Jack on a tour of Europe the year before his father became ambassador to England. Joe Kennedy arranged for the young men to meet the pope.
Later, Lem was an usher at Jack’s wedding in 1953 and worked on his political campaigns. He also participated in Jack’s sister Jean Kennedy’s wedding three years later to Stephen Smith, a financier and political strategist who worked on Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign. Lem was so close to the entire family that he continued to spend holidays at Hyannis Port and had his own bedroom at the White House when Jack was president. He declined offers from Jack to become head of the Peace Corps and ambassador to Denmark but accompanied him and Jackie on many official trips abroad. An unofficial aide to Kennedy, it was Washington’s best-kept open secret that he was homosexual.
Though Lem was not especially interested in children, he took an immediate liking to Kennedy. “That boy is just like Jack11,” he told Bobby. After Bobby’s death, Lem stepped forward to be a mentor and a kind of surrogate father to Bobby Jr.
Lem volunteered to take Bobby Jr. to Africa, a trip that been arranged before the assassination. In 1966, Bobby and Ethel had traveled to South Africa at the invitation of the National Union of South African Students, a prominent anti-apartheid group, at the University of Cape Town, where Bobby delivered his “Ripple of Hope” speech in which he declared that individual action, no matter how small, could change the world for the better. They also traveled to Tanzania, where they told their host, John Owen, the director of the Tanzania National Parks, of their son’s “deep interest” in animals and his summer jobs at the Washington Zoo. Owen invited them to send Bobby Jr. to spend time at one of the parks. He and his surrogate father, Lem, arrived in Nairobi on July 1, spending time at the home of the US ambassador before heading to Tanzania.
“Plans for the big trip12 had already been completed when the family—and the world—was plunged into grief by the senator’s assassination in June,” wrote a reporter for Life, which featured the story of his adventure months later. “It was his mother’s decision that young Bobby should go.”
Lem spent much of the trip speaking to Kennedy about public service, certain that he was the one who would continue the Kennedy legacy when he came of age. Lem encouraged him to keep a journal of their adventures and to take photographs to sell to a magazine once they returned. Lem, an erstwhile real estate developer and shrewd negotiator, managed to create a miniauction for the pictures and text, which were eventually sold to Life: an eight-page spread that paid the young Kennedy $25,000, a staggering sum that is equivalent to more than $200,000 today. Although the Kennedy children knew that they could easily profit off their famous last name, with many of them selling bags of “Kennedy sand” at Hyannis Port to tourists for $1, it was likely the first time Kennedy realized that he could make serious cash by trading on his last name.
“Bobby Jr. in Africa” opens with a photo of Kennedy wearing nothing more than a pair of surfer shorts and a St. Christopher medal around his neck climbing a tree in Samburu Park in Kenya. Skinny and disheveled, he grips the tree with his bare feet and hands, staring into the distance. He has the look of a feral animal, a kind of real-life Mowgli from The Jungle Book or the savage Jack Merridew in Lord of the Flies. He told the Life reporter that he had climbed the trees in order to get a a good angle to photograph the elephants. “I was in deadly danger,” he joked. “If they sensed I was there, they might have pulled the tree or me down.”
In another photo, taken amid the ruins of the Luxor temple in Egypt, a “somber Bobby” poses behind a headless statue, his expression distant and haunted. “Some animals are smarter than others, and the smartest ones are the most dangerous,” said the young naturalist, who almost seemed to be describing himself rather than the wildlife he was encountering. “They always know what you’re up to, and they go on the defensive.”
Despite his grief, he clearly enjoyed the three weeks he spent with Lem in the wild and told everyone they met that he wanted to be a veterinarian. He fed the Pixy Stix he had brought for African children to the baboons they encountered and left a plate of fruit cocktail for a monkey in their cabin, leaving the doors wide open to invite it in. “I put Lem’s fruit inside, held the door open, and when he ran in we ran out,” he said. “We were safe and he had the house! He was furious at having been tricked, so he remained in residence until he had dirtied the entire cabin, including the beds and eaten everything in sight, including our toothpaste.”
They also had “a gruesome and bloody battle” with bees. “Mommy thinks I am allergic to bees, which I am not,” he said, adding that he was stung twice. “She had sent along about six containers of every medicine known to man.”
In another adventure, he tossed a football—“Anywhere a Kennedy goes, a football seems to follow,” the Life article noted—he had brought on the trip to a “torn-eared” lioness. “We had to do something with it,” he said. “We saw this pride of lions—three females, one male, and about eight cubs. They all ran away when I first threw the ball, but one of the females came right back and picked it up in her mouth.” The cubs then tore the pigskin to shreds, and Kennedy brought it back to show his new schoolmates at Millbrook School, an elite all-boys school in the Hudson Valley. “It was my cousin Bobby Shriver’s football anyway,” he said.
The Life reporter also described Lem having “a marvelously light-hearted and teasing relationship with his summer charge,” with Kennedy saying, “I had to take care of him. He’s afraid of animals, you know.”
After their safari, the two traveled to Egypt at the invitation of Adel Younis, the country’s minister of justice, who had befriended them in the Serengeti. They visited the pyramids, ruins, and museums before returning to the United States. In a fitting end to their adventure, the family friend and talk show host Jack Paar gave Kennedy a lion cub named Mtoto Mbaya, Swahili for “Bad Boy,” which could have been a moniker applied to Kennedy and the downward spiral that would characterize the next several years of his life.
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Like Bobby Jr., Bad Boy, who was one of Elsa’s cubs from the 1966 film Born Free, boarded at Millbrook, which was modeled after a strict British boys’ school, for a short time. Elsa was an orphaned lion cub who had been raised by a game warden and his wife in Kenya. After two years of training, she had been released back into the wild. Millbrook’s on-site zoo and its natural history and ornithology programs were among the reasons that Kennedy wanted to attend the boarding school. Taking Mtoto Mbaya with him was surely a bonus, although he had promised to take the cub to join the Kennedy family menagerie at Hickory Hill as well.
Part of the students’ required community service at the school was helping to bottle-feed Mtoto Mbaya at the zoo, which was run by the senior students.
Before he was kicked out of Millbrook for doing drugs, Bobby Jr. joined the school’s informal falconry program, led by Peter Jenny, one of his fellow students. Jenny was the son of well-known veterinarians at the University of Pennsylvania, and he had been hawking since the age of seven. Jenny was two classes ahead of Kennedy at the school, but both were part of a small group of students who were passionate about falconry.
“When I first saw him13, he was this skinny little kid who looked like he had gone through a great deal of trauma,” said Jenny, who was the head of the Millbrook zoo while Bobby Jr. was at the school. “His father had just died, and he wore a black tie every day that he was at Millbrook. He was one of those kids who seemed so lost, so we sort of tucked him under our wing—pun intended.”
The falconers went out with their trained birds of prey most days, on a few occasions taking them to a nearby pit filled with the carcasses of dead cows next to a dairy. The pit was full of rats. “It was kind of gross,” said Jenny, describing how the group would train their birds on the “bazillion” rats in the pit. “We only did it a few times, but Bobby was never the ringleader. He was actually a very kind kid and very conscientious as a falconer. If he was some cruel weirdo, he wouldn’t have been allowed in our group.”
Years after their time at Millbrook, Kennedy sent Jenny a letter after his father died in 1971. “He wrote me a sweet note when he was in South America,” he said. “I didn’t expect it because we were not in touch.”
For Kennedy, Millbrook was heaven—at least at first. “We talked about hawks every spare moment14, at meals, between classes and after chapel,” he wrote in his memoir. “At night, we fashioned ardor, hoods, jesses, gauntlets and befits out of tough, pliant kangaroo hide and marked in our memories the raptor nests we found during our daily hunting excursions in the winter months.”
Hawks soon overtook his fascination with his lion cub, although he hadn’t given up on taking him to visit his mother at Hickory Hill. “I’m going to take my lion home for vacations,” he said. “Mommy will be delighted.”
But Mommy was delighted with very little about her third-born child and soon threw him out of the house yet again. Jenny recalled visiting Hickory Hill with Bobby and their hawks in the last months of Ethel’s pregnancy with Rory. “His mother was bedridden, and we were underfoot with our hawks,” said Jenny.
For much of their childhood, Ethel had frequently been away from her children while she traveled with her husband on his various campaigns, sometimes leaving them for six weeks at a time in the care of volunteer aides and nannies. She had been keen to be first lady of the United States and likely figured that the children would survive the same way she had—in a rambunctious household with little adult supervision. “I plan to remain active in my husband’s campaign,” she had said. “We miss our children when we’re away from home. Of course, I miss Robert when I’m home and not with him. It seems I’m caught in the middle.”
After her husband was killed, she was suddenly confronted with the enormous task of being a full-time mother to eleven children. Rory, the couple’s youngest, was born in December, six months after her father’s death. In a photograph after the birth, Ethel wears a smart white coat, cradling her newborn daughter as her brother-in-law Teddy looks on.
Ethel, who had never been as prominent as her glamorous sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy, suddenly became big news when Time put her onto the cover of one of its spring 1969 issues and dubbed her “the country’s most admired woman15” and “the mini-skirted super mom who exemplified all the headlong, slightly manic ‘vigah’ of the Kennedys.” The story went on to chronicle her infamous practical jokes at her parties at Hickory Hill when Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been pushed into one of the swimming pools and a raven had landed on “Mrs. Averell Harriman’s head.” Although Ethel was described as “a little harsh and sharp-tongued,” she had managed to put her life back together after her husband’s assassination just ten months before, the article said. “Yet those close to Ethel and to the life she has reconstructed regard her with something approaching awe. She has, they contend, emerged in many ways as the most remarkable member of her remarkable family. New York’s Senator Jacob Javits describes her with absolute conviction as ‘the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female.’”
Although she seems to have had a number of potential suitors, Ethel, the committed Catholic, decided early on that she would never remarry. “How could I possibly do that16 with Bobby looking down from heaven?” she asked People magazine in 1991. “That would be adultery.”
“I’d wake up in the morning and think he was happy in heaven and he had Jack—and they were together as they had been together on earth,” she said. “I didn’t think how I would survive. I knew it would happen but I didn’t know how.”
The 1969 Time magazine profile contrasted her with her “regal” sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy, who had “traced an esthetic arc of grief, ending with a stylish whirl into another world.” Months after Bobby’s assassination, Jackie had married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a union that was frowned upon by most of the Kennedy family. According to the magazine, “Ethel’s special triumph17 has been to maintain normalcy. She has simply carried on, as best she could, the kind of existence that Bobby would have pursued had he lived.”
But life at Hickory Hill following Bobby’s death was the very antithesis of “normalcy,” according to the magazine. It bordered on chaos, which mirrored the way Ethel had grown up in Connecticut with her older Skakel brothers. Despite a staff of nine, including both paid and volunteer aides,
Ethel is up every morning at 7 for breakfast with the children. Before attending Mass, she shuttles youngsters back and forth to school in one of the several car pools her large brood involves her in. Eight children are at Hickory Hill with her now. She sits down to every meal with them, says the rosary and reads the Bible with them every night. She comforts, counsels and disciplines quite strictly sometimes.
“Once in a while she gets sore as hell at them,” says a family intimate. “Bobby never struck any of the kids. Ethel, I think, has.”
At Hickory Hill, a long retinue of baby sisters and assistants resigned, unable to rein in Ethel’s unruly brood, who lacked discipline and were left to their own devices. The estate was dubbed “Horror Hill” by many who had worked there. For Kennedy, life at home soon proved to be untenable. “I cultivated a troubled relationship with my mother from the moment I could talk back, and the conflict mushroomed into an uninterrupted parade of skirmishes during my adolescence,” he wrote in American Values, adding that things had been so bad for him at Hickory Hill a year before his father had been killed that he had asked his parents to send him to boarding school when he was thirteen. Georgetown Prep became the first of three schools that he attended in high school before he was suspended. He repeated the tenth grade twice.
When he was at Millbrook, he returned to Hickory Hill only sporadically. Ethel did not visit him. Only Lem arrived for regular outings with his new charge. “Lem used to take us to lunch18 a couple of times a month, which when you’re in boarding school is such a rare treat,” said Jenny. But the lunches with Lem could be annoying, with Lem constantly telling Bobby Jr. that he needed to live up to the Kennedy family legacy. “He was a second father to Bobby, but he was a strange guy,” said Jenny. “But what he was doing was cruel. Nobody should be saddled with that burden.”
Jenny said he had felt the same kind of pressure in his life when he was expected to continue the legacy of his parents, who were both leading veterinary scientists. His Swiss-born father, Jacques Jenny, was a prominent professor at the University of Pennsylvania, known as “the father of equine orthopedics” because he had developed an innovative way to treat fractures in large animals, Jenny said. His mother, Mary Elinor Butt Jenny, had been among the first women to earn a veterinary degree in the United States, in 1949. Instead of following in his parents’ footsteps, Jenny said, he had broken from family tradition and helped establish a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the peregrine falcon, which was in danger of becoming extinct in the late 1960s. Years later, in 1999, the bird was removed from the US Endangered Species list, largely thanks to Jenny and the Peregrine Fund’s efforts. “I knew how Bobby felt,” he said. “It was a lot to live up to. I didn’t want to follow my parents. I wanted to work with birds of prey.”
Bobby Jr. remained at Millbrook for a little more than a year, Jenny said. He was suspended for doing drugs at a time when if you were caught smoking a cigarette, “you were out,” Jenny said.
It was Lem who found him yet another boarding school: Pomfret School in Connecticut. At the elite prep school, Kennedy insisted upon living in the all-Black dormitory and sneaking in Kim Kelley, his girlfriend from Hyannis Port. He hid her in his room during the day and then sneaked her into the basement, where he had set up a hot plate for meals. He refused to do any schoolwork, spending his days reading Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon, and other Black writers. By the end of the year, he was expelled.
That summer in Hyannis Port, Kennedy was arrested for the second time. The first time had been a year earlier, when he had been caught selling a joint to an undercover cop near the summer compound. Ethel had thrown him out of the house again, prompting Kennedy to buy a used Ford and drive across the country to Los Angeles, hopping freight trains and doing drugs with the hobos he met.
During his second brush with the law in Hyannis Port, he allegedly spat out an ice cream cone in a police officer’s face. He was arrested on the spot and taken to court, where he faced charges of “sauntering and loitering.” His response was to say that the officer was lying. In fact, in his memoir American Values he took great pains to “set the record straight19.” He said he had come out of an ice cream parlor on Main Street in Hyannis Port to find a police officer yelling at his girlfriend, Kim, for sitting on the hood of a car. When he had explained that it was his car and that he didn’t mind if she sat there, the police officer had handcuffed him and taken him to jail. He claimed he had never spat ice cream in the police officer’s face. He had spent the night in prison and the next day had left Hyannis Port with his girlfriend and moved into Lem’s apartment in New York City, where they stayed for the rest of the summer.
