Joan Kennedy, who married into one of America’s foremost political dynasties and spent much of her life wrestling with alcoholism while caught up in the tragedies and tempests that plagued the Kennedy family, died on Wednesday at her home in Boston. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by Steve Kerrigan, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. He did not cite a cause, saying only that she had died in her sleep.
The former wife of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted, Ms. Kennedy was shy and reserved compared with her competitive, athletic and often boisterous in-laws. Ill-prepared for life in the reflected glare of Kennedy klieg lights, and haunted by her own family history of alcoholism, she found herself caught up in high-stakes politics, a faithless marriage and an on-again, off-again struggle with her own drinking.
For stretches at a time, however, she registered numerous triumphs. An accomplished pianist, she gave a recital with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970 that won standing ovations and stellar reviews. Under the baton of Arthur Fiedler, she narrated stories, like Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” accompanied by the Boston Pops. She published a book, “The Joy of Classical Music: A Guide for You and Your Family” (1992), edited by her sister-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And she devoted her later years to raising money for nonprofit organizations and charities in Boston.
But she was never interested in politics, the Kennedy family business. Her introduction to it came when her husband campaigned for and won a special election to the Senate in 1962, when he was just 30 and she was 27. By then, his brother John was president and his brother Robert was attorney general.
Within a few years, though, with the assassinations of John and Robert, pressure built on Senator Kennedy to take up their mantle despite his family’s concern for his safety. He became less discreet about his infidelities and excessive drinking, and Joan, too, turned increasingly to alcohol.
She stood by her husband through considerable drama, most notably in 1969, when he drove off a one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, in Massachusetts, in an accident that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former secretary to Robert F. Kennedy when he was a senator from New York.
Ms. Kennedy, who was pregnant at the time, had already endured two miscarriages and was on strict bed rest. With the Chappaquiddick drama threatening her husband’s political future, she accompanied him to Ms. Kopechne’s funeral and to court, where he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.
Shortly afterward, she miscarried again. By then, she said, she had given in to the bottle.
“For a few months everyone had to put on this show, and then I just didn’t care anymore,” Ms. Kennedy told Laurence Leamer, the author of “The Kennedy Women” (1994). “That’s when I truly became an alcoholic.”
She and Mr. Kennedy had effectively separated before he ran for president unsuccessfully in 1980, but they kept up a united front during his campaign for the Democratic nomination; after he dropped out, the marriage officially dissolved.
Her alcoholism had become public with repeated arrests on charges of drunken driving, starting in 1974. After her third arrest, in 1991, she was ordered into a rehabilitation program, the first of several times.
Over the years, she consumed enough alcohol to develop serious kidney problems, and her children became her guardians.
A Part-Time Model
Virginia Joan Bennett was born on Sept. 2, 1936, in New York City. She and her younger sister, Candace, were raised in upper-middle-class suburban Bronxville, N.Y., by their mother, Virginia Joan (Stead) Bennett, an amateur seamstress who made most of their clothes, and their father, Harry Wiggins Bennett Jr., an advertising executive whose ancestors had arrived in Massachusetts in the 1600s.
Joan was studious and loved playing the piano. While a student at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart (now Manhattanville University) in Purchase, N.Y., where she majored in English and minored in music, she worked part time as a model and competed in beauty contests. She appeared in television commercials for Maxwell House coffee and in print ads for beauty products. She was also the Revlon Hairspray girl, appearing live on the game show “The $64,000 Question.”
She came out in New York society twice, first at the fifth annual Gotham Ball, then at the 19th Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball.
Manhattanville, from which she graduated in 1958, was the alma mater of several Kennedy women, and it was where Joan met one of the Kennedy sisters, Jean (later Jean Kennedy Smith). Jean introduced Joan to her brother Ted in October 1957, when the Kennedy clan gathered at the college to dedicate a gymnasium in memory of another Kennedy sister, Kathleen, who had died in a plane crash in France in 1948. Mr. Kennedy was then a law student at the University of Virginia. A whirlwind romance followed, and the two were soon engaged.
Joan connected with Ted’s mother, Rose Kennedy, the family matriarch, over their shared love of music — but only after Rose, also a Manhattanville graduate, discreetly called the college to check on her grades and reputation.
Before the wedding, however, Joan began having second thoughts about marrying someone she hardly knew, and her father suggested postponing the ceremony for a year. But Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Mr. Kennedy’s father, insisted that they go ahead. The couple was married in Bronxville on Nov. 29, 1958, barely a year after they met.
The focus on the new Kennedy wife was almost always on her physical appearance. She was an attractive blonde, whom John Kennedy called “the dish.”
She was “arguably the most conventionally attractive of the Kennedy wives,” Amber Hunt and David Batcher wrote in “The Kennedy Wives” (2014), comparing her with Ethel Skakel, who had married Robert, and Jacqueline Bouvier, who had married John. “Ethel had the spunk, Jackie the sophistication,” they wrote. “But Joan had the looks.”
Joan Kennedy said she had appreciated such attention for a time, but that later the public focus on her appearance only fueled her doubts about her self-worth.
The 1960s were a tumultuous time for the Kennedy clan, starting with John’s election as president. Less than two years into Ted and Joan’s marriage, Ted won the special election in Massachusetts to fill the remaining two years of John’s Senate term.
At that point, Ms. Kennedy was the mother of two young children, Kara and Edward Jr. A third child, Patrick, who would become a member of Congress from Rhode Island, came later, in 1967. Ms. Kennedy also gave birth to a baby boy who was stillborn.
A Plane Crashes
When Ted Kennedy was running for his first full Senate term in June 1964, only seven months after his brother had been assassinated in Dallas, his small campaign plane crashed in Massachusetts in a storm, killing the pilot and one of his aides. The senator was hospitalized for six months with severe back injuries and broken ribs.
That left Ms. Kennedy to assume full-time campaign duty in his stead. Though she had some practice on the hustings in 1962, she shouldered much more of the work in 1964. She did everything she was asked, including dancing the polka at a Pulaski Day event and enduring the local bands that introduced her by playing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” which she said she found both flattering and demeaning. Still, she gave substantive speeches and kept up a grueling pace.
When Senator Kennedy beat his little-known Republican opponent in a landslide, the entire Kennedy clan publicly thanked Ms. Kennedy — except for the senator, who told a reporter that he would have won anyway and that his wife’s work was just “icing on a cake that I had baked myself.”
Once Senator Kennedy had recovered from his injuries, he was frequently seen in public with attractive young women. Ms. Kennedy told interviewers that she sometimes tried to use her looks to gain her husband’s attention — on one occasion raising questions of taste when she wore a minidress to a White House function that had called for formal wear.
After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, the media’s obsession with Senator Kennedy’s future added to the pressure on him — and her. His philandering, cataloged by Michael Kelly in an article in GQ magazine in 1990, became less discreet, and his wife’s drinking accelerated.
“Rather than get mad, or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren’t hurt or angry,” she was quoted as saying in “The Kennedy Wives.”
“I drank socially at first, and then I began to drink alcoholically,” she said.
Then came Chappaquiddick and the death of Ms. Kopechne. While Senator Kennedy and his political advisers strategized about how to explain his failure to report the accident for 10 hours, Joan Kennedy was left in the dark.
Later she was asked to call Ms. Kopechne’s parents to extend the Kennedy family’s condolences. The senator’s advisers felt the Kopechnes had to be persuaded that the Kennedys were grieving along with them to minimize whatever damages they might seek, and that Ms. Kennedy was the one to do it, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli, the author of “Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot” (2000).
While Ted Kennedy apologized to the nation and to his constituents in Massachusetts after the accident, she said, he never apologized to her.
Isolated within the Kennedy clan, she said, made her drink only more.
“My mother inherited her own mother’s dark disabling alcoholism,” her son Patrick wrote in “A Common Struggle” (2015, with Stephen Fried).
She began to see a psychiatrist in 1971, Ms. Kennedy told Good Housekeeping magazine in 1972. “It’s very easy to feel insecure when you marry into a very famous, intelligent, exciting family,” she said. “You start comparing yourself to the other Kennedy women, and somehow your confidence in yourself begins to evaporate.”
Tired of playing the dutiful wife, she began to exempt herself from Kennedy family activities, immersing herself in music and playing the piano in serious venues.
Her children struggled, too. In 1973, her son Edward Jr. was found to have bone cancer at age 12. A portion of his right leg was amputated in 1973.
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In 1985, Patrick, then a senior at Phillips Academy, Andover, went into a rehabilitation program for alcohol and cocaine use. In 1991, Ted Jr., too, acknowledged seeking treatment for alcohol abuse. Kara overcame lung cancer, and then died of a heart attack at age 51 in 2011.
Joan Kennedy is survived by her sons, Edward Jr. and Patrick; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; and her sister, Candace McMurrey.
Rehab and Relapses
When her mother died of alcohol-related disease in 1976, Ms. Kennedy took it as a warning. She moved to Boston, where she attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, leaving behind not only the sprawling home in McLean, Va., that she had shared with Senator Kennedy but also her children, then 10, 16 and 17, to be looked after by family members and employees.
In 1978, not long after Betty Ford, the former first lady, had revealed her own problems with alcohol and painkillers, Ms. Kennedy publicly discussed her alcoholism and her first year of sobriety in the pages of McCall’s magazine. But she also relapsed, and would later veer in and out of rehab.
When she moved to Boston, Ms. Kennedy undertook a personal improvement regimen that included exercising, counseling other women in Alcoholics Anonymous and earning her master’s degree in education in 1982 from Lesley College, now Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. She and Senator Kennedy divorced that year.
“It’s such a relief now to be free,” she told The Boston Globe in 2000. “So much of my married life was about keeping secrets and pretending that I was doing great and was happy. But once you sober up, the whole idea is to become honest with yourself and other people.”
In addition to her piano playing and philanthropic efforts, she worked with charities and taught classical music to children. As chairman of the Boston Cultural Council, she oversaw the distribution of state money to local nonprofit organizations and supported a number of them, including Boston’s Pine Street Inn homeless shelter.
“Keenly aware of the potency of her name, she lends it generously to a host of public causes and is a familiar figure on the benefit circuit,” The Globe said in 2000.
But her sobriety was sporadic. In 2005, she was found sprawled on the sidewalk in the rain near her home, in Boston’s upscale Back Bay neighborhood. She was hospitalized with a concussion and a broken shoulder. Doctors said she had been swallowing mouthwash and vanilla extract in an attempt to satisfy her craving for alcohol.
Even before that incident, her children had realized that she needed assistance with her personal care and safety. They became her legal guardians in 2005, guided by a team of medical and financial professionals.
Senator Kennedy had stabilized his life in 1992 with his marriage to Victoria Reggie, a Washington lawyer. By then, Joan Kennedy and the senator had reconciled, and they often shared holiday meals, even after his second marriage. When he died of brain cancer at 77, in 2009, she attended the family funeral in Boston.
With all that Ms. Kennedy had been through, many saw her as a survivor. They rejected words like “fragile” and “vulnerable,” which the media had often used to describe her, and pointed to her proactive steps, like leaving her husband and starting a fresh life on her own in Boston.
“If fragile means somebody who can’t cope, well, Joan coped,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver, perhaps her closest sister-in-law among the clan, told The Globe in 2000. “I think she had a life that was very demanding of her. Sometimes she had real problems in those days. I think she never gave up. She consistently tried to improve and overcome her problems, and eventually she did. So that is not a person who is fragile.”
Katharine Q. Seelye, an obituary writer, was a reporter for The Times for 28 years. She previously covered national politics and New England.
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