Author's NoteMetamorphosis

Let others delight in the good old days;
I am delighted to be alive right now.
This age is suited to my way of life.
--Ovid

ON A FINE summer's day in 1970, Ted Kennedy skippered
his sailboat from Hyannis Port over to Monhegan Island, an
unspoiled, rocky outcropping ten miles off the coast of Maine, where
I customarily spent the month of August with my children. He'd
come to visit our mutual friend, the artist Jamie Wyeth, who'd painted
a portrait of Ted's brother Jack not long after the president's assassination.
Jamie always worked from live subjects, and while making his
preliminary sketches of JFK, he'd asked Ted to sit in, as it were, for
the dead president. As the portrait took shape, Ted had assumed the
identity of his martyred brother, and in that guise, he and Jamie had
become fast friends.

Ted and Joan Kennedy were staying with Jamie and his wife,
Phyllis, who owned the most beautiful home on the island. It had
once belonged to the famous illustrator Rockwell Kent, and it overlooked
a boulder- strewn beach called Lobster Cove, where a picturesque
old shipwreck lay rusting on its side.

Automobiles weren't permitted on Monhegan Island, and I ran
into the Kennedys and Wyeths as they were coming down the footpath
from Lobster Cove on their way to the general store. Phyllis
Wyeth, who'd been left paralyzed from the waist down as the result
of an accident, was in a wheelchair. She introduced me to her weekend
guests: Joan, thirty- three, blond and willowy, at the height of
her mature beauty; and Ted, thirty- eight, in robust good health. It
was easy to see why Ted had been called the handsomest of the
handsome Kennedy brothers.

"How are you, Senator," I said, shaking his hand.

My commonplace greeting seemed to perturb him, perhaps because
Phyllis had mentioned that I was a journalist with Newsweek,
and Ted Kennedy, at that time, was a fugitive from the media. Recently,
Massachusetts had released the official transcript of the inquest
into the 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island.
The judge presiding over the inquest strongly implied that a
drunken Ted Kennedy had been driving Mary Jo to a sexual tryst
when his car plunged off a bridge and into a body of water, where
Mary Jo died.

I couldn't tell whether Ted had a sailor's sunburn, or whether
his face was scarlet with shame. His edgy defensiveness was underscored
by his stumbling syntax--a stammer that at times made him
sound slow- witted and even a bit dumb.

"Well, um, yes, ah, glorious day . . ." he said. "Beautiful
here, isn't it? . . . Sailing, um. . . . Good day . . . er, for that. . . .
Wind. . . ."

Someone once referred to Ted Kennedy's off- the- cuff speaking
style--as opposed to his superbly crafted speeches--as a "parody of
[Yankees manager] Casey Stengel: nouns in search of verbs."I later
learned that the senator was aware of his tendency to speak in cryptic
fragments, joking that as the youn gest of nine children, he'd
never had a chance to complete a sentence.To correct the problem,
he'd consulted a psychologist, who prescribed a daily therapeutic
regimen to make him sound more intelligible when he wasn't using
a prepared text. But he quickly lost interest in the therapy, and kept
on uh-ing and ah-ing with no noticeable improvement.

As we talked, I was struck by the fact that Ted didn't look at
Joan. Their eyes never met. Indeed, they didn't even bother with
the casual intimacies that are common...

 

 

"Ted Kennedy is quick, light and fascinating. Neither exculpatory nor completely censorious, it's a portrait of an American legend whose life -- whatever one things of his politics and his past -- has been one of significance."

 

"Fast-paced, very readable...Klein drew on a vast store of original research and unprecedented access...worth reading."

 

EDWARD KLEIN is the former foreign editor of Newsweek and former editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. He frequently contributes to Vanity Fair and Parade. Klein is also the author of several New York Times bestselling biographies, including All Too Human; Just Jackie; Farewell, Jackie; and The Kennedy Curse.

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