Joan Kennedy is dead to me

Weird fact about her: she was an accomplished pianist.

I'm glad she got to outlive Ethel, who was such a bitch.

Frankly, I thought she had died long ago. The most incredible thing about this to me is that she actually lived to a ripe old age.

She must have gotten off the sauce long ago.

Good for her!

Ethel, Rose, Jean and Pat all treated Joan like shit. Jean and Steve Smith used to go on vacations and double dates with Ted and his longtime mistress, Babe Paley’s daughter Amanda Burden.

Jackie and Eunice were the only two that treated her well.

I saw her in person at a 1980 campaign stop. She was beautiful.

Why did they hate her so much, R6?

Okay.

There goes another face of my childhood. Growing up she was on the cover of all of the ladies magazines and on the flip side her drinking had her on the covers of all of the tabloids. She looked as out of place with the Kennedy’s as Jackie did. She looked a bit like Joan Van Ark.

Camelot is officially dead.

I feel so old.

The last standing Kennedy from the family's halcyon era. Unless you count Caroline.

It was a few things, r8. Joan was candid in interviews about her marital problems , her alcoholism , and the causes behind both, which angered Rose in particular.

Ted, Ethel and Pat were heavy drinkers., but they didn’t embarrass the family with drinking, while Joan’s drinking was discussed in the media.

Joan was also pretty, and like Jackie, she was more subdued than those gym teacheresque Kennedy women.

Ted brought the family together before he announced his presidential candidacy in 1980. The only one who questioned if this was going to be detrimental to Joan’s health was Eunice.

There's a person named Eunice?

[quote]She looked a bit like Joan Van Ark.

No Sweetpea, just no.

In the mid seventies I was riding around with a friend of mine, making deliveries for an electrical supply company. One of the customers was McLeans Hospital in Belmont, Ma.

As we pulled up, I was amazed to see Joanie out wandering the lawn in a white bathrobe. It was great to see her but also sad.

JFK called Joan 'the Dish'. She scandalized Washington society during the Nixon administration by wearing a mini skirt at an official function. Picture at link. Nixon looks delighted.

President Nixon was later taped complaining to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, about Joan:

Haldeman: Did you see his [Ted’s] wife came into the White House again all done up in some crazy outfit? Nixon: Weird. Haldeman: She was going to wear hot pants but Teddy told her she couldn’t. Ziegler: They’re weird people. They really are. I mean, even the– Nixon: It’s crude. What the hell’s the matter with them? What’s she trying to prove?

What’s she trying to prove?! Some crazy outfit! 🙂

When she was 69 she was found passed out in a bush by a pedestrian and taken to the hospital with a broken shoulder.

Her last public relapse was 2018 when she attended a charity event and got blind drunk even though accompanied by her 'handlers'.

This woman was staunch.

Joan!

She was beautiful in her youth and loved the booze. She should be a Datalounge patron saint.

She would often dress 'inappropriately' probably to piss of the other Kennedy women and shame her husband. I always felt empathetic toward her. She was wary about marrying Ted because they hadn't known each other very long but Old Joe decided she would be a good fit to the family and so it began. Besides being in a sham marriage, she was expected to put up with those awful Kennedy women.

I liked her, but otherwise I don't miss the rest of that generation at all--they were all too arrogant.

Poor lovely soul. Not an easy life and driven to the bottle by that horrible husband and family .

She was apparently a very kind woman and Ted treated her like garbage. Honestly, she was the only sympathetic character from that entire clan.

It's on her, she refused my offer of parasitic worms.

I'm having a "Mandela Effect" moment, as I thought she died years ago...

She’s a drunk!

In addition to being publicly humiliated by a POS husband who drove his mistress off a bridge to her watery death, her son had his leg amputated at ten years old and her daughter predeceased her in 2011 from cancer.

I didnt know about Amanda Burden and Ted. As an aside, what did Amanda see in Charlie Rose? 🤮

She's still alive. With all her inheritances I wonder what her fortune is.

Ted didn't embarrass the family with his drinking, R13? Didn't he famously drive drunk off of a bridge and leave a woman to die?

Not doubting that the family saw it that way but it's pretty rich that they stood by Teddy over Chappaquiddick but hated the wife he was clearly cheating/hoping to cheat on her with Mary Jo Kopechne.

R18 ATTA GIRL!

Shame she didn’t re-marry— someone who would have appreciated her and treated her decently.

I can’t even imagine all the shit she had to put up with — and unlike Jackie, she didn’t have the Fuck You money Jackie had.

During the Chappaquiddick incident, Joan learned about the story while Ted Kennedy was telling his girlfriend Helga Wagner over the phone. She was listening their conversation and overheard it on the parallel line. She once mentioned that she could never tell anyone about it. Jackie was so selfish as a friend and Ethel and Kennedy sisters were so jealous of Joan's beauty. Ted called Helga to reach Steve Smith. Helga, Ted, Jean Kennedy, and Steve Smith were planning to go on vacation together.Can you believe Jean Kennedy? What a awful person. Shameless! At that time, Joan’s youngest child was two years old and she was also pregnant. After that as we all know, Joan was forced to appear alongside Ted. In the Ted Kennedy Oral History Project, his friends speak casually about their memories with Helga and the vacations they took together. I think it’s an unbelievable story. Such humiliation must be unbearable. Poor Joan. I kove Ted Kennedy politically but his behaviour was just terrible, terrible . Bobby Kennedy very much protected Jackie after JFK but there was no one for Joan.

[quote] she was also pregnant.

And she had a miscarriage.

R14 - Yes, Rose! Eunice Burns. THE Eunice Burns

Wearing a mini-skirt in 1969 was hardly inappropriate. They were all the rage by 1967.....even my mom wore one. I'm sure there are photos of Julie and Tricia Nixon wearing them in 1969.

A woman truly abused by the Kennedy clan, male and female. Those Kennedy sisters and RFK's wife were the embodiment of high school Mean Girls and Joan was their target. As a poster above said, Jackie got out of it with her "fuck you" money.

My mother hated the Kennedy clan and back in1980, when delusional Ted wanted the Democratic presidential nomination, she was sympathetic to Joan (out there, once again, putting on a brave face). Mom did wish Joan would just divorce Ted, who she never forgave for leaving Mary Jo in that car to drown.

R36 tell that to Rose Kennedy.

[quote] Wearing a mini-skirt in 1969 was hardly inappropriate.

Depends on the occasion dear.

In the Kennedy family’s world, r30, Joan was more embarrassing because reports of her drinking and drunk behavior were published often in the 70s.

Also, Joan went to rehab in the 70s, and the National Enquirer found out and sent a reporter undercover into the facility, publishing her private conversations from rehab. This unfortunately led the family to keep the other alcoholics in the family, like Pat, from getting treatment.

[quote] Wearing a mini-skirt in 1969 was hardly inappropriate. They were all the rage by 1967.....even my mom wore one. I'm sure there are photos of Julie and Tricia Nixon wearing them in 1969.

Nixon was a paranoid loon--he didn't object to the mini-dress for any reason other than that the Kennedys made him insecure and he wanted to bitch about them. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were his constant toadies, and agreed with every single thing he said on the White House tapes. he could have said, "Tomorrow the sun will rise in the West," and they would have said, "Yes master! You are so wise to tell us this." (Gee, who does that sound like?)

No, by 1969 it definitely did NOT depend on the occasion. Mini dresses were made of all sorts of elegant couture fabrics for evening, including beaded fabrics.

They were also not nearly as short as we think of mini-skirts today, usually just a few inches above the top of the knee as can be seen in that photo of Joan with the Nixons at r17. And they were always worn with pantyhose or, for evening, often glittery tights. No bare legs back then.

from the NYT obit:

[quote] 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.”

Ted Kennedy really was just a bloated, drunken sack of shit. Joan may have had her moments but who could blame her?

I once read that whenever all the Kennedy women wanted something from the cook, they would ring the bell next to them and call her over. But Joan would always go to the kitchen herself and ask for what she wanted there. She must be at least a kind person.

Jackie was under father Joe’s protection. Kennedy girls couldn't say anything to her.

Ethel's status benefited from her supposedly great wealth which later turned out to be fake. She didn’t even leave anything even to her children. If Steve Smith and his team hadn’t stopped her, she would have almost single-handedly bankrupted the Kennedys.

So that left Joan who was at least 10 years younger than Kennedy girls. They abused her.

Ted Kennedy must be so reckless until 1990s. And he was very much encouraged by his siblings. There was a story in one of Laurence Leamer books:

“Edie Sedgeick flew to Hyannis Port in September 1966 to attend Joan Kennedy’s thirtieth birthday party. The Kennedys were not old money, but in their Massachusetts home they lived like it..Edie appreciated the scene and deftly worked her way through the guests, by any measure a social queen. It helped that before she flew up to Cape Cod, she went to see Dr. Roberts, her Dr. Feelgood, who shot her up with an injection that energized her for the rigors of this event. The only problem was that Senator Edward Kennedy kept hitting on her shamelessly. “Oh, he was always telling me that I should have an affair with him, that it was the healthiest thing for me and for him—right in front of Bobby Neuwirth,” Edie said.'

That was Joan's birthday. :)

Every person in the US was not unified in their love and support for miniskirts, weirdo. The Kennedys were and are quite conservative and modest in dress and presentation, and obsessed with image. Rose Kennedy, who ruled the family after Joe Sr.'s stroke, was an uber-Catholic harridan, not some swinging 60s party girl. I seriously doubt she was all in favor of any Kennedy woman wearing a miniskirt. She probably measured their hemlines before letting them leave the compound.

I don't think you quite get how conservative and traditional Catholic families like the Kennedys were. Nixon was a dour Protestant, but he was a Californian, didn't have to answer to anyone older than him in his own family, and he had Pat to soften his stances within that family. The Kennedys were an entirely different breed altogether.

R42 You don't seem to understand that we're talking about the first time a miniskirt was seen at a Presidential function where LONG GOWNS were the dress code. It was a first, and that was the headline. I was alive then and reading newspapers. Of course miniskirts were every where by then, no one claimed otherwise. You seem to be arguing with Nixon and his orcs having a paranoid response to it, so I'll leave you to it.

Not to make too radical a stretch for a comparison but Joan really seems like she was the Diana (of sorts) of the Kennedys - someone who was perhaps cast in a role with the understanding she'd perform it as written, but she found herself chafing at the restraints to that role and ended up falling apart - or having the marriage fall apart - quite publicly.

The dress Ethel Kennedy was wearing during the day RFK was assasinated wasn't much longer than Joan's dress. The problem was Joan was rocking those mini- dresses but no one noticed Ethel's. Joan was physically like a model.

Joan [italic]was[/italic] a model. She did print ads and a few TV commercials. She was gorgeous. But you are probably correct, R48, no one cared about Ethel showing skin but Joan was a different story because she had real, raw sex appeal, probably the only Kennedy woman you could say that about. Yes Jackie had admirers and was a cultural icon but she was never a sex symbol and certainly never looked like one.

Joan was born in the wrong era. In today’s social media age, she would have gone viral

[quote] My mother hated the Kennedy clan and back in1980, when delusional Ted wanted the Democratic presidential nomination, she was sympathetic to Joan (out there, once again, putting on a brave face). Mom did wish Joan would just divorce Ted, who she never forgave for leaving Mary Jo in that car to drown.

Your mom sounds like a sweetheart. Apparently Joan believed Ted was truly interested in reconciling during his Senate run.

But one day she came back, sad, from a photo op with him and told a friend, "it's all fake, he is just using me".

It's sad because it seemed like she really wanted to be his wife and was willing to play the game while he had his many dalliances. It sounds like she really loved him or at least wanted to be loyal to him.

r45 and r46, what are we are we arguing about? That Rose Kennedy and other conservative Americans weren't in favor of miniskirts in 1969? I totally agree with you.

That Joan's appearance in a miniskirt at the Nixon event caused headlines and outrage among conservative America? Yes, of course, I'll give that to you, too.

But since when is fashion ruled by the conservative population?

Joan may have been the first to wear a miniskirt to a formal DC evening event (though only in DC which was at least 2 years behind NY and LA, not to mention Paris and London). But she sure wasn't the last.

Btw I was 20 in 1969 and paying attention. Yeah, I'm old and still paying attention.

She also went to Silver Hill during the 70s. She was beautiful---Jackie was smart in making her main alliance with Joe which got her out of touch football and "those toothy Kennedy girls".

What's so great about Joan? The Kennedys were unkind to her. Still, she spent her entire life as a cosseted drunk. Amazing she lived so long. Not saying she was terrible person but she did nothing of note, made no meaningful contribution. As far as I know.

She was by all accounts a very kind person, R55.

Maybe you should look into that yourself.

When a distraught newlywed Joan came to Jackie when she first found out about Teddy's philandering. Jackie was sympathetic but advised the young bride not to take it so seriously. "Kennedy men rummage thru woman like they're a drawer of socks".

Dick favored a "good Republican cloth coat"!

Poor Joan. Marriage to Ted sucked the life out of her.

"Fuck you, Teddy! I'm sick of your whoring around. I'm just going to lock myself in my music room and drink.?

r8 jealous...look at the Kennedy horse faced, buck toothed women.....

She’s up in heaven now slurring her words and swerving into traffic.

Joan was another Kennedy wife who came from a Republican family.

Let's have another round.

[quote] Apparently Joan believed Ted was truly interested in reconciling during his Senate run.

It was during his presidential run.

And one for Mahler!

Beautiful in her youth, bitter and frustrated and a drunk-ass mess practically until the end. Joan Kennedy is a true Datalounge icon.

She would get shitfaced drunk and go driving around Hyannis Port late at night.

GOALS.

Paging Margot Robbie and Laura Linney to casting

Teddy was a fat whore. And he put her through hell. Not every woman could adopt that Jackie attitude and in point of fact, Jackie herself had a very hard time. Don't forget that Steve Smith's son, the rapist, William Kennedy Smith, was hanging out with Uncle Teddy boozing it up, the night he raped a young girl. He was acquitted. Now he is a medical doctor. They were all fucking predators.

Now you've all forced me to by Laurance Leamer's book, The Kennedy Women. I also got J. Randy Taborelli's book about Jackie. I'm in the mood for gossip.

R66 Yes, my bad.

I believe that either one or both of her parents (the Bennetts) were alcoholics.

Both of Joan’s parents were alcoholics. Shortly after Chappaquiddick Joan’s mother was on a vacation in Europe with a group of friends when she had some sort of breakdown, and the Kennedys had to have her flown home and institutionalized.

Joan had great sixties/seventies hair.

Good!

Wait, R44, I want to know more about this injection you can get from a medical doctor to pep you up before a big party. Is it legal and still available today?