So who’s your celebrity weakness? Whose face, airbrushed onto the cover of People Magazine, moves you to pluck this week’s copy from the grocery store newsstand and give up $3.00? Or to click on their pictures when you ought to be folding laundry?
Is it the British Royals? I wouldn’t blame you. I’m fond of them myself, even if I haven’t checked in lately on Princess Charlotte.
In my day, it was the Kennedys. If you wanted athletic families tossing footballs on the mansion lawn, or sailing near their Cape Cod compound, or skiing in Sun Valley, if you wanted sheath dresses and pillbox hats, if you wanted drama, the Kennedys were your fix.
I assume you know the basics, but if not: once there was an awful day in Dallas.
President Kennedy’s funeral included famous scenes of his tiny son, John-John, saluting; his daughter, Caroline, kissing his flag-draped casket.
I kissed caskets for months after that.
Well, OK, it was my toy suitcase, draped with a cloth diaper.
As if that was not enough drama, one morning my father wakes me up before a car trip to share this news.
This was the time that I fell in love with the Kennedy women’s black veils. Would that my church might require us to wear something so lovely.
So maybe you can understand why I might go for a book like Growing Up Kennedy by Harrison Rainie and John Quinn.
Rainie and Quinn take up the family story just as Teddy Kennedy decides he want to run for president in the 1980 election. He gathers his family and asks if they will support him. For the Kennedys, this means more than the grueling campaign schedule and the loss of privacy. They’re already used to all that. What gives them pause if the possibility that what happened Jack and Bobby will happen to Ted.
But they all rally around him, as Kennedys do.
Out on the campaign trail, to their surprise, they run into people who can’t forget this.
And what does that do to one’s sense of Kennedy-ness?
If you’re in the mood for a little throwback history, if you want to read about rich kids who are expected to spend their summers helping Navajos or mentally handicapped kids, you might take a peek at Growing Up. You will meet the Robert Kennedy clan, so disorderly that not a few governesses quit on their very first day. You will hang around the family’s Cape Cod compound and hear what all these cousins do to Kennedy tourists who wander by. You will see how they cope with tragedies.
Grandma Rose, the matriarch of the family, tried her best to create a family that uses its wealth and privilege to help others. Rainie and Quinn write the version Rose can be proud of.
But there’s always another side. Since Growing Up, a more decadent side of the third wave occasionally pops up in the news. Drugs, sex, mysterious death or, as the writer Florence King put, dying from acting like Daffy Duck–if it belongs in a movie, these people have lived it.
Grandma Rose also tried to teach a little self-reliance. Every week (I got this from a different book, which we’ll get around to), she gave the servants the night off. She would gather her children in the kitchen, and they’d scramble up some eggs or some other can’t-miss foods.
To that end, here’s something you can make for yourself on those evenings when you send the staff home. Though mine tasted great, they should look a little fluffier. I just kinda forgot about the half hour they needed to rise. I guess I have not practiced them enough.
Better dismiss my butler more often.
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