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| Kennedys in turmoil as 'drunk' Joan tries to sell family home |
| 2005-04-13 |
| AMERICA'S most famous family was embroiled in a fresh crisis yesterday as Joan Kennedy's children branded her a hopeless drunk on the brink of self-destruction and waged a legal battle to block her from selling their $6.4 million home. The 68-year-old former wife of Senator Edward Kennedy placed the ocean-front Cape Cod mansion on the market without telling her three children, who believe she did it out of revenge after a judge granted them control of her affairs. "My mother is not happy with the court-ordered guardianship, but the most important thing to understand is we're trying to save our mother's life, simply put. That's what's at stake," said her son Edward Kennedy jnr. He said that what he called his mother's irrational action "speaks to the insidiousness of alcoholism". He went on: "Basically, my mother is taking it out on us by trying to sell the house. She's trying to retaliate against her own children by taking one of the things we love the most, which is Cape Cod. It's very sad." The feud adds one more episode to the 50-year history of turbulence, tragedy and scandal that has beset the Kennedys, a clan viewed as the closest thing the United States has to royalty. With her model looks and reputation for glamour, Joan was once dubbed "The Dish" by John F Kennedy, whose brother she married in 1958. But while her outward image fitted that of the US's most glamorous and high-profile political dynasty, her timid nature did not. Crushed by shyness and struggling to fit in, she turned to the bottle. Her problems worsened amid the public humiliation of the Chappaquiddick scandal of 1969, when her husband - who was by then a Democratic senator - drove his car off a bridge in Massachusetts, leaving his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die as he fled the scene. Mrs Kennedy was pregnant with their fourth child at the time, but later suffered a miscarriage. In a 1985 book, Living with the Kennedys, her former secretary, Marcia Chellis, revealed that, while Mrs Kennedy publicly stood by her man - even going on the stump for him during his failed presidential bid in 1980 - in private, she turned to drink, unable to cope with the shame and the hurt. Surrounded by a family noted for its strong women - the matriarch, Ethel Kennedy, and JFK's wife, Jacqueline, among them - Joan was simply out of her depth. "She took on something she just couldn't handle," Chellis wrote. Mrs Kennedy has been arrested for drink-driving four times since the mid-1970s and has repeatedly undergone rehabilitation treatment for alcohol addiction. Only last month, she was taken to hospital suffering from a broken shoulder and concussion after being found lying face down in a Boston street in a drunken stupor. Divorced from Senator Kennedy since 1982, she splits her time between a smart Boston apartment and the six-bedroom mansion on Squaw Island, Cape Cod, where their children Kara, 45, Edward, 44, and Patrick, 37, grew up and still spend each summer. Last week, a family court judge, Robert Terry, ruled that Mrs Kennedy was incompetent and a danger to herself, and he granted her children guardianship of her affairs for 90 days. He will decide at a later hearing whether to make the order permanent. Edward Kennedy jnr, who was himself treated for alcohol abuse in 1991, said: "You can imagine how bad this situation has gotten for us to risk angering her and undertaking this legal action against our own mother. "We tried to keep this private until the story broke a couple of weeks ago - she tripped and fell because she was intoxicated. That is just exactly what we're trying to stop. I don't know if we're going to be successful but we have to try something. We're in a desperate situation." |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |