The House of Kennedy(71)
Joe’s been openly planning a run for Massachusetts governor, and allegations of his callous behavior causes backlash among his mostly Irish Catholic constituents, though at first it seems there’s every chance the ground he’s losing can be recovered over the year and a half between the book’s publication and the election.
But less than two days after Sheila appears on Primetime Live to launch her book tour, an even bigger Kennedy scandal overwhelms the annulment pushback. On April 25, 1997, the Boston Globe breaks the shocking story about an alleged affair between Joe’s younger brother Michael Kennedy, a thirty-nine-year-old married father of three, and Marisa Verrochi, his family’s nineteen-year-old former live-in babysitter. Even more disturbing—and potentially constituting statutory rape—are accusations that the affair began as far back as five years earlier, putting the babysitter at a mere fourteen years old.
“I’m told Ethel is devastated over this,” biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, author of The Other Mrs. Kennedy, says, adding that in his estimation, this was the “seamiest” Kennedy scandal yet. “Michael was the apple of her eye. He was among the Kennedys who were seen as the future of the clan.”
Indeed, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, the middle child in Bobby and Ethel’s brood of eleven, is the one Bobby Jr. calls “Mummy’s favorite.” Not that the other siblings resent that title, he says. “No one was jealous of her love for him because he was everyone else’s favorite, too.” Both Teddy and Ethel notice a certain similarity to his father in Michael. “Ethel always felt that he was a lot like Bobby. Very bright, quick,” a family friend notes, while Teddy recalls once glancing at Michael in profile and feeling overcome: “The resemblance was so striking, I had to just sit there and stare at him for a moment,” he says.
In 1981, Michael marries Victoria Gifford, daughter of football great Frank Gifford, and they have three children: a son, Michael Jr. in January 1983, and two daughters, Kyle Francis in July 1984 and Rory Gifford in November 1987. Like many Kennedys, Michael goes to Harvard, and, like his father and uncle Ted, the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating in 1984, he goes to work with his brother Joe at Citizens Energy, a company Joe started to help low-income families with heating oil. When Joe wins his first term in Congress—taking over from Tip O’Neill the seat his uncle Jack had held from 1947 to 1953—Michael becomes president and CEO at Citizens Energy.
Among the notoriously competitive siblings, Michael and Joe are said to be the most competitive with each other. “They resent each other because neither one gets what the other does,” says one family friend. “Michael didn’t get to run for Congress; Joe did. Joe, on the other hand, resents Michael because Michael made money, while Joe never did.”
But a race to see who can tarnish the Kennedy name faster is not a competition either brother wishes to win.
Chapter 48
On January 22, 1995, Michael’s wife, Vicki, woke up to find her husband missing from their bed. Perplexed, she begins looking for him throughout their million-dollar home in Cohasset, a seaside suburb of Boston. She can’t find him anywhere.
Surely he’s not in Marisa’s room?
The soon-to-be-seventeen-year-old is the daughter of Michael’s close friend, neighbor, and Democratic donor, billionaire entrepreneur Paul Verrochi. It’s well known that even before Marisa moved in, “Michael Kennedy would call her parents and say they were going to be out late and that [Marisa] should sleep over,” neighbor Dan Collins tells Time magazine.
She’s been living with the Kennedys since last spring, at Michael’s suggestion, and has been babysitting for them since she was in middle school. She’s even traveled with Michael and the kids on a few family vacations—whitewater rafting, skiing, etc.—trips that his wife hadn’t joined in on. With Vicki absent, people have been starting to notice an uncomfortable intimacy between Michael and the teenager.
Vicki opens the door.
Michael is there, in Marisa’s bed.
Vicki screams, waking the children, causing Marisa to cry, and Michael to deny knowing how he got there. He begs Vicki to forgive him, and blames it all on booze.
Michael’s drinking has increasingly been a problem over the past year. Until recently, he was known as a “straight arrow,” the calm and even-keeled one within the family. But then “something snapped,” as a family associate recalls. “Michael started drinking heavily and got depressed. He wasn’t a mean drunk, just reckless.”
Concern over Michael’s drinking culminates in a family intervention earlier that same month, at which Michael agrees to check himself into rehab by February 1. Michael swears to Vicki that he will clean up his act. But there will be no waiting the extra week now. He checks in to Father Martin’s Ashley rehab center in Havre de Grace, Maryland, that same day, January 22, 1995. “I have come to recognize I had a dependence on alcohol,” Michael is quoted as saying in People.
“No one has hidden behind alcoholism as an excuse for inappropriate behavior,” Michael’s younger brother, thirty-three-year-old Christopher Kennedy, says. “But all of us clearly understand the link.”
News of Michael’s entry into rehab is surprising to outsiders but overshadowed by the death of his grandmother later that same day. The 104-year-old matriarch of the Kennedy family, the “indomitable” Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, dies of pneumonia at home in Hyannis Port, and is buried on January 24, 1995. Six of the other grandchildren, including Michael’s oldest sister, Kathleen, the new lieutenant governor of Maryland, serve as pallbearers for her funeral in the same church in Boston’s North End where Rose was baptized in 1890.