The Fall of Joan

IT WAS THE BLOOD that caught the attention of a passerby, a streak running down one side of the woman's face in a long red tear as she tried to hoist herself off the Beacon Street sidewalk. She looked like a disoriented street person who had wandered into the Back Bay from the nearby Boston Common. "She said she was okay, but she did not look okay," says Constance Bacon, who shielded the helpless woman from the rain as they waited for an ambulance. "She was conscious. She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and she tried to get up and she couldn't. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who it was, that it was anything special."  

It took little more than a day for Bacon—and the rest of the world—to find out that the woman she had helped had a last name recognized across the globe, that this bloody and disheveled person was the former model once nicknamed "the Dish" by her brother-in-law, the late President John F. Kennedy. As with other members of the Kennedy clan, notoriety was nothing new to her. Her fall, which resulted in a concussion and a broken shoulder, was the latest incident in a long and very public struggle Joan Bennett Kennedy has waged against alcoholism.

"No, she did not appear drunk," Bacon said repeatedly afterward. But a source close to Kennedy's three children says Kennedy's blood-alcohol level was well above the legal limit when it was tested at the hospital that night. The limits of her ability to look after her own affairs had also been exceeded, setting the stage for a battle worthy of any of the political or media skirmishes in which the Kennedy's have engaged over the years.

JOAN KENNEDY HAD TAKEN TO DRINKING in secret in the months before her accident, and her drugs of choice were mouthwash and vanilla extract. Both contained enough alcohol to assuage her cruel thirst without producing the rank odor of hard booze. A caretaker complained that Kennedy, 68, had begun locking her out of the Beacon Street condominium where the one-time presidential in-law lives. (She also has a waterfront house in Hyannis Port.) The caretaker told Kennedy's son Patrick, a congressman from Rhode Island, about the large quantities of vanilla extract his mother was bringing home from the market. "She said she had taken up baking," the friend of the Kennedy children says. "She would tell the caretakers she would meet them somewhere and never show up. She'd try to lose them."

Suspicious amounts of mouthwash vanished from the bathroom. And there were Kennedy's frequent absences from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings she attended during periods of sobriety. In the world of AA, identities are closely guarded, and the shapely older woman in the baseball cap and expensive ensembles was no different there from the homeless, disoriented drunks still reeking of alcohol who would wander in from the Park Street T station, lured by free coffee and cookies. In the meetings she was no longer a Kennedy, but merely "Joan," a fellow alcoholic with a soul-sapping disease.

Booze does not discriminate. Still, Kennedy had a lot of people fooled. She cleaned up well and continued to travel in elite circles. In fact, her close friend, philanthropist Ann Gund, insists even now that Kennedy had been staying sober. Kennedy's doctors do not agree. The vanilla extract and mouthwash she apparently guzzled on a regular basis caused enough damage to her kidneys that her children say she was within a year of needing dialysis to stay alive. That, and the spill she took on Beacon Street, amounted to much more than just another embarrassing bout with the bottle. The kidney problems, the concussion, and the broken shoulder buoyed an argument Kennedy's children had been making for some time: Their mother was incapable of taking care of herself.