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.

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