Last week the New Yorker ran a story about the abandoned and screwed up "race" for the vacant Senate seat, (vacated by Hil on her way to celebritizing foreign policy), conducted by Caroline Kennedy. All in all it was an engaging article. But, the following quote sent my mind spinning:
"Caroline Kennedy’s friends are always saying how normal she is, and it appears that they are right. Normal people do not run for the Senate. Normal people with lots of money and families that they like tend to want to enjoy the money and the families. They do not spend their winters on the phone grovelling for support, or their summers at obscure state fairs ingesting disagreeable and fattening local food. Caroline Kennedy is normal. Until recently, she wasn’t even sure how much she wanted to work at all.
It was, evidently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s intention to raise children who were as unaffected as possible by the extraordinary circumstances of their lives, and it seems that she succeeded: Caroline Kennedy’s life has in many ways been indistinguishable from that of any other smart and reasonably diligent child raised on Fifth Avenue in the nineteen-sixties. She went to Sacred Heart School in New York in the lower grades, and then to Brearley. She was close to her brother; she resented her stepfather. In tenth grade, she went to boarding school at Concord Academy, where she smoked, like everybody else, and wore clogs, like everybody else. She put on weight and was hounded by her mother about it. (At her fiftieth-birthday party, according to one guest, many of the family toasts were about her obsession with being thin.) She had moments of greatness: according to the biographer C. David Heymann, when the police discovered pot plants that her cousin David was growing in her back yard in Hyannis Port, she took the blame.
After high school, she spent a year in London taking an art course at Sotheby’s. She went to night clubs and had a love affair. She went to Radcliffe. She majored in fine arts. She did the usual college things. The summer after her freshman year, contacts of her mother’s helped her obtain an internship at the News, and after college she went to work in the educational-film department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, she met a designer of museum installations named Edwin Schlossberg, and married him when she was twenty-eight.
After a few years at the Met, she decided to go to law school at Columbia. She interned for a summer at her mother’s lawyer’s firm, but then decided she didn’t want to practice. “I think that, like a lot of people who go to law school, she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to do with her law degree,” Ellen Alderman, a friend from law school, says. “We were taking it more as we went along.” It seems as though Caroline did not, at the time, have a sense of what she wanted to do with her life or a measure of her own ambition. “I would say it was very much like her mom’s,” a friend says. “Her mom wanted to get smart things done, and she wanted to have some fun, and I think that’s probably what Caroline thought. She thought, I’m going to stay in New York, on the Upper East Side, I’ll marry this smart guy, that’s good, I’ll hang out with my three good friends from school, and we won’t do anything crazy. I’m stabilizing things up here—John can move downtown. Jackie was like, Relax, let’s have lunch, let’s go for a swim, have you read this book?”
Though Ms. MacFarquhar, the author of the article quoted above, opines on the normalcy of Caroline Kennedy, she goes on to deliver a portrait of a young life of being raised by the President and First Lady; not liking her step-father, (Aristotle Onasis, the Greek shipping magnate), going to boarding schools, London, then Radcliffe, worked at the Met, and, at one point "...she smoked, like everybody else, and wore clogs, like everybody else." Whether her use of tobacco and fashionably ill-advised footwear is her link to normalcy, Caroline Kennedy is far from "normal." If she is the poster-girl for "normal", I can only hope that my own children continue to be blessed with their abnormal lives!
Happy Easter!
Here is Paul, sporting his Pink Easter Basket....
