Tragedy Strikes Again
As it has done too often, the Kennedy clan gathers to
mourn an untimely death, the painful result of a
senseless accident in Aspen
By Nancy Gibbs
(TIME, Jan.12) -- Within hours of Michael Kennedy's senseless death on a vertical
football field in Aspen, Colo., the cliches -- of "vigah" and
hubris, crossed stars and a genetic predisposition to take
stupid risks -- had piled up so high, it was hard to dig through
to the sad story beneath.
Michael's friends mourned him as a smart, hardworking,
bighearted man who, had he died a little sooner or a little
later, might have been remembered as a hero. He founded a
university in Angola, gave loans to women-owned businesses in
Ecuador and ran a company that supplies heat to 147 homeless
shelters in Boston. He spent much of his life doing generous
things, but just enough doing reckless things to join the long
index of scandals and self-destruction in untold Kennedy
histories to come.
On New Year's Eve, the family had gathered at the Sundeck
restaurant on top of the mountain in Aspen, fame's playground,
waiting for the slopes to clear at the end of the day so they
could have the hill to themselves to continue the annual family
downhill football game. The ski patrol was not keen on this bit
of Kennedy showboating and had warned that it was a dangerous
sport -- skiing fast and close, without poles, tossing a football
through improvised goals as the sun sank and the shadows
stretched and the slopes turned gray and icy. Aspen has had less
snow than normal this year, 24 inches of hard-packed base on
mid-mountain. Members of the patrol had been warning the
Kennedys off the game all week; the night before the accident, a
senior official of the Aspen Skiing Co., which runs the
mountain, contacted Michael's mother Ethel to try to halt this
family tradition. "They told her there was a rough game going
on," a source close to the company told TIME. "They wanted it
stopped."
But Michael, 39, was an expert skier and a cheerful quarterback;
he even brought along a video camera to record the game for the
family archives. By 3:30 the restaurant was closing, the lifts
had stopped and the ski patrol was telling the lingering
Kennedys and their friends that it was time to head down.
Nevertheless, 36 members of the Kennedy party prepared to play.
"Michael is the ringleader, without question," says New York
City social columnist R. Couri Hay, who describes himself as a
longtime Kennedy acquaintance, and whom the National Enquirer
quickly made a special correspondent last week. Ethel, however,
did not join the march to the slope. Sipping cocoa at the
restaurant, she had announced that she did not want to ski alone
and was taking the gondola back.
The clan split into two teams: Michael was captain of one, his
sister Rory the other, both wearing matching rust-colored ski
suits. A game the previous day had left the score tied, Hay
recalls, though there was amiable bickering over a goal. "Then
they said, 'We'll play tomorrow -- death to the loser.'"
Michael set off down the mountain with the camera and the small,
soft plastic football. The run was about 150 ft. wide at the top
and well-groomed but quickly narrowed as the trees closed in on
either side. After the first goal Michael handed the camera off
to a friend. "He skis off, he turns around to get a pass, he
slams into a tree head first, he falls down unconscious,"
reports Hay, who says he was a few feet away. He heard someone
say into a walkie-talkie, "Max, Max, it's an emergency! Ski
patrol, ski patrol, it's an emergency!" A friend groped for a
pulse. The children yelled, "It's my father! Please help my
daddy!"
It was sister Rory who stayed calm and went to work. She was the
baby of the family. After Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968,
Ethel asked each of her older children to act as a sort of
guardian angel over a younger one: Michael was assigned Rory,
born six months after their father died, and they spoke almost
daily. Rory began giving mouth-to-mouth and then started
pounding on her brother's chest, counting off "One. Two. Three.
Four."
"Michael, now is the time to fight," she said. "Don't leave us."
Someone felt a faint pulse. Rory turned him on his side, so he
wouldn't choke as he started breathing again; she wiped her face
with snow, then spit out the blood in her mouth. Michael's
children knelt, crossed themselves and prayed, "Our Father, who
art in heaven..." As paramedics worked, Rory gathered the
children up and told them to think good thoughts.
"When I arrived there, there were 15 or 20 people screaming for
help," said Michael Ferrara, a senior paramedic and the first
member of the ski patrol to reach Kennedy. "Very quickly we
realized there was one very injured man." He took over the CPR
and helped fit Kennedy with a cervical collar. The ski patrol
brought him down the mountain on a toboggan, covered in a yellow
blanket. The Rev. Lawrence Solan administered last rites at
Aspen Valley hospital and presided over communion for 15 family
members. Kennedy was pronounced dead at 5:50 p.m.; the official
cause of death was "massive head and neck trauma," and deputy
coroner Tom Walsh found no trace of drugs or alcohol in the
body. Michael's estranged wife Victoria was spending the holiday
in Vail with her father, sportscaster Frank Gifford, and she
arrived to take the children.
Michael's body was flown home on Kevin Costner's jet to the
family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., where weddings and
triumphs are traditionally celebrated, and disgraces and
tragedies escaped. The family draped the porch in blankets for
privacy, as the flag once again was shimmied halfway down a
flagpole and prying lights and cameras collected around the
compound. Kennedys, Cuomos, Schwarzeneggers, Shrivers and
Lawfords arrived to pay their respects. As night fell over
Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, the gates were locked, but the
Kennedy family headstone was lighted by the workers' spotlights
as they prepared to dig yet another grave.
The drama unfolded on New Year's Eve, a day the Kennedys spent
celebrating the fact that another bad year had finally ended.
The family measures misfortune on its own scale; the terrible
years have ended in violent death, the merely bad years are
defined by crimes and misdemeanors. Right up until dusk on the
very last day of 1997, this looked to be the latter. The worst
moments of the year were more tawdry than tragic, though bad
enough to derail Michael's promising political career. During
his years running the nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp., and
helping his Uncle Ted win a tough Senate re-election fight in
1994, Michael had earned a reputation as a creative
philanthropist and political counselor. He was all set to run
his brother Joe's campaign for Governor of Massachusetts, and
then maybe run for office himself. But that chapter reached its
ugly ending last April, when Michael's 16-year marriage publicly
collapsed amid accusations that he had had an affair with the
family baby sitter, allegedly beginning when she was just 14.
Prosecutor Jeffrey Locke eventually decided not to press charges
of statutory rape, but the damage was done. It turned out that
in 1995 Michael had sought treatment for alcoholism and then, a
year later, for sex addiction. Joe, embroiled in public discord
with his former wife over the circumstances of the annulment of
their marriage, withdrew from the race. He and Michael were
dubbed "poster boys for bad behavior" by cousin John F. Kennedy
Jr. in an editorial in his magazine George.
In the months after the meltdown, Michael retreated to his
seaside home in Cohasset, south of Boston, and immersed himself
in his work. But shame is fleeting; heir to a tradition of
repentance and reinvention, Michael consulted a publicist to
help get the spotlight off him and onto the work he was doing
for Citizen Energy. In October he appeared at an AIDS conference
at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. And there were reports
that he was trying to restore some stability to his private life
as well. Though separated, he and Victoria missed at least one
divorce hearing, and they were seen dining cordially in various
Boston restaurants. "The normalcy was for their children," says
Tom O'Neill, former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. "The
kids are at the core."
An older generation of Kennedys died fighting for the great
causes of the century: Joe Kennedy Jr. went down over the
English Channel, fighting Hitler. His brothers John and Robert
were assassinated in the midst of crusades -- against communism,
for civil rights -- that they were prepared to die for. This
younger branch of the family has always sailed smaller boats in
higher winds. As a teenager, Michael jumped off a 75-ft. cliff
above the Snake River in Wyoming during a rafting trip. Brother
Robert, while at Harvard, leaped 10 feet between two six-story
dorms on a dare. He was arrested in 1983 for heroin possession.
Joe II drove his jeep off the road in 1973, paralyzing family
friend Pam Kelley. Brother David died in 1984 of a drug
overdose. It is all more than any family can bear, especially
without the abiding solace of martyrdom to some cause greater
than a thrill and a game.
--Reported by Terry McCarthy/Aspen,
Charlotte Faltermayer/New York and Tom Witkowski/Boston
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