Sunday, May 27, 2012

Kennedy Dirt: Peter Lawford's Widow Talks

By Maureen Callahan

Robert Kennedy Jr., who has spent the last week and a half publicly absolving himself of any responsibility for the suicide of his estranged wife, Mary, has been a coarse, entitled womanizer for decades, according to a former family intimate who fended him off.

Patricia Lawford Stewart, who was married to former Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, reached out to The Post after last week’s funeral for Mary, appalled — but not surprised — by the Kennedy clan’s insistence that Mary was a lifelong depressive and alcoholic.

Before the funeral, Mary’s former sister-in-law and self-described “best, best friend,” Kerry Kennedy, strolled over to the press pool. “Mary suffered from depression,” Kerry said. “She was battling those demons.”

Robert, according to Robert’s eulogy, was just a good husband who tried so hard to help, not the boozy ex-heroin addict who publicly ran around on his wife, cut her off financially and took custody of their children, thereby demolishing every aspect of her life and identity.

“The Kennedy family is on damage control 24/7,” Stewart says. “They were ruinous to my husband, and they have harassed me for the last 28 years. I’m 54 years old, and I can’t deal with this crap anymore.”

Stewart first met the young RFK Jr. in 1976, when he showed up on the Lawfords’ doorstep in LA unannounced, having been kicked out by his widowed mother, Ethel. He was wearing his late father’s suit, rumpled. Robert sat on the sofa, and they made small talk for a few minutes while Peter was in the shower.

“Then he said, ‘I wish you weren’t married to my uncle — I’d like to f--- you right here on the couch,’ ” Stewart says. “That was a shocker. I knew him for four minutes.”...


Stewart, too, found herself like many a Kennedy wife — alone at home, husband off partying, expected to accept heavy boozing and rampant infidelity as the trade-off for becoming a member of America’s royal family.

She soon realized that, when it came to the Kennedys, nothing was as it seemed. Stewart says that in June 1980, when she called Ted Kennedy’s office to request a favor for Peter, she was rattled by his greeting.

“He gets on the phone and says, ‘I hear you’re the one with the big t--s. The kids all told me.’ I got quiet. He said, ‘So when are you going to come to Boston and campaign for me? We’ll go skiing, we’ll go to Vermont, we’ll do this, we’ll do that.’ It wasn’t familial; I’d never met him. I said, ‘I’m married to Peter.’ ”

Read the rest here.

No comments:

Post a Comment