From Anne Giovanni’s Fanny to Robert Kennedy’s Melancholy Eyes
By
David Gottfried
I became a political junkie in elementary school. One of my first political “stars” was Anne Giovanni, one of the two Democratic District leaders of our Assembly District in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She had an unpaid position, but hell, it was an elected position, and I went over election returns the way other guys looked at batting averages, and to me this fat, middle-aged, lasagna-making momma was as exciting as Hollywood.
Anne Giovanni reminds me that Bella Abzug was not the first woman in New York Politics to enliven politics with a millinery imagination. Anne Giovanni might not have had a single compelling idea in her head, but her head was dressed up fine, crowned by a big, broad, high diadem of a hat that seemed as wide as the flying saucer-like head gear of the Vietnamese Peasants we were napalming and as exalted and elegant as anything that Bette Davis might wear on the Late Late Show.
And so when the candidates in New York City's 1969 mayoral race made an appearance at our Synagogue, and Anne Giovanni arrived late, the crowds parted for her, as the Red Sea might have parted for Moses’ sister Miriam, and with her hat leading the way, she surged to the front of the ballroom, and managed to place her resplendently fat fanny, smiling and wiggling at us in a sequined dress, on a seat in the very first row.
This really was the stuff and meat and potatoes of politics, fannies and smiles and big broad hats that one wore like a coat of arms. And every candidate had a look that communicated his politics better than the content of his ideas, which most of the people never really listened to anyways. One did not have to understand a word of English to know that Goldwater was a conservative. One only needed to take in the pugnacious grating of his irate teeth coupled with the strict severity of his black framed glasses to know that this guy meant business. We all knew that William Buckley was an old school elitist conservative because, no matter how much of a macho man he purported to be, he spoke with the bitchy, feminine sarcasm of society ladies in "The Women," or "My Man Godfrey" or any number of satires of the effete, pre-Roosevelt aristocracy. (And the fact that so many liberals today sound like aloof ladies -- think of Michael Dukakis commending Belgian endive to Iowa farmers -- makes them no threat to the leisure class and may account for liberalism's success among relatively affluent professionals.) We knew that Lyndon Johnson was a bit of a liberal, in the old new deal sense of the term, because although he was gruff and mean and fat and ornery, he was also as amicably disheveled as Jed Clampett on the “Beverly Hillbillies,” aware of where he came from, proud of his rural roots, and ready to be generous with the unfortunate.
But there was a new liberalism, that did not quite know how to define itself, which was stalking the land. Its sources were as diverse as the gallantry of Dr. Kildare, a striking young doctor in a sudsy television drama; John Lennon's undying profession of faith and devotion in the thrilling chords of "Any Time at All," and the wry, ironical comedy on the "Doby Gilis Show." It had neither the blue collar, industrial liberalism of "The Honeymooners" or the vestigial strains of populist liberalism which made itself known on "Green Acres." This new liberalism was sleek and stunning, and although it was elegant, it had none of the effeteness of rock-ribbed Conservative Republicanism so masterfully exemplified by "The Millionaire and his Wife” on “Gilligan's Island.”
This liberalism, imagined in the personas of Paul Newman and other fearless leading men, had to find issue in the political arena, and finally, in the 1960's, politicians were produced to pick up the torch.
These politicians were as exquisitely groomed as Ken dolls. Their hair glistened as brightly as a carton of Tropicana Orange Juice. They spoke with all the confidence of a physician on “Medical Center” declaiming that "We must operate now."
They were the Kennedys. They came running at you, John, Bobby and Ted, in quick succession, with all the gusto of a bunch of football players running out of the locker room to claim the field. They smiled with the incessant intensity of acrobats on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” juggling swords and candelabras and ballerinas while dressed in red tights.
Whenever there was an election, they were at the center of the storm. Whenever there was a camera, their glowing faces provided the illumination to take a picture. Whenever a black man was in distress, they were a more handsome, mod substitute for Abraham Lincoln. Whenever a woman was truly alone and despondent, she could find an outlet for her mangled romantic emotions by patiently stuffing thousands of envelopes with Kennedy campaign literature.
The psychosexual aura of the Kennedys lifted the hems on skirts, accelerated the pace of the Nation's rock and roll and made America confront the specter of something heretofore unknown: The Sexy Irishman.
Before the advent of Kennedyism, the Irish contribution to America consisted chiefly in giving Protestants the satisfaction of knowing that there were some people more sexless, awkward in the bedroom, and dour than they were. The Italians might have had Sal Mineo. The Jews had John Garfield. But the Irish had the rasping voice of Al Smith, witty, garrulous but more congruent with drooling men, impotent from drink, than anything remotely sexual.
The sexlessness of the Irish was apparent in everything, in Irish soda bread, which was as dry as a ninety year old vagina; in the juvenile, fetishistic celebration of things like the color green, which seemed to evince a stupid giddy enthusiasm specific only to children or virgins; and in their premature aging, in which their giddy enthusiasm quickly faded into a brittle, brooding alcoholic depression.
But the Kennedys defied the rules and the archetypes of American culture. They did not speak in brogues like silly, fey, eunuch-like leprechauns; they spoke with a clipped, concise Boston accent, which, in its urbanity, seemed vaguely English and hence as profoundly sexual as the Beatles or James Bond. They did not wear gowns like priests, or clomp around like longshoreman; they strode into stadiums like Roman emperors in a Hollywood epic. Their wives were not dowdy, pasty, women, with pinched noses, whose ideal of a woman was a bitter, mannish, Mother Superior who whipped all the boys and girls in the parochial school.
Their woman was a dream, a vision, a heavenly gleam of angel dust called Jackie. And Jackie’s voice wafted in the air as gently as the snowflakes that made Washington an Ice Palace on the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. Her gait in her gowns had more glory than all the queens of England. She threw out the Soda Bread and brought in the fancy French everything and Irish Catholicism was never the same.
And the Irish Catholics of Bay Ridge were proud. Although they may have voted for Goldwater, that did not stop them from voting for Robert Kennedy when he ran for the Senate in New York that same year, 1964.
The Cult of Kennedyism was at its manic height from the moment John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas until Teddy profaned the Holy of Holies at Hyannis port with the Scandal of Chappaquiddick.
The killing of Jack Kennedy made the Kennedys a special species of Jesus. Whereas the first Jesus was Jewish, John Kennedy managed to be a Christian Jesus. But if we sometimes thought John Kennedy was too commanding and aloof to be a Jesus, Bobby certainly took on the role manfully: He bore the pain of his brother’s crucifixion like a cross carried to Golgotha. He professed to love the poor and the oppressed and little children just like a perfect Jesus would. And he exuded a melancholy that seemed to tell us that he knew he was fated to ascend the cross and die for our sins.
From the time Robert Kennedy died, until the time Teddy defamed the family name at Chappaquiddick, I thoroughly expected the Catholic church, anytime soon, to declare that Bobby was now Saint Bobby, or Jesus's first lieutenant, or to modify the liturgy to insert special prayers for the Kennedys. Many of my friends said that it was nothing but common knowledge, simple common knowledge, that the perfect form of American Government would have been a twenty-four-year reign of Kennedys: Jack Kennedy from 1960 to 1968; Robert Kennedy from 1968 until 1976, and Edward Kennedy from 1976 until 1984. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, when it was clear that the pro and anti-war factions of the Democratic party would never resolve their differences, the logical solution seemed to be the nomination of Edward Kennedy who, with his aura of religiosity and splendor, easily transcended such petty political issues as war and peace. After all, the goodness of Kennedyism was something that one accepted and cherished as readily as one loved Christmas, or Good Humor Ice cream, or the New York Yankees (Actually, at my synagogue. we all learned to love the New York Mets. Before the Mets won the world series, in 1969, they were always losing. Their chronic losses seemed so Jewish as we Jews suffered chronic persecution. Our synagogue repeatedly took us to Mets games, the Mets would duly lose, and we wanted to say a “broucha,” a prayer, for our Jewish ballplayers.)
In the end, Bay Ridge could not forget its racism. and its Catholicism was not the Christianity of St. John the Assisi; it was the aristocratic and Aryan Catholicism of the Nazi-Vatican Concordat.
It was June 1972. George Mc Govern was running for President and he was campaigning in the New York Democratic Primary. I campaigned for George Mc Govern with one of Robert Kennedy’s children, sweet Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. (I marched next to her with a big sign and exuberantly shouted, every 15 seconds, “Meet Kathleen Kennedy.”) On the Northwest Corner of 5th Avenue and 86th Street, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a woman screamed at her, saying that her Father, dear, sweet and recently departed Robert Kennedy, was a nigger-lover who had deserved to get shot.