Have you ever noticed how the females in the Kennedy family so often seem to find the absolute worst men to hook up with — mates who turn out to be mirror images of the horrible, sleazy, philandering, domestic-abusing males the Kennedy women grew up with.
The latest example of a typical Kennedy in-law is “embattled” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who used to be married to Kerry Kennedy, one of RFK’s daughters.
But Cuomo is only the most recent in a long line of cads, bounders and lowlifes who have bedded Kennedy gals — Peter Lawford, Steve Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others.
They all had one thing in common: While married to Kennedy women, they were touching everything but the third rail.
What was the attraction for these Kennedy women?
Were they looking for somebody like Dear Old Dad, or Dear Old Grand Dad, meaning Joe Kennedy, who raped movie starlets, and who once jumped uninvited into bed with one of his sons’ girlfriends and grunted, “This is something you’re never going to forget!”
Certainly, Andrew Cuomo’s young female staffers will never forget working for him.
On the other hand, maybe it was Cuomo’s sparkling intellect that first drew Kerry’s attention to him. Here is Cuomo’s analysis Friday of the charges against him:
“Serious allegations should be weighed seriously, right? That’s why they are called serious.”
Seriously, though, as Cuomo circles the drain, it seems odd that he’s been run out of office for behavior that, while boorish, is not criminal, unlike what other prominent Democrat politicians — say, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden — have been accused of.
And his fellow Democrat politicians seem much more appalled by his crude Kennedy-esque come-ons than by the 15,000 dead in the state’s nursing homes and his subsequent cover-up to avoid a federal criminal investigation.
The Cuomo-Kennedy marriage broke up in 2002 after she took up with a trust-funded polo player. But he seems to have been playing the field as well, if you can believe the latest New York magazine story, which includes an anecdote about Randy Andy way back when coming on to an unnamed woman “a few feet from where his then-wife was standing.”
How very JFK-like!
In this latest scandal, Kerry Kennedy seems to be the only woman in Cuomo’s sordid life who has not been interviewed.
They have three twenty-something daughters, and you have to feel sorry for those kids — in the modern tradition of the Beautiful People, their parents inflicted upon them both family surnames, parted in the middle. Kennedy-Cuomo, or maybe it’s Cuomo-Kennedy.
Whatever, that lethal hyphenated combination adds up to probable cause to suspect the worst about them … about anything.
Cuomo is without a doubt a dreadful human being, but when it comes to bad Kennedy in-laws, does he really measure up?
Take Peter Lawford, for instance. Brother-in-Lawford, they called him, married to Pat Kennedy.
Took drugs with his son Chris and smoked weed on Air Force One. Lawford was an alcoholic, a drug addict, promiscuous, fond of menages a trois and prostitutes — and those were his good points.
He was JFK’s favorite brother-in-law, mainly because he supplied the president with an endless stream of female companionship, shall we say.
By comparison, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a piker. Oh sure, he was both the governor of California and a major movie star. But what gave him gravitas in the Kennedy clan was that the family maid bore his child the same month in 1997 that his wife, Maria Kennedy Shriver, gave birth to his legitimate son.
Then there was Steve Smith, who married Jean Kennedy and abused her for the rest of his life.
As Teddy put it at Smith’s funeral, “Steve was like a brother in our family.”
You know, kinda like Tom Hagen was to the Corleones.
Smith was the fixer — he handled Chappaquiddick and later, the drug arrests, the OUI’s, the overturned Jeeps and the settlements, even the failed bar exams. It was Steve Smith who described one of the Kennedy kids as suffering “an affliction similar to drug addiction.”
In comparison, all Cuomo ever did was advise a woman young enough to be his granddaughter to get a tattoo on her rear end, so it could only be seen by … well, you know.
It looks like the end is near for Gov. Cuomo, and he’s only got one chance left to show that he absorbed some of that trademark Kennedy panache.
Governor, may I suggest a proper way to generate both sympathy for your plight and to offer an homage of sorts to your former in-laws?
When next you appear in public, probably Monday, on the Ides of March, be wearing a little something extra: Uncle Teddy’s neck brace from Chappaquiddick.
Some people may not get it, but your former in-laws will. It’ll tell the world just who you really are.
It might even win you the coveted Profiles in Courage award.
(To read more about the Kennedy family’s scandals, buy the books “Kennedy Babylon Vols. 1 and 2”)