Sweet Caroline – And Me, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

January 24, 2009 Martha Thomases 8 Comments

Caroline Kennedy withdrew from the competition to be the next Senator from the state of New York.  Her public statement says that she does this for “personal reasons.”  The media speculate that she’s worried about her uncle’s health.

They’re wrong.  She’s doing it because of me.

Not many people know about our decades-long rivalry.  It started when we were little girls, Caroline in The White House in Washington, DC and me on Selma Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio.  She did cute things and got on network television.  I did cute things and got on “The Seaweed Sam Show” on local television for my birthday.

Everyone thought she was pretty, with her blonde curls.  My hair was getting darker.

And then, she got a pony.

I wasn’t allowed to get a dog until I was ten years old, and Caroline Kennedy gets a pony.  This was war.  I would not rest until I got as much attention, and as much cool stuff, as she did.

You would think that Caroline, who had only her powerful family, the Secret Service and a load of money, would realize that would never be able to best me.  My family didn’t have anyone in government, but we did have weekly squirt gun fights, and the rabbi lived just two doors away.  God and good aim were on my side.  I would ride that pony one day.

November 22, 1963, changed everything.  The assassination of John Kennedy made me feel terrible.  Had my hostile feelings somehow inspired Lee Harvey Oswald, even though I didn’t know him, was only ten years old, and never said anything out loud?  I had a dog, and my dog was fantastic, and now Caroline didn’t have a father.  I would try to let it go.

For a few years, I did let it go.  I would see her picture in the tabloids, as the paparazzi tormented her mother.  When Jackie married Aristotle Onassis, Caroline was often photographed in a yacht, or on the streets of some exotic European metropolis.  Even though these seemed like fun activities, I knew that having my own dad was better.

Caroline, with her gorgeous mother and handsome brother, gained some weight when she was in college.  So did I, with a gorgeous mother and no brother.  However, she was at Harvard, and was laughed at by the staff of the Harvard Lampoon, gags that were reprinted in other magazines.  I was grateful for my own anonymity.

However, she also got an internship at the New York Daily News and then got to write for Rolling Stone magazine.  I didn’t.  More than anything, I wanted to go to New York City and work for someone glamorous.  Instead, I went to Rifton, New York, and worked for an anti-war underground magazine.  Caroline might have met Mick Jagger, Pete Hamill or Bob Dylan.  I met Allen Ginsburg, John Hall and Pete Seeger.

I married six years before she did, and my husband was cuter.  However, I bet she got better wedding presents.

We had our kids, and I stopped paying that much attention.  Sure, when she was on my television, promoting some book she wrote, I would mutter that I could sell more books if my name was “Kennedy.”  She seemed serious about her writing, however, and she didn’t choose easy subjects.  If she really wanted to exploit her position for money, she would have written trashy novels, not new versions of Profiles in Courage.

Her recent work for the New York City public schools earned my final and complete respect.  Caroline raised millions of dollars for our seriously under-funded classrooms, and she did it out of the spotlight, with no behind-the-scenes payback.  Our school system is a political battlefield, and she more than held her own.

I enjoyed watching her.  She seems like a real person.  She hasn’t pumped up her face full of Botox.  She looks like any other New York mom (albeit one with excellent bone structure and slim hips), dressed comfortably and stylishly.

Was she the best person to be Senator?  I don’t know.  I don’t think she was the worst.  True, she didn’t do a very good job in her interviews, stammering and uncertain.  I’m not so good out loud, either, which is why I write. And the other people mentioned for the position are, for the most part, also good folks.  She’s going to let one of them be Chuck Schumer’s junior.

Caroline knew that, as long as I have this column here on Michael Davis World, I had edged ahead of her on the career front.  She decided she could no longer compete, and withdrew.  It was the honorable thing to do.

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Media Goddess Martha Thomases is now mature enough to realize that a pony isn’t the best pet to keep in a Greenwich Village apartment, nor would a pony be as amusing as her cat on a day-to-day basis.