Chappaquiddick film: What it was like to vacation at the 'Kennedy house'

I have no photos of my family's 1972 vacation in Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. But very likely, some total strangers do.

We'd see them from the living room window. They would stop their cars in front of our rented house, get out, snap-snap-snap with their cameras, and drive off. It happened at least every other day. "Another one," we'd say.

What they all wanted was a shot of the "Kennedy house."

This was three summers after the once-infamous, now half-forgotten "Chappaquiddick incident" — which returns to the cultural bloodstream this Friday with the release of the movie "Chappaquiddick." 

When did Chappaquiddick happen?

Jason Clarke plays Sen. Edward Kennedy, younger brother of John and Robert, son of millionaire businessman Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (Bruce Dern), and a likely presidential front-runner. That is, until the night of July 18, 1969, when he went to a party in a small house on Chappaquiddick, the tiny rural sister island off of Martha's Vineyard.

He left in a car with 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne (played by Kate Mara in the film). Sometime after 12:30 a.m., the car plunged off a narrow, one-lane bridge near the beach, and into a tidal channel. Kopechne drowned, Kennedy escaped. He did not report the incident to the police for 10 hours.

The house where Kennedy partied on that fatal night is called Lawrence Cottage. And that was the house, back in 1972, that some perverse real estate broker rented to my parents.

It was a small house, nondescript. The one detail we did notice, and remark on, was a long bar that ran the length of the living room. (Kennedy swore he was sober when he left the party.)

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What really happened at Chappaquiddick?

No one ever claimed — convincingly — that the Chappaquiddick incident was murder. But in other respects it was the O.J. case of its time. 

It involved death, celebrity and the question of whether there were different rules for the rich and well-connected. (Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and got a two-month suspended sentence.) The case spawned dozens of conspiracy theories, and a whole paperback book industry. Public fascination with it was insatiable.

Which is why, three years later, tourists were regularly stopping in front of our house. Usually while we were eating breakfast, I remember. 

What it came down to, basically, was this: We were having our family vacation at a crime scene.

A little over a mile away from the cottage was Dike Bridge, the rail-less wooden bridge from which Kennedy's car had plunged. The morbidly curious were there, too, at all hours, snapping pictures.

We kids would swim in Poucha Pond, the little estuary next to the bridge, with nervous excitement. What if our feet, sloshing around in the water, suddenly touched it — The Car? (It had long since been removed from the water, of course). 

Three miles away was the tiny ferry to Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard. It plied the channel that Kennedy claimed to have swum that night, after ferry service had stopped. We were reminded of the "incident" every time we took the ferry into town. And if by any chance we forgot, there were always the paperback books on the racks at the drug store. "Teddy Bare," I remember, was the title of one.

Tourists may have been agog, but lots of locals got sick of hearing about Kennedy, the bridge, the accident. Many probably still are. The movie "Chappaquiddick" was mostly filmed in Newburyport Mass. and Mexico. There may be a reason.

Chappaquiddick, and Martha's Vineyard, might have been forever tarred as the scene of the Kennedy affair had it not been for a happy accident. 

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A different Martha's Vineyard movie

Two years later in 1974, a film crew arrived at Martha's Vineyard. My brothers and I, back for the summer, would ride our bicycles past beaches where cabanas, lights, technicians, vans, and large crowds had been assembled. We would wonder — without too much interest — what was being filmed there.

What was being filmed there was "Jaws."

And as soon as that opened, in 1975, Martha's Vineyard ceased to be, in the popular mind, the island of errant politicians driving cars off of bridges. It became instead the island where gigantic man-eating sharks attack swimmers. People now pointed to the Chappaquiddick ferry, not as the place where Teddy Kennedy swam the 500-foot channel, but as the place where the mayor told Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) that "we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

Such is the power of movies. Let's see what happens when "Chappaquiddick" opens on Friday.

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com

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