‘She was my friend, confidante, and my partner in recovery,’ he wrote. ‘Joan inspired me with her courage and humility. She was one of the first prominent women in America to publicly acknowledge her struggles with alcoholism and depression, a move that she felt was essential to breaking the silence and tackling the taboo of addiction in the 1970s.
‘Her honesty and candor, and her ability to successfully recreate her life in Boston, a community that supported her privacy and embraced her recovery, made her an inspiration to countless other women facing similar challenges. She encouraged many family members in early sobriety.’
Born Virginia Joan Bennett on 2 September 1936, in New York City, Joan was raised as a Roman Catholic by her parents, Virginia Joan Stead and Harry Wiggin Bennett Jr. The latter was president of the Joseph Katz advertising company, and in her youth, Joan acted in a number of television commercials, including for Coca-Cola and Revlon. It was as a student at Manhattanville College that she met the Kennedy family, studying alongside her future sisters-in-law, Jean and Ethel Kennedy.
In a moment that seems to summarise the so-called ‘Kennedy Curse’, Joan was introduced to her future husband, Ted, in October 1957, at the dedication of her school gymnasium to Kathleen Kennedy, who had died in a plane crash nine years earlier. During the ceremony, Jean put Joan in contact with Ted, who was studying law at the University of Virginia at the time.
Joan with her husband, Ted, and brother-in-law, John, at her wedding reception in 1958
Bachrach/Getty Images