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Set behind a newly constructed, six-foot cedar fence, the President's eleven-room, five-bathroom summer White House reflects the tastes of Jackie Kennedy. Yellow. Jackie's favorite color, dominates the decor. The walls are light and are hung with seascape paintings, including a few of Jackie's own, and one determined primitive by the President himself, showing the Riviera port of Villefranche.
Far more crowded than either the Big House or the summer White House is Bobby Kennedy's twelve-room cottage: some of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's seven children have to double up. Because the children spend so much time out of doors, Ethel has made their playroom over into a brightly colored second living room. In every bedroom are bunches of petunias, snapdragons, gladioli and cosmos from the Kennedys' carefully tended flower gardens. At night, hurricane lamps light the dining room.
Children & Charts. Not far from the compound is the summer home of Stephen and Jean Kennedy Smith, who also maintain a rented home in Georgetown. Only a mile and a half away is Edward Kennedy's newly bought ten-room cottage on Squaw Island. The house is typically Kennedy Eclectic—Modern and Early American. For a better view of the ocean, Joan Kennedy and her decorator had one wall removed and replaced with sliding glass doors. Two rooms remain to be decorated, but Joan and Ted Kennedy are waiting until the birth of their second child in November before they select the colors for the baby's room.
To the 19 Kennedy grandchildren, the best places at Hyannisport are the tennis court, the dock and the newest social center, the trampoline. The mothers—Jackie, Ethel, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Pat Kennedy Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith—have divided the children into two groups to avoid confusion and to make swimming, riding and sailing lessons easier: Group I includes the children in the six-to-nine age bracket: Group II. those aged five and under. A master chart details where which children are supposed to go on which days at what time. Despite her youth, Caroline Kennedy has one advantage over all the rest of the children: she has her own Secret Service man, one of whose unexpected chores was to sing a song about "Little Peter Rabbit," with appropriate rabbit gestures, during a sailing expedition.
Manors & Estates. Outdoor living is also stressed at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's 15-room, seven-acre estate, Hickory Hill, in McLean. Va. Once the Civil War headquarters of Union General George McClellan. Hickory Hill has two swimming pools, a tennis court, pony stables and, says one visitor, "the only treehouse in the world that looks as if it were designed by an architect." A major attraction of the house is the huge kitchen, which might have been lifted out of the pages of Gone With the Wind; it has no chrome or eye-level ovens, but an old gas stove large enough to have turned out food for a whole regiment of McClellan's troops. Actually, the kitchen does not get as much use as it might; because the press of his duties so often makes him miss dinner at home. Bobby Kennedy once a week herds Ethel and the children to a nearby Howard Johnson's for a family treat of hot dogs and ice cream.