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matrıarch W the makings of a BEHIND THE SCENES WITH DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER RORY KENNEDY ON THE MAKING OF HBO'S PEEK INSIDE THE KENNEDY DYNASTY, ETHEL. BY EVE ZIBART hen she first appeared on the public stage, Ethel Skakel Kennedy had Hollywood-starlet glamour and a sun- nier and more exuberant spirit than her cool, elegant sister-in-law, Jacqueline, the follow into the White House. Ethel was irreverent, fearless, funny, and famously fecund: In a clip from the pre-PC 1960s, she is introduced by talk show host Jack Paar on his popular TV show as "the lovely little girl here, mother of seven, who has given birth to her own precinct." (He redeemed himself later, calling her "one of the 10 most admired women in the world.") She also might almost be called the forgotten Kennedy, because she has ducked the spotlight for decades—no easy feat in the most closely watched family in American his- tory. But more than 40 years after Robert F. Kennedy ran for president, Ethel Kennedy, his widow and mother of a famously rambunctious and socially conscious brood of 11, is finally get- ting her due in a 97-minute documentary, Ethel, directed by her youngest child, Rory. "I think everyone fantasizes about the questions we wanted to ask [our parents]," Rory, 43, says in a phone interview. "We don't all have the time and opportunity to get that closure." While making the film, Rory says, she didn't learn anything that shifted her relationship the project gave her "a deeper understanding" of her family. Until Ethel, Rory Kennedy, often in collaboration with her screenwriter husband, Mark Bailey, has focused her documentaries on social issues such as AIDS, domestic abuse, poverty, and nuclear power. Her film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib won an Emmy in 2007; Killing in the Name, a film about mother." But because her mother's life was so intimately tied to one of the signal periods in American history—encompassing the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of RFK, JFK, and with her "mother or siblings, or surprised me emotionally." But she admits Martin Luther King Jr.—the documentary became more than that. It seems odd that with such a trove of material at home, a successful filmmaker with more than two dozen documentaries under her belt would wait so long to make this film. The main problem was that Ethel hadn't granted an interview in decades, and Rory fully expected her to refuse. "I think she only said yes because I'm her daughter." terrorism, was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. It was HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins who championed her latest project after meeting Ethel herself at the premiere of another of Rory's films. Ethel, which took a year to complete, airs this month on HBO. It debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in January and has been shown at a handful of other film festivals, including Berkshire International and Nantucket, where Rory's brother Doug presented her with the festival's Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling award. 108 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM And Ethel didn't make it easy. "Why should I have to answer all these questions?" Ethel asked. "Well, we're making a documentary about you," Rory answered. In the film, Ethel laughs. "That's a bad idea." Fortunately, as Rory points out, she also had siblings to interview, "and there are a lot of them." The family interviews took place over five days at the family compound in Hyannis Port in 2011, but for the finished film, Rory went through some 100 hours of newsreel and archival film, family photos ("Mummy had 16,000 photographs at Hickory Hill alone that we had to go Ethel received standing ovations at Sundance and Nantucket, and it's easy to see why. As well as being icons of liberal reform, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy—with their combination of witty charm, eloquence, and sex appeal, framed by their photogenic families—still light up the screen. In 1968 RFK was widely expected to carry the Kennedy standard back into the First Lady she once seemed destined to White House. Seeing the crowds surging around the candidates and the national mourning after the deaths of the two brothers only five years apart recaptures an era of both great optimism and deep national division that is permanently etched ("Where were you when…?") into the memory of anyone who lived through that tumultuous time. "I never knew my father. I was raised by my mother." —RORY KENNEDY The film is also a reminder of Ethel Kennedy's personal courage. Standing only a few feet from her husband when he was shot point-blank by Sirhan Sirhan, Ethel, then three months pregnant with Rory, pushed through the crowd crying for a doctor, then returned and cradled Robert's head. She, Jackie, his sisters Jean and Pat, and Jean's husband, Stephen Smith, were with him when he died more than 20 hours later. Rory says she wanted the film to primarily be a personal story about her mother's relationship with RFK and with her children. "Because I was born six months after he died, I never knew my father," says Rory at the start of the film. "I was raised by my