Cheryl Hines: Navigating Life as the Wife of a Controversial Presidential Candidate
It’s Christmas at the Kennedys’, and a happy sort of chaos has upended the family home, nestled in the affluent L.A. enclave of Mandeville Canyon.
Conor, 29, the heartthrob son once romantically linked to Taylor Swift, has emerged from the backyard sauna and is wandering around the house in a towel. His striking sister, Kyra, 28 — a fashionista and “Page Six” regular back in her party days — is fussing over their father, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 69, in preparation for today’s photo shoot.
Amid this flurry of activity, affecting an air of regal calm as best as she can, stands Cheryl Hines. Hines, 58, has been Kennedy’s wife since 2014 — a second marriage for her and a third for him. Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, mother to Conor, Kyra and two other sons — Finn, 26, and Aiden, 22 — died by suicide in 2012. Hines now oversees a blended family that also includes her own daughter, Catherine Young, 19.
Not 24 hours earlier, Kennedy — who is running as an independent for president (and polling higher than expected, with 1 in 5 Americans saying they are open to voting for him) — was in the hot seat for a combative CNN interview that challenged his highly controversial views on vaccine safety. Right now, however, he’s debating the merits of beige versus blue dress shirts.
It was not so long ago that Hines was best known for being someone else’s wife — that of Larry David on the long-running HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. That TV marriage ended in season six, after her Curb alter ego had reached her limit with her husband’s mortifying public antics. (The final straw: She called him from what she thought was a crashing airplane, but Larry only wanted to ask her questions about the DVR.)
Hines isn’t anywhere close to that point with her real-life husband, however, despite his own penchant for mortifying public antics. All of this fringe-minded controversy spilling over into predominantly liberal and groupthink-minded Hollywood has, not surprisingly, put stresses on Hines’ social standing around town. Nonetheless, Cheryl and Bobby, as most everyone in Kennedy’s orbit calls him, remain deeply in love and are committed to heading down the road together, hand in hand, wherever it leads. Even the White House.
Just weeks after Hines made her debut appearance as a potential first lady — introducing her husband as someone who “stood for the little guy” at an Oct. 9 campaign rally in Philadelphia — David announced that the upcoming 12th season of Curb, set to debut on HBO and Max on Feb. 4, will be its last.
Hines says none of this was planned and that if she had her way, Curb would keep on going. A small part of her holds out hope that it still could. (The show took a six-year hiatus, after all, between seasons eight and nine.) “Going into production, we were told most likely it will be the last season,” she later tells me in a frank three-hour conversation. “But since season one, Larry has said, ‘This is probably the last season.’ Until I saw it in black and white — when the press release went out — I didn’t want to believe it.”
Yet here she is, leaping from one precipice — bidding adieu to the role that transformed her from a struggling bartender into a star — into something vastly scarier: playing the good wife to a presidential candidate, with all the mudslinging and safety concerns that implies.
“I’m taking more precautions than ever,” Hines says of her new elevated profile as a candidate’s wife, especially since a mentally ill intruder broke into the home. “I was here doing an Instagram Live, and I look out the window and see a guy in our backyard. Then I see our security person intercept him and reach for his weapon.” The man was found to be wearing a fake police badge and had apparently sent hundreds of emails threatening Kennedy. He since has been released from jail and the family has a restraining order against him. Despite that, no Secret Service detail has yet been assigned to Kennedy — a decision ultimately made by the secretary of Homeland Security. “You would think that instance, plus the fact that his father and uncle were both assassinated, would qualify him,” she says.
Kennedy, an admitted former womanizer and heroin addict, is a special-case candidate in more ways than one. At his first campaign announcement (back in April, when he was running as a Democrat), he told a crowded ballroom, “I told my wife the other day, I said, ‘I got
