On a Campaign Trail for the Classics : Author: Joan Kennedy’s new book demystifies the subject of classical music. A memoir demystifying her own life, she says, won’t appear till she’s 90.

Joan Kennedy opens the door wearing a blue jogging suit and no makeup. She settles into a chintz sofa beside windows overlooking the Charles River.

At her elbow, a shelf holds books written and signed by friends such as the late Carl Sandburg and Norman Mailer. Photographs crowd the piano top. There’s Joan, singing Christmas carols with the Kennedy family at Hyannisport. There she is dancing with Jack Kennedy at her wedding, while Bobby asks to cut in.

Since her 1981 divorce from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), she has earned her master’s degree in education and taught in Boston’s public schools; performed as a pianist and narrator for orchestras, including the Boston Pops, and engaged in highly publicized struggles with alcoholism.

Now, Kennedy, 56, is on the campaign trail again as she was many times for Kennedy candidates, but this time for her own book. Doubleday has just published “The Joy of Classical Music: A Guide for You and Your Family,” her first book, which intersperses anecdotes about her girlhood and life with the Kennedys with information about music and how to introduce it to children.

Kennedy has toured for the book in New York and Washington and will give interviews by satellite to other cities. “We’ve started with a first printing of 50,000,” says Doubleday Editor Nan A. Talese. “Joan’s approach to classical music is superb--demystifying.”

While part autobiography, the book, five years in the writing, is no tell-all. Revelations about her famous in-laws are confined to such gentle observations as that John Kennedy couldn’t sing in tune. Someday she will write her memoirs, she says. “But I think I’m going to wait until I’m 90 years old. Because then I’ll feel safe about writing everything truthfully. I can’t talk about my experiences because I have to think about my children. I don’t want to speak publicly about a lot of what took place. And it just isn’t time.”

In her antique-filled living room, Joan Kennedy begins to talk about her book in the soft, unassuming voice familiar to music lovers who caught her PBS narrations of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” and Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.”

“I wrote the book,” she says, “because I wanted to share my love and enthusiasm for classical music. There’s an old saying: ‘If you want to keep it, you have to give it away.’ ”

Her good friend, the late Leonard Bernstein, encouraged her to write for the musical neophyte. Bernstein added that she could do a better job than he. She was flattered, Kennedy says, until he said, “ ‘People will buy your book because you’re just a nice, unintimidating, middle-aged lady.’

“And he thought it was a compliment,” she says, laughing.

Kennedy’s love of music is lifelong. She was born Joan Bennett, in Bronxville, N.Y., in 1936, the daughter of a successful advertising executive who loved the theater and music.

“I was a very serious, shy and studious child,” she says. “I started piano lessons when I was 5 and continued until I was 21. Music was always playing in our home. And music became very important to me. As I grew up, playing the piano at recitals gave me an opportunity for expression that I found difficult otherwise.”

In her senior year at Manhattanville College in 1957, she was introduced to Ted Kennedy by his sister Jean. Joan Bennett had never heard of the Kennedys; John was still a junior senator, not yet well-known.

“When I married Ted in 1958,” she recalls, “it wasn’t as dramatic as it might seem--it was more like marrying the boy next door.”

As Ted Kennedy’s wife, she traveled throughout the country campaigning when Jack ran for President (“I liked him very much,” she says. “He didn’t take himself too seriously.”) and in 1980 for her husband’s presidential campaign.

Music continued to play an important role as she performed at political rallies, benefits, fund-raisers and in private homes. It was her music that provided her special niche within the Kennedy family.

In the book she recalls that Jack Kennedy loved to sing. “Jack had a lot of enthusiasm,” she writes, “but not a great sense of pitch. He kept wandering from key to key, so I had to keep transposing to keep up with him.”

Kennedy says she has learned to be philosophical about her decision to divorce, as she is about Ted Kennedy’s remarriage this year and about her problems with alcohol that put her back in the headlines most recently when she was arrested for drunk driving in 1991.

“When you’re trying to come back from something that was very upsetting,” she says, “you have to think it over, try harder, you can’t take things for granted. I’ve been in therapy, and it has given me a little more insight, but I don’t think therapy alone does it for anyone. Mistakes, for lack of a better word, have been a helpful learning tool.

“I am in contact with supportive friends who remind me I can come through the good times. I am taking better care of myself now, and I take time out for myself. Last night I went to my health club and had a nice long swim and sauna. I walk everywhere. Growth takes time and effort, and recently, growth has been faster than usual.”

This year Ted Kennedy married Victoria Reggie, a woman 18 years Joan Kennedy’s junior. Joan Kennedy has met her on several occasions, the first time on a plane ride from Boston to Nantucket. She describes Reggie as likable.

“It wasn’t difficult for me when Teddy remarried,” she says. “I thought maybe it would be, but you see, we’d been separated for 10 years. That’s a long time. It’s not like he remarried right after our divorce.

“We had a chance to get to be good friends with each other. I believe in his politics--local politics, world politics. I think he’s a very good public servant. Among all his detractors, I don’t think anyone would say he wasn’t a good senator. He sticks to his beliefs even when liberalism is not in vogue.”

Does she still love him?

“Well, I was married 25 years,” she answers. “That’s a long time.”

Although no longer living in the glare of publicity that surrounded the Kennedys, there are still public appearances on behalf of her family.

“When I divorced,” she says, “I thought I’d never have to campaign again in my life. But my son, Patrick, is a state representative in Providence. Believe it or not, here I am, 10 years later, campaigning in Rhode Island, shaking hands, making speeches and meeting people with him.

“It’s a lot more fun being the mother of a candidate than the wife of a candidate,” she says. “All the world loves a mother. You can tell people how wonderful your son is, how proud you are of him, and no one can really criticize you for bragging.”

Kennedy’s daughter, Kara, lives in Washington and works for Very Special Arts, an organization that teaches arts to the physically and mentally disabled. Teddy Jr. works in New Haven, Conn., on a program to protect poor children from lead poisoning.

Today she tries to balance public, private and family life. She spends summers and weekends in the fall at her home in Hyannisport.

“I see a lot of my in-laws,” she says. “We’re very close because we’ve shared so much over the past 34 years; our children are also best friends. We share a kind of trust that you just can’t find outside the family. I feel I have the best of all worlds.

“I have family, three terrific kids and I see a lot of them, and my public life, which I’m about to embark on with a book-signing tour, but then I come home here to my very quiet world where I live alone, and I like it.”

Kennedy says she ended a two-year relationship last Christmas. “But I’ve been so busy with my book,” she says, “it’s OK not having a love interest.

“I feel that I’m in a very good place right now, and I feel that I’ve never stopped growing. I hope that it will continue. I’m thrilled that my book is finally being published. I have to pinch myself once in a while because I can’t believe my good fortune. As for the future, the sky’s the limit.”

Starting Kids Out on the Right Note

Here are some of Joan Kennedy’s tips on how to interest children in music, from her book “The Joy of Classical Music: A Guide for You and Your Family.”

* Play classical radio or records often at home so that your children accept it as part of daily life.

* Children need to see how music is made. When they are too small to go to live performances, make music with them. If you can’t play an instrument, sing. Buy them musical toys. Show them music videos.

* Educate them by reading. There are many children’s books about music and adaptations for children of the stories of operas and ballets.

* Make musical performances as usual an outing as a movie or a ballgame. For young children, a story ballet or an outdoor concert is a good first choice. Many community musical programs are low-cost or free and more casual in ambience than a major concert hall.

* In a concert hall, sit in the balcony. Children like to see the whole orchestra, especially the percussion in the back. And be ready to leave. It’s better for children to enjoy an hour than to be forced to sit until the concert becomes an unhappy experience.

* Lessons on an instrument are not the only way to start a child’s musical skills. There are early childhood groups that feature fun with music such as the Orff program.

* The piano is the best beginning instrument for learning musical structure; also, because its pitches are fixed, a child can create a beautiful sound more quickly. However, let your child choose an instrument that appeals and be open to change if the child wants a different instrument later.

* Take great care in choosing a teacher who understands children. Your aim is a musically literate child who enjoys playing, not turning out the next Itzhak Perlman.