Joan Kennedy Promotes Her Book: Classical Music Makes a Difference : Profile: Camelot may have been disappointing to her, but she remembers a richer music, and would like the rest of America to enjoy it with her.

Joan Kennedy remembers the piano which she met at age 5. With gratefulness.

She played piano for Jack Kennedy, her former husband’s brother, during his campaign for President.

In 1968, she played piano for brother-in-law husband Robert F. Kennedy when he ran for President. “He took me with him and encouraged me,” she says. “He had a theme, ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ the Woody Guthrie song. I’d play that on the piano and everybody would come in, feeling really great about everything.

“It seems like a long time ago, but it’s part of my memories,” she says softly.

Now her status is that of a listener who enjoys.

She has taken the road on her own behalf, promoting a new book, “The Joy of Classical Music: a Guide for You and Your Family.” (Doubleday, $22.50).

As she sits for an interview, her hair blond and fluffy, she’s wearing a purple suit with gold and green embellishments. The expression on her face says she’s eager to be helpful.

Her message is: “Beautiful music is going to make a difference in somebody’s life.”

She is talking to people who would like to get into classical music but don’t know much about it and people who’d like to expose their children to classical music but don’t know how.

The book, she says, was the idea of the late Leonard Bernstein. “He thought there should be a book to encourage people who know nothing about classical music,” she says. “He thought if he wrote the book people would be intimidated.

“He said, ‘If you write the book, people will not be intimidated. . . . You’re just another nice middle-aged lady.’ ”

Accustomed to being called glamorous and youthful, she laughs. “He thought that was a compliment. I couldn’t believe it.”

Kennedy, 56, does write from the standpoint of a layman. Though she has narrated such orchestral pieces as “Peter and the Wolf” and “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” where the speaker must come in on the right beat. She has played piano at benefits, but she still calls herself an amateur musician.

The first part of the book is autobiographical, with emphasis on music. It begins with music playing in the house when she was growing up, the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall concerts on the radio and 78 r.p.m. records playing Chopin piano concertos.

“There’s a lot of advice in my book,” she says.

It comes from her lifelong love affair with music. The piano came first, then violin lessons and singing with her high school choir.

As to when to start fostering a child’s interest in music, Kennedy says, begin at birth. Start by singing or humming lullabies to a baby and give an infant musical toys.

“Play classical music when they’re in the nursery; don’t wait till they’re in first grade,” she says. “They get used to hearing all those beautiful sounds.”

Music is uplifting when things are going well and music was a consolation, too, at the deaths of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, when son Teddy lost a leg to bone cancer 15 years ago, and when she and Sen. Ted Kennedy separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984.

“I do advise listening to music when you’re in grief,” Kennedy says. “Music has given me a lot of courage to carry on.”

All of her children listened to classical music at home. Kara, now 32, is married to an architect, living in Washington and working for Very Special Arts. Ted Jr., 31, is working on an anti-lead program for poor children in New Haven, Conn., and Patrick, 25, is a third-term state representative in Rhode Island.

“My children took piano lessons,” she says. “After a year or two, they stopped. They still thank me for the fact they had some introduction to classical music and learned how to read music.

“A lot of children resist taking music lessons at first. After a year or so, they love it. Or, if they aren’t entirely excited about the whole thing, they can stop.

“Many people listen to one radio station and don’t know what their choices are. I want people to know there are choices available to them. If you like Sinatra singing beautiful melodies, you’ll like Puccini arias.”

One of Kennedy’s strong desires is to get music back into elementary schools that have dropped it. She thinks parents and teachers can promote that. “I think PTAs still have some influence with school committees.”

RCA Victor has put out a recording with the same title as Kennedy’s book and the same photo of her at her piano. The book includes an RCA CD with eight different selections.

Kennedy advises not taking children to concerts too young. If you take tiny ones, leave when they tire of it even if it isn’t over. She advises balcony seats--cheaper anyway--for children at a symphony concert. They can look down onto all the orchestra players instead of just straight ahead at the front row.

She took Patrick, at 14, to hear Luciano Pavarotti and later they met the singer backstage. “He thought he was a neat guy,” she recalls. “He told his older brother how great Pavarotti was. Teddy Jr. told his father. The next thing you know, Sen. Kennedy had Pavarotti tapes in the car.”

Among her own friends in Boston are some who didn’t listen to classical music. So Kennedy took them with her to the Boston Symphony. “Now they’re subscribers,” she says proudly.

Kennedy doesn’t mention her fight against alcohol in her book, but she answers questions about it.

“There’s a lot of stress in politics,” she says. “But there’s wonderful forgiveness from people. They wrote in offering support.

“I began to fight it in 1978. It has been hard. It has been quite a long time. It is easier now. I have all this support, from family and also everybody. I get letters from people I don’t know. They say, ‘Keep going ahead, doing what you’re doing.’ That is really nice.”