By: Stephanie Ward
Texas Metro News
Jayne Kennedy’s name was synonymous with beauty. People would say she was cute, but she was not Jayne Kennedy. That kind of recognition followed Kennedy from Ohio to Hollywood. She became a media darling, appearing on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, traveling with Bob Hope to entertain American troops during the Vietnam War, and moving between television, movies, magazine covers and national advertising campaigns. Then came the CBS sports desk.
When Kennedy joined The NFL Today in 1978, women were still unusual in national sports broadcasting, and Black women were nearly invisible. She became the first Black woman in that role, working alongside Brent Musburger, Irv Cross and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder on one of television’s most recognizable sports programs.
From the outside, it looked like a remarkable climb. In Plain Jayne, Kennedy lets readers see what it felt like from the inside.
Kennedy will bring that story to North Texas this Saturday, Oct. 3, as a special guest at the 25th annual Sister to Sister Fitness Festival in Cedar Hill. She is scheduled to sign copies of her memoir. The public is invited to the festival, which runs from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Alan E. Sims Cedar Hill Recreation Center, 310 E. Parkerville Road.
The memoir is not simply a list of accomplishments. Kennedy takes readers backstage to the people in the room, the moments after the cameras stopped, the famous faces she met and the opportunities that appeared unexpectedly, then sometimes disappeared just as quickly.
. Kennedy arrived in Hollywood at 19, young enough that much of what would become her extraordinary life was still unimaginable. Within weeks, she was working on Laugh-In and preparing to travel overseas with Bob Hope to entertain troops.
One opportunity led to another: television, film, sports, advertising, fitness. Kennedy kept walking through doors that had rarely opened for Black women before her.
She hosted Greatest Sports Legends. She joined The NFL Today. She acted in and helped produce Body and Soul, earning an NAACP Image Award for her performance. Later, she created, wrote and hosted Love Your Body, becoming a major presence during the home-fitness boom. Her career moved so easily between sports, acting, modeling, television and fitness that she never fit neatly into a single category.
Neither does the book. Part Hollywood memoir, part family story and part reckoning with a life lived in public, Plain Jayne moves between the glamorous and the deeply personal. Some of Kennedy’s most memorable stories have nothing to do with a television studio. They belong to Muhammad Ali, whom she first met in Los Angeles in 1974. He spotted her across a crowded room, called her over, and a friendship began that would last more than 15 years.
By the time Ali fought Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila, Kennedy and her then-husband, Leon, were close enough to be invited along. She was 23, weeks shy of turning 24. The spectacle was international, but Kennedy remembers the personal joke Ali played: he told foreign reporters that she was his wife, Belinda. Photographs of the two of them, and the joke, made their way into newspapers overseas.
The moments she holds closest are quieter. At Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, she sat beside him on a pile of logs and listened, saying she “was a sponge, just soaking in all of his wisdom.” She remembers him carrying their luggage, driving them to the airport and loading the bags onto the plane himself.
Then there was the day Kennedy found the world-famous boxer sitting alone on the hood of his Rolls-Royce at the Los Angeles airport. When she asked what he was doing there, he told her, “I was just sitting at home and decided to come out and sign some autographs.”
Years later, Kennedy saw Ali outside a Los Angeles nightclub and ran to embrace her old friend. He did not recognize her. After years of laughter, travel and access to his private world, that encounter was painful. The man she had known was still there, but the connection between them was gone because of his illness.
Kennedy writes about growing up in Ohio, leaving home and entering an entertainment industry she had to learn almost on the run. She recalls the people and opportunities that shaped her, but she also writes about the experiences that changed the course of her life.
One of the hardest is the private recording of intimate moments with her husband that where stolen and made public without her consent. The tape became a scandal. Contracts disappeared. Opportunities ended. A woman who had spent years building a career found herself being discussed for something she had never chosen to share.
Kennedy has been careful about how she describes the episode: the recording was private, made within her marriage and never intended for anyone else to see. In Plain Jayne, she writes about the shame she carried, her retreat from public life and the role her children played in helping her move forward.
For years, other people told that story. In the memoir, Kennedy finally tells it herself. She began working on her life story around 2000, initially trying to make sense of her experiences and preserve what she had learned for her daughters. The manuscript spent years looking for a publisher before becoming the book she wanted to write.
Some of its most affecting pages are about what came afterward: motherhood, pulling away from the spotlight and the work of healing. Kennedy came to understand that moving forward meant not only forgiving the people who had harmed her, but forgiving herself.
At 74, she is filling in the blanks—not just about the famous years, but about the girl from Ohio, the young woman finding her footing in Los Angeles, the mother who stepped away from the spotlight and the person she became after it.
Kennedy’s appearance at Sister to Sister is fitting for another reason. The Celebrating Life Foundation created the festival 25 years ago around the health and well-being of Black women. The annual gathering combines breast-cancer education, early detection, fitness, survivor stories and community support. This year’s theme is “Unstoppable Together.” The Oct. 3 festival will include a 1K and 5K, fitness activities, health education, music and programs for survivors, caregivers and families.
Kennedy’s connection to fitness stretches back to Love Your Body. Her advocacy for women’s health is personal, too. Recalling her experience with endometriosis and her work to raise awareness, she said:
“Having suffered from endometriosis myself back in the 1980s before the medical profession really understood what it was, I became the national spokesperson for the organization and advocated for more research into the disease and helped raise awareness and generate millions of dollars to the cause. I continue to speak out on behalf of women’s health care especially Black women who, it has been clinically proven, do not receive the same standard of care by medical professionals as do white women.” Kennedy arrives in Cedar Hill with a story about more than physical strength. It is about what happens when life does not unfold according to the image everyone else has of you and what it takes to claim that story for yourself.
