by Paula Byrne
Rose stayed in her old bedroom, thinking about her future and, for a fortnight, nobody said a word to her. While there, she did agree to accompany Joe to the Ace of Clubs ball, an important event for her as she was President of the organization. Before she married Joe, Rose had founded a club for women who had studied abroad and were interested in current events. Every year she led the grand march in the charity ball.19 She was determined that, despite her marital problems, this year should be no different. It was business as usual. Though heavily pregnant, Rose looked stunning in her ‘black web dress’; one of the reasons she attended was to avoid being the subject of gossip. But after the dance the couple went their separate ways.
Shortly afterwards, her father came to talk and urged her to return to Joe. Divorce was never going to be an option. Rosie had made her choice, and she was going to have to live with it. ‘What is past is past,’ her father told her. ‘The old days are gone. Your children need you and your husband needs you. You can make things work out. I know you can.’20
When she cradled her small daughter, Kathleen Agnes, in her arms in February 1920, Rose knew that she had made the right decision to return to Joe. Just as she had experienced an epiphany at Blumenthal to dedicate her life to God and to marry Joe, she now resolved to become the perfect mother and wife. Like Marmee in her favourite book, Little Women, she would learn to suppress her anger.
Rose Kennedy would apply to motherhood the exacting standards that she brought to bear in her thwarted intellectual life. She would pour her vast reserves of energy and ambition into raising her children, a job she took very seriously: ‘I looked upon child-rearing as a profession and decided it was just as interesting and just as challenging as any profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.’
Furthermore, she wanted those children to be the best: ‘I had made up my mind to raise my children as perfectly as possible.’21 Rose would pay a huge price for her overweening ambition for her children. But she was steadfast in her beliefs: ‘what greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?’22
2
A Beautiful and Enchanting Child
All my ducks are swans . . . but Kick was especially special.
Joseph Kennedy
Kick was born, like her brother Jack and sister Rosemary, in the twin bed nearest the window in the upstairs master bedroom at 83 Beals Street in Brookline. From the start, Kathleen was a special baby. One of nine children, she would take on the status of eldest daughter, as a result of Rosemary’s special needs which made her forever a child.
Rose doted on her baby, but on the day that she was born, Jack, just two and a half, developed a serious case of scarlet fever and was hospitalized. In those days, as Rose recalled, it was a ‘dreaded disease, fairly often fatal, quite crippling in aftereffects’.1 Joe proved himself to be an exemplary father, praying for his son and spending hours in the Boston City Hospital. He had ‘never experienced any serious sickness in the family previous to this case of Jack’s’ and he had ‘little realized what an effect such a happening could possibly have’ on him.2
Jack of course did recover, and became particularly close to Kick. He returned home just before his third birthday, and he was shown his new baby sister. On the medical index cards that Rose kept for all of the children, she wrote that Jack seemed ‘very happy’ to see his sister.3 Physically Kick resembled him the most, with thick golden-brown hair and blue-grey eyes. She would not grow up to be conventionally beautiful. She had her mother’s strong jawline and short neck along with a somewhat square face that was unlike Rosemary’s (which was heart-shaped), but she was a striking girl with lovely ivory skin. Kick’s beauty was all within, and she would grow up to have the greatest sexual charisma of all the girls. Men would be utterly captivated by her.
She was a fearless toddler, always wanting to keep up with her two elder brothers in sports and physical activities. Rose noted in her journal that at the age of two and a half she went out in the snow by herself in her little sleigh.4 She was already exhibiting signs of the independent spirit that would define her life. In a diary fragment, Rose wrote that her three-year-old daughter was ‘a beautiful and enchanting child’, with the soft, high colouring and beautiful skin of her Kennedy grandmother: ‘Although we delighted in her, I don’t think we could have spoiled her if we had tried.’5
Rose Kennedy has sometimes been presented as a somewhat cold and uncaring mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was a strict disciplinarian (one had to be with nine lively children), but her journals show a different picture to the one that is sometimes perceived. She had a keen sense of humour, and she clearly took great pride and delight in her brood. Like many a Catholic mother, she especially adored her boys. She noted down all the amusing things that Joe and Jack did: ‘Joe Jr. and Jack have a new song about the Bed Bugs and the Cooties. Also a club where they initiate new members by sticking pins into them.’6 Another entry recorded: ‘Boys went to store and saw “No dogs allowed in this Restaurant” and they put in front of it “Hot”.’7
Kick was also naturally funny. When she was a toddler, her mother tried to discourage her from sucking her thumb in the night by binding it with a plaster. Rose noticed the next morning that it had been removed and when she asked where it was Kick replied innocently, ‘A little mouse took it.’8 Her first surviving letter was written to Santa Claus when she was six: ‘Dear Santa Claus i want a doll and a doll carriage tea set and paper doll little book and little blck board your little friend Kathleen.’9 Throughout her life, she adored writing letters, always scribbling at high speed, with frequent slips of the pen, regular spelling mistakes and occasional bad grammar (as far as possible, I reproduce her exact words in all quotations, only correcting where there is ambiguity of sense).
With so many children in the house, Christmas was a special time. Rose recalled that it was always ‘the greatest event in our house’.10 The children all helped to select the Christmas tree, ‘as big as our living room would allow’. Rose remembered them choosing presents carefully for one another, ‘a story-book with large colorful pictures’ for Jack, or a ‘wind-up toy’ or ‘for the baby of the moment, a rattle, or teething ring, or jingle bells’. Then the children would excitedly wrap them and hide everything away in secret places until Christmas Day.
Rose would tell them the Christmas Nativity story and the children would sing ‘Away in a Manger’, then on Christmas morning they would look to see what Santa had brought. The house looked like a Fifth Avenue toy-shop.11 She would also tell them the story about how her father had started the idea of public Christmas trees for those people who couldn’t afford to buy their own. Honey put up a Christmas tree in the middle of Boston Common, ‘and the idea spread, until thousands and thousands of cities and towns and villages all over the country have public Christmas trees every year’.12
Rose claimed that she was particularly close to her first four children. ‘I spent more time with them. I knew their every thought and each personality fascinated me,’ she declared in her memoirs.13 In an entry in her journal for 1923, she seems less enamoured: ‘Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great Life.’14
Rose, having made her decision to stick by Joe, was more content than she had been before, and she had all the trappings of wealth to reconcile her to the realities of her marriage. She took solace in her money and status. She was back, but it was to be on her own terms.
Joe had almost made his first million by the time Kick arrived. A few weeks after she was born, the Kennedy family moved into a large, newly built Colonial-revival house, at 131 Naples Road, which had all mod cons, including a washing machine and ice-box. Rose brought her cherished grand piano and her Sir Thomas Lipton crockery embellished with the Irish shamrock.
She had servants and a chauffeur. All the children had their own bedrooms, and so did she and so
did her husband. This was an important symbol of Rose and Joe’s increasingly separate lives. They also began vacationing apart, sometimes for months at a time. When they went to New York City, they always stayed at separate hotels.
The house had a wraparound porch, a key to Rose’s management of her ever-increasing brood: ‘the front porch is one of the greatest arrangements ever imagined for the benefit of mother and child’. She divided the porch into sections with folding gates, so that the children could play together but also be safe, and she could keep a close eye on them.15 The children were entertained by the ‘full panorama of neighborhood life . . . cars passing by, people walking along (many of them acquaintances who waved), the letter carrier, the milkman with his wire basket loaded full as he came to our house and empty as he left, the policeman passing by on his patrol, the grocery boy, tradesmen, visitors, and friends of all degrees and kinds – everybody with a smile and cheerful greeting for the children’.16
Kick’s first school was the Edward Devotion School, a five-minute walk from her family home. Joe, Jack, Rosemary and Kick all attended the school, though Rosemary was kept back from first grade and stayed in a class with younger children. She was rarely teased because she was so beautiful and innocent, and she had siblings to take care of her.
Rose Kennedy was a natural teacher. Indeed, she was probably a better teacher than a mother. Not coddling the children, or being overly affectionate, teaching them to be strong and independent, was part of her code. The children lived by a strict routine. Fresh air and exercise were high on the list. They were encouraged to take part in sports, especially swimming and tennis, to eat the right sorts of food, to read the right sorts of books, to contribute to the right sorts of discussions. Rose kept a close eye on their diets. She was obsessed with their weight, particularly the girls’. Every Saturday the children were weighed, and Rose scrupulously made a note of the latest figures on the index cards that contained all of their medical information. At the age of just seven, Kick wrote to her mother, ‘I gained a pound and a half. Eunice gained some too. Rose is as fat as ever.’17
Joe Kennedy wanted his family to be sleek and lean. He did not want his children to look like fat Irish peasants. The children were perfectly turned out, usually all of them dressed in the same clothes, as if their only identity was as a Kennedy – matching middy blouses and skirts for the girls and identical sailor suits for the boys.18
Rose hired an orthodontist to straighten out the children’s teeth, giving them the famous ‘flashing Kennedy smile’. For five years the children hopped into their father’s Rolls-Royce to be driven down to New York to a ‘superdentist’ to have their braces tightened. Rose closely monitored the intake of candy (only one piece allowed per day after dinner); tooth-brushing took place after every meal. With the thirteen-year age spread in the family, the dentist visits covered a span of two decades.
Rose admitted that she had all the domestic help she required, and that her role in the household was more like that of an ‘executive’. She recalled twenty years of ‘rows of diapers hanging up to dry on the back-yard clotheslines’.19 During the winter months, the diapers would freeze on the line, and would have to be thawed on the steam radiators.
Rose would think nothing of spanking the children with a ruler or a wooden coat hanger. She would never hit them in anger, but she believed in smacking, especially as she had such boisterous children. As she said, the mere mention of a spanking was enough to moderate a child’s bad behaviour. In later years, her grandchildren retrieved all the coat hangers from the closet and threw them down the garbage chute, just in case. Rose thought this was hilarious. Spanking was a very Roman Catholic punishment – immediate, direct, not inflicted in anger, and with the lesson learnt everyone could move on. Rose’s second method of discipline was to lock naughty children in the cupboard: ‘Well, I put them in the closet, but . . . they weren’t scared of the dark. It would just get one or two of them out of the way for a while.’20
Rose’s lack of emotional nourishment left its scars on her children. Jack, who was a sensitive boy, remembered: ‘My mother never really held me or hugged me. Never! Never!’21 The only time she touched them was to spank them. Kick, like Jack, was uncomfortable with physical demonstrativeness, which was another legacy of Rose’s emotional sterility. Later in life, Kick sought out several maternal substitutes, most notably Nancy Astor, with whom she developed deeply affectionate relationships. Older women were drawn to her, sensing that she lacked that special mother’s love.
Rose left the hugging and kissing to the children’s nanny, a working-class Irishwoman called Katherine Conboy, known to the family as ‘Kico’. Kick and her sisters adored her, and they would spend hours in the kitchen chatting to her. She in return adored the Kennedy children. Rose was perfectly happy with this arrangement. She simply did not see it as her role to kiss and hug for fear of ‘(s)mother love’. Respect was her by-word. The children always called her ‘Mother’, and they feared and loved her in equal measure.
Thus the Kennedy children were raised as upper-class British children were, by the nanny, and emotionally distant from their parents. It made them tough and independent, but it also left psychological wounds. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Kick and Jack understood and sympathized with their English aristocratic friends. Rose’s strategy was to encourage the eldest son and daughter to take on the role of nurturing and shaping the other children. Joe Jr took to this role of little father with aplomb. Jack later said, ‘I think if the Kennedy children amount to anything now, or ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor.’22
The surrogate-mother role was more difficult for Kick because of Rosemary. Kick had to assume the role of eldest sister and was encouraged to take responsibility for all of her sisters, but, although she loved them, she was not naturally suited to the role. She was too wild, too free-spirited. Eunice, just one year younger, was much more temperamentally suited to that role, and she felt especially responsible for Rosemary. All of the girls mothered Teddy, the baby of the family, who was born in 1932. ‘It was like having an army of mothers around me,’ he recalled.23
Kick worshipped her father. He was a forceful presence in the lives of the children, despite the long absences caused by his work. He approached his duties as a father with great seriousness, and he loved children, but only his own. When he was away from home, every Sunday the children would line up in order of age and speak to him on the telephone.24
When he returned from business trips, it was a moment of high excitement for the children. ‘He would sweep them into his arms and hug them, and grin at them, and talk to them, and perhaps carry them around,’ Rose recalled. As each child became able to talk he would ‘want that child in bed with him for a little while each morning. And the two of them would be there propped up on the pillows, with perhaps the child’s head cuddling on his shoulder, and he would talk or read a story or they would have conversations.’25 Joe struggled with Rosemary’s mental incapacitation. He wanted his children to be perfect Americans, and that was one of the reasons he especially doted on Kick, who was so lively and smart. She later called him a ‘powerhouse, a force of nature’.26
He believed in treating the small children as young adults, refused to talk down to them and was plain-speaking and blunt, though loving. He was very tactile with the children, unlike Rose. They knew, however, not to overstep the mark, and if they did, one ‘Daddy’s Look’ was all it took: ‘ice-cold steel blue, piercing right into and through you and stripped you to the soul’.27 But if the children were ever in trouble, Joe insisted always on hearing the truth: ‘tell me the truth. Tell me everything about it, the whole truth. Then I’ll do everything I can to help. But if you don’t give me the truth, I’m licked.’28
Joe had his own inimitable way of speaking, which the children long remembered, with amusing phrases and aphorisms that became part of family lore: ‘applesauce’ (bullshit)
was not tolerated, nor would he accept ‘monkey business’. ‘He doesn’t have the brains of a donkey’ or ‘He doesn’t have enough brains to find his way out of a telephone booth’ were Daddy expressions. ‘All my ducks are swans,’ he would say of the children, adding that Kick was ‘especially special’.29 ‘No crying in this house’ was another favourite, along with ‘You’d better believe it’, ‘Things don’t happen, they are made to happen’ and ‘I don’t want any sour pusses around here.’30 In later years, the children, now adults, would have cushions made with his aphorisms embroidered on them.31
Joe was not one for self-pity. Teddy revealed the key to his character when he described his father’s support and optimism, especially when things went wrong: this was when Joe was at his best. ‘The greater the disaster, the brighter he was.’ When things went really badly, Joe would declare, ‘That may be one of the best things that ever happened to you!’ But, most of all, Joe wanted his children to strive. Not necessarily to be the best, but to ‘strive’ for excellence. And then: ‘After you have done the best you can, the hell with it.’32
