by Paula Byrne
Food was an important part of the Cape Cod experience. The children loved to picnic on the beach, and they would set off with a thermos jug with creamed chicken, fresh fruit, lollipops and always a chocolate cake with thick, gooey icing. They bought ice cream from the store along with a pack of cones.7 One of the favourite Kennedy desserts was Boston cream pie, a luscious confection of light fluffy sponge sandwiched together with custard cream and frosted with chocolate. There were healthy snacks, too: carrot and celery sticks, and in the evenings roast chicken, apple jelly and acorn squash.8 Alcohol was not permitted in the Kennedy household.
Above all for the sporty, wholesome clan there were the outdoor games. The children played touch football on the beach, went swimming and played competitive tennis. Rose colour-coded the children’s bathing caps so she could recognize each child in the water. Each of them (except for Rosemary) had their own sailing boat. When they raced on Nantucket Sound, Joe would follow in his own boat, shouting out their mistakes. After every race the station wagon would be dispatched to collect the trophies. When Rose wanted the children to bring the boats in, she would lower the flag from the flagpole in front of the house.9 Joe later had a pool built, and an outdoor shower was installed by a side entrance. The children could practise their diving and splash about after a day on the beach.
Kick loved to run around barefoot. She was by nature a free spirit, and she and Jack chafed against Rose’s disciplined regime. Clocks were installed in every room and the children knew not to be late for mealtimes, or they would go without. They would learn to charm the cook behind their mother’s back.
Joe would sit in his favourite chair in the corner of the living room or on his bedroom balcony (nicknamed ‘the bullpen’), looking over his brood. If the children fought or dissolved into tears over a quarrel with a sibling Joe would clap his hands in steady rhythm: ‘No – crying – in – this – house! No – crying – in – this – house!’10 He hated tears and impressed upon the children that crying accomplished nothing. Kick and Jack invented a family motto: ‘Kennedys never cry’.
On cold days they played indoor games. A favourite was ‘categories’, a trial of intellectual trivia. The children always had to be doing something.
On Sundays, they would troop downstairs in ‘Sunday Best’. Rose would be waiting at the foot of the stairs to inspect them.11 They would set off for mass at St Xavier’s, the boys preparing to do their altar-boy duty, the girls clutching Bibles and rosary beads. They were the ideal Catholic family.
5
Bronxville
Kathleen . . . was such a beautiful and lively and outgoing child and girl that I became convinced she never felt neglected at all.
Rose Kennedy1
In May 1929, six months after the renovation of Malcolm Cottage, the Kennedys left their rented home in Riverdale and bought an imposing, luxurious red-brick Georgian house in the Westchester community of Bronxville, called Crownlands. The family had never been really happy at Riverdale, and never felt that they belonged. Bronxville was a leafy, affluent suburb, 15 miles north from central Manhattan, only 1 square mile in area. It had the all-important (recently built) Catholic church, St Joseph’s, good schools for the children and an easy commute for Joe, whose main offices were in Manhattan.
Crownlands at 294 Pondfield Road was a twenty-room house set in 6 acres of lush lawns high on a hill. It had a grass tennis court, a tea-house and a greenhouse. Outbuildings included a five-car garage for Joe’s fleet of ostentatious Rolls-Royces, as well as gardener’s and chauffeur’s cottages.
Rose set to work redecorating the interior. She placed her beloved grand piano in the hall. The main drawing room, impressive with two fireplaces, was adorned with cream carpets, walls painted in antique green and white calla lilies in large vases. Complete sets of Hardy and Shakespeare lined the bookshelves. On the children’s bedside tables, rosaries and crucifixes merged with toys and books.2
The small children occupied the second floor, and the older ones the third. Joe had a large study on the ground floor, and though he was not often home, his door was always open to the children when he was there. They would sprawl on his sofa bed and talk to him about their problems with school or friends, and he would focus on each child directly, giving them the full beam of his attention.
Bronxville was a friendly place, and a perfect one in which to raise a large, lively family. In winter the children skated on the ponds and went sledding and tobogganing on the many hills and open spaces. There was a popular drugstore with a soda fountain on the corner near to the children’s school. When the owner turned away, they would filch gum and Life Saver mints. Kick’s school was the Bronxville Elementary, a short walk from Crownlands. She liked art and took an interest in textiles, asking her parents to be sure to attend her exhibition.3
Kick adored her brothers but she was also a girls’ girl. She spent her allowance on swing records and clothes, shopping for skirt-and-sweater sets at Saks Fifth Avenue with her friend Alice Cahill.4 She loved summer camp, and even though she felt a bit homesick, she threw herself into the experience, riding horses and swimming and gossiping with her friends. She asked Rose to send her cakes and bobby pins and her ‘jadpaws’ for riding.5
When she was ten, Kick went to Washington to visit the White House. She was given a sense of her father’s importance when one of the Senators stopped her and asked her to send his regards to Joe.6 Another Congressman asked after her grandfather and her mother.
Her father had recently decided to get out of Hollywood and Wall Street and turn instead to politics. The year 1929 was a momentous one for Joe Kennedy. He had been consolidating his wealth in Hollywood and on the stock market; he had purchased two vast homes for his ever-expanding family; his father had just died, and his obsession with Gloria Swanson was reaching a critical point. She was often at the new house in Bronxville. As Rose left town in one car, Gloria would arrive in Joe’s Rolls-Royce. The actress stayed at the Gramatan Hotel, and the townspeople gossiped.
Rose was troubled, particularly as the word was out in Catholic circles. After returning to New York City in 1929, Gloria recalled being taken to a meeting with Rose’s friend Cardinal O’Connell, who tried to talk her into ending the affair. O’Connell told Gloria that Joe was talking to senior church officials about seeking a divorce. Did she not realize that his reputation would be ruined and she would be publicly tainted? The affair didn’t stop instantly, but it began to cool.
Joe knew that it was time to get out of Hollywood, and he also began to take his money out of the stock market. He had guessed that the bubble on Wall Street was going to burst. As Rose said of her husband, ‘Part of his genius was an amazing sense of timing.’7 He did indeed always seem to know exactly the moment to get into an investment and the moment to get out. When the market crashed in October, he remained unscathed. He left Hollywood a multi-millionaire.
In February 1932, Kick was given a twelfth-birthday party. Rose was in Boston, about to give birth to her ninth and last child. ‘Daddy did not come home last night,’ Kick wrote to her mother. ‘We do not know when he is coming.’ She told her mother to send games for her party. She had been at a school dance, where she had danced with a boy: ‘I had my hair waved and it looked hot.’8
When she wrote to her father, a few weeks later, she told him, more primly, that she had been to a party but ‘There were no boys.’ She hinted that she would like to have her own horse and that she wanted to go to see the musical comedy Hot-Cha. She showed off the typewriting skills she was learning and told Joe that she was pleased with the arrival of her new baby brother, Teddy: ‘Every body thinks that the baby Should have been called George After Washington mother said she didn’t like it though.’9
In her letter Kick asked if her sister Rosemary was coming home for her birthday party. Rose and Joe had bowed to the inevitable, acknowledging that Rosemary was brain-damaged and unable to cope with mainstream school. She was sent away to a specialist private institution, th
e Devereux School in Pennsylvania, where she began to make slow progress. But after two years she was brought home. In her memoirs, Rose wrote of her sorrow at her eldest daughter’s plight, but also of her determination that everything should be done to make her feel a normal and valued member of the family.10 Some friends wrongly assumed that Rosemary’s problems arose from her being in her vibrant sister Kick’s shadow, but this was not so. Nevertheless, it was difficult for Kick, who was forced to accept responsibility for her elder sister, to protect her from whispers about her slowness.
Kick at thirteen, her mother recalled, was ‘a very attractive lady, with a beautiful, pink Irish complexion – intelligent at school – radiant, a glowing personality – no illness like Jack as she matured, a lovely interest in all that was happening around her’.11 Rose also emphasized her daughter’s deep spirituality. Kick would make ‘Spiritual Bouquets’ for family members. This involved weeks and weeks of special prayers, going to mass and communion, after which the beloved person would be sent a card listing all the prayers and devotions that had been offered up on their behalf.
Though Kick was a devout girl, she was also at the age where she was beginning to take an interest in boys. Her mother worried about her popularity and the fact that she was spending so much time going to the movies or on the telephone chatting to boys. As Rose remarked rather drily, ‘she had a keen interest in social life’.12 Worried that she was being distracted from her schoolwork, Rose decided that it was high time that Kick received some of her education in a Sacred Heart convent school, as she had done herself.
In her memoirs Rose recalled that ‘Joe and I had agreed that the responsibility for education of the boys was primarily his, and that of the girls, primarily mine.’13 Joe set the course for Joe Jr and Jack to attend the prestigious Choate School in Wallington, Connecticut, and then, following their father, to go on to Harvard. Rose was determined that her girls would, above all, have a Catholic education. Kick was sent off to a Sacred Heart convent in Noroton-on-the-Sound, also in Connecticut.
6
Convent Girl
Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls.
Kick Kennedy
The journey from Bronxville to Noroton, Connecticut, was only 30 miles but for thirteen-year-old Kathleen Kennedy, she might as well have been travelling back in time. The Convent was an imposing mansion, a former governor’s residence, on the edge of a 10-acre estate. It was set behind walls, situated on a tiny peninsula, surrounded by the waters of Long Island Sound. A more isolated spot could hardly be imagined. If ever Rose Kennedy wanted to remove her headstrong, independent daughter from unsuitable boys this was the place to do so. Noroton Convent was the strictest and most exclusive of the Sacred Heart schools. Only girls from the very best Catholic families were accepted.
The nuns had converted the ballroom into a chapel; the elegant high-ceilinged bedrooms with parquet floors were now classrooms. Religious paintings and statues saturated the Convent. The girls rose at six every morning, and washed in cold water, often having to break through a layer of ice, before attending morning mass wearing black veils. They were taught to make a sweeping curtsey to the nuns. Silence was often imposed at meals.
The nuns, wary of lesbianism, discouraged close friendships; the girls were never permitted to go ‘two by two’. The school motto was ‘noblesse oblige’. Sacred Heart girls were taught French literature, Christian doctrine and needlepoint. The nuns were called ‘Madame’ or ‘Mother’; afternoon tea was goûter and holidays were congés.
Kick loved beautiful clothes, but here she was expected to dress in a plain brown woollen uniform (on Thursday afternoons and Sundays, the girls wore wine-red jumpers). For swimming, they had to wear a large woollen bathing suit under a short skirt. Even Kick’s underwear had to be woollen, which she loathed, but at least it kept her warm in the freezing conditions.
Kick’s letters home show how much she put on a brave face. She wrote to Rose telling her that she was performing in a Christmas tableau: ‘I am an angel. I’m decked out in a pink affair and wings. I’m perched up on this ladder looking down at the crib. Some fun.’1 She suffered from asthma, and disliked the harsh, damp climate of Noroton. She told her mother that she was unable to take part in the school walking race as she got out of breath. Her letters are full of longing for home.
The Noroton girls found their own small ways to rebel. The nuns insisted on reading all of the mail, which the girls resented. Kick found a way of making a mailbox drop that circumvented the censorship. ‘It is perfectly alright,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘and the whole school is doing it.’2
Kick railed against the school and its strict discipline, and longed for Sundays and Thursdays, the days when the girls were allowed visitors. The girls wore formal dresses and were served tea in the visitors’ cabin by the sea. That fall, Jack, who had started at Choate, often visited Kick. He brought along his schoolmates who invariably fell in love with his cute kid sister, a female version of Jack, with the same sense of humour and a dimpled smile.
Jack, in common with Kick, had a gift for friendship. His mother called it ‘his outstanding talent . . . making friends and enjoying friendships’.3 He would bring home numerous friends, known in Kennedy lore as ‘Jack’s surprises’. They never knew how many would turn up at any time, but the best of them was Kirk LeMoyne Billings, known to the family as ‘Lem’. Jack called him ‘LeMoan’, ‘Pithecanthropus’, ‘Ape man’: the Kennedys loved nicknames. He would remain Jack’s lifelong and most trusted friend and ally.
Lem was tall, blond, simian and athletic. He and Jack were drawn together by their mutual dislike of the strict discipline of Choate. They shared the same ribald sense of humour and trusted one another implicitly. Jack was utterly devoted to Lem. Lem’s father died while he was at Choate, leaving him no money. It was the Kennedy family who looked after him financially, and they practically adopted him. Joe Kennedy described him as ‘my second son’.4 Lem was probably homosexual; he never married and admitted that his devotion to Jack overshadowed everything else in his life. He adored Kick, who was so like her brother, and he did fall in love with her, though she, perhaps sensing his inclinations, only ever treated him as a brother.
At Christmas, the Kennedys took possession of a newly acquired Palm Beach house in Florida, on Millionaires’ Row. Rose loved Florida and she persuaded Joe to buy the imposing mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard. The Kennedys installed a tennis court and a swimming pool and added an extra wing. It had fabulous ocean-front views. They would now make a habit of spending every Christmas at Palm Beach and summers at Hyannis Port.
Lem spent his first Christmas with the Kennedys in 1933, and wrote to Kick when she returned to the Convent. ‘I hope Mother Superior enjoys my letters,’ he teased, knowing that all letters were read and censored.5 Kick had loved her Christmas vacation at her new home, and was miserable about returning to Noroton. ‘Daddy dear,’ she wrote, ‘Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls I am all safe and sound now and can’t go skipping around to “El Studio” or the Everglades . . . I feel very rested and everyone thinks I look very well so a few parties never did anyone any harm.’6 She was homesick, and struggling with the cold weather. She wrote to her mother separately: ‘I miss you all like anything in fact worse than I ever have. Every day this week I’d sit in the study hall and think a week ago today I was basking in the sun and now I am in a fire trap trying to study. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’7
That was the Kennedy mantra: be strong, fight harder, don’t give in. In fact all of the children, with the exception of Joe Jr, were beset with health problems. Jack was still by far the sickliest child. Bobby, Kick’s favourite little brother, born when she was five, joked that Jack was so poorly as a child that if a mosquito bit him, the insect would immediately perish from having tasted his brother’s tainted blood.8
Kick was deeply worried about Jack’s health, while herself continuin
g to suffer from increasingly bad asthma, and allergies, for which she took injections. ‘The asthma is coming,’ she wrote to her mother in January 1934, ‘I can feel it.’9 Kick starred in a play in which she cross-dressed as the hero and had to kill the villain. ‘I had ski pants on and Mother Fitzgerald wouldn’t let me appear without a coat over the pants,’ Kick complained to her mother; ‘. . . she thinks pants are immodest. Ski pants, mind you. If she only knew.’10 She asked her mother to give her love to everyone ‘and tell them they are not missing a darn thing in this Iceland’. She talked about plans for Easter, and flying south for the holidays. The Kennedys, with their vast wealth, thought no more of taking flights than lesser mortals would of bus journeys.
In February 1934, Kick was operated on for appendicitis and recuperated in Palm Beach. She seriously contemplated leaving Noroton and its damp climate, but she stuck it out. She was beginning to make some good friends and, like Jack, she made friends for life.
One of her closest friends was a pretty petite girl, with long blonde, wavy hair. Her name was Charlotte McDonnell, and she was from one of New York’s prominent Catholic families. She was as spirited as Kick, and likewise hailed from a large, boisterous family. She was one of fourteen. Charlotte was constantly in trouble at Noroton. The nuns excluded her for several days for possession of a dirty-joke book.11
Lem and Jack came to visit the girls whenever they could for Thursday tea, and a flirtation took place between Jack and Charlotte. She wrote to thank him for the jigsaw puzzles that he sent to the girls, and told him that it was so cold at school that she had to chop a hole in her inkwell in order to write to him.12 Jack would over the years flirt with and have affairs with several of Kick’s friends.
