Kick

by Paula Byrne

  Kathleen was extremely popular at Noroton. One of her schoolfriends who later became a nun recalled her vivacity and charm: ‘wherever Kathleen went, sunshine followed’.13 She was rarely moody or temperamental, always sunny and full of jokes, always quick to laugh.

  In May, Kick sent her mother another Spiritual Bouquet, for Mother’s Day with an affectionate card: ‘To the sweetest, youngest mother in the wide world . . . may this bouquet give you many graces. I love you.’14

  At Whitsun, there was a raffle for ‘gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost’, and Kick remarked pithily, ‘I got Wisdom which I need for these final exams and Patience, which I sure need too.’15 She was preparing herself for a one-day spiritual retreat ‘which I know you will not want me to miss’. But she longed to go home for the summer holidays. Her asthma was bad and she was continuing to have injections, and she told Rose that her doctor had ordered chest X-rays. ‘I go to Mass every morning,’ she added dutifully.16

  In June 1934, as a reward for his involvement in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency, Joe had been offered the position of Chairman of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That summer, he befriended the prestigious New York Times political journalist Arthur Krock, who would become one of his most powerful supporters and allies. Joe was setting his sights on the White House, and he leased Marwood, a huge, faux-French mansion in Washington, as his political base. The family would continue to live in Bronxville. At his new base, Joe held spectacular parties and dinners, shipping in lobster from Maine and oysters and clams from Cape Cod, washed down with plenty of the best Scotch.17

  Kick was relieved and delighted when she finally left the Convent for the long summer vacation at Hyannis: the coldness and the austerity would be temporarily forgotten with the promise of the sunshine of the Cape and reunion with the rest of the clan. Weeks and weeks of sailing, tennis, touch football, dancing and fun lay ahead. Kick was especially looking forward to spending time with Jack, who was bringing Lem for the vacation.

  Kick and Lem stuck together, worried about Jack, but also determined to enjoy the summer as best they could. Lem found the relationship between the Kennedy parents extremely odd, and saw at first hand how Joe dominated Rose. He was also struck by Rose’s obsession with good manners and social form, table manners, punctuality, appearance: ‘Don’t wear white socks with dress suit. Wear dark shoes with blue or gray suit, not brown shoes.’ She forbade the children to address people with ‘hi’. Nobody could leave the dining table until Rose had left.18

  Jack’s persistent and myriad illnesses were one of the reasons why he lived for the moment, and this was one explanation for why he loved sex and women. For Kick, it was another odd mixed message. She was a convent girl, expected to behave well at all times, to obey her mother’s commands and her insistence on etiquette and social form. Conversely, her brothers, to whom she was so close, were beginning to lead active sex lives. One friend reported that Joe Sr left carefully opened pornographic magazine centrefolds on Jack’s bed. ‘I think it’s Dad’s idea of a joke’ was Jack’s response.19

  While Joe was encouraging his sons to sow their wild oats, Rose continued to impress upon her daughters the importance of a religious life. In notes she made entitled ‘Advantages of Catholic Education’, she wrote about the benefits of a convent:

  If she is in a convent school, she is taught by women who have devoted their lives to the spiritual welfare of children. They themselves lead unselfish, exemplary lives, devoted to loving and worshipping of God. They give the girls the Catholic point of view about why they are in this world and their obligations to God, to themselves and their neighbor, and inspire them with the love of God . . . They teach the girls to be gentle, unselfish and charming in their manner and behavior, and it seems to me that I can tell a convent girl in any part of the world.20

  ‘Gentle, unselfish and charming’ with a devotion to God and the Catholic Church: that was Rose’s mantra for her girls. After a summer of sunshine, dancing and boys, Kick returned to Noroton: ‘Here I am back in this _____ I had better not say,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Its lovely here now but its awful to be back.’21

  7

  Muckers and Trouble

  She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.

  Joseph P. Kennedy to John F. Kennedy

  Kick embraced her academic work at Noroton. She was an able scholar. Her school report for Christmas 1934 suggests that she was near the top of the class. Pass mark for examinations was 75 per cent and she attained high marks in all of her subjects, especially in Christian Doctrine (91 per cent) and History (90 per cent).1 She wrote to her mother to enquire about her school report: ‘I hope it wasn’t too bad.’2 She told Rose that she was studying hard, but longing for Christmas at Palm Beach. There was nowhere to shop at Noroton and she badly needed ‘a bath-robe, bathing suit, underwear, shoes etc’.3

  She told Rose that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Angels’ and that four of her friends had got their ‘Child of Mary’ medals in a ‘beautiful ceremony’. Unlike her mother, Kick had not achieved membership of that exalted and exclusive sodality. She also wrote to ‘Daddy Dearest’, thanking him for a trip to New York to see a show. She was taking sewing classes and otherwise cramming for exams: ‘I am sitting in the Study Hall waiting for my dear brother, Jack, to show up. I only hope he does.’4

  Kick remained close to Jack. He knew that she was unhappy at the Convent and spent as much time as he could visiting and writing her amusing letters. Her relationship with Jack was based on jokes and banter. But she admitted to her father how much she adored and admired him. ‘She really thinks you are a great fellow,’ he told Jack. ‘She has a love and devotion to you that you should be very proud to have deserved. It probably does not become apparent to you, but it does to both Mother and me. She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.’5

  That February, Jack had got into serious trouble at Choate and was almost expelled. Kick had become involved in the story, incurring, for once, the wrath of her father. Jack had long clashed with his teacher and housemaster J. J. Maher. Maher disliked Jack, and believed that he was a bad influence on Lem, who slavishly followed every move he made and endorsed his every whim. Maher recommended that Jack and Lem be kept apart.6

  The headmaster, George St John, had a derogatory term for boys who refused to follow the Choate line: they were called ‘Muckers’ (a thinly veiled insult for Irish labourers). Jack and his friends decided to form a renegade society rebelling against the school’s values and ethics: it was to be called ‘The Muckers Club’, to, in Jack’s own words, ‘put over festivities in our own little way and to buck the system more effectively’.7 There were thirteen members, and each member proudly wore a tiny gold pin in the shape of a shovel with their initials inscribed alongside the logo of CMC (Choate Muckers Club).

  The club planned pranks, one of which was to spread a pile of manure on the school dance floor and have their pictures taken shovelling the muck. The headmaster got wind of the plan and was furious, threatening to expel the boys involved. Jack, the ringleader, was in the most serious trouble. Joe Sr was called to the school for a meeting to discuss Jack’s future. In the meantime, Jack wrote to Kick telling her all about the incident. Kick immediately sent Jack and Lem a congratulatory telegram, which was intercepted by the school staff:

  DEAR PUBLIC ENEMIES ONE AND TWO ALL OUR PRAYERS ARE UNITED WITH YOU AND THE OTHER ELEVEN MUCKS. WHEN THE OLD MEN ARRIVE SORRY WE WONT BE THERE FOR THE BURIAL

  Kick’s telegram made everything worse. Joe was not pleased. He wrote to her: ‘I know you want to do all you can for Jack,’ he began, but then told her that there was a genuine chance that he could be expelled from school: ‘I want to urge you to stop all this talk [in] letters and telegrams to him and LeMoyne, so that we can dismiss the whole matt
er.’ He told her that, by sending the telegram, she had added ‘fuel to the fire’.8

  It was Kick’s fifteenth birthday, she was far from home and clearly her father was angry. She wrote back, secretly: ‘I wanted to write you privately about the letter you wrote me. (in case you have not told Mother).’ She apologized for her part in the fiasco and confessed that Jack was angry with her. ‘I hope everything is OK now and I really want to help Jack.’9

  She was deeply upset by her rift with Jack, especially as it was her birthday. Her parents sent her perfume and money and she wrote to them that she had had a ‘very happy birthday although I missed everyone too much. It was the first birthday from home and its quite hard.’10 She kept up the pretence with her mother that all was fine, telling her she had had a birthday cake, and a birthday lunch with her roommates at Maillard’s in New York City; she and her friends also went to Radio City and watched Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. She told her parents that her birthday present from her eldest brother Joe was a visit to the Convent: ‘he is driving up here today on way to New York so am looking forward to seeing him’.

  She asked her mother to prepare ‘Palm Beach for my arrival around March 20th’. She also asked if her parents could send a film for the ‘Shrove days before Lent. They are the last two days we are allowed to have candy, dancing etc.’ She and her friends wanted David Copperfield. It would be the last fun time before the austerity of Lent.

  Kick and Jack made up. After the Muckers fiasco, Jack began to take his work seriously, urged on by the promise of a year in England in the footsteps of his brother Joe, who was studying under Professor Laski at the London School of Economics. Jack graduated from Choate, voted by his class as ‘most likely to succeed’. Kick was to take time away from Noroton, and plans were under way for her to spend time in Europe as well. Rose was determined that Kick should go to France, to improve her competence in the language and to undergo the experience of a French Sacred Heart convent.

  Perhaps Rose hoped that her headstrong daughter would experience a similar religious epiphany to the one she had had in Blumenthal, which had so shaped the course of her life. Rose decided on the Sacred Heart Convent in St Maux, north-east France. Kick and Jack would sail for England with their parents in September.

  As the children grew older, they insisted on bringing their friends to the Cape. The house was a hive of activity, with sports and picnics during the day and dances and movies at night. Several friends expressed their surprise at the disciplined way that Rose ran the household. Every lunchtime the family would head to Taggart’s Pier for swimming and diving.11 On the way to the dining room, Rose would pin a newspaper article or a theme to discuss on to her bulletin board and encourage the children to debate the issue of the day over dinner. History, geography and religion were at the top of her agenda. She later thought this contributed greatly to the prowess Jack showed in his televised debates with Richard Nixon in 1960. All of her children turned out to be brilliant public speakers.12

  Rose recounted in her memoirs that she could be strict, but that she always tried to temper this with a sense of humour: ‘People told jokes, made wisecracks, hurled friendly insults, and hooted and hollered at silly mistakes. They joshed and kidded and made faces and fooled around (within limits) and talked about things that popped into their minds: things that happened at school, news of friends, opinions, likes and dislikes, a certain amount of chatter and gossip: the stuff of life, well spiced . . . there was no lack of laughter or fun.’13

  One of Kick’s friends said that being at the Kennedy dinners at Cape Cod reminded her of being in a classroom. Everyone was expected to have an opinion. Kick was as ‘vociferous and opinionated as her brothers’.14 Over the dinner table, each child was expected to recount their day’s activities, and report on whether they had lost or won.

  One of Jack’s schoolfriends, Paul Chase, remembered how important it was for the Kennedy children to be winners: ‘Mr K. really did preach that winning was everything.’15 Whether it was card games, Monopoly or physical sports like tennis and sailing, winning first place was what mattered. If any of the Kennedy children lost, the reasons were carefully and methodically analysed.16 The children teased their father over his favourite aphorisms: ‘We don’t want any losers around here. In this family we want winners.’ ‘Don’t come in second or third – that doesn’t count – but win.’17 But they believed in his vision wholeheartedly.

  In the summer of 1935 the Kennedy children came away from the sailing competition at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts.18 Eunice remembered racing fourteen times a week when she was only twelve years old.19 Rose and Joe ensured that the children had proper coaching for swimming and for tennis.

  Joe was king at Hyannis. He would sit in the bullpen, usually on the telephone to the White House or to a business associate, but always with an eye on the children. He would watch them out in their sailing boats or on the beach. One of Kick’s friends recalled: ‘He ruled the roost. And, oh, God, did they love him. But they were scared to death of him, too.’20

  The children’s friends were surprised by their competitiveness. ‘Which of us is the best looking?’, ‘Who has the best sense of humour?’ All agreed that Kick was the nicest Kennedy.21 Jack was the most intellectual and witty, Joe the most handsome and athletic, and so it went on. As the years went by, brain-damaged Rosemary became more lost and left behind, until the moment came when Joe began to believe that her presence was harming the rest of the children.

  Even the liveliest guests were overawed and subdued by the ebullience of the Kennedys. Often it was hard for outsiders even to get a word in edgeways. Large families are entities unto themselves. They create a shorthand, private language, a code of behaviour, in-jokes, nicknames, family anecdotes, which bind them together, but also isolate those not in the know or in the fold. Years later when Jackie Bouvier met the family for the first time at Hyannis Port, she described them as ‘like carbonated water’ where ‘other families might be flat’. She was struck by their collective energy, enthusiasm and ‘interest in life . . . it was so stimulating’.22 Lem observed, ‘With them, life speeded up.’23 Video footage of the family at Hyannis Port shows the children pushing, jostling, racing one another, showing off. But always having the greatest fun. Their friends appeared happy to float in their orbit, perhaps hoping that some of the Kennedy glitter would rub off on them.

  Kick and Jack grew closer and closer. Like all the Kennedys they bickered and bantered, friends remarking that they were like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.24 Jack, the great reader of the family, would tease Kick for her philistinism. She would tease him back for being skinny and vain. But Jack adored Kick, and it was of vital importance that his favourite sister sanctioned any girlfriend of his. She was so popular and easygoing that it was almost impossible for anyone not to get along with her. If she had disapproved of a girlfriend of Jack’s, that would have been the end of the relationship.

  Jack had now got his driving licence and they would take off together to a dance at the Yacht Club or a movie at Idle Hours, the local theatre. If Kick stayed out late, at the golf club or the drugstore (the favourite hangout for American teenagers with ice-cream sodas), her mother would come looking for her in her little blue car. ‘Dear, it’s time to come home,’ she would say. The children always recognized the headlights on her car, and knew that it was time to go home.25 If Jack and Kick were very late home, they would crawl into the drive, turn their own headlights off, be careful not to slam the doors, take off their shoes and creep into bed. In the morning, Kick would find a note pinned to her pillow: ‘The next time be sure to be in on time.’26

  When she was at her friend Nancy’s house, over the road, staying beyond her curfew of nine o’clock, Rose would lean out of the window and summon her home calling out ‘Kaaaathleen!’ in her whiny Boston drawl.27 The Kennedy children thought it a great tease to call ou
t their sister’s formal name in imitation of their mother.

  Despite their great wealth, the Kennedys were often scruffily dressed and rarely carried cash. They would put their ice creams and drinks on account at Megathlin’s Drugstore. Kick was usually barefoot and dressed in cut-off shorts and T-shirt. On rainy days, she would cycle the 3 miles to the movie theatre, where she loved to watch romantic films.

  Kick chafed against her mother’s efforts to turn her into a proper young lady. One sunny day, Rose called her in from the beach to give her a flower-arranging lesson. Kick was torn between giggles and being horrified. Her mother gave her a basket and a pair of scissors and told her to go and cut flowers and then arrange them. Kick cut the flowers the wrong length and then put the basket down, absent-mindedly, leaving the flowers to dry out in the heat of the sun.28

  Kick, like Jack, was untidy and disorganized. Her clothes would be strewn over her bedroom floor, just waiting for someone else to pick them up. Make-up and the latest records were scattered over her dressing table. She would retire for the evening to find another of her mother’s interminable notes pinned to her pillow telling her to be sure to wipe her lipstick off her mouth before going to bed.29

  A hierarchy was established within the family with Joe Jr, Jack and Kick firmly at the top. Kick would introduce her brothers to her girlfriends for dates, and their friends in turn would fall in love with her. She would tease her brothers when she found bobby pins in between the car seats.