On another occasion, Joe Jr. told his friends how he had jumped into the Charles River to save a drowning man. To some of his friends, it seemed a boastful Irish yarn, and they started calling him “the Life-saver,” their words touched with more derision than admiration. But if Joe Jr. was one to garnish his stories with hyperbole, he was not known as a liar, and if he said he saved the man, he probably had.
Joe Jr. was quicker of temper than of mind, always ready to rush into a scrap or to charge into the toughest part of the line. His friends soon learned that he could turn on them in righteous anger as quickly as he could on some lowlife tough striking his girlfriend on a dark Cambridge street. Unlike his father, Joe Jr. brimmed with pride at his Irish-American heritage and took umbrage at those who dared to demean it. He clenched his fist at those who spoke with disdainful hauteur at the corruption of Irish politicians.
Reardon learned that he could not proffer even a gentle jibe. When a group sat discussing politics in Joe Jr.’s room in Stoughton Hall, everyone was in agreement that corruption was a problem in city politics. “Sure, these city officials are all the same,” Reardon said, taking it from generalities to specifics. “Now take even John F….”
“Get out this room!” Joe Jr. shouted even before Reardon had the name “Fitzgerald” out of his mouth. As Reardon hurried out the door, Joe Jr. attempted to give him a last good-bye with a kick in the posterior.
Reardon was the son of a barrel-maker who had lost it all during the Depression. He made the daily jaunt to Harvard from his modest home in Somerville. The young man had everything Joe Jr. had except for money, panache, and boundless self-confidence. In the end he settled into a position of subservience. He played the archetypal role of a Kennedy “friend,” one not that much different from the relationship Joe’s father had during his Harvard days with Robert Fisher, or that between Jack and Lem Billings. “I always thought that Joe’s father was putting Ted Reardon through college, paying for him,” recalled Robert Purdy, one of their housemates. “Ted just waited on Joe like he was a valet. He took care of his car, took him home every night.”
Joe Jr. was good at everything, from catching a pass thirty yards down-field to waltzing a debutante across the dance floor, from debating the latest New Deal policy with assurance and knowledge to carousing over beers with rowdy friends down at the pub. He did not care about grubbing grades, but the implication was clear that Joe Jr. could have bested the greasy grinds if he had wanted to and had chosen to take time for such silliness.
Joe Jr. might have spent his weekends at deb parties and postdeb gatherings, squiring around the most eligible and beautiful young Catholic women. But the games that he enjoyed playing were not on those dance cards, however, and good Catholic that he was, Joe Jr. went elsewhere for his pleasures. When it came to women, he had the natural predatory instincts of his father but the good sense to play his games of momentary romance primarily among women who had played before: actresses, showgirls, and cafe society women of certain means and uncertain morals.
Often Joe Jr. left Cambridge on Friday to spend his weekends in New York. When he returned, he had stories to tell of a sophisticated world that would have spurned most of his college mates. To him, women were short-term lovers, not long-term friends. They were perfumed beings put on earth for the pleasure of men like him.
Joe Jr. treated romance as a game that had few limits. Not until Robert Purdy married his college sweetheart did he learn that his friend had made an unsuccessful pass at his fiancée. “My impression of Joe was that he would never date the same girl twice,” recalled Purdy. “He was rough on girls, I gather. He was not apparently the kind of guy that nice girls liked to date.”
Joe Jr. had his claque of admirers. During freshman year he chaired the committee for the annual “smoker” and became a minor college legend by obtaining the services of the famous Rudy Vallee and his orchestra. He served on the student council and the Winthrop House Committee, including the chairmanship his senior year. He was a member of Hasty Pudding and Pi Eta but did not make one of the exclusive final clubs. This did not appear to rankle him in the least. He was a proud Catholic American, a member of the St. Paul Catholic Club. He espoused a passionate but manly Catholicism in which he prayed on his knees but winked at the sins of the flesh and of human corruption.
In the years since his father’s graduation, Harvard had attempted to democratize itself in part by forcing freshmen to live in the Harvard Yard dormitories and then creating seven houses for upper-class students. One of them, Winthrop House, was a sprawling red-brick structure by the Charles River. The resident tutors included such young instructors as B. F. Skinner, who would become the father of behavioral science, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the wry, arrogantly self-assured liberal economist.
Galbraith had the disconcertingly dangerous idea that liberalism was not only an abstract philosophical position but a guide to daily life. He looked askance at the way Winthrop House chose its residents, attempting to replicate the narrowly snobbish club world that the new house system was supposedly trying to end. The housemaster, Ronald M. Ferry, presented Galbraith with a ruled sheet featuring the cryptic letters: St. G. Ex, E & A, O.P, H.S., and X. Thus was displayed the social order, exactly as it had been in Joe Kennedy’s days.
At the top stood St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Groton and Middlesex, Exeter, and Andover, other private schools, public high schools, and then the all too common Xs, the Jews. Galbraith wanted to choose an outstanding student, Theodore White, but he was told that the quota of Xs was already filled, and so the man who would become one of the seminal journalists of his age went elsewhere. If he had been accepted, White would have found himself living on a floor with all the other Xs. Joe Jr., as a Choate graduate, was not up to the level of St. G. Ex., but he was far above H.S. and X, and he was readily chosen.
Many rich men’s sons would have spent their days at Harvard primarily with the sons and daughters of wealth. Joe Jr. enjoyed few things as much as heading off to Suffolk Downs with Joe Timilty, the rotund Boston police commissioner, sitting there among touts and pols. One day he took the incomparable Ethel Merman to the track with him, shepherding her as if she were some postdeb from Wellesley, not one of the stars of the musical stage. On another occasion he wangled a date with the beautiful young star Katharine Hepburn, who arrived accompanied by her mother.
Back in Cambridge, Joe Jr. was a gregarious young man who traveled with an entourage of friends and burst into Winthrop House full of energy and exuberant greetings as if to announce that life itself had arrived. Despite his temper, Joe Jr. was a man of myriad courtesies. Josephine Fulton, one of the managers of the house, answered the phone for Joe Jr. and often took calls from his grandfather, Honey Fitz. Then she would get in her car and go fetch him, most likely from a coffee shop where he hung out with his friends. He thanked her with boxes of chocolates, a small courtesy with which most young men could scarcely be bothered. When he went to visit his beloved Grandpa Fitzgerald at the Bellevue Hotel where he resided, Joe Jr. always stopped to say hello to the elderly housemaid.
Joe expected that Jack would follow his big brother to Harvard, but Jack said that he intended to join his friends Lem Billings and Rip Horton at Princeton. “You didn’t go to school because your friends are going there,” Joe Kennedy recalled telling his son. “That’s not the real reason, is it, Jack?” His son had had two blessed years away from his brother and all the tedious, inevitable comparisons. Doubtless Jack was looking forward to building his own identity away from Joe Jr.’s transcendent presence.
If Joe sometimes treated his sons like marionettes, he held the strings so loosely in his hands that they could not always feel the pull on their backs. He did not push Jack to join his older brother at his alma mater. He insisted, however, that before he went off to college he follow further along Joe Jr.’s pathway and study under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics.
Another young man would have been ecstatic to be sailing
off to Europe in September 1935 on the Normandie. In Jack’s letters to Lem, however, it is as if he had been marooned, cast off into someone else’s life. Jack’s letters read like the ribald mutterings of a precocious fourteen-year-old, not the Ivy League-bound eighteen-year-old son of Joseph P. Kennedy. He might have deferred to his father at the captain’s table, but with Lem Jack described his father as a humorless pain in the posterior who nagged his second son about feeding his pimples with rich desserts, monitoring his conduct like a German nanny. Jack was so appallingly thin, only 135 pounds on his six-foot frame, that his face was like a series of stark images. Look at it one moment—the great shock of hair, the deep intense eyes, the aquiline nose, the pearly teeth—and he appeared a handsome young man with matinee idol looks. Look at his face again—the thin cheeks, the eyes deep set, the face so long—and one thought only of ill health. Look yet again, and there was a strange feline quality to the face, nearly androgynous, a youth too sweet for the rigors of Kennedy manhood.
Outside of his father’s purview, Jack had a little adventure on the crossing that would have appalled Joe. “I have had a very strange experience,” he wrote Lem. “There is a fat Frenchie aboard who is a ‘homo.’ He has had me to his cabin more than once and is trying to bed me.” Strangest of all was that Jack was intrigued enough by the man’s entreaties that he ventured back to his cabin. There was a preening, narcissistic quality in young Jack, and he clearly found it flattering that a man would be so attracted to him.
Jack had hardly arrived at Claridge’s in London when he was stricken again with some mysterious malady and sent off to a hospital for tests. He wanted Lem to know that Jack Kennedy was not some self-pitying wretch, but an adventurer of such daring that he could turn even a hospital bed into a playground for his manhood. Only Jack would think of naming his penis “JJ Maher,” after his much-hated nemesis at Choate. “Today was most embarrassing as one doctor came in just after I had woken up and was reclining with a semi on due to the cold weather. His plan was to stick his finger under my pickle and have me cough. His plan was quickly changed however when he drew back the covers and there was ‘J J Maher’ quivering with life. As the nurses were 3 deep around the bed, I was rather nonplussed for a time.”
Jack’s visitors included “a very good looking blond whom Dad seems to know, about 24 who is a divorcee…. She is going to St. Moritz with me at Christmas but I have not as yet laid her.” Once again Jack’s room stirred with sex, not sickness, the borderline between fantasy and reality perhaps not even visible to Jack. There were the nurses, always the nurses, “very sexy and the night nurse is continually trying to goose me so I have always to be on my guard.”
Jack knew that not only Lem but also Rip and their friends would read his letters. There was nothing of the antiseptic smell of a hospital on these pages, nothing of fear, nothing of prayers or bewilderment, nothing of the sheer unfairness of his plight. His friends would laugh about Jack and “J J Maher” and wish him back among them, when life would be just a little more brilliant.
His friends got their wish, for Jack’s father decided that his son would be better back in the States studying at Princeton. Lem and Rip shared their modest fifth-floor quarters with their former Choate classmate. As Jack lumbered up those stairs, he had a strange patina to him. Bud Wynne, a friend, remembered him “turning yellow, a yellowish-brown tan, almost as if he had been sunbathing.” He was hardly at Princeton for six weeks before he left, victim of this undiagnosed, mysterious illness. To the doctors who examined him, he had become, in that most ominous of phrases, an “interesting case.”
After the new year of 1936, Jack was back in the familiar surroundings of a hospital room at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. From his bed, Jack wrote jumbled, scribbled missives to his friend Lem. Once again it was suspected that he had leukemia. By now his friend was used to the blend of scatology, sexual boasts, medical descriptions, and putdowns in Jack’s letters, but there was a fever pitch of intensity to them now, the sexual imagery even uglier, the assaults on poor Lem more merciless, the sexual boasts larger.
Jack’s penis was his nasty, irreverent friend, always ready to perk up at the most morbid of moments. He had scarcely arrived at the hospital when he suffered what he called “the most harrowing experience of my storm-tossed career.” The doctors put a rubber tube up his nose and into his stomach and poured alcohol into him. “I have this thing up my nose for 2 hours and they just took it out (don’t be dirty Kirk) and now I have a ‘head-on’ and a ‘hard on’ as … a beautiful nurse came in and rubbed my whole body.”
Jack might have been lying in bed, poked at by a team of doctors, but even here he saw himself as a vibrant sexual being, unlike Lem and his other wimpy friends. “I don’t know why you and Rip are so unpopular with girls,” he wrote. “You’re certainly not ugly looking exactly. I guess they’re [sic] is just something about you that makes girls dislike you on sight.”
He was ready to instruct his pitiful friends in the art of sexual conquest. “I’m writing Rip against taking Nancy Williams,” he told Lem about a planned weekend. “She is an ugly bitch and we’re not going to load the place with your women.” As for Lem, at least he could pay to have sex. “It seems to me, you prick, that if you can afford a week fuck fest with you paying Joe and I and Caesar $5.00 each for every fuck and paying the doctor bills for sif [syphilis] which you are certain to pick up in this nigger place.”
Jack slashed at Lem with one blow after the next, attacking his friend’s sexuality and his relative poverty, his two greatest vulnerabilities. Lem either ignored Jack’s thrusts or attempted his own minor feints, but he was largely defenseless.
When Jack could get out of the hospital in the evenings or on weekends, he spent much of his time looking for women. He did not share his big brother’s belief that a man—a gentleman, that is—did not attempt to seduce women of a certain quality, manner, or faith. Jack was nothing if he was not fair. He considered all women fair game. He discussed women with other young men like a woodsman sharing tips on how to set his steel traps.
One of his friends, Pete Ramney, had gone out with one of Jack’s dates. He boldly asked Ramney how far he had gotten with her. When Pete told him he had reached “second base,” Jack was incensed. Ramney had gotten further than he had. “The next time I take her out she is going to be presented with a great hunk of raw beef,” he wrote Lem, “if you know what I mean, although I doubt it.”
Here, as at Choate, Jack’s proud sexual boasts may have been written with a novelist’s imagination and read with guileless credulity by a Lem Billings who was far more sexually insecure than his friend. Jack’s close college friend and roommate James Rousmanière, is one of the skeptics. “I think he was making it up,” Rousmanière asserts. “That was the masculine ethic. And I think he made up three-quarters of it. And I don’t hold it against him.”
As a young man, Jack wanted an audience for his sexuality. He was at his most aggressive when there were other men around whom he wanted to impress even more than he did the woman of the moment. She was interchangeable; they were not.
These letters then should be read in part as Jack’s vision of what he could be or would be. He created a Don Juan image of himself long before he became one in reality. In sexual conquests, there are few things as helpful as a bad reputation, and in the end Jack became the sexual being he thought he wanted to be.
Jack was “getting rather fed up with the meat here, if you know what I mean,” he wrote Lem, though he knew his friend didn’t know. “They haven’t found anything as yet except that I have leukemia and agranulocytosis. Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.”
But two sentences were quite enough on the dark subject of a disease that probably meant his death. “Eat drink and make [out], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral,” he continued. “I think the Rockefeller Institute may take my case. Flash! Got the hottest neck ever out of Ha
nsen Saturday night. She is pretty good so am looking forward to bigger and better ones.”
The doctors tinkered away a few more weeks after they decided that Jack did not have leukemia. Many patients would have been infuriated that the doctors could make such a mistake, but for Jack it was just another pratfall visited upon him by men in white. Finally, after almost two months, he left the hospital at the end of February 1936 knowing as little about his malady as when he arrived. At least he was free to sun himself in Palm Beach and then to spend a few weeks at the Jay Six Cattle Ranch in Benson, Arizona. While there he applied for admission as a transfer student to Harvard College. He gave his father’s birthplace as Winthrop, a more socially acceptable address than the déclassé East Boston where he was in fact born.
Jack preened in the sun and the desert air. His narcissism grew out of not only his immense vanity but also a natural obsession with his star-crossed health. “If you could see what a thing of beauty my body has become with the open air, riding horses and Mexicans, you would stuff such adjectives as unattractive when you are speaking of my body right where they belong,” he wrote Lem from Arizona. He seemed to be flirting with his friend, taunting him with his alluring physicality. And yet there was a hint of self-mockery in his narcissism, for as much as Jack bragged about his beautiful body, something always went wrong. “I woke with a hacking cough,” he noted in another letter. “It will be the fucking last straw if I come down with TB in addition to a good load of clap in this my health cure.” That latter disease was a decided possibility, for he claimed he had ventured south of the border in search of his favorite pleasure. “I ended up in this 2-bit hoar-house [sic] and they say that one guy in 5 years has gotten away without just the biggest juiciest load of claps … so boys your roomie is carrying on … upholding the motto of ‘always get your piece of arse in the most unhealthy place that can be found.’ “
The Kennedy Men Page 14
