by Thomas Maier
This stern condemnation of sex by the Catholic Church in America differed from the old Irish view. The ancient Celts enjoyed bawdy Gaelic songs and imagery, and in the Irish countryside, well into the nineteenth century, the roadhouses were places of sexually charged dancing and delights.“Rural Ireland was a highly sexual society, with sexual tensions resolved by early marriages,” observed Charles R. Morris, in his history of the American Catholic Church.“Nudity or seminudity were not uncommon, and visitors were surprised to see young Irish men and women bathing within sight of one another.” All that changed in Ireland with the arrival of Cardinal Paul Cullen at the time of the Famine. Influenced by the Puritan strains of Jansenism, he enforced a strict and foreboding view of sex. Inside the marriage bed, sex had solely a utilitarian function—to produce enough sons and daughters to maintain a farm properly, attend Mass as faithful followers and ideally contribute one or more children to the Mother Church as priests, nuns and monks. “In a society where feckless reproduction had just led to catastrophe, the newly rigorist doctrine of sexual purity and the Church’s carefully fostered cult of the Blessed Virgin found receptive ears,” Morris noted.“Sex even among the married was shamefaced and fleeting.” Cullen’s influence spread widely among the Irish who sought new lives in America, where Puritanism and its hell-and-brimstone condemnations of sex were already deeply rooted. The American Catholic Church fathers proved every bit as conservative in sexual matters as their Protestant brethren, an attitude that intensified as the twentieth century progressed.
Rose Kennedy shared the church’s view of sexuality as a matter of her extended faith in all its teachings. Her schooling at the Sacred Heart convents prepared Catholic women for a future as mothers, but implied that the lust of men was a chore for wives and was to be handled neatly, like diaper changing or putting out the garbage. Good girls like Rose might preen and keep themselves attractively attired in the latest Paris fashions but, once married, the vibrancy of their sexual union was of little matter, certainly not compared to the more pressing needs of the family. As part of her family building with Joe, Rose Kennedy extended herself to her husband repeatedly and with the devotion that only a brood of nine children can attest to. But the romance of their youth, perhaps shattered by Joe’s early acts of infidelity, never matured into a sexually fulfilling relationship. After the birth of her last child, Rose demanded separate bedrooms and refused any more sex, according to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin quoted Marie Greene, an old family friend who played cards with the Kennedys on Friday nights, who recalled Joe Kennedy’s pleas: “Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong,” Joe urged in this account.“It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that and the books don’t argue that. And if you don’t open your mind on this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”
Instead, a false veneer arose with the Kennedys, who often spent a surprising share of their lives apart, sometimes for business reasons, but often in Rose’s case for purely personal reasons. Her trips to Europe, Florida and California seemed to be covering over a deep hurt. When confronted with evidence of cheating, she reacted as her mother, the good politician’s wife, had before her and simply looked the other way. Rose extended this same denial and sanitizing technique to her son Jack, preferring not to dwell on his sins and failings. Instead, she repeated the selective remembrances of his best friend, Lem Billings, who is quoted in her book as saying,“Never can I remember Jack not saying his prayers on his knees every night before going to bed.”
The most glaring example of these contradictions in the marriage of Rose and Joe Kennedy involved his relationship with actress Gloria Swanson. This affair came at the height of his business career. During the 1920s, Joe Kennedy mastered the art of making money on Wall Street. He amassed a fortune in the world of speculation, and then moved into Hollywood movies, which he declared a “gold mine.” Portraying her husband’s struggle in familiar ethnic terms, Rose would later recall:“When he went to Hollywood, there were predictions that this Boston Irishman soon would be sadder and poorer.” He soon controlled three studios. During the production of his most ambitious film, Queen Kelly, Joe began an affair with its star, Gloria Swanson, to whom Kennedy acted as an independent financial advisor. The new-money world of Hollywood was far different from the old established one he knew in Boston.“The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at the pictures or let their children go,” he explained to Swanson.“And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on in the world than they do. The working class gets smarter every day, thanks to radio and pictures. It’s the snotty Back Bay bankers who are missing the boat.”
The fabulously attractive Swanson, a sophisticated independent woman already married to her third husband, carried an allure that Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy couldn’t match. Swanson’s expressive blue eyes, underlined with mascara, and her de rigueur sleek, tight clothing carried tremendous allure. Joe’s intense sexual relationship with Swanson became an open secret in Hollywood, acknowledged by virtually everyone but Rose herself. Mrs. Kennedy carried on an acting tour de force worthy of an Oscar, ignoring both hints and clear evidence of her husband’s infidelity with the movie actress, whom she treated as a treasured family friend. In an extraordinary visit, Kennedy invited Swanson to his summer home so that she could meet Rose and all the kids. “If she suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never once gave any indication of it,” Swanson wrote years later. “Was she a fool, I asked myself as I listened with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”
When Swanson moved to divorce her husband, as she later claimed in her autobiography, Joe sought special permission from Cardinal William O’Connell to separate from Rose and set up a household with Gloria. Swanson said she soon got a knock on the door from the cardinal himself.
“You are not a Catholic,my child, therefore I fear that you do not grasp the gravity of Mr. Kennedy’s predicament as regards his faith,” explained the churchman. She recalled that his eyes were “filmy” behind his thick glasses. “I am here to ask you to stop seeing Joseph Kennedy,” O’Connell insisted. He informed her that Kennedy had met with some top Catholic officials in an attempt to legitimize their illicit affair without luck. Irked by the cardinal’s invasion of her privacy, Swanson questioned whether he’d violated the confessional or was just repeating gossip. The cardinal emphasized Kennedy’s position “as one of the most prominent Catholic laymen in America” and that this affair exposed him to scandal if she persisted.“Every time you see him, you become an occasion of sin for him,” O’Connell lectured.“ As a Catholic, there is no way Joseph Kennedy can be at peace with his faith and continue his relationship with you.” Swanson, not easily intimidated, suggested the cardinal address his concerns to Kennedy himself.
In an indirect way, the church did rupture Kennedy’s relationship with the movie star. At the time, many Catholic officials, including those in Boston, pressured regulators to oversee what they called the morally offensive and sexually titillating content of movies. “Everyone knows what Hollywood is—it is the scandal of the world,” proclaimed O’Connell. With Catholics making up a sizeable portion of the American population thanks to decades of immigration, the clergy threatened to ban the faithful from films that didn’t conform to their standards. By 1929, the film industry set up its own censor,Will H. Hays, to bring about a decency code. Halfway through Queen Kelly, it became obvious to both Swanson and Kennedy that their star director, Erich von Stroheim, had structured the film around scenes that would never get past Hays’s review. The script called for Swanson to play a poor Irish convent girl who falls in love with a crown prince, but some scenes were so salacious that Kennedy decided to fire von Stroheim and can the film without ever showing it. (Snippets from the film appeared years later as an “inside joke” in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, starring Swanson as an
aging film star and von Stroheim as her former director turned butler.) This disaster soon ended Kennedy’s affair with Swanson and his dream of becoming a major Hollywood magnate.
For her own reasons, Rose never mentioned whatever evidence existed of her husband’s sexual involvement with Swanson. A few years later, though, Rose recounted for her children how she bumped into Swanson’s former husband, Henri de la Fallaise, at a French restaurant in New York, and how he introduced her to his new wife, a woman from Colombia “who looked very sweet in her French frocks.” Rose couldn’t help but note the comparison.“As he [de la Fallaise] was never properly married before, he is now married to a Catholic so his mother is very happy.”
WHILE TENDING the mess he wrought in Hollywood, Joe Kennedy learned that his father had died. P. J. Kennedy, the son of Irish immigrants, never wandered far from home in East Boston, either physically or emotionally. Unlike his father, Joe considered himself far more American than Irish and was eager to prove it so. In settling his father’s estate, Joe found in his possessions a bundle of Republic of Ireland bonds issued in 1920 that were now worthless.
Many contemporaries viewed Joe Kennedy as an amoral hypocrite, a capitalist shark who jumped at the first sight of blood in any field or endeavor, then posed after Sunday morning Mass with his smiling family outside the church. “Yes, he was amoral, sure he was,” declared Arthur Krock, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, who for decades traded favors with him. “I think only a Roman Catholic could possibly describe how you could be amoral and still religious. That is, how you can carry an insurance policy with the deity and at the same time do all those other things.” But other observers suggested that Joe Kennedy was still fighting the Irish immigrant’s battle for acceptance, only at a much higher level.“Where does the Kennedy competitive drive come from? Most probably it stems originally from the chafing, frustrating atmosphere of anti- Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice in Boston fifty years ago that made the young Joe Kennedy determined to push himself and his children to a place at the top of the world where they would not have to take a back seat to anybody,” explained Joe McCarthy, the journalist who later collaborated with Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell on their memoir of the Kennedy White House years. “Resentment probably burned hotter in Joe Kennedy than in most Boston Irish of his generation because he associated more closely with the Yankee Brahmins than did most Irish of his time. Consequently, he was more exposed to slurs, more aware from first-hand experience of the cool condescension with which Beacon Hill looked down on people of his religion and racial background.”
In Boston, Joe Kennedy had attempted to break into the Brahmin world of finance on State Street, but was only able to enter banking with the Irish-controlled Columbia Trust. Twice Kennedy was rejected as a new member of the board of trustees for the Massachusetts Electric Company. When he finally made it to the board in 1917, the company president apologized for the two earlier turndowns, which he blamed on the company’s discrimination of Irish Catholics. The feeling of Irish resentment seeped into the consciousness of his own children, seemingly perfectly assimilated, one of whom commented to a friend while walking along the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill, “Those aren’t cobblestones—they’re Irish heads.” In suburban Brookline, the Kennedys weren’t much better off; they realized that the Kennedy girls, despite the family’s wealth, would never be invited to the top debutante cotillions of Boston. After spending several summers in the primarily Catholic enclave of Nantasket, where Mayor Fitzgerald kept a summer home, the Kennedys moved to the more fashionable Cohasset. When Joe applied for membership in the local country club, he was blackballed after a belabored and humiliating process.
Joe Kennedy was an anomaly who wallowed in Irish sentiments while rejecting all trappings of them. He didn’t want power as a ward boss in East Boston or as mayor of the town. He wanted to build a fortune big enough for his outsized family so that they could never again be treated as less than American, their birthright. He set up trust funds for each of his children so they’d never be intimidated by the rich, and could even “spit in my eye” if they wished.“Big businessmen are the most overrated men in the country,” he told his sons. “Here I am, a boy from East Boston, and I took ’em. So don’t be impressed.” He became convinced that Boston—the cradle of American democracy—could no longer contain his dreams. The Brahmins still hated the Irish pretensions to social acceptance and their exercise of power in City Hall, and the Catholics led by their Cardinal O’Connell were steadily retreating into their own segregated communities. He decided to move to New York. Not only could Wall Street provide more money for the Kennedy coffers, its New York social world didn’t appear as strangulated as Boston’s, nor as restrictive to his children.
In 1927, the Kennedys relocated from Brookline to Riverdale in the suburban-like outer reaches of New York City. In a parting boot in the pants, Joe declared that Boston “was no place to bring up Catholic children.” As he explained years later, “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there. . . .At that time, the social and economic discrimination was shocking. I know so many Irish guys in Boston with real talent and ability that never got to first base only because of their race and religion.” Honey Fitz bemoaned the departure of his beloved daughter, blaming anti-Catholic prejudice as the cause. The Kennedys, as strivers and very much pioneers in untested waters for Irish Catholics, were still hitting their heads upon what historian William V. Shannon called the “glass ceiling of religious bigotry” in Boston. Driving through the city years later with a journalist from a well-known and esteemed Boston family, Rose turned and asked,“When do you think the good people of Boston will accept us?”
Part II
The Family Faith
“I think that the Irish in me has not been completely assimilated, but all my ducks are swans.”
— JOSEPH P. KENNBEDY
Chapter Nine
Happy Warriors
“It is possible for a man in public life to separate his religious beliefs from his political activities.”
—GEORGE NORRIS
ALFRED E. SMITH’S presidential bid in 1928 contained a sense of yearning for Irish-Americans, an inestimable influence on their collective imagination. The New York governor was a Democrat, a Catholic and a “wet” who favored repeal of Prohibition’s drinking laws. If Smith could make it to the White House, so could any child of immigrants.
Smith’s candidacy had considerable impact on the Kennedys. Years later, Rose remembered the feeling of pride that one of their own kind was running for president, and the bigotry he faced in such states as West Virginia. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, John Kennedy lauded Senator George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska, for supporting Smith—the first Catholic ever to run for the presidency—and arguing that no American should be discarded simply because of religion. For his courageous stand, Norris ranked in JFK’s political hall of fame as “an idealist, an independent, a fighter—a man of deep conviction, fearless courage, sincere honesty.” But on the subject of Al Smith, Kennedy’s own father was never so forthright. In fact, it’s not clear whether Joe Kennedy even voted for Smith. At a time when thousands of Irish Catholics were rushing to Smith’s support, hoping for an electoral miracle, Joe Kennedy cagily stepped back, gauging his own prospects and acting in his own self-interest. Nonetheless, the ill-fated campaign of Al Smith in 1928—crippled by a nationwide tide of anti-Catholic bigotry—would hold a profound impact on the Kennedy family’s political fortunes.
For most of the 1920s, Joe Kennedy cared more about making money than about politics. He flirted with the Massachusetts Republican Party, and in 1924 he gave a sizeable contribution to the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Robert LaFollette. He adopted a similar contradictory role in 1928. In early September, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Smith’s floor manager at the Democratic Convention, sent a letter to Joe Kennedy asking for his “suggestions
and counsel.” It seemed natural that Kennedy favored Smith, already denied the 1924 Democratic nomination because of his religion. Both men were conservative Democrats who had grown up in working–class Irish Catholic neighborhoods and worked diligently to reach the pinnacles of American society. Back in his native Boston, Kennedy’s father-in-law, former Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, strongly supported Smith’s election. And Kennedy, a newly arrived resident of New York State, would likely need Smith’s help someday. In Joe Kennedy’s private correspondence, however, a friendly letter suggests he favored Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate for president. Dated April 1929, Kennedy’s letter complimented Hoover’s new secretary of the navy, Charles Francis Adams, whose selection, he wrote,“was reason enough for President Hoover’s election and sufficient justification for a good Democrat like myself to vote for him again.” Perhaps Joe Kennedy simply lied to flatter Adams or to curry favor with a new Hoover administration. If his letter expressed the truth, though, why did Joe Kennedy abandon the first Irish Catholic to run for president—the standard-bearer of his father’s party and a candidate promoted at rallies by his father-in-law in Boston? Some of the answers undoubtedly lie in what compelled Joe Kennedy into public life in the first place.
AL SMITH’S ascension to power in New York resembled the rise of Honey Fitz in Boston and other Irish politicians around the nation who emerged from immigrant neighborhoods to stake a claim at City Hall or in the statehouse.“Immigrants and city dwellers recognized that he was someone in higher politics who stood up for them, accepted them as equals, and above all, who gave them respectability,” wrote Robert Slayton, one of Smith’s biographers. Smith was a progressive, often brilliant politician who made no effort to hide his origins; with his brown derby hat, street-map complexion and a honking Lower East Side voice, he personified his theme song, “The Sidewalks of New York.” As New York’s governor, he championed educational reforms, built better housing and hospitals, and, with the help of a young aide, Robert Moses, created parks and playgrounds. Increasingly, the political coalition of various ethnic and religious groups built by Smith and other urban politicians, enfranchising thousands of immigrants as new voters, would invigorate the Democratic Party and redefine the nation during the twentieth century—even if these efforts came too late for Smith himself.