by Thomas Maier
THERE WERE OFTEN painful resonances for Joe Kennedy of the children he had lost, and he harbored a wariness of the potential for tragedy just around the bend. His Irish fatalism crept into a 1952 letter discussing the high costs of constant plane flights by his daughters, pointing out that it “becomes a matter of danger in that after having travelled as much as folks have, your chances of not having an accident are that much worse.” Joe Kennedy had long ago realized that his millions could not save his children from their own destinies, yet often he exerted a subtle control not only over his adult children but over their spouses as well. The emotional and financial strings were particularly evident in the marriage of his daughter Patricia to the actor Peter Lawford.
In a whirlwind romance, the couple decided to marry in 1954 after dating for only two months. The young and virginal Patricia, perhaps the most beautiful of the Kennedy daughters, was smitten by the suave charm and Hollywood good looks of the British actor, though the relationship began immediately with some difficulties. Peter was not a Catholic, and his widowed mother, Lady May Lawford, viewed the Kennedys as “barefoot Irish peasants” who were nouveau riche not worthy of her esteem. Nor were Patricia’s parents overly impressed. “If there’s anybody I’d hate worse than an actor as a son-in-law, it’s a British actor,” Joe reportedly said. Nevertheless, when the couple married in April 1954 inside an Upper East Side Manhattan church, not St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Peter agreed to raise their children as Catholics.“Is there any chance of getting the Pope’s blessing for our marriage, or does it have to be an all Catholic ceremony?” Pat wrote to her father that same month.
The couple moved to Los Angeles, and Pat quickly became pregnant. She even consulted her father on the choice of obstetrician-gynecologist, and whether the doctor she chose was a Catholic. (When considering a non-Catholic OB-GYN recommended by a friend, Pat informed her father, “He himself is not a Catholic but does work at St. John’s Catholic Hospital for patients.”) Drawing upon his own Hollywood experience, Joe Kennedy was asked to provide long-distance career counseling for Lawford, who patterned himself more as a Malibu surfer boy than an English squire. After receiving a long letter from Pat about the tribulations of her husband’s show biz career, Joe wrote back advising his pregnant daughter to worry less about such matters.
“I think it’s too bad you both have to be bothered with this contract at a time when you are looking for a house and expecting a baby,” her father wrote from Palm Beach. “My first interest would be that baby, second the contract, and third the house. . . . I have had enough experience in forty odd years to realize that anything you can settle with money is not worth losing a night’s sleep about because there is always a ways to fix it up.”Yet there was something about Peter Lawford’s character that left Joe and Rose unsettled, never quite comfortable with their son-in-law, as if marrying a Kennedy was just a fortuitous move for a rakish cad. Peter seemed more interested in Joe’s advice about the latest television or movie offer than in anything else. “Last night your father talked to Peter and after he finished, Peter mentioned that Pat and two other people had been listening in on the conversation,” Rose confided to her youngest son Ted.“It seems to me that it is almost as bad as having your wire tapped.”
At age sixty, Rose Kennedy appeared well suited to Roman Catholicism, with its allusions to saints, its penchant for sacrifice and its medieval view of the human condition. Her own life—a mighty cathedral of passions and ideals devoted to family and religion—contained its own contradictions and ironies as well as its abiding truths and love. She did not issue firebrand sermons or wholesale condemnations, yet she was neither a dupe nor a complete innocent. “She may look as fragile as a violet, but don’t be deceived for a minute,” said her close friend, Marie Greene. “If Rose had been a boy, she—not Jack—would have been the first Catholic president of the United States.”
Her son’s 1952 Senate campaign showcased Rose’s political skills, still the daughter of Boston’s ever-gregarious Honey Fitz. She could tell a good story, dress up anecdotes to the Irish Catholic audience about the British royalty she’d met during her days in England and spin yarns about rearing such a large brood. She always managed to underline, in a matter of fact way, why her family was so special. After the election, Rose asked Archbishop Cushing about setting up speaking engagements for her among Catholic organizations. Cushing’s response was hardly enthusiastic. He gingerly suggested that she begin with talks to the Catholic Women’s Club but not other groups because he sensed trepidation from elsewhere in the Kennedy family. Eventually, Rose garnered an invitation from her alma mater Manhattanville. She spoke about being a Catholic woman in America and the challenges of faith in the world. In a letter of thanks to the college’s president, Mother Eleanor M. O’Byrne, Rose admitted that she was “thrilled” by the size of the audience for her “speaking debut.”When she returned a few years later for a similar address at Manhattanville, Rose mixed in family tales with her own point of view “so full of faith and the practical expression of devotion to the Sacred Heart,” as O’Byrne later described it. The nun marveled over how “very brave” and “deeply moving” Rose was in talking before seven hundred people about her deceased daughter, Kathleen.“I am sure that Kathleen was sending a great current of prayer through the so sure bond of the Communion of Saints,” wrote Mother O’Byrne, “a current of prayer which sustained and up-held her mother.”
Rose Kennedy embraced the earthly demands of this world with the spiritual expectations of the next. She kept herself thin and attractive well past her youth, certainly not looking like a woman who had born nine children. She indulged herself in designer clothes that placed her on best-dressed lists, and she took long vacations without her husband, traveling with female companions such as her niece Ann Gargan, who for a time became a nun. As was true in many Irish families, the Kennedys had a clear division between the sexes. There was the men’s realm, Joe and his sons; and the secondary world inhabited by Rose, her daughters and eventually her daughters-in-law, deferential to the needs of their men. Rose’s spiritual life was truly her own, however, a place her husband respected and dared not invade. She wrapped herself in prayer and devotion to God, convinced of an afterlife where all of the departed Kennedys would someday be united, and actively encouraged family members and their siblings to join her at religious retreats. She could use her faith like a buckler, shielding her from the hurts and disappointments in life. At Hyannis Port, Rose maintained a tiny house along the shore where she could sit, read, meditate and pray—a shelter from her storms. Like many Catholic women of her generation who were educated and trained by nuns, Rose aspired to combine elements of a good Catholic home with those of the convent. She sought out religious retreats that would somehow reveal a new and even deeper insight into God. Some of her children, such as Bobby and Eunice, intuitively grasped her religiosity; those with far less devotion, such as Jack, learned to respect it, even if they shook their heads a bit defensively. “She was terribly religious,” said Jack to an early biographer.“She was a little removed, and still is, which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children. I thought she was a very model mother for a big family.”
For all her seraphic ways, Rose understood the sinner, the weaknesses of the flesh, especially the animal cravings of men. Particularly if these cardinal sins occurred in her own family, Rose could excuse, apologize and look the other way with extraordinary grace and self-denial. She did so with her father, then with her husband and again with her own children. Sex for her had been largely a duty, far more for procreation than for recreation, an integral part of the progression of the species, the marvelous extension of God’s plan as agreed to in her marriage vows. She did not refuse her husband’s insistent attempts at family making, but she didn’t engage in much more than necessary. Though often a crude practitioner, Joe’s interest in sex was more catholic than Catholic, a man whose far-flung tastes ran from showgirls and starlets to the young wom
en his adult children brought home as friends, according to his detractors. They attested that he could be a grabber, a cajoler and a boor, sometimes pushing himself on women when he wasn’t wanted.
At times, Rose adopted a strange, almost distant approach to her husband’s sexuality, as though he suffered from a glandular problem. For instance, in a letter to her daughters in 1949, Rose tried to fob off as cute a rather mortifying comment from her husband to Teddy’s girlfriend that summer: “She stayed here last night,” Rose recounted. “She is really very pretty but looks about fifteen. Your Father made the startling announcement to her that when she was about eighteen he would be waiting for her. As she is already eighteen, she was really dumbfounded.” Joe’s letters to his sons contained a jocular air about the opposite sex.“I haven’t seen all those beautiful girls that everybody talks about being here in the South of France,but maybe when Jack arrives here next week he’ll find them,” he wrote to Teddy in 1955 from the Riviera. He mentioned a girl “very anxious to see” Torby Macdonald, Jack’s friend from the Harvard football team, adding that “I don’t know whether it’s with a gun or a lawyer’s letter.”
The church’s anathema toward sex outside of marriage carried the unintended consequence of covering up and perpetuating this behavior by Joseph Kennedy and men like him who struck a firm distinction between marital relations at home and the pleasures they sought on the road. There were the Madonnas these men had married, who slept in separate bedrooms as shrines to their shriveled sex lives; and then there were the randy unattached women aroused by Joe Kennedy’s bankroll and those whom Joe allegedly paid for introductory services to Jack and Robert at an East Harlem whorehouse. In the world of Catholic imagery and Jansenist restrictions, sex for men was dirty and illicit and made all the more exciting by the condemnations of their religion and the belief their wives weren’t looking.
Clearly Rose knew about or suspected much of this lasciviousness but refused to worry or complain, trusting in the Lord that her family life would never be sunk by her husband’s infidelities. Whatever dalliance he found outside her purview would never disturb their permanent bond in life, the sanctity of a marriage consecrated by the church. Even in Hollywood, with her husband “surrounded daily by some of the most beautiful women in the world, dressed in beautiful clothes,” she didn’t fret, but rose above the muck and mire of her husband’s carnal desires.“One of the characteristics of my life with Joe was that we trusted one another implicitly,” avowed Rose, the ideal wife for a compulsive philanderer.“If he had occasion to go out with theatrical people, he told me that he was going and he went. There was never any deceit on his part and there was never any doubt in my mind about his motives and behavior.”
ROSE WAS NOT BLIND to the way women at various campaign teas gazed upon her handsome son Jack. After the election, the press certified the junior senator from Massachusetts as one of the most eligible bachelors in America. Jack enjoyed a randy bachelorhood, a fast-and-loose approach to women shared and encouraged by his father. In one letter during the war, Joe Kennedy bragged to his son how he had come across “a very beautiful blond in New York who was looking for some help to get a job on the stage . . . and said she got into the country through the help of my very attractive son, Jack,” he wrote. “It strikes me that you and Joe must have done some great work over there when I wasn’t looking.”
For the men of the family, sex—playful, active and frenetic—became the indoor version of the kind of games, like touch football, they played on the lawn with such intensity. Even when referring to so-called nice girls, Jack spoke in a kind of adolescent, almost misogynist patter with dear old Dad, as though he were shooting the breeze with another school chum. Years earlier, when he accompanied one of his sister’s friends, Charlotte McDonnell, to a 1940 Princeton football game, Jack told his father that it “will be my first taste of a Catholic girl so will be interested to see how it goes.” At that time, Charlotte’s family reigned as one of the leading Irish Catholic families in New York, part of a social circle with houses in Southampton who looked down their noses at the upstart Kennedys from Boston. Though some viewed Charlotte as a potential fiancée for Jack, he wasn’t particularly interested, nor was Charlotte’s father approving of young Kennedy as a potential suitor for his daughter. After Jack had attended a Saturday night party with Charlotte and his sister Kick, the threesome stayed up so late that they wound up going together to seven o’clock Mass on Sunday morning. “If the subject of marriage came up,” Charlotte remembered, “Jack would never talk about it directly.” Several years after serving in Congress and preparing for his Senate race, Jack’s blithe love life began to be viewed as a potential liability, as even his father recognized. At the overripe age of thirty-five, he needed to become a family man, not an overaged Casanova or worse.“I understand brother Johnny is on his way to Notre Dame next Sunday by way of Jamaica,” Joe wrote to Eunice.“I know he’ll almost go insane when he hears that the Associated Press carried a front page story last night that ‘he had gone to Jamaica for a short vacation.’ That should furnish plenty of material for his constituency, particularly Mr. Lodge. With Congress just reconvening, that’s rotten publicity. After all, he’s over 21 and he knows what he’s doing.”
The Kennedy family rejoiced when Jack started seriously courting Jacqueline Bouvier, a beautiful, dark-haired woman with a whisper of a voice and an intelligent, sensitive manner. The couple met at a dinner party but their romance escalated after they attended an inaugural party for the new president, Dwight Eisenhower. Jackie came from a wealthy Catholic family familiar with the estates of Southampton and Newport. As a young girl, her parents divorced—a rare event for Catholics—because of the numerous affairs of her father (called “Black Jack,” a descriptive, if somewhat dark, term of endearment), which biographers suggest left Jackie emotionally shaken but still attached to her daddy with the wandering eye. Her mother soon married a wealthy older man, Hugh Auchincloss—who doted over his stepdaughter and her sister, Lee; the new Mrs. Auchincloss moved with her daughters to the Auchincloss estate in Newport, Rhode Island. Jackie’s education took place not in the Catholic convent academies attended by the Kennedy women but in a private secular school in Connecticut, then on to Vassar, the Sorbonne in Paris and graduation from George Washington University. She was working as a photographer for the Washington Times-Herald when she met Jack Kennedy. Their relationship evolved as part fairy tale and part press release; it developed privately on dates and publicly in glossy photos taken by the popular magazine Life.
When Jackie’s mother met with the Kennedy parents in the summer of 1953, a certain competitive air, the jockeying for the high ground of class and stature, took place. The Bouviers liked to give the false impression of being related to French royalty, and Jackie’s mother, Janet Norton Lee, suggested that her origins were with the famous Lees of Maryland. In fact, her grandparents were famine Irish who lived in the slums surrounding New York City, and her grandmother spoke with a brogue. To the Kennedys, Jackie gave no hint of her heritage and, as her cousin John H. Davis later claimed, she “did everything possible to hide her Irish background.” Joe Kennedy, who had FBI reports on the backgrounds of his sons-in-law sent to him when they became serious suitors, never had a clue about the Bouvier lineage, nor did his eldest son. They were both smitten by Jackie’s charm. In Jack’s marriage proposal was the unspoken prospect of moving up socially by marrying a Catholic woman whose family was seen as part of the old money, blue-blood set in Newport. At times with the regally poised Jackie, the Kennedys’ feeling of social inferiority, of still being somehow part of the Irish immigrant class, became transparent. The Kennedy girls mocked Jackie’s upper-class affectations. Jack sensed that the Kennedys were perceived in Newport as somehow wild and uncultivated.“I’m afraid that they feel that their worst fears are being realized,” Jack quipped, after he and two friends improperly played a round of golf at Auchincloss’s exclusive club without permission of a member.“The inv
asion of the Irish Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of America’s socially elite is being led by two chunky red-haired friends of the groom.”
The religious compatibility of Jack’s fiancée proved an important factor in gaining Rose’s endorsement. One account of the wedding noted, undoubtedly with Rose’s approval, that the bride was related to Mother Katherine Drexel of Philadelphia, a nun who had founded the Order of the Blessed Sacrament in Pennsylvania. “Joe and I could not be more thrilled to know that Jack had won such an outstanding bride who is so charming, so cultured and such a devout Catholic,” Rose wrote to Jackie’s mother. “We shall welcome her with all our hearts and we shall always try to make her very happy.”The Auchincloss parents, who hosted the wedding reception at their Hammersmith Farm estate in Newport, were taken aback by the onslaught of press and relented only after much disagreement to the Kennedys’ demand that reporters and cameramen be allowed to attend in the background. “I had no idea what it was like to be in politics!” Jackie’s mother bemoaned. Nevertheless, Janet Auchincloss reaffirmed her daughter’s commitment to the young senator and his family. “We are perfectly delighted that Jackie has chosen to marry a man whose mind and whose religion and whose great charm give them so much in common,” she concluded.