The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  P. J. had asked that with his death all the IOUs that he had amassed over the years be burned. His two daughters, Loretta and Margaret, followed their father’s mandate, burning notes totaling at least $50,000. Beyond that, P. J. left an estate that one of Joe’s closest associates, James Landis, estimated as between $200,000 and $300,000, half to his two daughters and half to his son.

  Joe’s affair with Gloria had begun with what the actress called “passionate mutterings,” and it continued with duplicity within duplicity. Joe was the daring director of the romance, with life as his great stage. He brought the actress home to meet Rose and the children. He invited her to travel with him and Rose on a European trip. Through all this Rose played the humble hausfrau and Gloria played the star, and hardly an honest word passed between them.

  Gloria had a friend whose face had been scarred by broken glass in an automobile accident. The actress feared that fans pressing against her car might break the glass and destroy her face and career. Rose was sent forward into the crowds around the vehicle. “Who are you?” they shouted as she got in the car. “What are you doing? We want to see Gloria.”

  Joe was perfectly willing to send his wife into the yearning, starstruck crowds to protect his mistress. Joe knew that no matter what he did, Rose would act as if she did not see how she was being treated. She had her children and her faith, her honored name and great houses. That was what had been rendered unto her. What transpired beyond that was not her life.

  “The story got around that Joe and Gloria had gone on a trip to Europe together,” Rose recalled decades later. “A long story started until they said her child was named after him. The boy Joseph had been named after her father. He was four or five when she [Gloria] first laid eyes on Joe Kennedy. But the story had got around that he was Joe’s son.”

  Gloria wrote in her autobiography that at one point Cardinal O’Connell implored her to end the affair. The Church had supposedly turned down Joe’s request to be allowed to marry the actress, and now it was time for them to sever their relationship. That was Gloria’s story. But it is doubtful that Joe would have gone to the Church to ask that he, Joseph P. Kennedy, honored Catholic layman and father of eight children, be allowed to become Gloria’s fourth husband.

  Gloria was an actress, and she used all her skills in her autobiography, as she did in her decade-long affair with Joe Kennedy. She continued to visit him even as the affair slowly dissipated. Joe was left not with sweet memories of nights of bliss, but with an object lesson in the danger of passions, not only for himself but also for his sons. “Forty is a dangerous age,” he reflected to Harvey Klemmer, an aide. “Look out, boy. Don’t get in trouble. When I was forty, I went overboard for a certain lady in Hollywood of which you may have heard. It ruined my business. It ruined my health, and it damn near ruined my marriage.”

  After a year in their rental house in Riverdale, Joe bought a splendid estate in the exclusive Westchester County community of Bronxville. When he was home, Joe joined the other men in this town of sixty-five hundred residents, commuting to New York City each morning by train, leaving Rose and their children behind in the brick Georgian mansion.

  Alice Cahill Bastian, the nurse, recalled that Joe “was always the first one up in the morning in the household. Shortly thereafter, the sound of childish voices came from his room. The little ones had quietly crept down the hallway to enjoy a romp and reading the funnies with Daddy. This early morning visit was a highlight of their day and his. As he kissed them good-bye when leaving for his office or on a trip, he was never too hurried to ask them about school or their plans for the day. Oftentimes the younger ones would accompany him to the train.”

  Joe was the more demonstratively affectionate parent. His children responded with a love that was far more deeply emotive than what they felt for Rose. They learned quickly not to lie to their father. He tolerated none of the casual dissembling he called “applesauce.” Nor did he want any “monkey business” at home or school. Though their mother’s hand disciplined them, they feared their father’s displeasure far more deeply. His slightest reprimand stung far greater than a coat hanger applied to their backside. Joe, however, like Rose, was often gone. “Daddy did not come home last night,” Kathleen wrote her mother in Palm Beach in February 1932. “We do not know when he is coming.”

  Gossip was one of the town’s primary products, and a favored subject was the mysterious Kennedys living in the most expensive property in town. “They were considered nouveau riche,” recalled David Wilson, who went to school with the Kennedy boys. There were no Jews and few Catholics in Bronxville, but it was neither the Kennedys’ faith nor their ethnic background that had set the town buzzing. It was Joe’s sexual indiscretions.

  Bronxville fancied itself a sedate, churchgoing, conservative place, but there were dalliances galore among the affluent couples. It did not matter what one did as long as one did it quietly. Joe was so public in his womanizing that even many of the children in town knew about his assignations. He was so disrespectful of the shallow sanctimoniousness of the village that he brought women to the Gramatan Hotel. Some of the teenagers in town were so brazen as to chase after Joe, hoping for a glimpse of his current companion.

  Joe’s most flagrant adventures did not begin until after Rose gave birth to Edward Moore “Teddy” Kennedy, their ninth and final child on February 22, 1932. “People said, ‘Why do you want to have nine children [if] you have had eight?’” Rose recalled. “You are over forty years old, and you will be all tired out, and you will lose your figure and looks. Why do you want to pay any attention to those priests? So I got rather indignant and made up my mind that neither Teddy or I were going to suffer and [we] were going to be independent and make it in a superior fashion. We weren’t going to have anybody feel sorry for us.”

  Rose was forty-one years old, and it was a difficult, tiring labor that left her exhausted and seriously ill. She was in bed for over a month. Rose had ample reason to believe that if she became pregnant again she might die in labor. Since she was not going to violate the church’s mandate against birth control, she saw that her only choice was no longer to have sexual relations with her husband. Joe had needed no excuse for his affairs, but now there was an unspoken agreement that he could live as he wanted to live.

  On the first day that ten-year-old Jack attended Riverdale Country Day School, he came running out late for the sparkling Reo bus, clutching a piece of toast in his hand, his shoes in the other hand, his tie askew. Jack had a preternatural instinct to take whatever was best. Instead of moving toward the back of the bus, he plunked himself down in the seat directly behind the driver. The seat had been claimed already as the prized property of one of his new classmates, Manuel Angulo. The boy cherished the seat in part because whoever sat there got first dibs in the afternoon when the driver stopped for the Good Humor ice cream truck. Manuel was no more going to argue his case with Jack than Jack was going to listen to his belligerent seatmate, and within a few minutes the boys started pounding each other, rolling into the aisle, setting off screams and shouts of encouragement. The bus driver pulled over to the roadside and separated the two boys. “After that we became good friends,” Angulo recalled.

  Joe Jr. and Jack both had an intense, nervous hunger for all the minutiae of a boy’s life, treating touch football games as epic contests and passionately competing for even something like a bus seat as if the struggle were for life itself. Their friends relished their time at the Kennedy house, for everything was intensified there.

  When Rose was home, she was not like many of their mothers, who were interested in bridge games and garden clubs. Rose was a mother who directed her children’s every endeavor. She had ample time for her children in part because the ladies of Bronxville had largely ostracized her. She was blackballed from the Bronxville Women’s Club, an outcast not because of her faith but because of her husband’s infidelity. It was also unthinkable that the Kennedys would be admitted to the Bronxville Countr
y Club.

  Jack and Joe Jr. were among the most popular boys at Riverdale. Joe Jr. was the dominant brother, pushing his little brother into the background. “Perhaps Joe Jr. was kind of spoiled,” Angulo recalled, “but then again, that was because he was the apple of his father’s eye. I wouldn’t say that Jack was spoiled.”

  Joe Jr. was ahead of his class in everything, including his interest in girls. Jack was so shy around girls that when it came time for him to go to dancing class he would hide in the bathroom. He was a handsome lad, but when girls started calling him on the phone, he could not even bring himself to speak.

  Girls weren’t everything. One fall afternoon Jack was sitting in the upper field with his football-playing mates, waiting for his turn to take the field. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” one of the boys asked. “I want to be a doctor,” one boy said. “I want to be an engineer,” a second asserted. “I’m going to be president of the United States,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

  Little Bobby would never have expressed such bold dreams, or if he had, his words would have been lost in his big brothers’ boastful shouts. His own mother often scarcely paid attention to him. She ruefully admitted years later that by the time the seventh of her nine children was born, even she was dragged down by the relentless routine of mothering.

  “As a mother, yes, I did get a bit tired after fifteen years of telling the same bedtime stories, celebrating the same holidays,” Rose confessed. She was traveling more now, including twice-yearly sojourns to Paris to be fitted for the latest styles, and much of the time she foisted Bobby off on governesses and nannies. She might have felt differently if Bobby had been a brilliant boy, but lost in the middle of the family, he seemed to have nothing singular about him.

  His big brother Jack could not remember Bobby until he was three and a half. Jack’s first significant memory is perfectly emblematic of Bobby’s upbringing. There stood this tiny tyke on the deck of a yawl in Nantucket Sound, jumping again and again into the rough waters, teaching himself how to swim, while Joe Jr. watched from another boat. Joe Jr. might have stopped him, lecturing him on the dangers, but short of saving him from drowning, Joe Jr. let his little brother continue.

  Bobby could dive into that sea a thousand times, but he would never be able to knife into the water with the ease and elegance of his big brothers. Bobby scrambled on in life, fearful that he would be dismissed as unworthy and that when he arrived at the table of life the food would be gone and the guests departed. Once, when he was only four years old, he came careening down to the dining room, terrified that he would be late, and ran into a glass door, severely cutting his face. Another day he was playing in the toolshed when he dropped a rusty radiator on his foot, breaking his second toe. The pain was excruciating. Most boys would have burst into tears, dragging their injured foot behind them as they stumbled toward the house. Bobby sat there grimacing in pain, not even removing his shoe. A half hour later he finally took off his shoe: his sock was soaked in blood, and he had to be taken to the hospital.

  In the high stakes of inheritance, Bobby seemed to have drawn the worst card. Unlike his brothers, he wasn’t a handsome child whose presence could charm the uncharmable. Bobby was scrawny and small, always struggling to keep up, running along double time while his brothers forged ahead with long strides. As a boy, he had soft, gentle features that suggested he had best stay away from the tough playing fields of manhood. His mouth was often pursed in a wry expression, suggesting nothing if not bewilderment. Some called him shy, but it was a strange shyness, for he would suddenly burst out like a cuckoo clock on the hour, making a few loud noises, before shutting himself up again. He was not especially smart either. Not only was he not a top student, but he showed none of Jack’s flashes of brilliance that excused his otherwise mediocre school record. Joe Jr. was one of the top students in his class at Riverdale, while in sixth grade Jack won a commencement prize for best composition.

  “Bobby looked on both [of his parents] as if they were saints,” reflected Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Jack’s closest friend. “He could see no defects in either. They did not reciprocate. They did not return his love.” Joe and Rose surely loved their son, but he seemed at times an interloper, an observer to the dramatic comings and goings of his big brothers, half ignored as his parents doted over little Teddy. Bobby was the most emotionally vulnerable of the boys. “Bobby got along better with his mother than with his father,” his younger sister Jean reflected. “Jack, the reverse. His father was often very rough on Bobby; his mother would console him, ‘You’re my favorite,’ half jokingly.” Rose may have told Bobby on occasion that he was her favorite, but she most likely did so because he was not.

  Life for Bobby was a foreign language that he spoke only haltingly, stumbling over the syntax, his accent showing that this was not a tongue that came naturally to him. He struggled to stay up with the world his father taught him must be his. As a boy in Bronxville, he signed up for a paper route, an endeavor that Joe thought admirable training for a youth. Admirable training it was, but primarily for the Kennedys’ chauffeur, who delivered the papers each morning. “I put an end to that,” his mother recalled. “Bobby said he was so busy with his schoolwork.”

  Bobby had the deepest faith of any of his brothers. He appeared so devout at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville that one of the nuns, Sister M. Ambrose, thought that he “might have a religious vocation.” “Bishop Bernard from the Bahama Islands used to be given permission by Father McCann to collect at the Masses at least once a year,” Sister Ambrose recalled in a letter to Bobby years later. “After an appeal at the nine o’clock mass, you went home, got your bank, and gave the contents to the Bishop.”

  The Kennedy boys had set their roots in Bronxville far deeper than their parents ever would or could. Rose wanted her sons to go to an elite Catholic school or, if Joe spurned that idea, to public school, “where they’d meet the grocer’s son and the plumber’s son as well as the minister’s son and the banker’s son.” In Bronxville there were few plumber’s and grocer’s sons in the classrooms, but the progressive school system was among the best in America.

  Joe, however, had no use for what he considered the tedious malarkey of American democracy. He had received his education in American social mores at Harvard. He was not going to have his sons go through life bearing the stigma of public school. Rose argued with her husband, but this was not a debate that she had any business joining or the possibility of winning.

  In the fall of 1929, fourteen-year-old Joe Jr. left his classmates at Riverdale to head off to Choate, one of the half-dozen or so top prep schools in America. “He is a rare youth and you will be most fortunate to have him,” Frank S. Hackett, the Riverdale headmaster, wrote in support of Joe Jr.’s admission. “I regret exceedingly that this family are contemplating any change.”

  Jack stayed at home another year attending Riverdale before being sent to Canterbury Prep, a Catholic school in New Milford, Connecticut. Since his early years of sickness, he had been a healthy, vibrant boy in Bronxville. Away from home, thirteen-year-old Jack began to suffer from a myriad of minor maladies. He joined the football team, but being small and weak, he was knocked up and down the field. “My nose my leg and other parts of my anatomy have been risked around so much that it is beginning to be funny,” he wrote Bobby.

  By now Jack was fluent in the emotional language of the Kennedys. He knew he could never complain too loudly that he missed his mother or his friends, or that he was full of wistful homesickness. He might allude to such things, but sickness was the only avenue of emotional release left to him. His frequent letters home were full, not of the joys and vicissitudes of a boy’s life, but of problems with his health. He wrote his father that at mass he “began to get sick dizzy and weak. I just about fainted and everything began to get black.” He said he was only saved from collapsing onto the floor by an alert proctor, who held him up.

  Jack could not tolerate the suggestion that
he might be weaker than his brother, and he pointedly reminded his parents: “Joe fainted twice in church so I guess I will live.” On another occasion he wrote about problems he was having with his eyes: “I see things blury [sic] even at a distance of ten feet,” he told his parents. “I can’t see much color through that eye either.” He wrote that he was losing weight and that he was “pretty tired.”

  Such letters would have sent most parents hurrying to the school to succor their sickly son. Neither Joe nor Rose apparently ever visited Jack at the school. They wrote frequent letters. They kept in contact with the school administration. But they treated the school year as a sentence that Jack had to serve out on his own and whose life lessons would be diminished by their presence.

  Jack was already imbued with the Kennedy attitude that individuals outside of the family were largely interchangeable. That winter of 1930/31, Jack wrote his mother complaining about the suit that she sent him and detailing problems with his eyes. Only then did he mention what another boy would have considered the most important news. Jack had been out sledding with some of the other youths. The hill was steep and slick with ice. Jack estimated that the sleds careened down the pathway at close to forty miles an hour. He was traveling so fast that he did not make a turn and sailed into a ditch. Jack set out again, and as he wrote his parents, “I smashed into a sled that was lying on the ground and I saw the other boy, Brooks, lying on the ground holding his stomach.” Jack went on in clinical detail describing the youth’s “grayish color” and speculated that the injured boy was probably operated upon. “He had internal injuries and I liked him a lot,” Jack concluded, describing the student as if he were deceased.

  The friend had been carried off life’s playing field, and though he presumably recovered, Jack moved on. In her reply Rose might have tried to teach her son that without a sense of responsibility for his own actions, he would never be a true adult. She did not even address the matter, however, or ask about the boy’s well-being. If she did, the letter has been lost.