Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (11 page)

But Rosemary was intellectually disabled, of below-average intelligence, an affliction distinct from those of certain learning-delayed or -disabled individuals. Dearborn’s theories and ideas certainly had applicability for a child with intellectual limitations, but Joe and Rose were still hoping for a
cure
for Rosemary’s disabilities. They hoped and believed that Rosemary had learning delays, not intellectual disabilities. Dearborn recommended an individualized course of instruction in arithmetic and reading. Rosemary should, for instance, have an account at a “department store,” he told them, where she would have a budget, keep careful records, and pay bills on time.

Rosemary remained at Miss Newton’s through the rest of that school year and returned in the fall of 1935 for another full academic year. Dr. Dearborn met with her in October 1935, reporting to Rose that “Rosemary seems to be very happy. She also appeared to me to have profited by the summer and to be more alert.” Miss Newton’s School was “an excellent arrangement,” he told Rose, possibly because Helen Newton’s program matched his research on the benefits of individualized teaching. Perhaps Rosemary’s alertness stemmed from the close attention and encouragement she received there. The O’Keefes were still actively involved in Rosemary’s life, and Dearborn was impressed by the affection between Ruth O’Keefe and Rosemary. “Mrs. O’Keefe is already attached to Rosemary and Rosemary to her. The rela
tions with the other members of the family seem to be excellent, too,” he assured Rose, “and Miss Newton reports that Rosemary has taken hold of her studies with more interest and vim, and she is very hopeful of further progress this year.” Their meeting took place on a good day for Rosemary. She seemed compliant and eager to please the doctor: “We gave Rosemary a couple of tests . . . because she wanted to have a try at them. I was able to accomplish more in the short time that we worked with Rosemary than I had been able to on any previous occasion. I hope this all augurs, as I am sure it does, an even more profitable year than last year.”

Rosemary was maturing into a lovely young woman, full-figured, poised, and sociable with her friends. Her academic progress remained negligible, however. Her letters to her parents during that year reveal a busy social life with the O’Keefes, as well as with family and other friends in the Boston area, but little about her academics. Rosemary’s handwriting, though she was now seventeen years old, still appeared more like that of an eight- or ten-year-old, with incomplete and sometimes incoherent sentences, misspelled words, faulty punctuation, and poorly structured paragraphs. Writing was clearly arduous for her.

Even as Dr. Dearborn’s efforts were not yet showing clear academic results, Dr. Lawrence’s injections continued. “Sorry to say I have to take Injections 3 times a week,” Rosemary reported to her parents in January 1936.
Helen Newton went on experimenting with various techniques and strategies to help Rosemary learn. In the spring of 1936, Newton reported that Rosemary’s writing was improving. She included a sample of Rosemary’s homework in a letter to Rose: “Please show it to her father for it is a practically perfect paper, which we have been aiming for.” She had been drilling Rosemary on famous European explorers and leaders, and she hoped that the Kennedys would ask Rosemary
questions about the historical figures to observe how much she could recall. But Newton doubted that Rosemary remembered much about Renaissance painters, “as we hadn’t drilled quite long enough here.”

Helen Newton’s mother, Adeline, was teaching Rosemary to weave, because the two educators realized that Rosemary could not tolerate academic lessons beyond lunchtime. Helen Newton found that breaking up Rosemary’s day between academic lessons and craft activities helped with her concentration and gave Rosemary opportunities to talk about her academic work with Adeline: “I received this idea from visiting several schools for retarded children when they found this plan of procedure gives the best results, as 9–11:30 or longer is too long for her to concentrate on school subjects.” Helen spent lunchtime showing Rosemary how to use her lessons as launching points for polite conversation. Adeline monitored Rosemary when she did her homework, and Helen noted, “She gets a great deal from my mother’s personality.”

Math continued to frustrate Rosemary. “There are days when change seems very hard,” Helen Newton told Rose, “and of course she longs to do algebra as Mary [O’Keefe] does—but I’ve told her she needed the plain use of money more. If you can help me out here I’d be most appreciative.” Newton co-opted Rosemary’s Easter holiday trip to Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family had recently purchased a winter vacation home, to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of math: “I had her [make] up mythical prices going to Palm Beach and taking someone with her—using certain amounts to cover meals, berth, tickets etc.”

Newton alluded to other issues. An early April letter to Rose reads, “I wrote thanking you for your cooperation in the other matter, but probably you’ve been too busy to write.” What New
ton was referring to is a mystery, because the next two sentences have been blocked out with opaque tape, purposefully redacted under the terms in the donor’s gift of deed to the John F. Kennedy Library. But Newton was clearly expecting a response from Rose, a response that had yet to come. She closes the letter by reminding Rose, and the family governess, Alice Cahill, to let her know if Rosemary had retained any of her lessons as the Easter vacation proceeded, “because what I am trying to do and the results may not come as quickly as we all desire.”

The tone of discouragement is palpable. By the time of Newton’s letter, Rose had been in contact with another consultant, Mary Baker, a teacher who worked with “special children” in New York. During March, Rose engaged Baker to go to Boston and make an assessment of Rosemary, with an eye toward Baker’s taking on Rosemary as a private student in her home on Long Island. After Baker’s visit to Boston, she wrote to Rose and Joe on March 27:

She is not only attractive but has possibilities exceedingly worth developing. It would make me most happy to have the opportunity to help Rosemary train those capacities in real happiness for herself and in increasing ability to deal with life and people. In all my work with special children I have found an entirely new environment away from things which they have been accustomed, a real necessity. In other words, if she were here with me I would handle the situation exactly as I have always done in my private school.

Baker suggested that Rosemary come to her immediately and begin “a period of intensive study of her interests, abilities, and special needs, and an intensive tutoring of her most needed and
practical abilities and skills.” Her daily program would include a “simple study of balanced diets and foods . . . making of simple candy, cakes, cookies, salads, etc. This furnishes excellent opportunity for gaining dexterity in the use of her hands; the practical arithmetic of measurements, simple fractions, temperatures, and telling time,” Baker suggested. Reading, writing, and vocabulary drills would be promoted through lessons in history, geography, civics, and science, interspersed with “athletics,” “music,” “shopping,” and leisure activities.

Baker would ensure that Rosemary had ample social interactions: picnics and parties during the day, and in the evenings, dances, the theater, concerts, movies, special dinners, and games with other students. “An occasional evening with a young man escort of fineness and understanding” would be part of the social development Baker envisioned. “Special emphasis would be placed on the matter of companions. I am in close touch with a number of exceptionally fine and understanding young people who would furnish excellent opportunity for happy companionship. All activities would be planned in the amounts best adapted to Rosemary’s physical health as well as happiness and education.” Those social activities would have to be balanced, Baker noted, with the Kennedys’ need for privacy: “The people with whom I deal would in no way come in contact with your acquaintances and she would visit you only at times planned by you.”

Baker met with Drs. Dearborn and Lawrence, too, going over “definite instructions as to [Rosemary’s] care.” Baker did not discuss the Newtons or Rosemary’s studies with them but complimented Ruth O’Keefe instead: “Mrs. O’Keefe has made a wonderful contribution to Rosemary and I am hoping that I may have the opportunity to continue the excellent work she has done.”

The Newtons were apparently unaware that Rose was inves
tigating an alternative program for Rosemary. All the arrangements for Baker’s meeting with Rosemary and her doctors were coordinated through Ruth O’Keefe and her husband, Dr. Edward S. O’Keefe, not the Newtons.

In any case, Baker’s assessment and her plans to tutor Rosemary on Long Island were not acted upon. The Kennedys decided to keep their daughter at the Newtons’ school. Yet in August 1936, just before another fall semester was to begin, Helen Newton wrote Rose, telling her, “I have had from 15 to 20 years experience with retarded children, and Rose[mary] is the most difficult child to teach so that she may retain knowledge that I have ever encountered.”
Now, after two years, Helen Newton said she could do no more, denying Rosemary readmission for a third year of instruction.

Immediately after Newton’s letter was received, Rose found another program, enrolling Rosemary at Miss Hourigan’s Residence School. The school, located in Manhattan, had been established in 1920 by Mollie Hourigan. It occupied a spacious mansion at 37 East 83rd Street, offering instruction for young women, ages seventeen to twenty-one, in “Music, French, Advanced English, Social Service, Journalism, Fine Art, Designing, Graduate Medical Assistant, Law Assistant, Homemaking and Household Management, Business,” and “Bride’s School.”
The bridal course offered social skills and training for rich young debutantes of the day. Miss Hourigan’s did offer a rigorous high school and postgraduate program for young women, but it was far more demanding than what Rosemary would have been capable of handling. She was able to enroll in classes outside of Miss Hourigan’s, too, receiving private daily instruction, for instance, at the Universal School of Handicrafts at Rockefeller Center.
To ease the move to New York City and a new school, Rose hired a Radcliffe College
graduate, Amanda Rohde, to be both tutor and companion for Rosemary.

In the midst of this transition, tragedy struck the family. Rose’s remaining sister, Agnes, suddenly died in September 1936, a devastating and unexpected blow. Agnes, who had married late but at the age of forty-three was enjoying life with her husband, Joe Gargan, in Boston, was a seemingly perfectly healthy and happy mother of three young children. An undetected embolism took her during her sleep, in just the way her grandmother had died from an embolism fifty years before. Her six-year-old son, Joey, discovered his mother dead in her bed the following morning.

Rosemary had spent a great deal of time with Agnes during her two years at the Newtons’ school in Brookline, especially during the spring and summer of 1936. Agnes was fun and patient, a disposition Rosemary loved. Her aunt’s death must have hit Rosemary exceptionally hard, as she was trying to adjust to a new environment and routine as well as to the frenetic pace of a big city. Rose, for her part, spiraled into depression. Her brother Frederick had died in February 1935, and now Agnes was gone. Rose later wrote, “A sister is a most wonderful asset, I believe, as a brother is to a boy. From my own personal experience and from watching my own children at all ages, I believe sisterly devotion is one of life’s choicest blessings.”
Now, she had no more sisters.

Within a few weeks’ time, Amanda Rohde was discovering how difficult working with Rosemary could be. Years of instruction, both individually and in classrooms, had advanced Rosemary only to the fourth- or fifth-grade level in math and English, in spite of her age of eighteen. Dance classes became a struggle of wills, as did many of her other lessons. Rohde echoed the concerns of teachers from the past seven years. “It appears to me that she has taken advantage of her weakness and has used it as a weapon
to have her way too much,” the twenty-one-year-old Rohde wrote to Rose in October. Not only was Rosemary a challenging student for the young woman, but also Rosemary’s “attitude towards her work, and consequently towards me” made daily interactions with her exhausting. “Now she makes herself unpleasant when she finds herself in a situation in which she has to think. If she is allowed to continue with this, she will become more and more difficult to live with,” Rohde cautioned. “Daydreaming” was her problem, Rohde believed, causing Rosemary to “brood too much about herself.”
Rohde asserted that “Rosemary has been allowed to escape too much for her own welfare. She has found it more pleasant to day-dream . . . Little by little she must be brought to face reality. It will be a long siege, but it can be done.”

The Kennedys, as always, were hopeful that this new situation would work better than the last. They instructed Rohde to incorporate a curriculum developed by Walter Dearborn into Rosemary’s daily studies at Miss Hourigan’s. By this time Dearborn had been working with Rosemary for more than two years, but he was now more cautious concerning his expectations for her success. He observed not only that Rosemary was socially awkward but also that her anxiety and fears in public seemed to be the result of “intellectual blocking as a result of . . . tense social settings,” where her clumsiness and incompetence raised “the concerned looks of all concerned,” embarrassing and frustrating her even more.
Just how this problem could be addressed was a question left unanswered.

Again, Rosemary would not progress as her parents had planned. By the end of the school year at Miss Hourigan’s, Rosemary had achieved little. Rohde was taking the summer off to travel home to Sioux City, Iowa, and new exercises and assignments for Rosemary, especially the “handicraft” classes that Rose
believed “would develop her fingers,” would have to wait until the fall and a new academic year.
That July, the Kennedys sent Rosemary to Wyonegonic Camp for Girls in Denmark, Maine—the first summer-camp experience for her—for the month of July. She was accompanied by Elaine Dearborn, Walter Dearborn’s seventeen-year-old daughter.