Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (14 page)

Traditionally, elite young women from America whose families could afford to send them to England for the season, or who were living in Europe or in London at the time, were eligible for presentation. Such an arrangement led to status-hungry citizens pressuring the American ambassador to allow their daughters to be presented at court.
Joe, perhaps taking the opportunity to spoil things for a class of people who had long shunned him because of his working-class upbringing and Irish Catholic heritage, decided that only the wives and daughters of the U.S. diplomatic mission who were actually living in England could participate. The uproar was deafening. In spite of the negative press, but with President Roosevelt’s support, Joe refused to acquiesce. The prior year had seen twenty American women presented at court. This year it would be only seven, three of whom were Kennedys: Rose, Rosemary, and Kick.

On the evening of the presentation, Rose claimed she felt like “Cinderella,” dressed in her silver-embroidered Molyneux gown with matching tulle train. She wore long white gloves over which “jewels were added.” A Molyneux dressmaker, who had come to the embassy to help Rose get dressed, secured three white feathers “at the proper angle” on her hair, and a jewel-encrusted tiara, purchased for the occasion, completed the look.
Rose later wrote that she “ran into my husband’s room to show him my elegance . . . His blue eyes lit up, and he grinned in the most loving way and said—as he
would
say—‘You’re a real knockout,’ which was the highest compliment I could ever want.”

Rosemary was resplendent in her “picture dress of white tulle embroidered with silver paillettes and worn over white satin,” and she was a specific favorite of both the American and the Brit
ish papers. Kathleen radiated in her French gown of “white and silver rosettes scattered” on white tulle over satin, with a matching embroidered train.
Eunice would later remember that leading up to her presentation at court the following year, “more excitement and joy seized me than ever before in my life.”
Rosemary and Kick felt the same thing. The girls carried “Victorian posie” bouquets, while Rose, like the rest of the matrons attending, carried an ostrich-feather fan.

After the group gathered on the first floor of the embassy and posed for photographs, Ambassador Kennedy led his wife and daughters to a waiting limousine. Following a procession past thousands of spectators who lined the streets approaching Buckingham Palace, the Kennedys exited the car at a diplomatic entrance and were ushered along red carpets through the palace’s opulent galleries via “a special route for the diplomats who head off the court’s list.” At 9:30 sharp, to the sounds of the national anthem, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth entered the ballroom and were guided to their thrones. The queen was wearing the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond in her crown. Weighing 105 carats, the diamond had been taken as war spoils from India a century before. The king, only a year past his coronation, wore the deep scarlet uniform of a field marshal.
The debutantes, already lined up, began moving in perfect tandem toward the royal couple. The ballroom, decorated in gold, silver, and white, sparkled from the crystals twinkling in the giant chandeliers hanging above, which enhanced the jewel-studded tiaras, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets worn by the guests.

Rosemary was stunning, more beautiful than her sister. A few weeks of practicing the perfect “Saint James bow,” smiles, handshakes, and ballroom dancing had paid off—almost. Much to everyone’s embarrassment, Rosemary tripped and stumbled in front
of the king and queen. Quickly catching herself and avoiding a reputation-shattering fall to the floor, Rosemary accomplished her curtsy and followed her sister Kick into the ballroom. Fortunately for Rosemary, she did not take the embarrassment as seriously as others in the room, and her evening was a success. She danced and chatted graciously like many of the other debutantes. According to the gossip columns, Rosemary and Kick both danced with “Prince Frederick of Prussia, Earl of Chichester, Earl of Craven, Viscount Duncannon, Viscount Newport, and Baron von Florow.”
Years of training and the close supervision that Rosemary received helped mask her intellectual challenges so successfully that no one seemed to suspect how profoundly different she was. Many assumed that the older, prettier sister was just a little more reserved or more shy than the younger and more outgoing Kathleen. But it was Rosemary, in her beautiful Molyneux gown, who received the most attention from the British press. Rose would later complain that the London papers reported on Rosemary’s dress to the exclusion of Kathleen’s. She believed the British prejudice against Paris fashions jaded the reporting, but she could not deny that her eldest daughter’s great beauty had captivated the society-column pages.
The
New York Times
noted, perhaps rather cattishly, “Court observers noticed that Mrs. Kennedy wore a white gown, the same as her daughters, a color formerly reserved for debutantes.” Apparently, Rose committed nearly as bad a faux pas as her husband, who refused to wear the traditional formal British knickers and instead wore “ordinary full evening dress.”

Rose planned for the girls to share in a coming-out party in June. She deftly orchestrated a dinner for eighty and a reception for one hundred more to celebrate the two sisters’ coming of age and entrance into elite society. The embassy dining room glowed in shades of yellow, and guests sat at beautifully appointed tables
topped with silver candelabras surrounded by rings of roses and sweet peas. Kathleen and Rosemary wore “severe gowns of white, relieved only by necklaces of pearls.” The stunningly handsome sisters danced in the embassy ballroom, which was exquisitely decorated in “pink and mauve flowers.” The event was called “one of the best of recent dances for debutantes” in London that season.

Becoming increasingly beautiful as she aged, and with a little extra weight adding to her voluptuousness (much to her parents’ dismay), Rosemary attracted a tremendous amount of attention, including that of the men she met. Given Rosemary’s easy sheltering at convent schools, it would take concerted, coordinated efforts by Rose, Joe, and Rosemary’s siblings to monitor and guide Rosemary through social situations outside of school. She was now flirting freely and unabashedly. In July, after the presentation at court, Kathleen wrote that she and Rosemary and two other girls had gone out with “about six midshipmen after a movie.”
After singing some songs at a restaurant, they discovered their bill had been reduced by half by the owners of the establishment, who were honored to have the ambassador’s daughters as customers. Kathleen would not mention Rosemary again in her diary for the rest of the year. With so many young servicemen eager for female company, and the sons of British aristocracy inviting her to parties and outings, Kick was eager to have a vibrant social life. She may have begun chafing at the responsibility of monitoring and chaperoning Rosemary.

Though invitations for both Rosemary and Kick continued to arrive at the ambassador’s residence throughout the summer and fall, Rosemary was increasingly accompanied by other family members, the Moores, or hired companions. Kick, by contrast, was experiencing more liberty and freedom. In fact, eighteen-year-old Kick quickly became the darling of British society.
Finding it easy to socialize with Britain’s nobility and politicians alike, she quickly won many friends. She danced at clubs all night and spent weekends at the country estates of Britain’s social and economic elite, independently of her family.
This may have deeply annoyed Rosemary, who was not allowed to live such an independent life.

By the end of June, the debutante season had run its course. Rose’s parents, Josie and Honey Fitz, arrived in London on the Fourth of July and stayed for nearly three weeks. They visited historic sites; attended social and sporting events with political dignitaries, including the country’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain; and were treated to an audience with the dowager queen Mary. After they left, at the end of July, Rose gathered the children and headed to the south of France for a few weeks’ vacation before the start of school, in late September.

Joe had rented a villa at Cap d’Antibes, near Cannes, for the entire family. When Rose saw the dirty pool at the villa, she complained, and Joe immediately secured a cabana at the nearby exclusive Hôtel du Cap, where the family could spend their days swimming, playing tennis, and enjoying other outdoor activities. Elizabeth Dunn and Luella Hennessey joined them, allowing Rose some freedom to travel to Paris and other places, with or without Joe. Movie star Marlene Dietrich and other American and European celebrities and dignitaries vacationed at Cap d’Antibes, too, delighting the girls in particular. Rose’s focus on the children’s weight had become a family obsession, one that did not lessen on vacations.
“Almost go mad listening to discussion of diets . . . Jack is fattening, Joe, Jr. is slimming, Pat is on or off, and Rosemary (who has gained about eight pounds) and Kathleen and Eunice are all trying to lose.”

Rosemary spent much of her time with Dietrich’s thirteen-
year-old daughter, Maria. An only child, Maria loved the Kennedys, preferring to be with a large family of siblings who were fun and constantly on the move than with her mother. Maria knew about her mother’s infidelities—Marlene’s affairs were common knowledge—and she soon realized that Joe Kennedy was becoming a frequent visitor to their cabana. “The Ambassador to the Court of St. James was kind of rakish,” Maria later wrote. “For a man with such a patient wife, who had borne him so many children, I thought he flirted a bit too much.” But she thought the Kennedy children were so much fun that, she later recalled, “I would have gladly given up my right arm, the left, and any remaining limb, to be one of them.”

Maria noticed that Kick had “assumed the role of the official eldest sister” and that Eunice, at seventeen, was “opinionated, not to be crossed, the sharp mind of an intellectual achiever.” Joe Jr. was “a handsome football player with an Irish grin and kind eyes,” while Jack, “the glamour boy,” was every “maiden’s dream” and her “secret hero.” Though Pat, “a vivacious girl,” was nearest in age, Maria found herself more often paired with twenty-year-old Rosemary. Rosemary was “the damaged child amidst these effervescent and quick witted children, [but] she was my friend,” Maria recalled fondly. “Perhaps being two misfits, we felt comfortable in each other’s company. We would sit in the shade, watching the calm sea, holding hands.”

A little afraid Rose might be angry about the affair between her mother and Joe Sr. and might possibly banish her from the family’s daily activities, Maria was shocked to discover that Rose remained warm and inclusive in the midst of what Maria perceived as an obvious and brazen affair, as if nothing unusual was happening. Eventually, however, the guilt and embarrassment over her mother’s affair with the ambassador forced Maria to stop
spending her time with the Kennedys. She suspected, though, that they “were as used to their father disappearing as I was my mother.”

During the latter part of the summer of 1938, Eunice, Pat, Bobby, and Rosemary traveled with the Moores and Elizabeth Dunn to Scotland and Ireland.
Maria Dietrich joined them and found herself paired with Rosemary again, in spite of the large age difference. Eunice reported that the girls were getting “plenty of attention” as the daughters of the ambassador and that they had had several requests for interviews and autographs.

With the children all taken care of, Rose had stayed in Cannes by herself. Joe was by then attending to diplomatic duties in Paris. But by the middle of September, he was urging Rose to return to London. “When Joe phoned last night, he said things were terribly agitated in London and perhaps I should leave in the morning,” she wrote in her diary on September 13.

Rose’s absence was in fact causing her husband professional concern. Standard protocol for a newly arrived ambassador would have been to host scores of formal teas, diplomatic luncheons and dinners, and private social gatherings, and Rose was supposed to be the official hostess for these events. But Rose had been focused on organizing and settling her children and staff when they arrived in London in the spring, and then the court presentation and debutante parties for Rosemary and Kick took precedence. “I had to settle their problems without the aid of protocol,” she later noted to her biographer.
Nearly two months of vacationing on the French Riviera afterward had not endeared the Kennedys to a British public anxious about inevitable war. Rose’s ambitions as ambassador’s wife were in fact remarkably different from those of her husband.

Settling the children in school would be Rose’s first priority upon her return to London. Catholic schools were preferable, of course. Rosemary was at first sent to a Sacred Heart school in the London borough of Wandsworth, about six miles from the embassy at Princess Gate. The Convent of the Sacred Heart Finishing School for Girls enrolled young women ages seventeen and older, “on the verge of womanhood,” “to face the responsibilities of life, to control their own larger independence, and thus fit themselves to take with ease and dignity their place in the home and in society.”
Teddy and Bobby attended Gibbs Preparatory School, a London boys’ school, while the younger girls, Pat, Jean, and Eunice, enrolled in the Sacred Heart Convent School in nearby Roehampton. Rose considered enrolling Kick in college in London, but after researching potential programs, she realized that college education for young British women was not as common as it was for American women, so that plan was abandoned. Perhaps with Kick’s encouragement, Rose decided instead that she would help “a bit with my duties as hostess.”
Now, of the children, only Kick, the two youngest boys, and Rosemary lived at the embassy, but everyone was home for weekends as often as possible, ensuring their engagement in the cultural, political, and social life of their parents.

The educational program at Rosemary’s Sacred Heart Finishing School was an advanced one. Diplomats and other foreign business leaders sent their daughters to this school, which specialized in educating students from across Europe, Asia, and America. Courses in literature, foreign languages, history, and art were part of the advanced and postgraduate high school curriculum. Domestic, social, and job-skills training was also offered, including dressmaking, cooking, typewriting, shorthand, elocution,
singing, and dancing.
Rosemary’s skill levels would not have been adequate to compete or even participate in many of these classes. It is likely Rose arranged for a personal aide to work with her.