Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (17 page)

Joe wrote to Rose in New York expressing relief that Rosemary and the Moores were safe at home and assuring her that in spite of German threats he felt confident that he would be secure in London. Joe fully expected that the Germans would invade England, “but once this has happened I will expect F.D.R. to send for me . . . since there won’t be much for me to do, my place is home, I’ve done my duty.” Rosemary could return to the care of the Assumption Sisters, he believed, “when things settle down here under any regime, [and] they [the nuns] will be delighted to have her back and I’m sure she’ll come back hopping. This state of the world can’t keep on long at this [level of] tension.”
Joe’s seemingly blasé comment that England could be conquered by the Nazis—and that he was “sure” his daughter could return to live in a totalitarian state under a fascist government intolerant of people with disabilities—reflects his increasing disconnect with the English people and with his own democratic government.

Rosemary’s twelve-year-old sister Jean reported to her father at the end of May, from the family home in Bronxville, New York, that everyone was thrilled that “Rosie” was returning home.
But Rosemary would find the adjustment to life back in the States after a year of living apart from her family difficult and destabilizing. She missed her British friends and the Assumption Sisters at Belmont House. Perhaps most important, she missed the humane and practical educational and vocational program that had effectively groomed her to be a primary-school teacher’s aide.
Arriv
ing back in Bronxville—a home she had spent little time in since 1929, when the Kennedys had purchased it—Rosemary was now a twenty-two-year-old woman, one still needing a structured environment and close monitoring. Instead of the nuns, who had supplied expert, loving guidance under which Rosemary had felt secure and successful, she would be back under the watchful eye of her often demanding and impatient mother. She would no longer have a special teaching assistant assigned to guide her on a daily basis, take her for walks, and share life with her, as Dorothy Gibbs had done so devotedly at Belmont House. There, she did not have to compete for attention with eight siblings until someone had time for her.

A packed schedule of visiting old friends and extended family members occupied a good deal of Rosemary’s time in the first two weeks. She attended the World’s Fair in New York City, saw the dentist, and called on a podiatrist who fitted her with new arch supports to combat an ongoing problem with ill-fitting shoes. She chatted with everyone she met, including the “Saks man,” about her adventures in Europe.
She attended the wedding of her friend Frances O’Keefe—the sister of her friend Mary from Miss Newton’s and the daughter of Rose’s childhood friend Ruth Evans O’Keefe—in Boston, accompanied by Rose. Her participation in these events would have been well choreographed, just as it had been in England. In America, as in England, Rose and Joe agreed that no one outside the immediate family should know the true extent of her limitations. Rosemary’s inability to engage in the well-known Kennedy banter—the quick intellectual and comedic jousting that characterized the family’s verbal competitiveness—would be noted during this time, as it had been before, as shyness by most observers and even some close friends.

Although she had matured physically, Rosemary remained
as emotionally and intellectually immature as a barely adolescent girl. Her friends and acquaintances, by contrast, had grown into mature young men and women. Fitting back into their lives would be difficult at best.

A trip to the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port in early June began quietly. Eunice complained to her father that she feared that the Kennedys would be the only ones racing their boats that summer; no one else had shown up yet.
Since Rosemary could not handle a boat well enough to race by herself, Eunice, and sometimes Bobby, took her along as crew.
Her youngest sister, Jean, ten years her junior, would accompany her to the movies when the water was too cold to swim.

Jack’s graduation from Harvard on June 20 marked the true beginning of the Hyannis Port summer for the Kennedys. Jack and his Harvard friends descended just as the area’s summer residents began to arrive in droves, and family and friends, acquaintances, and others from near and far filled the Kennedy household. The structured life that had given Rosemary a sense of purpose and self-determination at Belmont House was now gone. Family life swirled around her. Even within the confines of the Kennedy compound, athletic games and competition dominated daily life, but those competitive activities were now played at an adult level and were beyond her capability. The heated dinner conversations about politics and current events, the war, and Roosevelt’s policies could not have included Rosemary.

Her siblings’ lives had become more complicated, full, and varied. Traveling to distant tennis tournaments in which she competed kept Eunice away for parts of the summer, leaving Rosemary the odd one out more often than not. The younger children could not be a substitute for true friendship or replace the bond she shared with Eunice. Jack was consumed with the success of
his first book,
Why England Slept,
and was so busy with book-signing engagements, socializing, and planning for law school in the fall that he had no time to accompany Rosemary to parties or drive her to places in his own car. Joe Jr. was busy with politics, attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a delegate from Massachusetts; and Kick was preoccupied with her own social life, volunteering for the Red Cross, and privately absorbed by any news about her friends and the war preparations in England as Germany bore ever closer to its shores.

Efforts were made to be as inclusive as possible with Rosemary. Luella Hennessey, the family’s longtime private nurse, observed that the children were “especially kind” to her, and Jack and Joe Jr., in particular, made sure that there was “always a place for her in the family’s activities.” But she was forced to spend “a good deal of her time with her younger brothers and sisters, rather than with those who were closest to her age.” Hennessey believed this was because Rosemary “found it easier to share their interests; their dependence on her gave her a feeling of security and usefulness.”
But this was not entirely satisfying for Rosemary, who wanted to mingle with her older siblings and people her own age.

Joe Jr. and Jack shared their social lives with Kick, not Rosemary. “From her childhood, Kick had been . . . our eldest daughter because of Rosemary’s disability,” Rose later acknowledged.
Smart, engaging, competitive, and confident, Kick was much admired, not only by her many friends and the friends of her brothers who vied for her regard, but in the family, too. Much attention rained down on Kick, an “enchanting child, girl, and young woman,” Rose would later remark.
“Never was there a girl who had so many gifts lavished upon her . . . She was lovely to look at, full of
joie de vivre
and so tremendously popular.”
Returning from
England months earlier had allowed Kick, now twenty years old, the occasion to seize increasing personal independence and freedom. She could spend more time with her brothers going to parties and dating some of Jack’s buddies.

Kick initially bore some of the responsibility for making sure Rosemary was not left out of social gatherings with people her own age. Kick’s friendly and outgoing personality could deftly orchestrate an evening full of fun for Rosemary, and, with the help of Joe Jr. and Jack, Rosemary’s dance card was filled. “Jack would . . . take her to a dance and he . . . with Lemoyne Billings [would] take turns dancing with her,” Eunice recalled. “She’d come home at midnight and [Jack would] go back to the dance.”
But Rosemary noticed that she mostly danced with her brothers and a few of their close friends. “Why don’t other boys ask me to dance?” she would ask.
In spite of Kick’s efforts, Rosemary may have felt like the proverbial stepsister.
Miriam Finnegan, a close friend of Rose’s, once remarked, “I think there’s so much made of Kick . . . that Rosemary is a little conscious of that and feels a little bit in the background.”

Kick and Eunice helped Rosemary dress and put on lipstick, a ritual any twenty-two-year-old woman should have been able to do on her own. This added to Rosemary’s feelings of inadequacy. Her sisters had to secretly watch her all night to make sure she “didn’t spill things on her clothes or try to put on fresh lipstick herself.”
One can imagine the anxiety the younger sisters felt, worrying that Rosemary might smear lipstick or create an embarrassing dilemma at a dance.

Kick, though used to accommodating Rosemary, probably began to chafe, too, at the relationship with her sister. One close friend of Jack’s recalled that it “was embarrassing to be around Rosemary sometimes. She would behave in strange ways at the
table, and I think they all were at great pains not to seem embarrassed . . . She would appear there standing in her nightgown when everyone else was moving ahead so rapidly. I don’t think she really existed in the lives of Jack and Joe Jr., not any longer.”

After Eunice became closer to Rosemary during their time in London, the responsibility of monitoring and supporting Rosemary now fell most heavily to her, three years younger and less socially mobile than Kick. But Rosemary may have resented this family transition; she was the oldest sister, and she knew it. Friends were few, and her daily companions were her youngest siblings. She was more of a babysitter than a young woman embarking on life in an adult world.

Rosemary also felt keenly the separation from her father, who remained in London as the American ambassador. During those months when Rosemary and Joe had been the only Kennedys remaining in England, Joe had made Rosemary feel special and feel that he needed her. No longer having his support nearby, and now lacking the close relationship to her mother she had experienced as a very young child, compounded Rosemary’s feelings of anxiety and isolation. Her father had made clear in a letter to Rose from England that Rosemary was “much happier when she sees the children [her brothers and sisters] just casually. For everyone’s peace of mind, particularly hers, she shouldn’t go on vacation or anything else with them.”
But such a separation during the early summer of 1940 hadn’t proved possible; Rosemary was home, and her integration into the family was necessary. Lem Billings, a close friend of Jack’s from Choate who spent time with the Kennedy family that summer at Hyannis Port, remembered that Rosemary “seemed to realize that no matter how hard she tried she would never even come within sight of” her brothers’ and sisters’ accomplishments.
Rosemary became “aggressively
unhappy, irritable and frustrated at not being able to do the things her siblings could do.”
The pressure to perform was overwhelming; after all, the children understood that “only their best was good enough.”
Luella Hennessey remembered the “fiercely fought” Monopoly tournaments, “Twenty Questions and Geography, quizzes and word games” the Kennedys engaged in that kept their “wits sharp and razor edge.”
“In a large family . . . there is a great deal of competition,” Rose told biographer Robert Coughlan. “[The children] learned to be winners, not losers, in sports . . . We would spur them on . . . [but] when they were defeated, the reasons for this were analyzed.”
On the one hand, such expectations and levels of achievement were impossible for Rosemary, and on the other, the restrictions placed on her were noticeably greater than those for her siblings. “In our family,” Rose admitted, “if you’re not doing anything you’re left in the corner.”

Luella Hennessey recalled that in advance of one Kennedy party that summer, Rose asked her to take Rosemary to Hennessey’s sister’s house in nearby North Falmouth for the day. Hennessey obliged, calling for the family chauffeur, Dave Deignan, to drive them the twenty miles to her sister’s home on Buzzards Bay.
Though Hennessey had been hired by the family several years before, when Rosemary was eighteen years old, the two of them had not developed the deep bond that Hennessey had with the younger children. In fact, Rosemary, who called her “Laura” because she found it too difficult to say the name Luella correctly, complained that Hennessey “bosses me so.”

Once they arrived at the home of Hennessey’s sister, Rosemary behaved like the aristocrat she had been raised to be, especially during her two years in England. Drinking tea with grace, tipping the cup smoothly, Rosemary conveyed sophistication, not, in the parlance of the day, feeble-mindedness. Hennessey’s sister
noticed how easily Rosemary then gathered the household’s four children and took them to the beach, where they swam and frolicked for hours. When the children tired of that, Rosemary sat them down and announced it was “reading time.” Carefully and slowly, she read them selections from
Winnie-the-Pooh,
both a children’s favorite and also one of the few books she could read with confidence.

When Dave Deignan arrived to pick up Rosemary and Hennessey, Rosemary bid Hennessey’s sister’s family goodbye with poise, waving to them like “she was Mrs. Astor.” Upon returning to Hyannis Port, Rosemary immediately sat down and, with great difficulty, wrote out a personal thank-you note to Hennessey’s sister. When she returned to the house after mailing the card at the post office, Rosemary broke down, lashing out with anger, exhaustion, and frustration. Eunice rushed to soothe her, the only person, Hennessey remembered, who could calm Rosemary’s rages.
Lem Billings remembered that “somehow, Eunice seemed to develop very early a sense of special responsibility for Rosemary as if Rosemary were her child instead of her sister. There was an odd maturity about Eunice which was sometimes forbidding but which clearly set her off from all the rest.”

The family began to notice that Rosemary’s earlier gains from her time in England, both intellectual and emotional stability, were receding rapidly. She was increasingly tense, irritable, and irrational. Rosemary clearly could not manage within the freewheeling but highly demanding style of her family. But even Eunice understood that Rosemary was struggling more than in the past. “She started to deteriorate,” Eunice later recalled. “She didn’t make such a good adjustment at home.”