Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (23 page)

Joe Jr., stationed at Dunkeswell airfield, in East Devon, 220 miles southeast of London on the Plymouth coast, received a pass to travel to London to give Kick away at the May 6 ceremony in the Chelsea Town Hall. He was the only Kennedy family member in attendance; he would be dead in three months. Joe Jr. was willing to risk the wrath of his mother in order to support his younger sister; he liked Billy, and he had become particularly close to Kick during the preceding year. Rose was inconsolable over the marriage, “horrified [and] heartbroken.” She checked herself out of the hospital the day of the wedding, flying to New York and then to Hot Springs, Virginia, where she would experience “much needed rest.”
“What a blow to the family prestige . . . We should think of a way to extricate her,” Rose wrote privately in her diary
in Hot Springs.
Joe Jr., who probably understood what his family’s fear of exposure had cost his oldest sister, responded to his parents: “As far as what people will say, the hell with them.”
But Rose refused to answer Kick’s and Joe Jr.’s letters and cables. “The Power of Silence is Great,” Joe Jr. cabled his father in desperation.

By the time of the wedding, Hartington had earned the rank of major, and not long after the marriage, he left with his unit for the front lines in Europe. On September 9, less than five weeks after his brother-in-law’s fatal mission, Hartington was also dead, shot while liberating the town of Heppen in Belgium, then under Nazi control. Still in mourning for her brother, and living temporarily with her family in New York City, Kick experienced profound pain and isolation. The church offered no comfort. Because she had married a non-Catholic, the sacrament of Communion was now denied her.

Kathleen returned to England by the end of September to be with Billy’s family and to attend his memorial service. While there, she found the love and comfort with his family that she had been denied by her own. Billy’s sister Elizabeth recalled that she had “never met anyone so desperately unhappy. [Kick’s] mother had tried to convince her that she had committed a sin in this marriage, so in addition to losing her husband, she was worried about having lost her soul.”

Kick remained in England, serving with the Red Cross until the Japanese surrendered and the war was officially over, in 1945. Her years in England greatly changed her, and the estrangement from her family further shaped her decision to buy a small home in Smith Square in London and to build a life there.

Back in the States, Jack was laying the groundwork for a run for Congress—a plan that had originally been devised for Joe Jr. The Catholic vote for Jack was important, and Kick’s marriage to
a Protestant was problematic. The family believed that her presence on the campaign trail, and in church on Sundays with them, would be proof of her renewed commitment to her Catholic upbringing. After months of pleading by her father, Kick finally returned to New York that fall of 1945. The family assured the press she was returning home for good, though Kick in fact was vague about her plans.

Living apart from her family in her own hotel suite in New York, Kick tried to carry on an independent life. But she could not escape the stifling family responsibilities expected of her. Her father remained controlling, interfering in her private life and scolding her for her choice of friends and boyfriends. Her mother remained distant and cold.

Soon, her participation in the campaign and other Kennedy family events stopped. The press took notice, but by the winter of 1946, Kick probably did not care. The family had begun featuring the heroism of Jack and Joe during the war as part of the campaign rhetoric, ignoring Billy Hartington’s sacrifice. Kick felt the snub deeply. Rejecting the pleas of her parents, who had seemingly done everything to isolate her, Kick moved back to London. She had seen enough of what happened to Kennedy daughters when they acted outside accepted social boundaries. For the next two years she renewed old friendships and spent time with her in-laws, who welcomed her warmly. She regained her love of the theater and parties, and as a titled war widow she started to rebuild her life.

Kick became romantically involved with the earl Peter Fitzwilliam, an immensely wealthy, decorated war hero with family estates in both Ireland and England, including the largest private house in England, Wentworth Woodhouse. Fitzwilliam was married, with a twelve-year-old daughter. Over the years, his wife,
Olive, had become an alcoholic, while he became a notorious womanizer; his adulterous affairs with women across Europe were legendary. Nevertheless, Kick and Fitzwilliam fell in love, and he decided to divorce his wife and marry Kathleen. In spite of efforts to keep their relationship secret, rumors spread rapidly in postwar London.

During the spring of 1948, Kick traveled to America to spend the Easter holiday with her family. Stunned by Kick’s news that she would marry Fitzwilliam once his divorce was final, Rose was inconsolable—and furious. She threatened to cast Kick out of the family forever. Fearing Joe would side with his daughter and continue to support her financially, Rose took the step of threatening to leave Joe in order to “embarrass” him.
She believed this threat would force Kick to choose her father over Fitzwilliam.

Rose was wrong. Kick sailed for Europe, heartbroken but more determined than ever to marry the man she loved. Rose made one more attempt to convince Kick, now a twenty-eight-year-old war widow, to reconsider, following her to London and appearing at her home. Rose told Kick she would never see her mother or siblings again, if Rose had anything to say about it. She would have no money of her own, no family. Was Fitzwilliam worth it?

Kick held out hope that her father would support her decision. She and Peter Fitzwilliam made plans to spend a few secret days together at Cannes, in the south of France, in May. In fact, Joe, traveling to Paris on business, had agreed to meet the two of them there on their way back to London. On May 13, the pair took off from London for Cannes in Fitzwilliam’s private plane. A short, scheduled half-hour stopover in Paris was prolonged when Peter and Kick decided to have lunch with friends in the city. Their leisurely lunch cost them two hours of good weather, weather that was quickly turning stormy near the Cavennes Mountains. The
pilot, who had been uneasy about the weather reports, strenuously objected to a takeoff, but Fitzwilliam overruled him. They flew directly into the violent storm, crashing into the peak of Le Coran. Kick, Peter, the pilot, and the copilot were killed instantly.

Joe, then in Paris and anticipating his meeting with Kick in a few days, learned of the news the next day. The family back home in the States was stunned. Unable to bear the responsibility, Joe left the funeral plans to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Kick was buried next to Billy in the Hartington family plot, near Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate. Joe was the only Kennedy family member, among two hundred guests, to attend the funeral service. Back in Hyannis Port, the family held a small, quiet service.

B
Y THE END
of the decade, Craig House’s proximity to New York and its connections to the city’s elite may have made Joe uncomfortable. Jack, the war hero, had been elected to the House of Representatives by Massachusetts voters in 1947, and he was hopeful for a future Senate seat. The risk of having anyone discover that Rosemary was institutionalized and in such a debilitated state was a public-relations problem for a family with political ambitions. Joe did not want to explain why Rosemary had had a lobotomy, when it was performed, and what had happened to her afterward. Ironically, Joe’s decision concerning the lobotomy had rendered Rosemary more, rather than less, of a threat to the Kennedy family aspirations.

Settling Rosemary in Massachusetts or Florida would have been more convenient for visits by the family, if they had wanted to or could visit her. But there were hardly any private facilities in those two states that were suited to Rosemary’s needs. Patient abuse was also rampant.

McLean Hospital, offering residential care and treatment for the mentally ill at its Frederick Law Olmsted–designed campus in Belmont, Massachusetts, was an option not available to Rosemary. An institution that provided private care with the leading psychiatrists and specialists of the day, it attracted members of the nation’s wealthiest and most famous families, much like Craig House. It did not, however, care for the physically disabled. While Rosemary may have benefited from an examination at McLean when her erratic and violent behaviors increased before her surgery, it was not suitable for her after the lobotomy, given the physical and intellectual impairments it caused.

In 1948, Joe consulted with one of his close friends and spiritual advisers, Boston’s Catholic archbishop Richard Cushing.
The Catholic Church had been building residential treatment and therapeutic hospitals, sanitariums, and special schools for decades. Among them was Saint Coletta School in Jefferson, Wisconsin, staffed and run by the Sisters of Saint Francis of Assisi. Serving about two hundred children, the facility offered care for mentally disabled adults as well. Cushing in fact had sought the support of the Saint Francis of Assisi sisters of Milwaukee to build a Saint Coletta school in Massachusetts in 1947.

Cushing’s school, Saint Coletta by the Sea in Hanover, Massachusetts, was originally designed for a small number of children who lived at, and were schooled in, two small buildings on a 176-acre campus. Joe, through a newly established nonprofit philanthropic family foundation created in the memory of Joe Jr., called the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, would donate more than $100,000 to the building of a chapel, a children’s playroom, three classrooms, and a dormitory for forty children there in 1948.
Within ten years, another large donation of funds from the Kennedy Foundation would help the school expand to in
clude separate residential homes, additional classrooms, and more recreational facilities for children and a few adults.
But, in the late 1940s, the Massachusetts facility was not suitable for Rosemary—not because she could not be properly cared for there but because, as Archbishop Cushing told Joe directly, “it would be impossible to avoid public attention.” Joe understood and probably agreed. Cushing encouraged Joe to send Rosemary to the Jefferson, Wisconsin, program. “There,” he assured Joe, “and not Hanover, will solve your personal problems.”

Joe worked through a friend and longtime business associate, John Ford, to make all the necessary arrangements for a transition. “Word has come from Mother Mary Bartholomew that the school at Jefferson, Wisconsin will co-operate in every way concerning the placement of Rosemary,” Sister Maureen wrote to Ford from Saint Coletta at Hanover. “I am sure that everything can be arranged to Mr. Kennedy’s entire satisfaction.”
Joe dispatched Ford to investigate the facility in January. “If you have time, I wonder if, when you are in Chicago [on business], you will run up to the school at Jefferson, Wisconsin, and have a talk with Mother Mary Bartholomew . . . You know just what I have in mind and, after an examination of the place and a talk with the Nuns, I am sure you will be in a position to tell me what you think. I thought I would follow it up with a visit myself, possibly in March or April,” Joe wrote to Ford on New Year’s Eve in 1948. “That is the most important unfinished business that I have.”

Sometime in the early summer of 1949, Rosemary moved to Jefferson. Leaving familiar surroundings at Craig House, she was taken by train in the company of two sisters to Milwaukee, and then to Saint Coletta, about an hour away.
Over the next fifteen years, Ford would visit with Rosemary at Saint Coletta, checking on her care. He handled the financial details, paying Saint Colet
ta’s monthly invoices, and acted as intermediary between Joe and the sisters caring for Rosemary.
Joe never saw Rosemary again.

Saint Coletta had been established during the mid-nineteenth century as a Sisters of Saint Francis of Assisi convent, which was eventually expanded to a religious boarding school for girls. In 1904, under the auspices of the Diocese of Milwaukee and administered by the sisters, the school was transformed into the Saint Coletta Institute for Backward Youth. The name was changed in 1931 to the Saint Coletta School for Exceptional Children, not only reflecting a change in understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities but also, according to the school, “for the residents, one of whom remarked, ‘We don’t walk backward.’”
Located on more than two hundred acres, the school also encompassed an additional five-hundred-acre farm, where the sisters raised hogs, chickens, cows, and geese; operated a dairy; and grew vegetables and other foodstuffs, mostly to feed themselves and the school’s patients. The school offered appropriate academic programs for the youngest residents and, for older, adult patients, vocational training for jobs in the community.

Sister Margaret Ann, a nun who oversaw Rosemary’s later care at Saint Coletta, revealed that the 1949 transition to the school was traumatic.
Rosemary “was very uncontrollable when she first got here,” she recalled hearing from the sisters who cared for Rosemary at Saint Coletta during those early years.
Unhappy and feeling “inferior to her brothers and sisters,” Rosemary, as one caretaker later reported, eventually came to understand that “in God’s eyes she has worth and value. She is a wonderful remarkable woman.”
Joe paid for a special one-story brick ranch-style cottage to be built for Rosemary, which also housed two specially trained nuns who could live with her full-time. Informally named the Kennedy Cottage, the house was near Alverno House, about a
mile from the main Saint Coletta campus. It would become Rosemary’s home for nearly sixty years.
Alverno House served adults at the school who, like Rosemary, would need dependent care for their entire lives.

Settling into a routine, Rosemary found comfort and security, even friendship, with the nuns, staff, and patients. She was happy, the nuns reported, and was adeptly cared for and nurtured by the sisters, who became her substitute family. She took walks with the nuns, who kept her from curiosity seekers. Inquisitive reporters tried to find her and uncover her story, but the nuns were vigilant, thwarting attempts by journalists and others to speak with or photograph her. “A Mr. Rudy S. Holstein . . . stopped in and wanted to see Rosemary,” Sister Anastasia from Saint Coletta wrote to John Ford. “We told him that Rosemary does not wish to see anyone without the parents’ consent. Mr. Holstein said he was in the army with Joe [Jr.].”
Joe was furious. “I do not know who Mr. Rudy Holstein is and I do not care who the rest of them were or what their arguments were—your rules still stand,” he wrote to Sister Anastasia.