Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (29 page)

The construction of the new swimming pool at Saint Coletta began in earnest that spring of 1971. Eunice visited in mid-June and approved of the progress, and Rose followed with a visit later that month, after vacationing in Europe for several weeks. Perhaps flustered by the hurried nature of the less-than-twenty-four-hour trip, Rose forgot to give Rosemary a photograph of Joe—in “a rather expensive frame”—which she inadvertently left in her suitcase. Rose’s secretary mailed it to the school; there is no record of what Rosemary’s reaction was to the photograph, if indeed she had one.

Rosemary spent her fifty-third birthday that fall surrounded by the nuns and fellow residents. She received a canary—she named it Skippy—as a gift. He “sings his little heart out for her,” Sister Charitas reported to Rose. “She loves it and calls it by name.” Rosemary also had a poodle named Lollie. “Woe be to us if we dare raise our voice to Lollie,” the sister confided. “[Rosemary] takes it as a personal offense.”
Lollie liked to take Rosemary’s exercise ball and jump on a chair. Rosemary would scold
Lollie “with all the indignation she can command [by shouting,] ‘Lollie, Lollie, get off of there.’”

Sister Charitas transitioned to retirement by November, and three nuns were now responsible for Rosemary’s round-the-clock care. Rosemary was finding it “difficult to adjust to three different persons after being used to one person to take care of her,” Sister Mary Charles wrote to Rose. “But we feel she is doing well at that. I believe it is an injustice to her to have only one person look after her, and when this person is no longer with her, she seems lost and frustrated.”
The nuns were struggling with finding a routine that worked for Rosemary, while encouraging her to share in the responsibility of mundane daily activities. “Many times the three of us march with her to the bed room and each one does something for her, or even suggest that she help us with the ceremony,” Sister Mary Charles wrote. “I tell her she is the Princess and we are her three attendants. She loves this. After all the main thing Rosemary wants is love and attention.”
Sister Paulus reported that when she took a rare night out to go to a concert in Madison, Rosemary complained to the other sisters, “I don’t like the maid going out!”
The sisters were confident, however, that Rosemary could adjust to new ways of doing things.

After failing to make a promised visit in October—she made a month-long trip to Europe instead—Rose flew out to Wisconsin in early December 1971. Something displeased Rose during her visit, because in early January, Eunice fired off a letter complaining that Rosemary was not getting enough exercise. “I would like to emphasize again my mother’s and my concern that Rosemary be kept on a good strong physical education program. This should include, I would hope, at least an hour’s walk every day, plus a swim once a day when the new pool is built. Even in bad
weather or when it is cold.”
Madeline Sulad, another of Rose’s secretaries, followed up a few days later. “Mrs. Kennedy wanted you to know,” she wrote to Sister Paulus, “that she hopes Rosemary is swimming now and that she is not having to wait for the new pool to be built.” Rose seems to have forgotten that the old pool was not accessible in the wintertime. “She feels that, if Rosemary wears a warm fur coat to and from the pool you now have, she should be able to enjoy a swim every day.”

Rose directed her secretary to write to Saint Coletta to ask that all of Rosemary’s medical reports be sent to her. “Mrs. Kennedy is very involved at this time in writing her memoirs . . . [but] Mrs. Kennedy would like to be sure that any progress report on Rosemary be sent to her at the same time one is sent to Mrs. Shriver.”
Though she wanted to be more actively involved with Rosemary’s care, Rose did not want sole responsibility. Her dependence on Eunice in this regard was strong. Days before Christmas 1971, Rosemary tripped and fell on the flagstone walk in front of her cottage, landing her in the hospital to receive stitches and an overnight stay for observation.
Though the sisters and health-care professionals reported the accident to Rose on the twenty-ninth, Rose may have felt they had not included her as readily as she expected.
In March 1972, Rose wrote again to Saint Coletta, reiterating her interest in being informed of Rosemary’s status. “Mrs. Shriver has followed Rosemary’s regime very closely during Mr. Kennedy’s prolonged illness, as I was confined at home during that period, but now I have no obligations and I am free to devote time and effort to her difficulties.”
Rose had not been involved in Rosemary’s care since her institutionalization, thirty years earlier. The sudden interest no doubt created some adjustment on the part of Saint Coletta. “We understand Mrs. Shriver takes most
direct responsibility for Rosemary, but we will make sure that you get copies of all our communications,” an administrator from Saint Coletta assured Rose.

Rose’s new relationship with Saint Coletta developed at the same time that she was collaborating with ghostwriter Robert Coughlan on her autobiography,
Times to Remember.
Over several months’ working with Rose in 1972 and during several interviews, Coughlan pressed the issue of Rosemary’s condition and her whereabouts. Though Coughlan knew Rosemary was at Saint Coletta in Wisconsin, Rose took only an incomplete step forward to the truth. “Her mind is gone completely,” she assured him. “But that was due to an accident which I don’t really discuss. But I am going to say in here [
Times to Remember
] that there was an accident and she became worse. So people won’t become discouraged and think that children do become worse but it was due to an accident.”

When Coughlan asked Rose to explain the “accident,” she refused. But she felt compelled to explain the situation to him again, repeating herself in a way suggestive of someone meaning to create and stick to a narrative “which is true”:

Rose had an accident, and so her condition deteriorated. Because I didn’t want to discourage people because she was getting on quite well and she did have this accident. I wasn’t going to go into [it,] [but] her condition did deteriorate otherwise they’d think that the child was well until she was 20, 23 or 24 . . . well enough to travel, it would be discouraging for other people to think then she suddenly retrogressed so I said, which is true, that there was an accident and in which her brain was further damaged and so [it] was found expedient and necessary really better for
her to go to this home in Wisconsin where she is very well taken care of with the nuns of St. [Coletta].

Within a month of one of Coughlan’s interviews with Rose about Rosemary, in January 1972, Eunice did tell Coughlan what had happened to Rosemary. The “accident” was in fact surgery that removed “a small section of the brain . . . but it didn’t work.” She told Coughlan that she couldn’t understand “why they permitted [it], but that was 30 years ago and it was acceptable then . . . but of course you wouldn’t do that today.”
It seems unlikely that Eunice would not have conferred with her mother on this point before mentioning it to Coughlan. Nevertheless, the fact of the lobotomy was not revealed in
Times to Remember,
and it would remain secret for a decade more.

Rose was forthcoming with Coughlan concerning her feelings that, as the mother of eight other children who also needed her, she had shortchanged them by spending so much time with Rosemary as a child. “And then I think sometimes, of course, children don’t always understand the circumstances—when they are little, they don’t know why certain things are done, and they feel resentful.” Her daughter-in-law Jackie assured her that Jack had never felt slighted, in spite of Rose’s belief that he, in particular, did. Rose told Coughlan that the survival of Rosemary and the loss of three of her sons “is a puzzle—is a question, too—why God took three sons who were equipped and wanted to work for the government and for humanity, and left my daughter who is incapacitated. But, as I said, that is one of those things about life we cannot understand—God’s ways we can’t always understand, as I have said before.”

When the children got together to review Coughlan’s manuscript of
Times to Remember,
each carried his or her own perspec
tives and anxieties to the editing of the book, and each made some significant changes. Eunice was particularly troubled by Rose’s quoting of Rosemary’s childhood letters. “She was sure,” historian Laurence Leamer noted, “that the nuns had helped write [the letters], and they made Rosemary seem too normal.”

Rose would continue to monitor Rosemary’s care from afar. In August 1972, Rose complained to the sisters at Saint Coletta that one of Rosemary’s physical-therapy appointments had been canceled because it conflicted with a regularly scheduled hairdressing appointment. “I cannot understand why it happened when Rosemary has so much free time,” Rose wrote to Sister Sheila. “Her hair is easily shampooed by one of the Sisters, if necessary, and afterwards rolled on Carmen (electric) curlers, which can be bought at any department store.”
Two weeks later, Rose wrote again, instructing Sister Paulus to “buy presents for Rosemary and sign the cards from her brother and sisters.” She was also interested in sending some artificial flowers for Rosemary’s birthday—Rose could not visit herself because she would be leaving for Europe on an extended vacation—but she could not recall the color scheme in Rosemary’s cottage.
Sister Paulus agreed that the sisters would purchase presents for Rosemary and sign the cards “as you suggested,” adding that Rosemary’s “walls, drapes, and davenports are green, and the floor is multicolored: red, rust, yellow, brown, so almost any colors would fit in nicely.”

Rose’s demands from afar may have been particularly trying given that the sisters were already doing so much. In a post-Christmas letter that December, Rose singled out the flaws in Rosemary’s appearance in a photograph the nuns had just sent her. Noting, first, her pleasure at receiving a “very good photograph of Rosemary from Sister Prudenz,” she proceeded to criticize the clothing the sisters had been asked to purchase for Rose
mary. “I think her clothes are usually very pretty, but a dress with a circular design . . . gives her a more rounded silhouette than a dress with a straight pattern.” In this regard, Rose did not single Rosemary out for particular criticism. Just a couple of weeks later, Rose wrote to Jean, criticizing her for a fashion faux pas. “I happened to notice that your long evening gloves were rather loose at the top,” she noted.

In June 1973, apparently not satisfied with the way the sisters at Saint Coletta managed their time, Rose requested a full accounting of what each nun did for Rosemary. Sister Mary Charles responded by outlining in detail what each sister was responsible for. Sisters Juliane, Paulus, and Mary Charles participated in Rosemary’s therapy—walking, swimming, and playing ball—in addition to carrying out daily grooming, laundry, meal preparation, chauffeuring, shopping, and housecleaning. They played games, sang songs, read, and played cards with Rosemary, “do[ing] the little things for her I know she likes,” Sister Mary Charles wrote. “We are a family and Rosemary is the object of our love and concern.”

Rose told Coughlan in 1972 that she had considered bringing Rosemary home for a visit, “but I don’t think that I will. Because she is used to it out there. She has her own home and her own car and people that she is used to being near.”
Two years later, however, in 1974, Rose decided to bring Rosemary to Hyannis Port for a summer visit, the first trip Rosemary had made to her former home in more than thirty years.

Sister Margaret Ann recalled telling Rosemary that she would be going home for a visit. Rosemary responded with two words: “Bronxville” and “European.”
Bronxville, of course, was the last home Rosemary knew. “European” represented some of Rosemary’s most happy times, when she was living with the Assump
tion Sisters at Belmont House, and the great historic, cultural, religious, and recreational sites she had toured across Europe. Rose was very anxious about Rosemary’s upcoming visit. “I was wondering if we should get a hospital bed for my daughter,” Rose wrote to Sister Sheila.
Assured that Rosemary would be fine in an ordinary bed, Rose made plans for a short, one-week visit at the end of July.

Saint Coletta preferred to have two sisters accompany Rosemary, but Rose insisted that one was all she would pay for. In the commotion of gathering Rosemary’s luggage at the airport, Rosemary wandered off. A frantic search ensued, and she was discovered wandering in the parking lot.
This first visit apparently went well enough, though, for Rose to make plans to take Rosemary to Palm Beach for an Easter visit in 1975. But Rose couldn’t cope with Rosemary alone. “Of course, I would like you to be here, since she relates to you so well,” Rose wrote to Eunice in January, in anticipation of Rosemary’s visit, adding that “Pat might be able to do the job also.”
Rose had become increasingly close to Eunice in the years since Kick’s death, and even more so after the deaths of her sons Joe, Jack, and Bobby. When asked which child was her favorite, Rose would later remark, “I don’t have a favorite. I love all my children and I have never shown any favoritism . . . never. I’ve tried to do all I could for all of them. The children tease me about this . . . they all think Eunice is my favorite. Maybe she is . . . just a bit. If she is it is because she’s the hardest worker. She has helped me so much in my work with the retarded.”

On April 17, 1975, a week or so after the Easter visit, Rose sent a letter to Pat, “to remind you not to forget to visit Rosemary [at Saint Coletta].”
Two months later, Rose, who had made only brief and infrequent visits to Saint Coletta, wrote another letter, this time to both Pat and Jean, requesting that they make a trip
to see Rosemary. Apparently, they did not fulfill the obligation as Eunice readily did.
It seems that the issue of visiting their disabled sister caused tension between siblings. “With reference to Eunice,” Rose wrote in response to a complaint from Jean, “she has been a source of great joy and consolation through the years because she keeps in constant touch with Rosemary. You remember I asked you to go see her when Eunice was in Paris [in the late 1960s], but you said you could not make the effort—a great disappointment to me.”
Jean’s response remains unrecorded. But Rose was intolerant of any excuse. The next letter promptly informed Jean that Rose would not accommodate Jean’s family at Palm Beach for the Easter holidays.
Mother–daughter tension ran deep; as Laurence Leamer observed, Jean remained angry with her mother for many years.