Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (5 page)

Rose attended occasional theatrical performances with Joe, where she met some of his theater friends and business associates. She later claimed that all this was “a completely new and different environment . . . gay, exciting and quite different and quite breathtaking to me.”
The familiarity and intimacy some of the women displayed toward Joe, and the frequency with which he spent time with them without her, would have been clear. Until she died, though, Rose argued that she trusted him completely. “I had heard that chorus girls were gay, but evil, and worst of all, husband snatchers. But nothing shocking happened,” she claimed. Joe, Rose later wrote, “always liked to have someone gay around him, so he would have relief from his heavy cares and responsibilities.”
She and Joe “trusted one another implicitly,” and he always told her when he was going out with “theatrical people.” Just as Rose was quite assertive in her claims concerning her own enjoyment of Joe’s theatrical world—so “new and different . . . gay [and] exciting”—so was she ardent in her defenses of his obvious infidelities. “There was never any deceit on his part and there was never any doubt in my mind about his motives or behavior.”
Joe’s extramarital activities and the public perception of her marriage were to be managed with intensity. Rita Dallas, a family nurse, observed that Rose’s “formula for survival seemed to be based on: see what you want to see and hear only what you want to hear.”
This was a lesson Rose had learned from her politician father at the center of the many smear campaigns and slanderous newspaper articles that defined Boston’s political gamesmanship. “Gossip and slander and denunciation and even vilification are part of the price one pays for being in public life,”
Rose later wrote.
For the Kennedys, this maxim would hold true for generations to come.

But despite Rose’s public sentiments, Joe’s need for gaiety and his finding it in the theater district plagued her, feeding her insecurities and self-doubt. Rose was becoming less “gay” and more unhappy. This provided even more reason for Joe to find pleasure elsewhere.

I
F ROSE’S CRISIS
and retreat resulted in a reimagining of her marriage, it also led to a new conception of her role as mother, one that would affect none of her children, perhaps, more than Rosemary. Returning home to her children, Rose devoted herself to them, now convinced that the “challenge” and “joy” of her role was to “mold and to influence” every child.
“On [a mother’s] judgment [a child] relies and her words will influence him, not for a day or a month or a year, but for time and for eternity and perhaps for future generations.”
Rededicating herself to becoming the exemplary, consummate Catholic mother, Rose would eventually emerge in the public sphere—as Joe’s life became more prominent—as the model for professional motherhood, an image she would cultivate and promote for the rest of her life. Her children, she believed, would be indebted to her forever.

The children, in a very profound way, would be Rose’s security in the marriage, even if Joe found sexual and emotional fulfillment with other women. Through their children, she found ways to remain the center of attention and in control. Her children would become her career. She would not allow herself to become “an emaciated, worn out old hag” or “a fat, shapeless, happy go lucky” mother whose life was defined solely by “children, kitchen, and church.” Instead, “I looked upon child rearing as a profession
and decided it was just as interesting and just as challenging as anything else and it did not have to keep a mother tied down and make her dull or out of touch.”

The Kennedys’ fourth child and second girl, Kathleen, was born on February 20, 1920, when Rosemary was not yet eighteen months old. Beginning with the birth of Kathleen and after the birth of each child thereafter, Joe would send Rose on a vacation and take “responsibility of the family . . . It was a relief to know that the children were well supervised in case of an eruption of children’s diseases, which often hit four or five of them at once.”

Accommodating Rose had become a linchpin of the marriage. In April and May 1923, she took an extended vacation to California with her sister Agnes, leaving Joe behind to manage their household and children, all of whom were between the ages of eight and two and required constant supervision and care. While Rose was enjoying spa treatments, sightseeing, and the lovely beaches of California’s south coast with her sister, the boys, ages eight and six, were taunting everyone with a charming song called “Bed Bugs and Cooties” and had started a boys’ club, which required new members to be stuck with pins as their initiation.
In frequent letters to Rose from Boston, Joe’s initial confidence devolved into growing anxiety about her extended vacation. In a telegram sent on April 8, Joe was cheerful and optimistic. Though a governess, a cook, the Moores, and assorted Fitzgerald and Kennedy relatives shouldered the major portion of the child care, Joe painted a scene of himself commanding the helm of orderly bliss. “The children are fine,” he assured Rose, and “Jack is sleeping every noon and is greatly improved . . . the Moores have been the busiest people in the world . . . and we are all doing nicely.” Joe finished his telegram wishing Rose would have “a real good time because you richly deserve it please do not think too much about us and spoil
your party . . . I am not lonesome because I find myself in happy thought that you are enjoying yourself . . . lots of love from us all, Joe.”
Shorter telegrams followed until five weeks later, on May 13, when Joe wrote rather desperately, “Dear Rosa Mother’s Day finds us all looking forward to your return . . . we all realize now more than ever how important you are to the happiness of you [in] this home . . . we all love you and want you back . . .”

Rose’s lengthy trips, especially those abroad, became more common during the late 1920s and 1930s, unsettling the children, who never seemed to adjust to her absences. Young Jack complained about his mother’s repeated “holidays” away from her family. Before leaving for California in 1923, Rose noted in her diary that Jack told her, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.”

But these trips were only a respite from the constant demands of Rose’s highly controlled mothering. At home, she set rigid rules for raising children, rules Joe tried to adhere to while she was away. As more children joined the family, this organization helped her maintain the order she needed and the singular purpose she craved. It was an era when the principles underlying industrial efficiency and time management were being promoted in the latest literature to American businessmen and mothers alike. Rose, always an avid reader, embraced the new ideology of modern motherhood. The “Home Manager . . . is the active partner in the business of running a home,” a popular magazine of the day declared, “to make home life happy, healthful, and beautiful.”
Rose would apply the most current business and industrial-management techniques to the raising of her children and the running of her household.

She had strict guidelines for health and cleanliness, eating, reading, dinner conversations, playtime, education, and more.
In spite of all the full- and part-time help, Rose later insisted that she maintained an active role in the children’s lives. Diapers needed changing, washing, and drying, and baby bottles needed cleaning, sterilizing, and refilling. Someone had to manage the hired help doing all that work. “The bottles for the babies had to be cleaned and sterilized at home on the kitchen stove and woe to the nursemaid if she put her bottles on the stove when the hired girl was preparing the lunch or cooking a cake. Words would fly and kettles would be pushed back and forth and diapers would stop boiling and there would be . . . a fight from the kitchen.” While havoc swirled, Rose would take the youngest in a carriage, with “one or two others on each side,” and up the street the family would go, stopping at the grocery store and visiting Saint Aiden’s Catholic Church on the way back home.

Rose’s index-card catalog for the children became legendary among members of the family. She chronicled medical records for each child, noting every illness, disease, vaccine, and surgery endured, as well as complications, medications taken, height, weight, doctors’ names, allergies, physical exams, and eye-test results. She noted dates of each child’s baptism, schools attended, First Communion, Confirmation, graduation, the names of godparents, and more. Not only did the file cards help her keep track and stay in charge of each child’s medical history, but they also were available to Joe and to all the nannies, nursemaids, and other caretakers responsible for the children during Rose’s absences. The British press would later marvel at this system, dubbing Rose the model of “American efficiency,” but Rose called it “Kennedy desperation.”

Rose’s obsession with weight would become notorious, too. The Saturday-morning weigh-in was a ritual in the Kennedy household. Each child’s weight was noted in Rose’s card-catalog
system. The children would not become “emaciated . . . fat . . . [or] shapeless” if she could help it.
If a child’s weight “showed a change, his program changed.” Young Jack was often underweight, so for him “there would be less swimming and perhaps more fat in his diet.” Alternatively, she would put her children on diets if they gained too much weight, and order them to get more exercise. Because Rose was constantly worried about her own figure, her fixation on weight would dominate nearly every letter passed between the children and their parents well into their adulthoods, even extending to Rose’s grandchildren in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Dinner conversations were always lessons of some sort. Rose drilled her children on the saints and martyrs of the church, famous men in history, and “great leaders in their country.” The children, Rose wrote, were “taught to admire the leaders of Christendom who died for their faith . . . [and] to emulate the Pilgrim fathers . . . and [they] learned about Paul Revere and his famous ride.”
Leadership, Rose firmly believed, was the result of patient, deliberate efforts on the part of parents, who encouraged their children through solid instruction and example.

The children’s upbringing included an emphasis on sports as well as on academic studies. “They learned to be winners, not losers in sports,” Rose proudly claimed. Rose and Joe tried to attend as many school sports competitions as possible, spurring the children “on to victory” and providing a little sympathy—though no more than a “nod”—when they lost. When a child failed to win, “the reasons for this were analyzed.” As each grew older, it fell to him or her to urge on the younger siblings, yet they were very competitive with one another, too. Rose liked that.

As the family disciplinarian, Rose believed in “good old fashioned spanking,” though she did not allow family nurses, maids,
or governesses to punish the children physically. Fully aware of debates about the efficacy of corporal punishment and the possible physical and psychological pain caused by it, Rose nevertheless believed it was vital in teaching young children the difference between right and wrong, particularly as a “means of preventing accidents and bad behavior.” She prided herself that none of her children ever said no to her, though this seems highly unlikely to be true. Rose claimed she would not hesitate to hold a child’s finger to a hot stove to show that he or she would get burned, or to prick a little finger with the point of a pair of scissors to emphasize the danger of running and falling or poking a sibling with them. A ruler was never far from reach. “After a few raps, the mere mention of the ruler would usually bring the desired results.”

A
FTER THE BIRTH
of Kathleen, Rose realized her modest house on Beals Street was much too small for a growing family of little children, along with an expanding staff. Joe’s career was flourishing; he had joined Hayden and Stone, a stock-brokerage firm, in 1919, had been buying and selling property through his own real estate investment company, and was maintaining his profitable interest in Columbia Trust. He and Rose sold the eight-room home to Eddie and Mary Moore and bought a larger and more formal twelve-room house around the corner, on Naples Road in Brookline. The school district—an exceptionally good one—remained the same, so Rose felt assured that her children’s early education would be first-rate and uninterrupted. She could attend the same church and remain in a familiar neighborhood where the children had made friends, where they could take their daily walks and visit the local shops, and where they had long grown accustomed to playing. The Moores, who had been living
with Mary’s mother in an apartment in Charlestown, on the other side of the Charles River from Brookline and Boston, were now just a block away, available at a moment’s notice when needed and in a house the children already loved.

After settling into their new Naples Road home, in October 1920, when Rosemary had just turned two and Kathleen eight months, Rose discovered she was pregnant again. The newest baby, Eunice, was born at Naples Road in July 1921 and named after Rose’s youngest sister. Perhaps Rose knew that her sister did not have long to live. Eunice Fitzgerald had contracted tuberculosis while working for the Red Cross, nursing sick and wounded soldiers in Boston during and after World War I. Ten years younger than Rose, with a brilliant intellect and a soft beauty that some believed surpassed Rose’s, Eunice had replaced Rose as Honey Fitz’s most favored daughter. He showered her with the attention and affection that Rose had once enjoyed before she married Joe and moved out of the family home. Honey Fitz spared no expense trying to find a cure for his dying daughter. The new baby would carry not only Eunice’s name but also the strong intellect of her Fitzgerald aunt and the political genius of her grandfather Honey Fitz.

The house on Naples Road had a large wraparound porch, which Rose and her staff would divide into sections for the children’s play. Separating the children with folding child-safety gates allowed them to play in segregated sections according to age groupings. Rose felt that with so many children—two more followed Eunice over the next four years on Naples Road—having them all play together was problematic. “There I was with seven children and when they would play they would knock each other down, [and] gouge each other’s eyes with toys.”
The older boys were rough, and the younger children were bound to get
hurt. The divided porch solved the problem nicely. “They could see one another and still they could not push one another or stick some heavy thing on top of the baby carriage,” Rose recalled years later. Neighbors, deliverymen, and police officers would stop by and chat with the children, distracting and entertaining them, Rose observed, allowing her to “read the papers inside or outside with an occasional look in the direction of the children.”