The House of Kennedy(10)
In 1921, Rose is pregnant once again, this time with Eunice. Joe buys a new house for the family, at 131 Naples Road in Brookline. Rose describes the place as “bigger and better,” much like the “special presents” Joe bestows on her after the birth of each child. For instance, to celebrate Jean’s arrival in 1928, she has her choice among three diamond bracelets.
At some point along the way, Rose decides to change her perspective.
“I used to say, ‘Why did I spend time learning to read Goethe or Voltaire if I have to spend my life telling children why they should drink their milk or why they should only eat one piece of candy each day and then after meals.’ But then I thought raising a family is a new challenge and I am going to meet it.”
Rose is a strict disciplinarian. She insists the children attend Sunday Mass (she attends daily), and as Proverbs 13:24 instructs, she does not spare the rod. Actually, she uses a ruler from her desk, or a wooden coat hanger, an object she reasons “didn’t hurt any more—probably less—than a ruler” to administer spankings “just hard enough to receive the message.”
Besides, the Kennedy children are a rough-and-tumble brood, prone to intense physical rivalries. When the siblings “would play, they would knock each other down and gouge each other’s eyes out with toys.”
Rose sets up safety gates to protect the younger kids from the older ones, but the sounds of their roughhousing cannot be contained. According to biographer Evan Thomas, young Bobby “used to lie in [his] bed at night sometimes and hear the sound of Joe banging Jack’s head against the wall.”
The exception to such violence is Rosemary, a gentle child. “She loved music, and my mother used to play the piano and sing to her,” younger sister Eunice recalls.
Throughout another full decade of dutiful procreation—Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean, and Ted, all born between 1921 and 1932—Rose polishes her presentation on motherhood. In 1936, she records in her calendar, “I looked upon child rearing as a profession and decided it was just as interesting and just as challenging as anything else and that it did not have to keep a woman tied down and make her dull or out of touch. She did not have to become an emaciated, worn-out old hag.”
She proves herself the antithesis of an “old hag” when prominent fashion designers name Rose one of the best dressed women of the 1930s. “Joe always wanted me to dress well,” Rose writes in her memoir. “It pleased him, in fact it delighted him, to have me turn up in something quite special.”
Rose holds her family to the same fashionable and elegant standards she herself maintains. Thus her frustration when Jack looks less than his best, as at his Harvard graduation, “in his black academic gown, with a suitably serious expression, but with his feet in a pair of worn brown-and-white saddle shoes.”
As the Kennedy family’s public profile begins to rise, Rose oversees the upkeep of appearances among her photogenic family. “Mother is a perfectionist,” Ted Kennedy says. She monitors the children’s food intake and weighs them regularly. She also invests in cosmetic dentistry, encouraging the display of the toothy trademark Kennedy smile in all family portraits. A Choate School classmate noting, “When Jack flashed his smile, he could charm a bird off a tree,” rates Rose’s regimen a success.
Each summer, the Kennedys gather at Hyannis Port, where the siblings share time and activities. Sailing is a family favorite. In 1935, calculates biographer Laurence Leamer in The Kennedy Women, “the young Kennedys, led by Eunice, Kathleen, and Pat…plus Rosemary, Jack and Joe Jr., came away with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts” from the Hyannis Port Yacht Club.
The Kennedy children are largely educated at boarding schools—convents for the girls, secular schools for the boys. For a time, Rosemary is homeschooled, but when she is in her early teens, Joe and Rose decide that Rosemary, too, is ready to live and study away from home. She does well academically, but she writes to Joe, “I get lonesome everyday,” asking him, “Come to see me very soon.”
The physical act of writing is difficult for Rosemary, but she perseveres, penning in blocky print affectionate letters to her father. “I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to Disapoint [sic] you in anyway.” But Rose and Joe’s feelings go deeper than disappointment in Rosemary. They are fearful of being shunned in elite social circles for having a “defective child.”
Yet Rosemary is easy to please. “She loved compliments,” Eunice recalls. “Every time I would say, ‘Rosemary, you have the best teeth and smile in the family,’ she would smile for hours. She liked to dress up, wear pretty clothes, have her hair fixed and her fingernails polished. When she was asked out by a friend of the family, she would be thrilled.”
Rosemary’s happiest years may be those the family spends in England during Joe’s service as ambassador. On May 11, 1938, she is presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, looking radiant in a white gown embellished with silver piping alongside her parents and sister Kathleen.
But the timing of the family’s return to America upon Joe’s abrupt resignation and the eruption of World War II unfortunately parallels an inner conflict in Rosemary, whose behavior noticeably regresses at age twenty-one.
Back in the States by 1940, Rose and Joe are concerned that a “neurological disturbance” is the cause of their daughter’s emotional state, depression punctuated by violent verbal and physical outbursts. Eunice tells of the family being “terribly serious about the problem,” yet at the same time her parents continue to wonder whether Rosemary might simply try harder to assimilate into mainstream society.