“THE KENNEDY FAMILY: NINE CHILDREN AND NINE MILLION Dollars,” Life proclaimed in December 1937. President Roosevelt had just named Joe as US ambassador to Great Britain, and the media loved it. Splashed across oversized pages, the Kennedy photo portrayed Joe, Rose, and nine offspring posed around their Bronxville hearth.1
“Big, rich, good-looking families always beguiled Life’s attention back in 1937 when the magazine was only a year old,” explained editor Philip B. Kunhardt Jr.
The variety of their [the Kennedys’] activities and their sumptuous settings and life-styles were ideal for pictures. In addition, the Kennedy children had a shrewd, outspoken father who wielded enormous power in financial circles, had a glamorous background in Hollywood filmmaking.… And there was mother Rose, the lovely daughter of a storied mayor of Boston—stylish, reverent, eloquent in her own cool way—the ideal mother. The four sons seemed dashing and athletic. The five daughters pretty and competitive. The settings were usually Palm Beach or Cape Cod. Politics was on the horizon. How could a fledgling magazine ask for more!2
In 1986, Teddy Kennedy pronounced Life “the scrapbook for our family.”3
Joe wrote Christmas 1937 greetings to the Kennedys’ former nanny: “I am delighted that you liked the picture and I think the one in Life was very cute. Of course, I am getting a bit fed up with hearing that my wife looks so very young, because to really understand that it means that I look like her father and that is a terrible state of affairs after all these years of struggling to keep my youthful figure, so I am going right back to chocolate ice cream and plenty of chocolate cake,” he teased.4
The Boston Post caught Kennedy fever as well. One tabloid-style headline touted “The Real Story of Joseph P. Kennedy’s Romance.” Another described “Why He Turned His Sweetheart’s Picture to the Wall” when Rose’s father declared that he was seeing too much of his daughter. A third headline proclaimed, “And He Married His Childhood Sweetheart, Beautiful Rose Fitzgerald.” Mrs. Kennedy appeared as “Slim, Girlish Looking at 47.” Rose loved that caption. Yet the Post couldn’t help poking fun at the Kennedy clan and its newfound prominence. One cartoon portrayed Joe bowing with Rose before the enthroned King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The new ambassador looks a mite self-conscious in his knee britches (which in reality he refused to wear), but Rose (“Mrs. Joe,” as the cartoon labels her) smiles like the poised public celebrity she had been most of her life. Behind them stand caricatures of “9 Little Kennedys,” a riff on the popular children’s book Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Attempting to join the spectacle is pint-sized Honey Fitz, singing “Sweet Adeline.”5
At the White House on February 18, 1938, Supreme Court justice Stanley Reed swore Joe in as ambassador to Great Britain. Smiling broadly, FDR shook Kennedy’s hand; undoubtedly, the president relished the irony of appointing the first Irish Catholic, only two generations removed from Ireland’s peat bogs, to represent the United States before the British. By doing so, Roosevelt was also sending to England a potential rival for the White House, should FDR try for an unprecedented third presidential term in 1940. The voluble new envoy, although at the pinnacle of his career, seemed uncharacteristically subdued in accepting the president’s felicitations.
Recovering from an emergency appendectomy, Rose missed the ceremony as well as Joe’s departure for England. She recuperated at Palm Beach, with nurse Luella Hennessey, who had cared for Pat when she had appendicitis and for Bobby when he had pneumonia the previous summer. Eight of the nine Kennedy children bid their now-famous father farewell at the pier. Suffering from a cold, Jack skipped the rain-dampened departure.6
By March Rose was well enough to ready five of her nine children for the voyage to join their father. Ambassador Kennedy joked with the press that such a large family would have to come across the Atlantic in installments, lest they cause a UK housing shortage. Joe Jr. and Jack stayed behind at Harvard. Attending convent schools in New York and Connecticut, Rosemary and Eunice would make the Atlantic crossing five weeks later. Eunice, though only sixteen, was adept at supervising her older sister. Sending Rosemary apart from the rest of the family also ensured that she would receive less media attention.
The night before Rose and five of her children set sail, the New York Sun featured the Kennedy matriarch and her family, using Life magazine’s photo of the clan accompanied by a full-length portrait of stylish Mrs. Kennedy outside her Palm Beach home. This coverage of Rose launched many of the family’s iconic images. Described as “an Irish beauty,” whose petite figure and youthfulness belied her mother-of-nine status, Rose asserted, “In the case of such a large family as mine it is necessary to have absolute regularity and co-operation. The children are taught that they must be on time for meals, always help one another, be courteous and considerate of servants, and own up to any of their small faults, telling the truth no matter what the penalty.” The article portrayed the children as accomplished swimmers and tennis players (on the Bronxville estate’s grass court). Rose discussed her devotion to golf: “it does give me a chance to get away for a little time from the house and the children.” Noting her knowledge of French and German from her days at Blumenthal, the paper cited Mrs. Kennedy’s love of travel. The article described the Bronxville home as a center for music, with its grand piano in the drawing room, and reading, from the shelves of books in the sunroom.7 “What a charming family!” inscribed the Associated Press’s Mary Elizabeth Plummer on a clipping of the article that Rose kept in her diary.8 Having climbed the ladder from Famine Irish to Lace Curtain Irish in parochial Boston, the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds had achieved money, power, and celebrity in New York. They would soon conquer the international scene in London.
Journalists surrounded Rose, Teddy, Jean, Bobby, Pat, and Kathleen, dressed in their Sunday best, on the deck of the USS Washington. Poised yet charmingly boyish, twelve-year-old Bobby stepped to the newsreel microphones, encouraged by his mother: “This is my first trip to Europe. I was so excited, I couldn’t even sleep laaast night!” he exclaimed in his Boston accent. Around the world flashed the AP wire photo of the six voyagers.9 Elizabeth Dunn, the children’s governess, had signed on for duty in England, and Joe had persuaded Nurse Hennessey to accompany them “for a while to help out until we get settled.”10 (Hennessey stayed with the family for their entire tenure in England and for years after they returned.) Rose was transformed, from a mother obsessed with her children’s health, once observing that she dared not leave them, to an eager player on the public stage of her husband’s ambassadorship.
After six days of braving stormy seas, the ship made landfall in Cobh, Ireland. “Kathleen and [the] other children were besieged in the dining salon by a lot of reporters inquiring about her rumored engagement [to Peter Grace, of the Grace Steamship Company],” wrote Rose in her diary. For the next decade Kick’s love life would prove an endless source of news fodder. Rose earnestly began her attempts at stage management in the world arena, which meant redoubling her legendary self-control, as well as her attempts to supervise the family’s public image. The media gaggle insisted on photographs, “which it seems we must allow them to do—otherwise, they become very disagreeable and extremely annoying and take pictures in unconventional poses. They inquired about my Irish ancestry, about the number of the children—their where-abouts.…”11 “Kathleen was [a] debutante at the time, and everyone was interested that she was going to marry” into the Grace family. “[She was] quite attractive. And every place that we would stop I would get questioned by people trying to find out about her romance or whether she was really hav[ing] a romance with Peter Grace [one of Kick’s many beaux]…,” recalled Rose.12
Appropriately, on St. Patrick’s Day this Kennedy contingent disembarked in Plymouth, on the Devon coast, about 190 miles southwest of London. “Jolly Joe,” as the British had dubbed the American ambassador, bounded onto the ship to greet his children and Rose, swathed in her fur coat. Arriving in London, they proceeded directly to the embassy at 14 Princes Gate, near Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. The seven Kennedys now in London marched arm in arm into the embassy’s private garden. A scrum of some twenty photographers snapped away at Britain’s newest media sensation. Six-year-old Teddy, in short pants and knee socks, looked particularly adorable. Rose’s seventeen years of giving birth and nurturing nine children now reaped dividends. Simply having so many babies, yet appearing youthful and svelte, made Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy an instant celebrity. “Joe and Rose Plus Nine” would be their reality TV show in the twenty-first century.
“When they arrived [in 1938] it caused a sensation in London,” Deborah (“Debo”) Mitford, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, declared decades later, “because no diplomat had ever arrived with nine children attached. And the chief thing that amazed [the British] was Rose—not any of the others—because she had such a marvelous figure. And she was so smartly dressed that all of the people of her age and anybody who had anything like nine children were incredibly jealous of her because she just looked so wonderful!”13
Comparing the family to Canada’s celebrated Dionne quintuplets, Life covered the Kennedy invasion of Britain. Yet, the magazine proclaimed, “There are only five Dionne Quints and the Kennedy kids are nine.…” It named Joe and Rose’s brood “the most politically ingratiating family since Theodore Roosevelt’s.”14 Rose later calculated her family’s appeal: “One advantage our family had was there were plenty of us to photograph and that, I was told, was an asset. People are attracted by a group much more than by a single child, or even by two people. Also, it seems girls or women are more of an attraction than men and we had plenty of femininity too. Teddy was so young and unselfconscious that he would pose any time, but he alone was not enough, two or three girls must be along.”15
If Joe reached the pinnacle of his short political career as US ambassador to Britain, Rose’s experience created a bridge in her long public life—from the young daughter of Boston’s mayor to a political matriarch. No longer was she simply a well-traveled Boston debutante. She had become a celebrated spouse on an international and historic stage. Honing her social skills in courtly prewar London, Rose’s experiences would form the core of her initial campaign speeches for John F. Kennedy during his first forays into the political arena.
Until World War II’s onset, Rose kept a meticulous daily diary that reflected the essence of her personality. No superficial detail eluded her observation. No notable persons—heads of state and government, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, ambassadors and their wives, star athletes, Hollywood stars—escaped her all-seeing eye. She noted clothing, hairstyle, makeup, facial characteristics, hair color (or lack of locks in the case of men), height, weight, posture, demeanor, accent, religion, and intellect. Her thoughts on places visited amount to a travel guide. Accounts of meals she supervised or attended list each course, sometimes the menus themselves, and occasionally the prices.
Rose also recorded her practical concerns about teeth, weight, and health. Was her family’s milk pasteurized? Were the children too heavy or too thin? What about dental hygiene, never a priority in England? To her 1938–39 diary Rose attached society columns, news stories, and features. Craving the public spotlight, she especially enjoyed preserving press photos of herself at Epsom Downs and Winchester Cathedral or representing Americans in London at July 4 and Memorial Day commemorations.
Her new, fairy-tale life couldn’t have been more spectacular and memorable. Only a day after reaching London, Rose rode to Buckingham Palace for her presentation to Queen Elizabeth, King George VI’s charming and gracious wife. Rose curtsied and Joe bowed before the queen, who radiated a “happy natural smile.”16 Rose admired the queen’s porcelain complexion, which “never came through in photographs.” Indeed, newspaper portraits of Rose (as captured by Phyfe) and the queen reveal Mrs. Kennedy as the more attractive woman.17
As Rose and Joe embraced their diplomatic duties, their children began a whirlwind of London tours. Bobby, Jean, and Teddy eagerly photographed the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and listened intently as a kindly Beefeater explained the Tower of London’s colorful history. Rose quickly enrolled Bobby and Teddy in a London day school, Gibbs, in nearby Kensington, and sent Eunice (once she and Rosemary joined the family in late April), Pat, and Jean to board at a Sacred Heart convent in Roehampton. Rosemary settled in with Assumption nuns and thrived under the tutelage of Mother Isabel.
The European fashion scene drew Rose’s attention. Her annual trips to the Parisian couture houses, starting in the 1920s, gave her a head start on the latest styles. A compulsive shopper, she reportedly once told a Boston store clerk that she annually purchased two hundred suits and dresses.18 Elsa Schiaparelli offered Rose discounts, but her clothes were “severe—plain—almost exaggeratedly so; they are not feminine enough for me,” said Mrs. Kennedy. Schiaparelli’s avant-garde creations, influenced by Salvador Dalí, violated Rose’s utilitarian tastes. She described Schiaparelli’s 1938 “circus” collection, with elephants, horses, and clowns on the clothing, as “fantastically embroidered” and rejected it for evening wear. Instead, her favorite designer was Britain’s Edward Molyneux in Paris; his creations were “conservative, smart, supple, easy to wear.”19 That they were ubiquitous in London didn’t stop her from purchasing one of his white lace gowns, trimmed in silver and gold beads, for the presentation of Rosemary and Kathleen to the king and queen at Buckingham Palace that May.
Luncheons, cocktail parties, and teas with British aristocracy abounded. Little did Rose know how tea-party etiquette would create a paradigm for her political work on behalf of her sons. She recorded that British socialites “looked conservative, little make-up, hardly any lipstick. All very cordial.” They reminded her “of the Boston B[ack] Bay society.” This was no compliment from Irish Catholic Rose, whom the Boston Brahmins had shunned. She later wrote that British people “do not look as well as in the U.S.A. Figures of older women are not as good and their clothes look dowdy not smart.” And their teeth were bad, the ultimate hygienic sin for Rose.20
Mrs. Kennedy also expanded her political horizons. She met the editor of the Catholic Herald and discussed the ongoing Spanish Civil War. He “feels [the] only way to fight Communism is for Catholics to take some action to improve workers’ condition rather than ignoring it as has been the attitude of the Church often in the past.”21
A mere three weeks had passed before Joe and Rose were driven to Windsor Castle for a weekend with King George and Queen Elizabeth. The trip took less than an hour, but it represented a journey back through centuries of British history for the enthralled Kennedys. Arriving at 7 p.m. sharp, they were met by the “master of the household,” a former army general, who clearly approved of their punctuality. Escorted to elaborate bedrooms in the castle’s Lancaster Tower, they sipped sherry prior to dinner. Forever after, Rose loved to quote her husband’s pithy summary of the royal scene: “Rose, this is a helluva long way from East Boston.” In the reception room the Kennedys chatted with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his wife, and at dinner Ambassador Kennedy sat next to the queen, while Rose took her place beside the king. What does one say to a king? Rose chose the subject she knew best and one that stirred no controversy: her children. When the gentlemen excused themselves for an after-dinner chat with the king, the ladies conversed with his wife, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, mother of the future Queen Elizabeth II. “I must be dreaming that I, Rose Kennedy, a simple young matron from Boston, am really here at Windsor Castle, the guest of the queen and two little princesses,” she thought to herself later that night.22
Beginning with her 1934 stay at the White House, Rose loved writing to her family and friends from historic homes. She reported to daughter Pat from the royal castle in Windsor, “We have just spent the most delightful day here after a very brilliant dinner party last night. I sat on the right of the King, and I was so thrilled. We shall be returning in the morning. Much love, Mother.” Thinking ahead for history and posterity, Rose added, “Pat—Please keep this note, dear.”23
The next day, Palm Sunday, the Kennedys attended Mass at a nearby church, followed by lunch with the king and queen and their two princesses and a walk around Windsor’s manicured grounds and gardens. When, during tea, the queen’s older sister suffered a heart attack, quick-thinking Rose escorted the young Princess Elizabeth (age eleven) and Princess Margaret (age seven) outside. Joe proudly observed that the king and queen expressed gratitude to his wife, who had “established a bond” with Queen Elizabeth.24 To a friend back in Dorchester, Rose wrote on Windsor Castle stationery that the weekend had been “very brilliant” and the royal family “charming.”25 Of the top seven events in her life, Rose would rank the “weekend at Windsor Castle” at number five.26
The Kennedys were also getting to know the Chamberlains, lunching with them at 10 Downing Street. To Rose, the prime minister compared favorably to her husband. Both men possessed business backgrounds, enjoyed walks with their wives, and appreciated classical music. Rose shared her thoughts with Joe, but he cautioned her not to comment on these similarities in public.27
ROSE HOPED TO VISIT the Roehampton convent for Pat’s birthday but had to cancel her trip because of a flu outbreak. She couldn’t risk illness, for in a few days she, Rosemary, and Kathleen would be presented at court. When associating with English royalty, certain proprieties had to be observed. One was to wear a tiara. Rose liked jewelry—real, “brilliant” jewelry, not “paste.” Always pragmatic, she considered buying a tiara with precious jewels and then converting it to a bracelet or clip. Instead, she borrowed a “gorgeous marquise diamond” tiara but had to have it enlarged to fit comfortably on her head. Ultimately she purchased her own tiara. She loved precious stones: “The most flattering jewels are, I think, pearls and diamonds. Pearls are especially very flattering, especially when you get older. Rubies with diamonds are very effective, and they are my birthstones.”28
As the court presentation drew closer, so did photographers. Vogue snapped pictures of the Kennedy ladies, and Rose obliged press requests for interviews and photographs of the younger children at tea. Questions about the upcoming court presentation were off-limits, however. In order to decrease the embassy’s burden of sponsorship, Joe had just cancelled the tradition for most American debutantes. Only those living in England—seven to be exact, including the two Kennedy girls—would be presented. “To enthuse too strongly about” the presentation wouldn’t be tactful.29 Rose’s premature release of the seven names several days before the event stunned Buckingham Palace, which traditionally made such announcements. She had committed her first faux pas in England.
Meanwhile, Kathleen and Rosemary practiced curtsying. From her convent days, Rose had already mastered balancing on one foot, while bending slightly at the knee, before the reverend mother. Rosemary required extra training because of her poor coordination. Each lady had to display three feathers in her hair, a symbol for the Prince of Wales, and carry flowers. Rose’s innate penchant for perfection and precision obviously served her well in rule-bound British aristocracy, as did her Prussian convent background. Dresses and trains worn by ladies presented to the king and queen had to be a prescribed length so that, according to Rose,
the person behind you would not step on your dress because the curtsies for the king and queen were [in] perfect alignment. You take three steps and you curtsy, the lady by you takes three steps and then curtsies. Therefore, if her dress was so long, she’d have to take four steps to curtsy. It would throw out the whole procession.… The procession is mathematically carefully thought out. Because there’s a long line of curtsies. The whole court was watching each woman as she presented each embassy, and each embassy wants to make a good show. [T]here was a rehearsal at the embassy before we were presented.… Nobody wants to make a mistake because there were a good many people there who keep you in line.…30
May 11 finally arrived; Rose cleared her morning to relax and have her hair styled. Then she inspected the bouquets of roses and lilies of the valley that Rosemary and Kathleen would carry. An Elizabeth Arden makeup artist arrived for the Kennedy trio. Dressed in her new Molyneux gown, Rose joined her two daughters on the embassy’s windy balcony for press photographers. Fretting that gusts were mussing her decorative feathers and tulle train, she happily moved indoors. There she discovered a Movietone News crew but didn’t realize that microphones were recording “even our most casual conversation.” (The next day Rose was embarrassed to hear on the film’s soundtrack that she was “giving orders to everyone … fussing at the lights, and generally [being] more or less difficult.”) At the appointed hour Joe and Rose motored to the palace, acknowledging the crowds along the route who waved and smiled. Kathleen and Rosemary followed in a separate car.31
The Evening Standard commented, “Miss Rosemary Kennedy, one of the daughters of the American Ambassador, looked particularly well in her picture dress of white tulle embroidered with silver.”32 That clipping went into Rose’s diary. The New York Times, however, noted how few American debutantes were presented by Mrs. Kennedy to the king and queen. “Ambassador [Kennedy] Limited the List So Only One [Debutante] Was Not Relative of an Official,” headlined the paper.33 Fortunately, no one reported that Rosemary had tripped after her curtsy to the queen, and Rose never publicly acknowledged her daughter’s literal faux pas.34
The social season remained in high gear. After a weekend at historic Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, Rose moved on to Epsom Downs and the English Derby. She particularly enjoyed meeting Lord Derby. He sent her a handwritten letter outlining the Derby’s history and its inspiration for America’s Kentucky Derby. “Of course, he was part of the Victorian-Edwardian era of good manners and graceful living, in which personal correspondence was regarded as important and almost as an art form,” recorded Rose. “I have often wished our society had retained more of that feeling: So much correspondence nowadays comes off a typewriter and lacks the personal qualities of handwriting; and, of course, there is such a great deal of telephoning now, instead of writing, and the words spoken are lost forever.”35 Eventually, Rose embraced telephonic communication for keeping up with her peripatetic family, but she also became the chronicler of its activities through round-robin letters.
In early June, for their debut, Rosemary and Kathleen welcomed eighty “close friends” for dinner. Afterward, two hundred additional guests joined the coming-out party and danced the night away in the embassy’s second-floor ballroom. Although the celebration focused on Kick, the Kennedys insisted that Rosemary be included. Rose admitted to apprehensions over how she would respond to so many unfamiliar people, in new surroundings made more chaotic by the dancing, music, and frivolity. Apparently, Rosemary committed no social errors.
The previous day Bobby and Teddy had presided “gracefully” over the ribbon-cutting at the new Children’s Zoo in Regent’s Park, according to a London magazine society column.36 Bobby delivered his maiden speech. “It gives me pleasure to be here today. My brother—he is six—and I are enjoying ourselves enormously, and I hope all the English children who come here will do so, too.” A Ministry of Education representative responded, “I think we have just listened to a future president of the United States.”37 At the elephant enclosure, Ba-Bar reached out his trunk to snatch a peanut from a startled Teddy, and British photographers chronicled the playful incident. Meanwhile, after attending the Ascot races, Rose made London’s Evening Standard society column. Although it described the queen’s dress and those of the duchesses of Kent and Gloucester and the Princess Royal, the paper ran only one photo. “Mrs. Kennedy, wife of the American Ambassador, wore a short-skirted printed dress and a big hat for Ascot,” announced the caption.38
JOE SAILED BACK to the States in mid-June for conversations with President Roosevelt and the State Department on European tensions, and ostensibly to celebrate Joe Jr.’s graduation from Harvard.39 Rose stayed behind with the other children and maintained her busy social and media life. The Ladies’ Home Journal wanted to feature the Kennedys’ upcoming fall wardrobes. “Seems like a terrific chore,” confided Rose, “as I am so particular about their clothes. [The reporter] says she can borrow things from shops here [and] pin them where they do not fit.” But she happily admitted that pictures of Pat, Eunice, and Jean “developed into very attractive photographs.” She especially liked the images of Rosemary, “who photographs extraordinarily well.”40
In Joe’s absence, Rose’s parents visited. A veteran prankster, Honey Fitz mailed mock invitations on embassy stationery to his Boston cronies, asking them to tea. “[H]e thought [this was] amusing,” but Joe thought it “disgraceful.” “You know, different personalities, both strong personalities,” Rose commented.41 With some annoyance in her voice, she declared to her memoirist, “[My father] was an extrovert and Joe wasn’t and that was it.… [Honey Fitz] liked to talk about the movies and talk about people … and Joe didn’t. Joe was in the movies and he would just tell Father that and that was it.”42 Of Rose’s four boys, Teddy was most like gregarious Honey Fitz. Conversely, Rose saw herself as a loner, although, like her husband, she welcomed the spotlight of public life. For Joe, the right kind of publicity afforded influence and power during his ambassadorship. Eventually, he became more like his father, P. J. Kennedy, content to serve behind the scenes as a power broker.
Rose and her mother attended Wimbledon’s 1938 tennis championship, seated in the Royal Box with Queen Mary, the king’s mother. There they watched American Helen Wills Moody defeat her countrywoman Helen Jacobs, hobbled by injury, in the ladies’ final. It pleased Rose enormously that the queen had known Josie Fitzgerald would be visiting, “which makes me realize how thoroughly conversant with or (au courant) with affairs the royal family is trained to be.”43 Mrs. Kennedy was quite au courant herself, having memorized the names of British Cabinet members to keep abreast of her husband’s contacts and any officials she might meet.
On July 4, when Joe, Joe Jr., and Jack arrived in England, all of the Kennedys were together once again. That night, at the American Society’s banquet in the Dorchester Hotel, Joe, as the society’s honorary president, delivered the keynote address. Rose discovered a photo of herself chatting with Member of Parliament Anthony Eden in the next day’s Manchester Daily Dispatch.44 She requested three autographs from the future prime minister—one for herself and one each for Pat and Eunice.
The Kennedys had been in London fewer than six months when Vogue magazine made it official: “The American Ambassador and his family have swept like a conquering horde upon London, which has lowered its defenses and admitted itself stormed.” Citing Rose’s “youthful beauty,” as well as the “transatlantic efficiency” of the index file on her nine children, the article concluded, “And so this remarkable woman stands, and London finds her responsible for much of that rare harmony and unity which is, as it were, both the central theme and leitmotif of the Kennedys.…”45 Photos of Rose, Rosemary, Kick, Bobby, and Teddy covered three pages. In one, Rose served formal tea to her offspring gathered in the embassy’s Pine Room. Each child had a separate photo; Rose and her two eldest daughters were featured on the opening page. Even Rosemary appeared relaxed and happy, just as photogenic as her siblings. The time hadn’t yet arrived when the family would shield her from all publicity.
Not everyone in England, however, thought so highly of the Kennedy media blitz or the nine children. To Joe an irate British subject wrote:
Sir,
I am sick to death of seeing photographs of yourself and family in the newspapers. To be the father of nine children is nothing wonderful in this country though it may be in the U.S. and certainly does not merit the publicity you get for yourself.
A. Fraser46
Writing to her parents, Rose complained about intrusive press coverage of her and the children, especially when they traveled. But she appreciated American Catholics’ support. Mother Grace Cowardin Dammann, president of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, wrote that the “whole Society of [the Sacred Heart of Jesus] is calling down blessings on your dear husband for his great charity in helping our nuns out of Spain [during the Spanish Civil War].” Dammann added, “I hear such lovely things about your own personal and well-deserved popularity, the splendid impression the children are making and the great work your husband is doing. It is a joy to know that in the midst of all this, you, dearest Rose, keep your unspoiled simplicity and straightness with God and man.”47 Simple might not have been quite accurate concerning Rose’s new life abroad. Yet no words could have pleased her more.
IN LATE JULY the Kennedys embarked on a Riviera vacation. Rose and several of the children left first, while Joe stayed in London until Parliament adjourned. According to the press, “Kathleen, who has been one of the most popular of the season’s debutantes, will join her mother at the end of the month.”48 In fact, Kathleen spent several days at the Eastbourne estate of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, parents of her new friend Billy Hartington, whom she had met at a Buckingham Palace garden party that summer. Kick attended the annual Goodwood horse races with the Hartington clan, and Rose filed in her diary a newspaper photo of Kathleen walking with Billy’s younger brother, Lord Andrew Cavendish, at the racecourse.49 Andrew’s future wife, Debo Mitford, recalled Kathleen’s magnetism: “[E]veryone absolutely loved Kick! I think girls of eighteen are often very jealous of each other, but nobody ever said a word about Kick that wasn’t nice. It was extraordinary, actually.” Yet Mitford, destined to become Kick’s sister-in-law, did not succumb to all of the Kennedys’ charm. About Jack, she wrote in her 1938 diary, “Danced with Jack Kennedy. Very nice but very dull.”50
Rose and the children settled into their rented Cap d’Antibes villa. She planned their excursions and meals, even for twenty-one-year-old Jack. She thought him too thin and returned to her old tactics of bulking him up with dairy products. A part-time secretary was tasked with finding “fresh milk and cream. It is most urgent as Jack lost weight swimming at Harvard last spring, and the doctor was insistent on his having a quart daily.”51
The family’s villa was near the famed Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, where they could sunbathe on the beach, swim in the Mediterranean’s crystal-clear waters, or lounge around the pool. Tennis, swimming, golf, and sightseeing by day and summer balls and parties at night kept the energetic family occupied. Rose and her children encountered Marlene Dietrich walking on the beach and asked the German actress for her autograph. To Rose, Dietrich was “gracious, animated, pleasant to meet, seems to be taking a holiday with her hair thrown to the winds and no worry about make-up. Her daughter Maria, a child of fortune, well behaved, unspoiled, under the constant surveillance of an English governess.”52
Despite, or perhaps because of, Dietrich’s carefree appearance, the bisexual seductress caught Joe Sr.’s ever-roving eye after his arrival in early August. According to the actress’s daughter Maria, Kennedy pursued a passionate affair with her mother during his beach holiday, often rendezvousing with Marlene at her cabana. Dietrich maintained a vast array of paramours, including many of her Hollywood costars, and preferred that her lovers not use condoms.53
Marlene’s daughter, a somewhat awkward teenager, frequently found herself paired with Rosemary when she joined the family after a trip to Ireland with her caretaker, Dorothy Gibbs. Though nearly twenty, because of her developmental disabilities she could never travel or live alone. Rose observed that her eldest daughter had “[p]ut on about eight lbs, so we all razzed her about it, as well as Eunice [and] Pat, and she was rather upset. As they all are slimming, she started in, too, today.” Rose admitted that she “almost [went] mad listening to discussions of diets as Jack is fattening.… Rosemary, Kick, and Eunice are slimming—Rosemary having put on pounds and pounds on her trips.” Slender Bobby’s vacation assignment from his mother was to improve his writing and spelling. His London school deemed him deficient in both, so Rose supervised his daily diary entries.54 She delighted in pasting a comment in her own diary from a society column: “The American Ambassadress seems to find controlling and rounding up her family quite an important assignment. They have delightful manners, rarely squabble,…”55
IN MID-AUGUST Joe Jr., who planned to spend a year serving as his father’s secretary, left for Paris. Joe Sr. thought his son should experience firsthand the impending currency crisis and visit the American embassy there. Perhaps after working informally with the US ambassador to France, William Bullitt, for several weeks, Joe Jr. would return with suggestions on how better to run the London embassy. By month’s end, Rose and Joe Sr. departed for Paris, he by plane with Jack, she by train with Kathleen. Ambassador Kennedy then traveled to London and a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Chamberlain over Nazi Germany’s aggressive move to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, home to a sizable German minority. A banner headline in the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris edition suggested that a proposed British compromise would divide the disputed Czech territory along the lines of the Swiss federal model. On the clipping Rose scribbled that she had shopped and met with Joe Jr. but had for the day “no special news.”56
Always captivated by Paris, no matter what was happening elsewhere, Rose didn’t recognize that these were the waning days of peace. “Hair shampooed and coiffeur arranged it on top of my head, which is the way a great many smart people are wearing it now. Makes me look very chic and Parisian but am not sure I like it.” She bemoaned the fact that “the girls are not wearing any hats—most smart Americans lunch and pass in and out of Ritz not wearing any—a very disastrous custom as far as milliners are concerned.” Rose attended Mass at La Madeleine. The French custom of standing, even during the most sacred part of the liturgy, perturbed the devout Irish American. It was quite unlike Boston, where congregants knelt reverently. Considering a move for Rosemary, she visited a convent school outside Paris but discovered that most of its girls were studying at the Sorbonne as part of their course, “so it does not seem practical to leave her there.”57 Rose knew that her daughter, whose writing skills were only those of a youngster half her age, couldn’t manage such academic rigor.
As her Paris trip drew to a close and she prepared a return to Cannes to rejoin the younger children, Rose marveled once again at the Arc de Triomphe “illuminated at night. It is so beautiful in design, so perfect in its properties, so appropriate in its setting, so exquisite in its detail, and when the upper part is lighted at night, it is quite awe-inspiring in its beauty, silhouetted against the sky.” Perfection impressed Rose, but she didn’t realize that soon the lights of Paris and all of Europe would be extinguished. Before departing for the Riviera, Rose paused to phone her husband in London to wish him a happy fiftieth birthday, but the ambassador was on his morning horseback ride. So she went to Cartier to buy him cuff links. “They are baguette diamonds in a square link with a small diamond at the corner. More elegant than anything in Paris and still simple in design and especially right for him, as he would not look right with a lot of diamonds, though these are terrifically expensive. In fact, the man [at Cartier] said I had chosen the most exclusive design in Paris.”58 Joe Jr. bid farewell to his mother as she departed for the south of France again, looking forward to warm Mediterranean sunshine. All seemed well. Joe Jr. was enjoying his US embassy stint, and Rose concluded that his experience meeting with important diplomats would serve him well in his next academic challenge—Harvard Law School.
With her husband in London, Joe Jr. in Paris, Jack preparing to return to Harvard, and Kick heading back to the United Kingdom, Rose moved the remaining Kennedys out of their rented villa and into the Provençal Hotel in Cannes. She liked its modern rooms with balconies, but the bathing facilities failed to meet her standards: “rather dirty looking and intensely crowded, air mattress laid closely to next and people sitting next to each other packed like sardines.” The bathers weren’t up to snuff either. “People mostly English, sprinkled with French, tall, lanky … women and girls with no particular look or figures. Suppose the trim, sleek figures at Eden Roc spoiled me forever.”59
On September 10, 1938, Rose saved a newspaper photo of her husband arriving at yet another meeting with Prime Minister Chamberlain. In the picture, a black cat led the American ambassador into 10 Downing Street, an ominous omen for the superstitious. Joe’s aversion to war began to attract rebukes from President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.60 A few days later, Hitler convened the annual Nazi Party conference in Nuremberg, featuring especially strident tirades against the Czechs.
Rose sent Teddy and Jean, along with Nurse Hennessey, back to London, where Teddy faced a tonsillectomy. The rest of the clan—Rosemary, Eunice, Pat, and Bobby—departed with Miss Dunn, the governess, for a two-week tour of Scotland and Ireland. Now the family matriarch could enjoy the sun-kissed Riviera alone. It lasted only a few days. Her husband phoned to report that “things were terribly agitated in London and perhaps I should leave in the [morning].” Rose’s diary took on a more urgent tone when she found no available seat on the plane to Paris. Instead, she departed on the sleeper train to Paris and then caught a ferry across the Channel. She worried Joe might be shouldering too heavy a burden, with Teddy’s surgery on his mind, along with “these crises in world politics. Everyone fearing war. The French all took part in the last war and are almost frantic at the specter of another one.” Rose had a painful conversation with a French woman who had lost her grandfather in the Franco-Prussian War and her husband and brother in the Great War. The widow vowed that she would not send her son to yet another military conflict.61
Now Rose’s diary turned, for the first time, to the dangerous state of international relations. Chamberlain, nearly seventy years old, was taking the first plane trip of his life to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden, near the führer’s mountaintop retreat in the German Bavarian Alps. “Position much more acute and more urgent than P[rime] M[inister] realized. Hitler determined to march in [to Czechoslovakia] and risk a world war if Sudetenland Germans do not get the right of self-determination …,” Rose recorded. Several people had commented to her “that Joe [Sr.] has been on hand constantly and has aided [the British] by his presence. Feel that he has given great moral support.” After Chamberlain’s return, Rose concluded, “Everything looks as though it is moving to peaceful solution.”62 She wasted no time resuming her London routine, playing golf the day of her arrival and preparing for the return of Rosemary, Eunice, Pat, and Bobby.
From time to time, Rose felt the sting of a fickle British press. Now she resented stories that she would send the children to school in southern Ireland in case war broke out on the Continent. She traced these falsities to a phone call she had made to her parents on their forty-ninth wedding anniversary. She had told Honey Fitz that the children had just returned from a visit to the Emerald Isle, not that they were on their way there to find safety. Rose was convinced that someone was eavesdropping on her phone calls and informing the press.63
She was also surprised that England would be pilloried for sacrificing the Czechs to the Germans in order to preserve peace. She cited the “reproaches hurled at the English in the U.S.A. by the Jews who hate Hitler so desperately.” The day that Rose recorded her views on the Czech crisis, she and Joe hosted Charles and Anne Lindbergh for lunch at the embassy. Rose found the charismatic aviator “rosy-cheeked, fresh-looking with wavy hair, which falls naturally without much combing.” She admired his “wonderful smile, which comes easily and lights up his entire face.” Anne was “small, gentle, terribly sweet in looks and manner with a wistful expression all of which makes you seethe to know that anyone had hurt her so tragically. She is always neatly, simply dressed and wears clothes of the latest fashion but always in a sort of subdued way. I should say no makeup or lipstick.”64
As a mother, Rose empathized with the sorrow Mrs. Lindbergh bore after her baby son’s kidnapping and murder six years earlier. Contemplating the so-called crime of the century always sent a chill through Rose. “[W]hen we went to England, [the press] said that each [of the Kennedy children] had a million dollars. That was written up in Life. I remember protesting it to Henry Luce … because I said they’d be a prize for kidnappers, and if it hadn’t been publicized nobody would have known if we had 1 million or 10 million but the fact that it was publicized might attract kidnappers and at that time kidnaping had been in the news considerably.”65
Colonel Lindbergh’s declaration that “Germany could turn out dozens of planes to England’s one” startled Rose.66 She didn’t anticipate, however, that Joseph Kennedy’s and Charles Lindbergh’s intense efforts to keep the United States out of the next European war would indelibly stain their respective careers and provoke charges of anti-Semitism. While the charges against Lindbergh were true, it is harder to gauge Joe Kennedy’s position. His “attitudes toward Jews are extremely complex, and any attempts to elucidate them are confounded by his diligent efforts to project a favorable political image and to use his memoirs to erase any stains on his ambassadorial tenure,” writes psychologist Will Swift.67
Joe and Rose shared a strain of prejudice common in their religion, ethnicity, and social class. Rose simply had not socialized with Jews (or Protestants, for that matter) in her segregated life among well-heeled Irish Catholics. Meeting Jews occasionally among British aristocracy, she described them in stereotypes, but not malicious ones. At one formal dinner Rose sat next to Viscount Bearsted, whose father, Marcus Samuel, had founded Shell Transport and Trading Company, merged it with Dutch Petroleum, and formed Shell Oil. Bearsted “was interested in oil and, of course, in the … Jewish question in Jerusalem, also in art. Most Jews seem to be interested in the arts or intellectual pursuits,” Rose commented.68
After Chamberlain’s and Hitler’s next round of negotiations, Rose bluntly wrote, “Hitler to occupy Czechoslovakia October first.” Even so, she stuck to her habits, sending Teddy and Bobby back to their London day school and then leaving for Scotland. Only five days had passed since her return from six weeks in France. She monitored the increasingly dire news coming from London. How sad she thought Prime Minister Chamberlain sounded on the radio, urging the British public to remain calm. In case war erupted over Czechoslovakia, “trenches were being dug in Hyde Park and sandbags were being put up around the air ministry building.” Despite her children’s vulnerability if war did erupt, Rose remained in Scotland. Joe, however, was alarmed. Phoning her on September 28, he told her to return to the embassy by evening “because war is imminent,” but she ignored his edict. While Rose shopped for tweeds, she heard about the upcoming summit meeting at Munich to try to resolve the Sudentenland controversy. The news gave her hope and relief. She took a golf lesson, then played seven holes “on the Queen’s course, which was wonderful.”69
Joe called again the next day to tell her that the children were packed and ready to depart. Yet Rose still did not budge from her Scottish retreat. As other guests and staff (including her maid) left the hotel, she finally made preparations to leave but hoped to stay through the weekend (another four days). She pasted photos and articles in her diary about the distribution of gas masks throughout England, observing that they must be cared for properly in order to work. Another of her clippings detailed the British government’s plan to evacuate some two million schoolchildren and adults from London’s vulnerable sections.70
On September 30, 1938, after Chamberlain’s return from Munich, declaring that he had achieved “peace in our time,” Rose rejoiced: “We all feel that a new psychology for settling issues between difficult countries has been inaugurated and that henceforth war may be out of the question.” Chamberlain’s quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV particularly resonated with her: “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”71
Three days later Rose did end her Scottish fling and recorded that back in London she “did some shopping and got a report about Teddy, who had his tonsils taken out this [morning].” She did not mention whether she visited him at the London hospital, but she did report inspecting the newly dug trenches in Hyde Park, adjacent to the American embassy, and the blackened street lamps, “darkened as if for war.” British gas masks concerned both Rose and Joe. They didn’t fit children Bobby’s age or younger, as American ones would have. Ambassador Kennedy warned the State Department that he was reporting it for refusing to spend $10 per US-manufactured mask for at-risk American citizens abroad. More disconcerting was Rose’s report that when some Brits tested their masks at home by turning on their gas stoves, several died when the masks malfunctioned.72
Amid the growing crisis, Britain debated its next move on the diplomatic chessboard. In early October 1938, Rose began attending Parliament’s sessions on Chamberlain’s Munich pact with Germany, Italy, and France. Winston Churchill, firmly opposed to appeasement, fascinated her with his “delightful, easy to follow” rhetoric. “The past is no more,” Churchill predicted. “We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that.” “It must now be expected that all countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi power,” he warned.73 Returning the next day to observe Parliament’s confidence vote for the government, she referred to Clement Attlee, leader of the opposition Labour Party, as a Socialist who was bald, short, and aggressive. She found the Socialists’ “method of speaking … decidedly less polished [than that of the Conservative Party majority], as the government is usually [alumni of] Oxford or Cambridge.”74 Ironically, Conservative prime minister Chamberlain, who impressed her with his “quiet, unhurried, deliberate way he addressed the House [of Commons],” held no university degree, much less one from Oxbridge.
Four days after six-year-old Teddy’s tonsillectomy, Rose visited him in the “nursing home,” where he was recovering from his surgery. His temperature had returned to normal, and she expected him home later that day. Rose was clearly relieved because she did “not like hospitals in Eng[land]. There is no heat, except an electric stove, there is no way of elevating or lowering the bed, which we have even in wards in [American hospitals].” She even critiqued the nurses’ uniforms, especially their “shoes with a heel, which we think may allow them to fall.”75
On October 7, 1938, Joe and Rose marked their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary with a play and late supper at the Savoy, packed with patrons calling each other “darling.” Rose was unusually annoyed with the affectation: “Joe says it is the regular way to address one another. I was sick to death of it and worse I remember him using it to speak to someone on the phone occasionally.” Not even his gift of a “gorgeous ruby necklace” placated her. “I am afraid [it] is too elaborate for the U.S.A. and … I feel constrained to return [it].”76 This rare discordant note in Rose’s journal may have revealed her usually sublimated anger over Joe’s philandering.
DISCORD ON THE international scene was riling the British, who floated nearly a hundred barrage balloons over London. Steel cables tethering each balloon to the ground were intended to sheer off enemy aircraft wings. Rose carried on her maternal duties. Kathleen needed a college she could attend part time, one that offered courses in English literature and history. They visited the University of London’s King’s College, but it preferred full-time, degree-seeking students. Rose concluded that “most girls here do not go to college. Society girls stay in [the] country where they shoot or hunt and evidently not so much attention is given to education of young women as there is in the U.S.A.” This observation was only half right. American college women had achieved numerical parity with men in the 1920s, only to lose ground during the Great Depression. Rose next tried Queen’s College, surely perfect for Kathleen. Unfortunately, half of the students and instructors had fled to the countryside, and some of the girls had been called home because of war fears.77
Joe was obviously under severe pressure. Rose observed that he “at times … becomes restless and chafes at the restraint necessarily surrounding his position.” To discuss “world affairs,” he wanted to go to Berlin, but John Cudahy, the American minister in Dublin, “did not think the President would allow him to go, as the trip would be thought at home and abroad to have political significance.”78 Rose felt most comfortable in her private, often solitary, world. Even if she had yearned for a larger official role, women’s circumscribed opportunities at that time would have stymied her. Yet, once, she found herself drawn into public debate over war and peace by Joe, if only facetiously.
The occasion was a speech Joe delivered at the British Navy League’s Trafalgar Day dinner, where he quoted Rose several times. Ambassador Kennedy observed to the audience of military veterans and nobility that his wife had nixed several topics for his address: arms reduction, dictatorships and democracies, and Prime Minister Chamberlain—but only after he had told the audience just what he wanted to say about each subject. His jocular rhetorical device kept the speech light while allowing him to assert a serious position—that an arms race would destroy nations’ economies by diverting them from peaceful productivity. Yet he conceded the dilemma that not arming “may mean domination by a stronger Power or group of Powers.” Rose saved the London Daily Herald’s article on Joe’s speech, featuring her portrait with the caption, “Mrs. Kennedy warned her husband not to talk in his speech about” the trio of controversial topics. The ambassador’s picture appeared with the notation, “Mr. Kennedy considered his wife’s advice, then made a speech about” the topics she supposedly told him to avoid. The more staid London Times headlined, with tongue in cheek, “How an Ambassador’s Wife Makes His Speech.” In her journal Rose stated simply that Joe “[a]dopted a new technique in composing [the speech], namely, submitting a few questions to me, which I frowned [on], and finally returning to the original subject.” Did he literally consult her, or use Rose as a public-speaking contrivance? The record is unclear. Kennedy men typically didn’t view their wives as professional equals, so it is unlikely that Joe genuinely sought Rose’s opinions. The day after the dinner she noted, “Reporters calling for interviews for me at Chancery and Embassy—as they took speech seriously and believe I inspired it.” Joe had run the text of his remarks by the State Department in advance but had received “hardly any recommendation.”79
Apparently, State’s Division of European Affairs felt safe in saying that the talk reflected Ambassador Kennedy’s personal views, not those of the Roosevelt administration.80 A few days after the Trafalgar Day dinner, Joe received a note from the State Department saying that if Rose was going to continue writing her husband’s speeches, the department had some wisdom to impart to her. Rose observed that she “should like to send for [the suggestions].”81 Accepting her limited role as Joe’s sounding board, Rose drolly concluded years later, “That was the beginning and the end of my entire career in international politics.”82
A few days later, Rose and her husband attended the funeral of a member of Parliament at Westminster Cathedral. She was “embarrassed by having a [purple and green] quill” in her hat when she should have displayed a black feather. “No other ambassadors’ wives [were] there or one of them might have erred as I did.”83 Rose didn’t wish for someone to have alerted her to proper attire but, rather, for someone to commit a faux pas with her.
Soon after, Rose paid Eunice, Pat, and Jean a visit at their Sacred Heart convent school. “They seem well,” she observed, “altho[ugh] Pat never is as contented at any boarding school as are the others. She wept when I was leaving today.”84 Rose didn’t note that she, too, had suffered homesickness during her first days at the Dutch convent before busying herself in studies and extracurricular activities. The Kennedy aversion to displays of negative emotion earned Pat a “stiff upper lip” letter from her mother: “I am a little worried about you, as you do not seem as happy as you should. Please do not let yourself get too depressed as really—darling—you know you will not be there too long. Everyone your age is away at school and in the long run you should be quite contented. So please cheer up my pet.” Rose gave her a pass on cutting calories while at boarding school. “Please do not diet as you can get thin enough once you get out, and if you do not eat nourishing food you cannot study, etc. Well, lots of love, darling, and I shall see you all soon. Mother.”85
Former US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith recalled in 2010, at age eighty-two, that she didn’t suffer from loneliness at boarding school because her sisters were there. “My family were my best friends.” There was the slightest catch in Smith’s voice when she commented that her mother told her to live her life to the fullest as Jean entered her college years. “Your father and I have lived our lives,” Rose told her youngest daughter. Tears welled in the Irish eyes of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s last surviving child, and she clutched her heart. Reflexively, her interviewer reached out a hand in sympathy, but the proud woman didn’t grasp it and quickly regained her composure.86
Rose observed that October 20, the day she visited the Roehampton convent, marked the feast of Mater Admirabilis (“mother most admirable”). The title refers to a nineteenth-century fresco of the Virgin Mary at the Trinità dei Monti in Rome. Catholic legend maintains that a young French woman painted the portrait of Jesus’s Blessed Mother at the request of Sacred Heart nuns. When the mother superior examined the woman’s completed mural, she decided the colors used by the painter were too bright and garish and ordered it hidden from view behind a cloth. Pope Pius IX visited the church on October 20, 1846, and instructed the mother superior to remove the drape. The colors had faded, and the pope called the painting Mater Admirabilis,87 a title to which Rose surely aspired.
The fawning media might have bestowed such a label on Rose. Her life as maternal teacher, booster, and wardrobe supervisor appeared in the popular press with the publication of a Ladies’ Home Journal article soon after the Trafalgar Day speech, in October 1938. It is among the earliest magazine features on the Kennedys, and it supported many of the initial images and legends of the clan, especially of its matriarch, that would become so familiar to the American public. “Mrs. Kennedy might be mistaken for one of her daughters. She is young, looks even younger, is slimmer than most of the girls, hasn’t a gray hair, prefers running up and down stairs to taking the iron-gated lift, and is said to have the prettiest and best-dressed feet at Ascot,” the LHJ’s fashion editor gushed. She praised Rose’s camaraderie with the children: helping with homework, dancing with them, attending their sporting events, joining their meals at least once daily, encouraging hobbies, and offering advice on wardrobe and hairstyles. All of the children, except Joe Jr. and Jack, still at Harvard when the article’s author arrived in London the previous spring, were photographed as young models. The girls wore sports attire, formals, and suits; Teddy and Bobby were pictured in their school clothes, which included coats and ties, and, for little Teddy, shorts and kneesocks. The largest photo depicted Rose, looking “so young, so right, in her gray-and-blue-plaid tweed suit,” as she “helps Teddy with his lessons.” Rose was delighted by how beautiful the children appeared, especially Rosemary, whom the article described as preparing to teach nursery school.88 The article made no reference to Ambassador Kennedy, who was in the States when the magazine’s fashion editor visited the embassy, or his role in the family.
Rose was also pleased with an article about Jack in October 1938. By then he was the only member of the immediate family in the United States. The Boston Sunday Advertiser Green magazine featured the twenty-one-year-old, including a photo of him dressed in coat and tie, unpacking at his Harvard dorm room. The article focused on his handsome looks punctuated by the “bluest of blue eyes made bluer by being framed in a sun-browned face.” Rose was particularly gratified that, according to her hometown paper, Jack was “literally shown with polished cleanliness and the broad white smile typical of the Kennedys.” Her efforts to produce perfect-looking children were reaping benefits. And her role as dinner-conversation moderator, when Joe was away, was producing results. In the Boston press, young Jack spoke intelligently about Europe’s precarious situation and his impressions of the British response.89
As the tense fall of 1938 progressed, Rose continued her routine of daily golf, when England’s fickle weather allowed. She reveled in the rare sunshine but felt slightly homesick one crisp autumn day, recalling Harvard football weekends. She grew weary of noisy construction next door to the embassy, which awakened her in the mornings, so she escaped to the country for a quiet break. Throughout her life, Rose remained sensitive to noise and disruption, and she frequently removed herself from her family to seek refuge. Whether retreating to the cottage that she kept on the Cape Cod beach (leaving her boisterous children to claim the Hyannis house and yard) or to the hotel rooms that she requested in the back of buildings (to shield herself from street hubbub), Rose simply craved solitude and peace.
Yet she was by no means a recluse, enjoying the high life of social seasons from New York to London to Palm Beach. In early November 1938 Rose and Joe attended a new play, Dear Octopus, by English playwright Dodie Smith, starring a young John Gielgud and Dame Marie Tempest, star of light opera and the British stage. The play took its title from the line, “The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.” No wonder Rose, so attached to her clan, adored the production, “built around a family of six grown-up children who have returned home to celebrate for two days the golden wedding of their parents.” She explained that the play was a “[v]ery true portrayal, revealing the various vicissitudes through which the difficult members had passed, and the results in the characters of each of them through the years. There was just enough pathos with comedy to make the play one of the most absorbing which I have ever seen.”90
Yet never too far from the mundane, Rose also commented that Nurse Hennessey returned “from her vacation in Ireland where she was shocked and distressed and rather annoyed at the squalor, the poverty there. A child barefoot winter and summer for four years runs the errands. Her relatives delighted at her strong regular white teeth, which they insist she show to all their neighbors.”91 How fortunate for Rose’s family to have escaped the squalor of Irish poverty and American tenements. What a contrast between life in the Old Country and the Kennedys’ new status among British aristocracy.