Leaving Boston
As a parent, Rose had the unenviable job of being the taskmaster, the disciplinarian, the one who most often said no.
Their mother “was the disciplinarian of all our headstrong impulses, and was sometimes strict,” Teddy would later write. “Spankings and whacks with a coat hanger were in her arsenal, as were banishments to the closet.”
Their father, on the other hand, got to return to a house that was always ecstatic to see him. “He would sweep them into his arms and hug them, and grin at them, and talk to them, and perhaps carry them around,” Rose later wrote. “Also, as each one became old enough to talk . . . he would want that child in bed with him for a little while each morning. And the two of them would be there propped up on pillows, with perhaps the child’s head cuddling on his shoulder, and he would talk or read a story or they would have conversations.” At least at home, Joe had the easier job: He was a cheerleader to the children, a booster, the parent whose job it was to say yes.
It was a contrast Rose only sharpened by withholding physical affection. “Rose touched her children when she spanked them,” wrote Laurence Leamer. “She touched them when she adjusted their collars or rubbed a spot of dirt off their cheek before they headed to school. But she did not touch them when she loved them. She did not grasp Joe or Jack, Rosemary or Kathleen or Eunice to her bosom, holding them and telling the child ‘I love you.’ ” In behaving this way toward her children, she was very much in line with Irish American mothers of that time. “These children were Rose’s masterwork, and to her mind it was too serious a business to indulge in the excesses of affection.” The sole exception was Rosemary, who, because of her disability, got the majority of Rose’s physical affection.
Though not outlandish for its time, Rose’s parenting style did lead to a strangeness and distance in her relationships with most of her children that lasted throughout their lifetimes. Jack’s attitude toward her, generally one of irritation, would never change. Interviewed in 1972, Jack’s lifelong best friend, Lem Billings, said that Joe Kennedy’s “great warmth and outgoing affection” toward his children “led kids naturally to love as well as honor” their father. “They loved their mother too but in a rather detached way, as she did them.” In later life, Jack came to have a “good working relationship” with his mother, characterized by “filial love, but never devotion, and continued feelings of irritation. He really didn’t want her around much.” From an early age, Jack’s personality prickled at formality, reveled in the sloppy yes-ness of life, bridled at no. Often, his disposition naturally placed him at odds with Rose, who preached the virtue of restraint.
But despite her strictness—or, more accurately, through her strictness—she showed the children what they were capable of. “She was a great believer in opening up many opportunities for all of us,” Eunice would write. “And though some of those things were difficult, she would compensate by saying you ought to try them.”
Rose hoped to make Joe more of a constant presence in their lives by agreeing to move the family to New York. They rented a mansion in the neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx, where they lived for two years before buying an estate in Bronxville, in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan. Leaving Boston couldn’t have been an easy or happy choice for a woman so identified with her hometown, but Rose deemed it worth the trouble to be closer to Joe. Unfortunately, Joe’s escalating involvement in the film industry meant that, almost immediately upon his family’s arrival in Riverdale in 1927, he started spending most of his time in Hollywood, as he would until 1930.
Joe’s business dealings in Hollywood were typically diverse and complicated, but the focus of his work was running FBO, a film studio that he bought in 1926 on behalf of a consortium of investors that he organized. Moving pictures were still in their youth, and there was money to be made. One of the ways Joe did this was to root out inefficiencies in the filmmaking process on both coasts. He centralized the accounting practices of FBO in New York and fired several overpaid studio execs in New York and Los Angeles.
Joe was not indulging previously latent artistic urges; he was muscling in on a new and rapidly expanding market. “He was interested not in making artful or even good pictures at FBO,” wrote David Nasaw, “but in making a profit by producing cut-rate ‘program pictures,’ low-budget westerns, stunt thrillers, and action melodramas and distributing them to independently owned and operated small-town theaters that could not afford to pay premium prices for expensive pictures.”
In Los Angeles, Joe avidly pursued his business interests and, just as passionately, pursued actress Gloria Swanson, becoming both her manager and lover. A huge star of the silent era, Swanson was struggling to make the transition to the talkies. Kennedy hoped to manage this transition, and he did so with only limited success. Their coproduction of the epic Queen Kelly would be a disaster—one of the most famous uncompleted films of all time—and Swanson’s career would subside to regular TV and theater work until 1950, when she would again rocket to fame (and become a camp icon) with her scenery-chewing turn as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Swanson became familiar to the entire Kennedy family during the late 1920s, visiting them in Hyannis Port and at their new home in Bronxville. Joe’s ardor for her was ultimately short-lived but flagrant; if Rose knew, her feelings about the affair, like her feelings about so much else, would never be available for public consumption. Rose visited Joe in Hollywood exactly once, in the late spring of 1927. She returned to Riverdale pregnant with Jean.
With Jean’s birth on February 20, 1928, Rose now had eight children, ranging from newborn to twelve years old. She instituted a new dining schedule. “Up to age six, [the children] ate an hour earlier than the rest of the family. Rose sat with them and discussed simple topics of interest to toddlers and preschoolers. Then the older children dined together, and she would chat with them about more complicated subjects.”
Rose and Joe would always see the family dinner table as a prime location for education and intellectual stimulation. They expected the older children to read the newspaper and have not only knowledge of, but opinions about, current events. Rose “posted articles or documents on a bulletin board, expecting older children to read them and discuss the content at dinner. . . . On Sundays and Holy Days she posed questions about the priest’s sermon and Catholic symbolism.” According to Rose, the Sunday dinner interrogations ensured that “if they didn’t pay attention one Sunday they’d pay attention the next.”
When Joe dined with the family, Rose took an auxiliary role. This happened more frequently after 1928, when Joe bought the vacation home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, that would, in later years, become the nucleus of the cluster of homes that came to be known as the Kennedy compound. “It was really quite a lot of fun to be at the dinner table with them,” remembered nurse Luella Hennessey, who would join the family in 1937 and serve the wider family off and on in some capacity for decades.
Mr. Kennedy was the chairman or moderator of the discussions . . .Mrs. Kennedy sort of led the discussion on feminine and cultural things. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy wanted the children to have a well rounded education, and she often discussed fashion and music and literature, and left it to her husband to handle the diplomatic and government discussions.
Eunice, noting Rose’s deference when Joe was at home, put it succinctly: “My mother was more articulate with everything when he wasn’t there.”
Arriving in 1929, the Kennedys found Bronxville hospitable. Their mansion sat on six acres, walking distance from the Bronxville School the daughters attended; Joe Jr., Jack, and eventually Bobby could ride the bus to the Riverdale Country Day school. The nearby golf course was open to Catholics, and Joe and Rose both enjoyed playing. In the summertime, the family would decamp to Hyannis Port, as they would for much of the rest of the decade.
Joe Jr. and Jack both spent much of the 1930s away at school, and Rose did her best to monitor their health and grades from Bronxville. She was not a mother who hesitated to be in touch with principals and teachers. “The fact has come to my attention that some of the boys at Choate do not seem to know how to write a letter correctly or how to address it,” Rose wrote to one of Jack’s teachers in 1932. “It seems to me it would be a very practical idea and a very useful one if a short period could be given to demonstrating the different forms.”
On another occasion, the same teacher heard from Rose,
I understood from Jack’s letter than he is much better and he also said something about eating in the Tuck Shop in order to get “built up.” I was a lot worried at that suggestion because the Tuck Shop usually means sweets to me, and Jack has no discretion, in fact he has never eaten enough vegetables to satisfy me. I do not want to bother you, but will someone please investigate this matter a little?
At the age of forty-one, Rose had her last child. Edward Moore Kennedy, nicknamed Teddy, was born on February 22, 1932. Of all the Kennedy men, he would come to most openly express his affection for and admiration of his mother. As the youngest child of the family, he would benefit from more one-on-one time with Rose than any of the older children: His returns home from boarding school would be to Rose the empty nester, rather than to a household bustling with children and household staff. He called Rose “our Pied Piper into the world of ideas,” citing her leadership of their dinner conversations: “geography one night, the front-page headlines the next.”
By the end of 1931, Joe Kennedy was out of the movie business and no longer trading stocks. He’d been perspicacious enough to recognize, as early as 1923, that the market was overvalued, and in the wake of the 1929 crash, he actually made money via short sales. As a result, the Great Depression was something the Kennedys read about in the newspapers, rather than experienced as much of a daily reality. In 1933, at the depth of the Depression, Joe even bought a third home, this time in Palm Beach. He bought the mansion, a white Spanish-style villa with red tile roof, pool, tennis courts, and large stretch of private beach, for $100,000. Even in 1933 dollars, it was a steal.
Joe’s money was safe, but the pessimist in him suspected that the sun might be setting on capitalism. If financial power was about to lose its meaning, he figured, the future lay in political power, and those who wielded it. He became one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s biggest fund-raisers, hoping that by helping Roosevelt gain the presidency, he might secure for himself a post of some power and prestige. Kennedy had his eye on the Secretary of the Treasury, but he was passed over twice for the position. He fumed privately while waiting for Roosevelt’s call.
In 1934, that call finally came when Roosevelt asked Kennedy, despite great public and private opposition, to become the first chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Politicians and newspaper editors across the country argued that putting one of Wall Street’s most notorious manipulators in charge of reforming Wall Street was tantamount to having the fox guard the henhouse, but Roosevelt argued that it took a thief to catch a thief. It turns out that he was correct. By most estimations, Kennedy did an excellent job as the first head of the SEC. And he did it by systematically criminalizing many of the manipulations he had used to build his own fortune. When he resigned in September of the next year, the agency was up and running, having been called by Time magazine “the most ably administered New Deal agency in Washington.”
Even by Kennedy standards, the 1930s were a frenetic decade for the clan. Joe flew between New York, Hyannis, Palm Beach, and Washington, DC. Rose learned to transfer her entire household—nine kids and a large staff—between three houses while also traveling tirelessly herself. At Hyannis, Rose found a balance between packed, kinetic family life and her need for solitude and reflection. She ordered a prefab cottage, complete with front porch and outfitted with a writing table, and stuck it on the beach. In her little shack, she could read, write, and get some peace away from the bustling household. After one cottage was washed away by a storm, a second was ordered. After the second was wrecked, Rose said, “I started going to Europe, and I didn’t need it.”
She went to Europe at least seventeen times during the decade, often by herself; this included the trip that Joe gave her in the fall of 1934 for their twentieth anniversary, which tellingly she went on without him. At other times, though, she traveled in the company of the older children, who were learning to travel in the Kennedy fashion: often and lavishly.
It wasn’t all shopping and beaches, though. In 1936 Rose and Kathleen (nicknamed “Kick” by the family) went to Russia, or “The Soviet,” as Rose referred to it. In Moscow, they visited Lenin’s tomb and the czars’ palace; they sampled Russian ballet and theater and toured its art museums. Joe Jr. had visited the previous year, and his descriptions had fired her curiosity.
After FDR’s 1936 reelection, the president convinced Joe to tackle another administration role, this time as the head of the United States Maritime Commission. After performing the job ably, Joe felt he was in line for something more exalted. The call came late in 1937: Roosevelt appointed Joe as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the official title for the integral role of US ambassador to the United Kingdom. It was time, after almost twenty-five years of marriage, to move the whole family to London.