at 294 Pondfield Road was a twenty-room house set in 6 acres of lush lawns high on a hill. It had a grass tennis court, a tea-house and a greenhouse. Outbuildings included a five-car garage for Joe’s fleet of ostentatious Rolls-Royces, as well as gardener’s and chauffeur’s cottages.
Rose set to work redecorating the interior. She placed her beloved grand piano in the hall. The main drawing room, impressive with two fireplaces, was adorned with cream carpets, walls painted in antique green and white calla lilies in large vases. Complete sets of Hardy and Shakespeare lined the bookshelves. On the children’s bedside tables, rosaries and crucifixes merged with toys and books.2
The small children occupied the second floor, and the older ones the third. Joe had a large study on the ground floor, and though he was not often home, his door was always open to the children when he was there. They would sprawl on his sofa bed and talk to him about their problems with school or friends, and he would focus on each child directly, giving them the full beam of his attention.
Bronxville was a friendly place, and a perfect one in which to raise a large, lively family. In winter the children skated on the ponds and went sledding and tobogganing on the many hills and open spaces. There was a popular drugstore with a soda fountain on the corner near to the children’s school. When the owner turned away, they would filch gum and Life Saver mints. Kick’s school was the Bronxville Elementary, a short walk from Crownlands. She liked art and took an interest in textiles, asking her parents to be sure to attend her exhibition.3
Kick adored her brothers but she was also a girls’ girl. She spent her allowance on swing records and clothes, shopping for skirt-and-sweater sets at Saks Fifth Avenue with her friend Alice Cahill.4 She loved summer camp, and even though she felt a bit homesick, she threw herself into the experience, riding horses and swimming and gossiping with her friends. She asked Rose to send her cakes and bobby pins and her ‘jadpaws’ for riding.5
When she was ten, Kick went to Washington to visit the White House. She was given a sense of her father’s importance when one of the Senators stopped her and asked her to send his regards to Joe.6 Another Congressman asked after her grandfather and her mother.
Her father had recently decided to get out of Hollywood and Wall Street and turn instead to politics. The year 1929 was a momentous one for Joe Kennedy. He had been consolidating his wealth in Hollywood and on the stock market; he had purchased two vast homes for his ever-expanding family; his father had just died, and his obsession with Gloria Swanson was reaching a critical point. She was often at the new house in Bronxville. As Rose left town in one car, Gloria would arrive in Joe’s Rolls-Royce. The actress stayed at the Gramatan Hotel, and the townspeople gossiped.
Rose was troubled, particularly as the word was out in Catholic circles. After returning to New York City in 1929, Gloria recalled being taken to a meeting with Rose’s friend Cardinal O’Connell, who tried to talk her into ending the affair. O’Connell told Gloria that Joe was talking to senior church officials about seeking a divorce. Did she not realize that his reputation would be ruined and she would be publicly tainted? The affair didn’t stop instantly, but it began to cool.
Joe knew that it was time to get out of Hollywood, and he also began to take his money out of the stock market. He had guessed that the bubble on Wall Street was going to burst. As Rose said of her husband, ‘Part of his genius was an amazing sense of timing.’7 He did indeed always seem to know exactly the moment to get into an investment and the moment to get out. When the market crashed in October, he remained unscathed. He left Hollywood a multi-millionaire.
In February 1932, Kick was given a twelfth-birthday party. Rose was in Boston, about to give birth to her ninth and last child. ‘Daddy did not come home last night,’ Kick wrote to her mother. ‘We do not know when he is coming.’ She told her mother to send games for her party. She had been at a school dance, where she had danced with a boy: ‘I had my hair waved and it looked hot.’8
When she wrote to her father, a few weeks later, she told him, more primly, that she had been to a party but ‘There were no boys.’ She hinted that she would like to have her own horse and that she wanted to go to see the musical comedy Hot-Cha. She showed off the typewriting skills she was learning and told Joe that she was pleased with the arrival of her new baby brother, Teddy: ‘Every body thinks that the baby Should have been called George After Washington mother said she didn’t like it though.’9
In her letter Kick asked if her sister Rosemary was coming home for her birthday party. Rose and Joe had bowed to the inevitable, acknowledging that Rosemary was brain-damaged and unable to cope with mainstream school. She was sent away to a specialist private institution, the Devereux School in Pennsylvania, where she began to make slow progress. But after two years she was brought home. In her memoirs, Rose wrote of her sorrow at her eldest daughter’s plight, but also of her determination that everything should be done to make her feel a normal and valued member of the family.10 Some friends wrongly assumed that Rosemary’s problems arose from her being in her vibrant sister Kick’s shadow, but this was not so. Nevertheless, it was difficult for Kick, who was forced to accept responsibility for her elder sister, to protect her from whispers about her slowness.
Kick at thirteen, her mother recalled, was ‘a very attractive lady, with a beautiful, pink Irish complexion – intelligent at school – radiant, a glowing personality – no illness like Jack as she matured, a lovely interest in all that was happening around her’.11 Rose also emphasized her daughter’s deep spirituality. Kick would make ‘Spiritual Bouquets’ for family members. This involved weeks and weeks of special prayers, going to mass and communion, after which the beloved person would be sent a card listing all the prayers and devotions that had been offered up on their behalf.
Though Kick was a devout girl, she was also at the age where she was beginning to take an interest in boys. Her mother worried about her popularity and the fact that she was spending so much time going to the movies or on the telephone chatting to boys. As Rose remarked rather drily, ‘she had a keen interest in social life’.12 Worried that she was being distracted from her schoolwork, Rose decided that it was high time that Kick received some of her education in a Sacred Heart convent school, as she had done herself.
In her memoirs Rose recalled that ‘Joe and I had agreed that the responsibility for education of the boys was primarily his, and that of the girls, primarily mine.’13 Joe set the course for Joe Jr and Jack to attend the prestigious Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and then, following their father, to go on to Harvard. Rose was determined that her girls would, above all, have a Catholic education. Kick was sent off to a Sacred Heart convent in Noroton-on-the-Sound, also in Connecticut.
6
Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls.
Kick Kennedy
The journey from Bronxville to Noroton, Connecticut, was only 30 miles but for
