residence, on the edge of a 10-acre estate. It was set behind walls, situated on a tiny peninsula, surrounded by the waters of Long Island Sound. A more isolated spot could hardly be imagined. If ever Rose Kennedy wanted to remove her headstrong, independent daughter from unsuitable boys this was the place to do so. Noroton Convent was the strictest and most exclusive of the Sacred Heart schools. Only girls from the very best Catholic families were accepted.
The nuns had converted the ballroom into a chapel; the elegant high-ceilinged bedrooms with parquet floors were now classrooms. Religious paintings and statues saturated the Convent. The girls rose at six every morning, and washed in cold water, often having to break through a layer of ice, before attending morning mass wearing black veils. They were taught to make a sweeping curtsey to the nuns. Silence was often imposed at meals.
The nuns, wary of lesbianism, discouraged close friendships; the girls were never permitted to go ‘two by two’. The school motto was ‘noblesse oblige’. Sacred Heart girls were taught French literature, Christian doctrine and needlepoint. The nuns were called ‘Madame’ or ‘Mother’; afternoon tea was goûter and holidays were congés.
Kick loved beautiful clothes, but here she was expected to dress in a plain brown woollen uniform (on Thursday afternoons and Sundays, the girls wore wine-red jumpers). For swimming, they had to wear a large woollen bathing suit under a short skirt. Even Kick’s underwear had to be woollen, which she loathed, but at least it kept her warm in the freezing conditions.
Kick’s letters home show how much she put on a brave face. She wrote to Rose telling her that she was performing in a Christmas tableau: ‘I am an angel. I’m decked out in a pink affair and wings. I’m perched up on this ladder looking down at the crib. Some fun.’1 She suffered from asthma, and disliked the harsh, damp climate of Noroton. She told her mother that she was unable to take part in the school walking race as she got out of breath. Her letters are full of longing for home.
The Noroton girls found their own small ways to rebel. The nuns insisted on reading all of the mail, which the girls resented. Kick found a way of making a mailbox drop that circumvented the censorship. ‘It is perfectly alright,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘and the whole school is doing it.’2
Kick railed against the school and its strict discipline, and longed for Sundays and Thursdays, the days when the girls were allowed visitors. The girls wore formal dresses and were served tea in the visitors’ cabin by the sea. That fall, Jack, who had started at Choate, often visited Kick. He brought along his schoolmates who invariably fell in love with his cute kid sister, a female version of Jack, with the same sense of humour and a dimpled smile.
Jack, in common with Kick, had a gift for friendship. His mother called it ‘his outstanding talent … making friends and enjoying friendships’.3 He would bring home numerous friends, known in Kennedy lore as ‘Jack’s surprises’. They never knew how many would turn up at any time, but the best of them was Kirk LeMoyne Billings, known to the family as ‘Lem’. Jack called him ‘LeMoan’, ‘Pithecanthropus’, ‘Ape man’: the Kennedys loved nicknames. He would remain Jack’s lifelong and most trusted friend and ally.
Lem was tall, blond, simian and athletic. He and Jack were drawn together by their mutual dislike of the strict discipline of Choate. They shared the same ribald sense of humour and trusted one another implicitly. Jack was utterly devoted to Lem. Lem’s father died while he was at Choate, leaving him no money. It was the Kennedy family who looked after him financially, and they practically adopted him. Joe Kennedy described him as ‘my second son’.4 Lem was probably homosexual; he never married and admitted that his devotion to Jack overshadowed everything else in his life. He adored Kick, who was so like her brother, and he did fall in love with her, though she, perhaps sensing his inclinations, only ever treated him as a brother.
At Christmas, the Kennedys took possession of a newly acquired Palm Beach house in Florida, on Millionaires’ Row. Rose loved Florida and she persuaded Joe to buy the imposing mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard. The Kennedys installed a tennis court and a swimming pool and added an extra wing. It had fabulous ocean-front views. They would now make a habit of spending every Christmas at Palm Beach and summers at Hyannis Port.
Lem spent his first Christmas with the Kennedys in 1933, and wrote to Kick when she returned to the Convent. ‘I hope Mother Superior enjoys my letters,’ he teased, knowing that all letters were read and censored.5 Kick had loved her Christmas vacation at her new home, and was miserable about returning to Noroton. ‘Daddy dear,’ she wrote, ‘Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls I am all safe and sound now and can’t go skipping around to “El Studio” or the Everglades … I feel very rested and everyone thinks I look very well so a few parties never did anyone any harm.’6 She was homesick, and struggling with the cold weather. She wrote to her mother separately: ‘I miss you all like anything in fact worse than I ever have. Every day this week I’d sit in the study hall and think a week ago today I was basking in the sun and now I am in a fire trap trying to study. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’7
That was the Kennedy mantra: be strong, fight harder, don’t give in. In fact all of the children, with the exception of Joe Jr, were beset with health problems. Jack was still by far the sickliest child. Bobby, Kick’s favourite little brother, born when she was five, joked that Jack was so poorly as a child that if a mosquito bit him, the insect would immediately perish from having tasted his brother’s tainted blood.8
Kick was deeply worried about Jack’s health, while herself continuing to suffer from increasingly bad asthma, and allergies, for which she took injections. ‘The asthma is coming,’ she wrote to her mother in January 1934, ‘I can feel it.’9 Kick starred in a play in which she cross-dressed as the hero and had to kill the villain. ‘I had ski pants on and Mother Fitzgerald wouldn’t let me appear without a coat over the pants,’ Kick complained to her mother; ‘… she thinks pants are immodest. Ski pants, mind you. If she only knew.’10 She asked her mother to give her love to everyone ‘and tell them they are not missing a darn thing in this Iceland’. She talked about plans for Easter, and flying south for the holidays. The Kennedys, with their vast wealth, thought no more of taking flights than lesser mortals would of bus journeys.
In February 1934, Kick was operated on for appendicitis and recuperated in Palm Beach. She seriously contemplated leaving Noroton and its damp climate, but she stuck it out. She was beginning to make some good friends and, like Jack, she made friends for life.
One of her closest friends was a pretty petite girl, with long blonde, wavy hair. Her name was Charlotte McDonnell, and she was from one of New York’s prominent Catholic families. She was as spirited as Kick, and likewise hailed from a large, boisterous family. She was one of fourteen. Charlotte was constantly in trouble at Noroton. The nuns excluded her for several days for possession of a dirty-joke book.11
Lem and Jack came to visit the girls whenever they could for Thursday tea, and a flirtation took place between Jack and Charlotte. She wrote to thank him for the jigsaw puzzles that he sent to the girls, and told him that it was so cold at school that she had to chop a hole in her inkwell in order to write to him.12 Jack would over the years flirt with and have affairs with several of Kick’s friends.
Kathleen
