friendly but distant, sexy but never promiscuous. Women liked her and rarely felt threatened by her charm, while men adored her and were drawn to her natural sexiness and vivacity. One of Jack’s friends, Tom Egerton, recalled, ‘I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life. She wasn’t especially pretty, but she just had this appeal.’18 Another devoted Englishman trying to put his finger on her elusive charm said that she had the most ‘sex appeal of any woman he had ever known. Not because she was beautiful, but because she was so kind.’19
As the sister of red-blooded brothers and a sexually promiscuous father, she was no innocent, and yet she exuded a kind of purity. She was not a vulnerable or needy girl; she was very happy in her own skin. She had that Kennedy streak of independence and spirit that was extremely appealing to the opposite sex. The more aloofness she exhibited, the more her suitors were drawn to her. Jack had this too.
One element of this coolness was her Catholic prudery. The strict religious education she had been given taught her that fornication, masturbation and birth control were sins. While in Europe, she had been genuinely alarmed by the voracious Italian men and had also warned her sisters about Frenchmen: ‘Don’t eye the Frenchmen or they will be hot on your trail.’20
Her extreme self-possession had a darker side: an inability to give fully of herself. This caused her a degree of anguish. Many years later, she confided to a close male friend that she was afraid that she didn’t have it in her to be truly intimate with a man. This prudishness was coupled with an extraordinary warmth and charisma. It was a heady and intoxicating mix.
It seemed also that Kick was saving herself for someone special, that she had a sense of destiny. She was happy to date American men, but always at a distance.
11
love from a daughter who needs more sense.
Kick Kennedy
The stage set looked like a ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ location from a movie about the days of slavery. The bandstand was a replica of a Southern mansion with large white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters. The band played on the veranda of the mansion. A few steps down led to the dance floor, which was also used for floorshows. This was the Cotton Club, which in 1936 relocated to new premises in Times Square on Broadway. It was one of the most sophisticated jazz nightclubs, presenting top-rate black performers for an all-white audience. Waiters in red tuxedos served champagne to Manhattan’s caviar-and-martini crowd, along with delicious suppers of venison steak and Chinese chop suey.
The club had an illicit feel. Rumours abounded about associations with the Mob. It opened at nine for dining and light music, then at midnight the entertainment would begin with the first floorshow. It closed at 3 a.m.
Sitting at one of the tables, set out in a horseshoe design, was the sixteen-year-old convent girl Kathleen Kennedy with her brother Jack and his friend Lem Billings. Jack had recovered his health, had begun at Harvard. He had lost his virginity to a white prostitute in Harlem for 3 dollars. Like his father, he had acquired a taste for showgirls and waitresses. Jack was making up for lost time. He made no secret of his libertinism. In part, it may well have been a reaction to his mother’s frigidity, her strict piety and emotional coldness, but it was also, given all the health problems he had to endure, a way of feeling alive. Jack Kennedy lived for the moment.
In the fall of 1936, Kick headed back to ‘the old fire-trap’ of Noroton to finish her Convent education. She was unhappy to be going back and saw Jack and Lem whenever she could. It was like old times, the three of them being together. Jack had promised to take Kick to the Cotton Club. But when Joe discovered that his precious daughter had gone there he was livid.
It wasn’t only that he disapproved of Kick’s and Jack’s duplicity, but he was also worried about the family’s public image. Joe was back on the campaign train with Roosevelt. In September of that year, his campaign book, I’m for Roosevelt, was published. Joe let his feelings be known and Kick wrote him a contrite letter: ‘love from a daughter who needs more sense’. In October, Joe gave a series of nationally broadcast radio speeches, at his own expense, urging voters to back Roosevelt. He sent Kick a telegram asking her to remember to tune in to his latest broadcast. That month he opened up an account for her at Saks.
Kick, to her amusement, had heard rumours that Jack’s Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald kept her photograph on his bureau. Jack had met Torby on the Cape by accident, but at Harvard they became firm friends. As with Lem Billings, it was a friendship that lasted all his life. Lem and Torby adored Kick, but she kept them at a distance, treating them as she did her brothers.
Nineteen-thirty-six was an important year for the Kennedy family for two reasons. The first was Roosevelt’s remarkable landslide victory in the November elections; he won 523 of the 531 electoral votes.1 Joe was delighted. Then the same month, Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, made a visit to America and wished to meet with Roosevelt. Pacelli was widely considered to be the second most powerful priest in the world. Two and a half years later he would be crowned Pope Pius XII. Pacelli was accompanied on this trip by Enrico Galeazzi, the man who had so dazzled Kick when she met him in Rome, and who had organized for her party a private audience with the Pope.
Galeazzi called on Joe at his office in the Rockefeller Plaza, noting the blue carpet, ‘of the same colour as the eyes of this man’. They would become firm friends. Galeazzi said that Joe ‘could be as gentle and kind as a gallant knight or as violent and cross as a general at war’.2
On a sunny November day, Rose and Joe travelled in a private train with Cardinal Pacelli as he rode to the Hyde Park home of President Roosevelt. Rose felt exalted, thinking herself ‘in the presence of a mortal very close to God’. On the way back, Pacelli stopped at the Kennedys’ Bronxville home to take tea and meet the children. They were finally achieving their dream of becoming one of America’s prominent Catholic families.
Now that Joe was turning into a powerful political figure, with huge press interest in him and his family, Rose spoke to the children about the importance of humility and ‘public service’. She would tell them that great wealth brought responsibility. And she would (mis)quote from St Luke: ‘To whom much has been given, much will be required.’3
In January 1937, Joe and the family were invited to the President’s second inauguration, but young Joe and Jack were unable to attend, due to mid-term examinations. The children were invited to a private luncheon in the White House ballroom. A month later, Joe was asked to head up a new federal agency, the United States Maritime Commission. It was not the job that he wanted, but he accepted and leased Marwood again, writing to a friend to say how much he was looking forward to ‘nice cool mint juleps and Boston lobster’.4 Joe was biding his time.
That spring, he wrote a loving letter to Kick at Noroton. He knew how much she disliked it, but felt that she was making a go of it. Jack had told his father how much the nuns liked Kick, and Joe was gratified and encouraging: ‘I think that is really a great tribute to you, knowing how you felt about going back to the convent, to have made as big a success as you have of it.’5
