Joe, too, no matter what anyone thought or said’.14 For his part, Joe was equally determined to marry the Mayor’s beautiful daughter. Her newfound piety only added to her allure. He was furious that Fitzgerald didn’t think him good enough for his ‘Rosie’. He hated to be underestimated, and it drove him harder in his ambition to succeed. He was the first and only son in his family, with three sisters and a strong mother, who was also a devout Catholic. His father, P.J., a quiet and more benign figure, was rarely at home, busy with his bank and with the world of politics.
At Harvard, despite his sporting success and easy manner, Joe was not accepted into the more Brahmin clubs. His Irish roots and Catholicism saw to that. Rejection only fuelled his ambition. And to succeed he wanted to make money. And for that, it would help to have the right wife. With his good looks and his charm, he had developed a reputation as a ladies’ man with a taste for ‘actresses’. But they weren’t the kind of girls you married. If he wanted the Mayor’s daughter, he was going to have her. And Honey Fitzgerald was not going to stop him.
Joe graduated from Harvard and took a position in his father’s bank, before leaving to become an assistant bank examiner, an auditor responsible for ensuring proper financial practice. His plan was to become the youngest bank manager in Boston. The time was ready. But Fitzgerald was still set against him.
Then in December 1913, something happened that changed the dynamic between Rose and her father. Fitzgerald was in the middle of a re-election campaign. Out of the blue a letter was posted to the Mayor, edged in black, demanding that he should withdraw from the campaign or his affair with a cigarette girl called Toodles would be exposed. In fact, Fitzgerald had done little more than kiss her on a dance floor, but he knew that the damage was done. This was a battle he was not going to win. The Toodles scandal had brought shame to his door.
Josie and Rose were united in their fury. Toodles was the same age as Rose. Fitzgerald had constructed an idealized image of home and family. Josie had put up and shut up as long as her home and family were inviolate. But now that the press was on to her husband, the lines had been blurred. Fitzgerald withdrew from the campaign for ‘health reasons’. For Rose, this spelt freedom. Her beloved father, her idol, had feet of clay; he had been a coward and had run from a fight. She had lost respect for him, and he was never the same again in her eyes. A known philanderer was in no position to stop his daughter from making a good marriage to a man who was now cutting a figure: early in 1914, at the age of twenty-five, Joe Kennedy had become President of Colombia Trust Company, making him the youngest bank president in the United States.15 Rose married him later that year, on 7 October. Cardinal William O’Connell, a close friend of the Fitzgeralds, conducted the ceremony. ‘I’d always wanted to be married by a Cardinal and I was,’ said Joe.16
Rose almost immediately got pregnant, giving birth to a healthy 10-pound boy called Joseph on 25 July 1915. He was known as ‘young Joe’, or ‘Joe Junior’. Honey Fitz told a waiting reporter the happy news of his grandson: ‘Of course, he is going to be President of the United States, his mother and father have already decided that.’17 A year after Joe’s arrival, Rose was pregnant again, and she gave birth on 29 May 1917 to another boy, though he was an underweight and sickly child. She called him John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but he was to be called Jack.
Rose now longed for a daughter, and she got her wish when she gave birth to a girl whom she called Rosemary. But the child seems to have been starved of oxygen at birth. The deadly Spanish flu epidemic was as its height. The family physician was worked off his feet and he arrived late. The midwife could easily have delivered the baby herself, but she followed instructions to wait for the doctor and she held back the baby’s head until he arrived (he would receive his full fee only if he was present at the delivery). This decision was to have dire consequences for the baby. Though she was a lovely child, the most classically beautiful of the Kennedy daughters, it became increasingly clear that she was brain-damaged.
Soon Rose was pregnant again. But she was deeply unhappy. Joe was rarely home, and she was lonely. She missed her family, and her father, and the role she had cultivated as Mayor’s daughter. There was also the problem of sex. As a devout Catholic, Rose believed that sexual intercourse was for the sole purpose of procreation. Canon law decreed that contraception was tantamount to murder. Kick would inherit this belief. Rose refused to use birth control and she had been pregnant almost constantly since she was married. But sexual intercourse during menstruation and pregnancy was frowned upon. Joe had embarrassed Rose one evening at dinner with close friends when he began discussing their sex life: ‘Now, listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong … It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that … and if you don’t open your mind on this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.’18 His sexual frustration is evident from this remark. And it no doubt gave him licence to have extramarital affairs and justify them to himself. Joe did not drink or smoke, but his vice was ‘fornication’. Invariably he was drawn towards actresses, waitresses, secretaries and models. Like many powerful men, he had a high libido, and an appetite for ‘fresh meat’, which his son Jack would inherit. He compartmentalized his life, without compunction, into two parts, family and home on the one hand, and his affairs on the other. Rose felt utterly cheated by how her life was turning out. That was why she walked out and returned to her family home.
Rose stayed in her old bedroom, thinking about her future and, for a fortnight, nobody said a word to her. While there, she did agree to accompany Joe to the Ace of Clubs ball, an important event for her as she was President of the organization. Before she married Joe, Rose had founded a club for women who had studied abroad and were interested in current events. Every year she led the grand march in the charity ball.19 She was determined that, despite her marital problems, this year should be no different. It was business as usual. Though heavily pregnant, Rose looked stunning in her ‘black web dress’; one of the reasons she attended was to avoid being the subject of gossip. But after the dance the couple went their separate ways.
Shortly afterwards, her father came to talk and urged her to return to Joe. Divorce was never going to be an option. Rosie had made her choice, and she was going to have to live with it. ‘What is past is past,’ her father told her. ‘The old days are gone. Your children need you and your husband needs you. You can make things work out. I know you can.’20
When she cradled her small daughter, Kathleen Agnes, in her arms in February 1920, Rose knew that she had made the right decision to return to Joe. Just as she had experienced an epiphany at Blumenthal to dedicate her life to God and to marry Joe, she now resolved to become the perfect mother and wife. Like Marmee in her favourite book, Little Women, she would learn to suppress her anger.
Rose Kennedy would apply to motherhood the exacting standards that she brought to bear in her thwarted intellectual life. She would pour her vast reserves of energy and ambition into raising her children, a job she took very seriously: ‘I looked upon child-rearing as a profession and decided it was just as interesting and just as challenging as any profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.’
Furthermore, she wanted those children to be the best: ‘I had made up my mind to raise my children as perfectly as possible.’21 Rose would pay a huge price for her overweening ambition for her children. But she was steadfast in her beliefs: ‘what greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?’22
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