revealed the key to his character when he described his father’s support and optimism, especially when things went wrong: this was when Joe was at his best. ‘The greater the disaster, the brighter he was.’ When things went really badly, Joe would declare, ‘That may be one of the best things that ever happened to you!’ But, most of all, Joe wanted his children to strive. Not necessarily to be the best, but to ‘strive’ for excellence. And then: ‘After you have done the best you can, the hell with it.’32
This interest and devotion exhibited by a father towards his children was highly unusual in those days, when fathers were often remote and women were left to run the house and family. As well as the telephone calls, the children were encouraged to write letters to their father, and he admonished them whenever they forgot to write. Kick’s earliest letters to him are full of affection and love, funny stories, and kisses, hearts and pictures. In preparation for writing her memoirs, Rose looked back over her papers and noted that Kick’s ‘early letters seemed so warm and affectionate, perhaps more so than the other children’.33
Kathleen also missed her father and worried about him when he was away: ‘Dear Daddy, I hope you have got rid of your cold … We are all fine and we miss you very much.’34 She told him jokes, reported that she had joined the Girl Scouts, that there had been ‘peachy skating’ at the Field Club, and asked ‘are you coming home soon?’35 Her letters to Rose were much less effusive.
In 1925, Joe set up a trust fund for each of his children that would increase to $10 million by the mid-1940s. All of the children were ‘trust fund’ babies. They had the cushion of money, which also bestowed confidence, but also carelessness.
In May 1927, when she was seven, Kick made her first Holy Communion. Her parents were in California, but she wrote to tell them that she had been preparing for it by going to church every day for the week leading up to the ceremony. It’s surprising to discover that Rose and Joe were absent. For Catholic children it’s a very special ceremony, a watershed moment in which the Holy Eucharist is taken for the first time. Little girls are dressed to look like mini brides in white dresses and veils, symbolizing purity. Shortly before Holy Communion, the child makes their First Confession, a daunting experience in which the heart is opened in a dark booth. The priest, who sits behind a screen or grille, gives absolution; the child says an act of contrition and is given penance in the form of prayers.
It was left to Joe Jr to take on the paternal role, writing to his parents to inform them that little Kathleen was preparing herself for the sacrament.36 By this time Rose had seven children and was pregnant again. Joe Sr was about to become even busier, and Hollywood was beckoning.
3
A real-life Jay Gatsby, ever-reinventing and legitimizing himself.
Amanda Smith, Joe’s granddaughter1
September 1927.
They tumbled out of the silver Rolls-Royce with blue fenders, like characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The glamorous woman and the tall, handsome, impeccably dressed man in his white flannels. Then came the children. There were seven of them, good-looking, beautifully turned out, barely able to conceal their excitement. Mother and children had taken a private train from Boston, where Joe met them, and they were now arriving at their newly rented home in Riverdale, an affluent suburb of New York. The Kennedys always knew how to make an entrance.
The move was crucial for Joe, who knew that however much money he made, he and his family would never belong in Brahmin Boston. They would never be welcomed at the right sort of country club. Joe later said that he had moved because he felt that his daughters would never be invited to the best coming-out parties in Boston. He knew that New York was a meritocracy in a way that Boston could never be.
Joe’s rise to the top was carefully orchestrated. He had the big house; he wore tailored suits and custom-made shirts and refused to ride the streetcar to the office, preferring to drive in his Cadillac. He gave up baseball for golf, through which he could make important connections. He was still an outsider. But there was one place where he could use his outsider status to his advantage, and where he would make his fortune. Hollywood.
In November 1919, Joe, seeing the opportunities in the new world of moving pictures, had set up his own film-distribution company, Columbia Films Inc. By 1926 he was a movie mogul, and owned his own motion picture company, FBO (Film Booking Offices of America). One of his strategies had been to convince the studios that he was the man who could clean up Hollywood. In the early twenties Hollywood had been rocked by sex scandals and charges of immorality, such as the notorious Fatty Arbuckle affair, when the actor was accused of the rape and murder of a young starlet.
Film titles such as Loving Lips, The Restless Sex and Short Skirts give an idea of the way that Hollywood was going. Joe would give Hollywood good clean family films. Furthermore, there was widespread anti-Semitic distrust of the studios, which were mainly run by Jews. Joe, by contrast, was ‘a Harvard graduate, a Boston businessman and banker, a family man, a practicing Christian, and decidedly not a New York City Jew’.2 As studio head, Joe instituted new accounting procedures and fired several of the overpaid executives. While the films were produced in Hollywood, the major decisions were made on the East Coast. Kennedy moved into the FBO offices at 1560 Broadway off 24th Street in New York City.
Joe was known in the studio world as the ‘blond Moses’, leading the way for film companies converting from silent movies to talkies. His charisma and charm were remarked upon time and time again. The actress Joan Fontaine said, ‘You felt not just that you were the only one in the room that mattered, but the only one in the world.’3 What he took from his time in Hollywood was the art of performing as a public personality, and the importance of image. In a stroke of PR genius, he invited in a group of newspaper reporters and explained his vision for the movie industry. ‘Wholesomeness, Mr Kennedy pointed out to his guests, is intended to form the keynote of the pictures … and there is to be a very general elimination of the sex problem movies and of those which depend upon sex appeal,’ announced the Boston Daily Globe.4
The Kennedy children were a key part of his image as a family man. From their perspective, to have a father in the movie world was thrilling. They had access to the latest Hollywood films, much to the envy of their friends. Kick’s early letters are full of references to the movies that she had seen. They provided the backdrop to her life. All the movies were checked in advance for their suitability: ‘if there was a slip-up and the plot became lurid, the projector was switched off and the audience was sent out’.5 The boys loved the cowboy films that Joe sent over. Kick and her sisters watched Douglas Fairbanks movies and films with titles such as Welcome Danger.
Kick attended the Riverdale County School, along with four of her siblings. As Catholics, the Kennedys were outsiders. They were a tribe and they stuck together, but Jack and Kick found it easy to make friends, and were keen to establish their own identity outside that of being a Kennedy. After school, the children played touch football in the field behind the Presbyterian church, Kick joining in with her brothers.
