was overstepping the mark in bringing his mistress to Hyannis. It was a place that was associated with family. The Kennedys considered it their true, spiritual home, the epicentre of their lives. A decade later, in 1939, Rose gave an interview to Reader’s Digest in which she set out the Kennedy family manifesto: ‘Years ago, we decided that our kids were going to be our best friends and that we could never see too much of them.’ Rose explained that, with her husband’s hectic schedule, it wasn’t possible to have friends, and go to dinner parties. Because Joe was often away from home, when he was with the family they didn’t want to share their precious time with outsiders. The substituting of children for friends meant that outsiders, close colleagues and, later, in-laws often felt excluded. The family was at once cohesive and suffocating. What Rose failed to understand was that her children needed friends with differences to kick against, in order to find out who they were. For her, family always, always came first. As she told Reader’s Digest: ‘as a result the Kennedy children became natives of the Kennedy family, first and foremost, before any city or any country’.5
Every summer, for the duration of the holidays, the whole family assembled at Hyannis Port. It was their playground, the backdrop to their lives. For generations, it would be the place to which they would return in times of triumph and tragedy. They all looked back on summers on the Cape as providing their happiest memories – the long summer vacation stretching out before them, the lazy hot days of sports and fun. The family had begun holidaying in Hyannis Port in 1924. In those days, it was not a fashionable place. The ‘Kennedy Compound’ lay far in the future. But there was good railway access, lovely sandy beaches and a golf club that was more than happy to accept Joe Kennedy as one of its members. Equally important for the Kennedys was that Hyannis Port had a Roman Catholic church. St Francis Xavier, located on South Street, was a pretty structure, built in 1874. Once called St Patrick’s Church, it changed its name to avoid giving the impression that it was an ‘Irish only’ church. This was the summer parish for the Kennedy family. Joe Jr and his brothers became altar boys.
The family rented Malcolm Cottage, a large white clapboard house with green shutters, at the end of Marchant Avenue, just a block from the sea. It had an extensive lawn where the children could play and it came with its own private beach. After renting the house for several years, Joe bought it in November 1928 and instructed the original architect Frank Paine to remodel it. Extra rooms were added, windows were widened to take in the sweeping ocean view and a large RCA sound movie theatre was built. Hyannis Port had only just got its own theatre for the talkies, so it was very spectacular that the Kennedy family had their own private facility, which showed the latest films shipped in from Hollywood.
The house was spacious but it was not grand. It was a lovely family home. Rose loved her Cape Cod garden and planted ‘old-fashioned blooms’ such as asters, chrysanthemums, calendulas, black-eyed susans and marigolds. The glorious riot of colour contrasted with the dazzling white of the clapboard house and the rich green lawn. There were butterflies, and innumerable birds: seagulls, oystercatchers, bobwhites and the beautiful red cardinal. Eagle-eyed children could spot chipmunks foraging for food. The beaches were lined with a profusion of wildflowers, in particular the hot pink wild beach rose, which emitted a strong and sweet fragrance. The family would hunt for beach plums, rose hips, elderberries, chokeberries and wild grapes.
One morning Rose bundled the children into the station wagon. They were off to forage for wild blueberries, each child carrying a tin pail. Ten miles into the wilds, they spotted a sunny patch of bushes with ripening berries and began to fill their buckets. Suddenly Eunice began screaming. A wasp had stung her, and all of the other children suddenly imagined that they, too, had been stung. Seconds later, Jack ran up yelling and waving his arms. He had sat on an anthill and ants were swarming all over him. Rose packed up the children ‘with a small harvest and my deflated educational ideas’. On the way home, they stopped off at the store and bought three quarts of blueberries: ‘I never mentioned picking blueberries again.’6 Rose had her issues, but she certainly didn’t lack a sense of humour.
Food was an important part of the Cape Cod experience. The children loved to picnic on the beach, and they would set off with a thermos jug with creamed chicken, fresh fruit, lollipops and always a chocolate cake with thick, gooey icing. They bought ice cream from the store along with a pack of cones.7 One of the favourite Kennedy desserts was Boston cream pie, a luscious confection of light fluffy sponge sandwiched together with custard cream and frosted with chocolate. There were healthy snacks, too: carrot and celery sticks, and in the evenings roast chicken, apple jelly and acorn squash.8 Alcohol was not permitted in the Kennedy household.
Above all for the sporty, wholesome clan there were the outdoor games. The children played touch football on the beach, went swimming and played competitive tennis. Rose colour-coded the children’s bathing caps so she could recognize each child in the water. Each of them (except for Rosemary) had their own sailing boat. When they raced on Nantucket Sound, Joe would follow in his own boat, shouting out their mistakes. After every race the station wagon would be dispatched to collect the trophies. When Rose wanted the children to bring the boats in, she would lower the flag from the flagpole in front of the house.9 Joe later had a pool built, and an outdoor shower was installed by a side entrance. The children could practise their diving and splash about after a day on the beach.
Kick loved to run around barefoot. She was by nature a free spirit, and she and Jack chafed against Rose’s disciplined regime. Clocks were installed in every room and the children knew not to be late for mealtimes, or they would go without. They would learn to charm the cook behind their mother’s back.
Joe would sit in his favourite chair in the corner of the living room or on his bedroom balcony (nicknamed ‘the bullpen’), looking over his brood. If the children fought or dissolved into tears over a quarrel with a sibling Joe would clap his hands in steady rhythm: ‘No – crying – in – this – house! No – crying – in – this – house!’10 He hated tears and impressed upon the children that crying accomplished nothing. Kick and Jack invented a family motto: ‘Kennedys never cry’.
On cold days they played indoor games. A favourite was ‘categories’, a trial of intellectual trivia. The children always had to be doing something.
On Sundays, they would troop downstairs in ‘Sunday Best’. Rose would be waiting at the foot of the stairs to inspect them.11 They would set off for mass at St Xavier’s, the boys preparing to do their altar-boy duty, the girls clutching Bibles and rosary beads. They were the ideal Catholic family.
5
Kathleen … was such a beautiful and lively and outgoing child and girl that I became convinced she never felt neglected at all.
Rose Kennedy1
In May 1929, six months after the renovation of Malcolm Cottage, the Kennedys left their rented home in Riverdale and bought an imposing, luxurious red-brick Georgian house in the Westchester community of Bronxville, called Crownlands. The family had never been really happy at Riverdale, and never felt that they belonged. Bronxville was a leafy, affluent suburb, 15 miles north from central Manhattan, only 1 square mile in area. It had the all-important (recently built) Catholic church, St Joseph’s, good schools for the children and an easy commute for Joe, whose main offices
