When she wrote to her father, a few weeks later, she told him, more primly, that she had been to a party but ‘There were no boys.’ She hinted that she would like to have her own horse and that she wanted to go to see the musical comedy Hot-Cha. She showed off the typewriting skills she was learning and told Joe that she was pleased with the arrival of her new baby brother, Teddy: ‘Every body thinks that the baby Should have been called George After Washington mother said she didn’t like it though.’9
In her letter Kick asked if her sister Rosemary was coming home for her birthday party. Rose and Joe had bowed to the inevitable, acknowledging that Rosemary was brain-damaged and unable to cope with mainstream school. She was sent away to a specialist private institution, the Devereux School in Pennsylvania, where she began to make slow progress. But after two years she was brought home. In her memoirs, Rose wrote of her sorrow at her eldest daughter’s plight, but also of her determination that everything should be done to make her feel a normal and valued member of the family.10 Some friends wrongly assumed that Rosemary’s problems arose from her being in her vibrant sister Kick’s shadow, but this was not so. Nevertheless, it was difficult for Kick, who was forced to accept responsibility for her elder sister, to protect her from whispers about her slowness.
Kick at thirteen, her mother recalled, was ‘a very attractive lady, with a beautiful, pink Irish complexion – intelligent at school – radiant, a glowing personality – no illness like Jack as she matured, a lovely interest in all that was happening around her’.11 Rose also emphasized her daughter’s deep spirituality. Kick would make ‘Spiritual Bouquets’ for family members. This involved weeks and weeks of special prayers, going to mass and communion, after which the beloved person would be sent a card listing all the prayers and devotions that had been offered up on their behalf.
Though Kick was a devout girl, she was also at the age where she was beginning to take an interest in boys. Her mother worried about her popularity and the fact that she was spending so much time going to the movies or on the telephone chatting to boys. As Rose remarked rather drily, ‘she had a keen interest in social life’.12 Worried that she was being distracted from her schoolwork, Rose decided that it was high time that Kick received some of her education in a Sacred Heart convent school, as she had done herself.
In her memoirs Rose recalled that ‘Joe and I had agreed that the responsibility for education of the boys was primarily his, and that of the girls, primarily mine.’13 Joe set the course for Joe Jr and Jack to attend the prestigious Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and then, following their father, to go on to Harvard. Rose was determined that her girls would, above all, have a Catholic education. Kick was sent off to a Sacred Heart convent in Noroton-on-the-Sound, also in Connecticut.
6
Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls.
Kick Kennedy
The journey from Bronxville to Noroton, Connecticut, was only 30 miles but for thirteen-year-old Kathleen Kennedy, she might as well have been travelling back in time. The Convent was an imposing mansion, a former governor’s 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