Lem spent his first Christmas with the Kennedys in 1933, and wrote to Kick when she returned to the Convent. ‘I hope Mother Superior enjoys my letters,’ he teased, knowing that all letters were read and censored.5 Kick had loved her Christmas vacation at her new home, and was miserable about returning to Noroton. ‘Daddy dear,’ she wrote, ‘Now I suppose you are glad you have me stuck behind convent walls I am all safe and sound now and can’t go skipping around to “El Studio” or the Everglades … I feel very rested and everyone thinks I look very well so a few parties never did anyone any harm.’6 She was homesick, and struggling with the cold weather. She wrote to her mother separately: ‘I miss you all like anything in fact worse than I ever have. Every day this week I’d sit in the study hall and think a week ago today I was basking in the sun and now I am in a fire trap trying to study. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’7
That was the Kennedy mantra: be strong, fight harder, don’t give in. In fact all of the children, with the exception of Joe Jr, were beset with health problems. Jack was still by far the sickliest child. Bobby, Kick’s favourite little brother, born when she was five, joked that Jack was so poorly as a child that if a mosquito bit him, the insect would immediately perish from having tasted his brother’s tainted blood.8
Kick was deeply worried about Jack’s health, while herself continuing to suffer from increasingly bad asthma, and allergies, for which she took injections. ‘The asthma is coming,’ she wrote to her mother in January 1934, ‘I can feel it.’9 Kick starred in a play in which she cross-dressed as the hero and had to kill the villain. ‘I had ski pants on and Mother Fitzgerald wouldn’t let me appear without a coat over the pants,’ Kick complained to her mother; ‘… she thinks pants are immodest. Ski pants, mind you. If she only knew.’10 She asked her mother to give her love to everyone ‘and tell them they are not missing a darn thing in this Iceland’. She talked about plans for Easter, and flying south for the holidays. The Kennedys, with their vast wealth, thought no more of taking flights than lesser mortals would of bus journeys.
In February 1934, Kick was operated on for appendicitis and recuperated in Palm Beach. She seriously contemplated leaving Noroton and its damp climate, but she stuck it out. She was beginning to make some good friends and, like Jack, she made friends for life.
One of her closest friends was a pretty petite girl, with long blonde, wavy hair. Her name was Charlotte McDonnell, and she was from one of New York’s prominent Catholic families. She was as spirited as Kick, and likewise hailed from a large, boisterous family. She was one of fourteen. Charlotte was constantly in trouble at Noroton. The nuns excluded her for several days for possession of a dirty-joke book.11
Lem and Jack came to visit the girls whenever they could for Thursday tea, and a flirtation took place between Jack and Charlotte. She wrote to thank him for the jigsaw puzzles that he sent to the girls, and told him that it was so cold at school that she had to chop a hole in her inkwell in order to write to him.12 Jack would over the years flirt with and have affairs with several of Kick’s friends.
Kathleen was extremely popular at Noroton. One of her schoolfriends who later became a nun recalled her vivacity and charm: ‘wherever Kathleen went, sunshine followed’.13 She was rarely moody or temperamental, always sunny and full of jokes, always quick to laugh.
In May, Kick sent her mother another Spiritual Bouquet, for Mother’s Day with an affectionate card: ‘To the sweetest, youngest mother in the wide world … may this bouquet give you many graces. I love you.’14
At Whitsun, there was a raffle for ‘gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost’, and Kick remarked pithily, ‘I got Wisdom which I need for these final exams and Patience, which I sure need too.’15 She was preparing herself for a one-day spiritual retreat ‘which I know you will not want me to miss’. But she longed to go home for the summer holidays. Her asthma was bad and she was continuing to have injections, and she told Rose that her doctor had ordered chest X-rays. ‘I go to Mass every morning,’ she added dutifully.16
In June 1934, as a reward for his involvement in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency, Joe had been offered the position of Chairman of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That summer, he befriended the prestigious New York Times political journalist Arthur Krock, who would become one of his most powerful supporters and allies. Joe was setting his sights on the White House, and he leased Marwood, a huge, faux-French mansion in Washington, as his political base. The family would continue to live in Bronxville. At his new base, Joe held spectacular parties and dinners, shipping in lobster from Maine and oysters and clams from Cape Cod, washed down with plenty of the best Scotch.17
Kick was relieved and delighted when she finally left the Convent for the long summer vacation at Hyannis: the coldness and the austerity would be temporarily forgotten with the promise of the sunshine of the Cape and reunion with the rest of the clan. Weeks and weeks of sailing, tennis, touch football, dancing and fun lay ahead. Kick was especially looking forward to spending time with Jack, who was bringing Lem for the vacation.
Kick and Lem stuck together, worried about Jack, but also determined to enjoy the summer as best they could. Lem found the relationship between the Kennedy parents extremely odd, and saw at first hand how Joe dominated Rose. He was also struck by Rose’s obsession with good manners and social form, table manners, punctuality, appearance: ‘Don’t wear white socks with dress suit. Wear dark shoes with blue or gray suit, not brown shoes.’ She forbade the children to address people with ‘hi’. Nobody could leave the dining table until Rose had left.18
Jack’s persistent and myriad illnesses were one of the reasons why he lived for the moment, and this was one explanation for why he loved sex and women. For Kick, it was another odd mixed message. She was a convent girl, expected to behave well at all times, to obey her mother’s commands and her insistence on etiquette and social form. Conversely, her brothers, to whom she was so close, were beginning to lead active sex lives. One friend reported that Joe Sr left carefully opened pornographic magazine centrefolds on Jack’s bed. ‘I think it’s Dad’s idea of a joke’ was Jack’s response.19
While Joe was encouraging his sons to sow their wild oats, Rose continued to impress upon her daughters the importance of a religious life. In notes she made entitled ‘Advantages of Catholic Education’, she wrote about the benefits of a convent:
If she is in a convent school, she is taught by women who have devoted their lives to the spiritual welfare of children. They themselves lead unselfish, exemplary lives, devoted to loving and worshipping of God. They give the girls the Catholic point of view about why they are in this world and their obligations to God, to themselves and their neighbor, and inspire them with the love of God … They teach the girls to be gentle, unselfish and charming in their manner and behavior, and it seems to me that I can tell a convent girl in any part of the world.20
‘Gentle, unselfish and charming’ with a devotion to God and the Catholic Church: that was Rose’s mantra for her girls. After a summer of sunshine, dancing and boys, Kick returned to Noroton: ‘Here I am back in this _____ I had better not say,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Its lovely here now but its awful to be back.’21
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