One of Jack’s schoolfriends, Paul Chase, remembered how important it was for the Kennedy children to be winners: ‘Mr K. really did preach that winning was everything.’15 Whether it was card games, Monopoly or physical sports like tennis and sailing, winning first place was what mattered. If any of the Kennedy children lost, the reasons were carefully and methodically analysed.16 The children teased their father over his favourite aphorisms: ‘We don’t want any losers around here. In this family we want winners.’ ‘Don’t come in second or third – that doesn’t count – but win.’17 But they believed in his vision wholeheartedly.
In the summer of 1935 the Kennedy children came away from the sailing competition at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts.18 Eunice remembered racing fourteen times a week when she was only twelve years old.19 Rose and Joe ensured that the children had proper coaching for swimming and for tennis.
Joe was king at Hyannis. He would sit in the bullpen, usually on the telephone to the White House or to a business associate, but always with an eye on the children. He would watch them out in their sailing boats or on the beach. One of Kick’s friends recalled: ‘He ruled the roost. And, oh, God, did they love him. But they were scared to death of him, too.’20
The children’s friends were surprised by their competitiveness. ‘Which of us is the best looking?’, ‘Who has the best sense of humour?’ All agreed that Kick was the nicest Kennedy.21 Jack was the most intellectual and witty, Joe the most handsome and athletic, and so it went on. As the years went by, brain-damaged Rosemary became more lost and left behind, until the moment came when Joe began to believe that her presence was harming the rest of the children.
Even the liveliest guests were overawed and subdued by the ebullience of the Kennedys. Often it was hard for outsiders even to get a word in edgeways. Large families are entities unto themselves. They create a shorthand, private language, a code of behaviour, in-jokes, nicknames, family anecdotes, which bind them together, but also isolate those not in the know or in the fold. Years later when Jackie Bouvier met the family for the first time at Hyannis Port, she described them as ‘like carbonated water’ where ‘other families might be flat’. She was struck by their collective energy, enthusiasm and ‘interest in life … it was so stimulating’.22 Lem observed, ‘With them, life speeded up.’23 Video footage of the family at Hyannis Port shows the children pushing, jostling, racing one another, showing off. But always having the greatest fun. Their friends appeared happy to float in their orbit, perhaps hoping that some of the Kennedy glitter would rub off on them.
Kick and Jack grew closer and closer. Like all the Kennedys they bickered and bantered, friends remarking that they were like Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.24 Jack, the great reader of the family, would tease Kick for her philistinism. She would tease him back for being skinny and vain. But Jack adored Kick, and it was of vital importance that his favourite sister sanctioned any girlfriend of his. She was so popular and easygoing that it was almost impossible for anyone not to get along with her. If she had disapproved of a girlfriend of Jack’s, that would have been the end of the relationship.
Jack had now got his driving licence and they would take off together to a dance at the Yacht Club or a movie at Idle Hours, the local theatre. If Kick stayed out late, at the golf club or the drugstore (the favourite hangout for American teenagers with ice-cream sodas), her mother would come looking for her in her little blue car. ‘Dear, it’s time to come home,’ she would say. The children always recognized the headlights on her car, and knew that it was time to go home.25 If Jack and Kick were very late home, they would crawl into the drive, turn their own headlights off, be careful not to slam the doors, take off their shoes and creep into bed. In the morning, Kick would find a note pinned to her pillow: ‘The next time be sure to be in on time.’26
When she was at her friend Nancy’s house, over the road, staying beyond her curfew of nine o’clock, Rose would lean out of the window and summon her home calling out ‘Kaaaathleen!’ in her whiny Boston drawl.27 The Kennedy children thought it a great tease to call out their sister’s formal name in imitation of their mother.
Despite their great wealth, the Kennedys were often scruffily dressed and rarely carried cash. They would put their ice creams and drinks on account at Megathlin’s Drugstore. Kick was usually barefoot and dressed in cut-off shorts and T-shirt. On rainy days, she would cycle the 3 miles to the movie theatre, where she loved to watch romantic films.
Kick chafed against her mother’s efforts to turn her into a proper young lady. One sunny day, Rose called her in from the beach to give her a flower-arranging lesson. Kick was torn between giggles and being horrified. Her mother gave her a basket and a pair of scissors and told her to go and cut flowers and then arrange them. Kick cut the flowers the wrong length and then put the basket down, absent-mindedly, leaving the flowers to dry out in the heat of the sun.28
Kick, like Jack, was untidy and disorganized. Her clothes would be strewn over her bedroom floor, just waiting for someone else to pick them up. Make-up and the latest records were scattered over her dressing table. She would retire for the evening to find another of her mother’s interminable notes pinned to her pillow telling her to be sure to wipe her lipstick off her mouth before going to bed.29
A hierarchy was established within the family with Joe Jr, Jack and Kick firmly at the top. Kick would introduce her brothers to her girlfriends for dates, and their friends in turn would fall in love with her. She would tease her brothers when she found bobby pins in between the car seats.
Kick and Jack shared a sense of irony and got through life on their charm, whereas Joe was strong and opinionated, with an explosive temper. But he rarely lost his temper with his youngest siblings. People remarked that he treated little Teddy like a son. In video and photographic images of the Kennedys in Cape Cod, Joe is often seen with a small child on his shoulders, or cuddling one of his younger siblings.
But Joe Jr could be tough with Jack and Kick, and in many respects they feared him more than their father. He was the one who often meted out discipline. He was over-protective and obsessed with the family honour.30 Jack did not try to be the favoured son. He knew how difficult it was to compete with Joe the Golden Boy, so he rarely bothered. ‘Jack did the best on the intellectual things and sort of monopolized them,’ Eunice recalled.31 It was also a way of rebelling against his father who rather disliked intellectuals. Kick recognized that Jack, like her, was a rebel, and that rebellion could take many different forms. For the moment, she was content to flirt with her brother’s friends, play her records on her Victrola, tease her siblings, show allegiance to the Kennedy code. Kick was biding her time.
Friends noticed the especially tight bond between Joe Jr, Jack and Kick. They were an unbreakable trinity, talented, good-looking and most of all good fun. A friend of the family said that the three were like a family within a family: ‘They were the pick of the litter, the ones the old man thought would write the story of the next generation.’32
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