Paula Byrne - Kick - The True Story of Kick Kennedy, JFK’s Forgotten Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth

But the child kicking so strongly inside her belly was a constant, nagging reminder that she was now a mother with responsibilities. Two of her small children were a cause for grave concern. Little Jack was sickly, in and out of hospital. Nobody could work out what was wrong; it was many years before he was correctly diagnosed. Rose’s firstborn daughter, Rosemary, was also a worry. She was too quiet, didn’t cry as much as her other two babies.1 Rose was trapped, and she knew it. But she was teaching her husband a lesson. She was a Fitzgerald, the cherished eldest daughter in one of the city’s most prominent Roman Catholic families. And now she was home.

Her diminutive father, John F. Fitzgerald, of Irish immigrant stock, was the first American-born Irish Catholic to be elected to the office of Mayor of Boston. What he lacked in height, he more than compensated for in energy. He was a gifted athlete and a good scholar and was accepted into Harvard Medical School. Just one year after his studies began, his father died. Fitzgerald left Harvard, took a job as a civil servant and raised his siblings. He washed their faces and dressed the babies.2 He never complained. He just got on with it.

He was a man of extraordinary charm and vitality. So charming, with the Irish gift of the gab, that his nickname was ‘Honey Fitz’. Other nicknames were ‘young Napoleon’ and ‘the little General’.3 In trying to describe her father’s particular brand of charisma, Rose would one day write of the attractive mix of his ‘abundant energy, vitality, physique, quick reflexes, and a psychological or endocrinological “x factor”’.4 She noted that her father had the ability to walk into a room full of dull, bored people and within minutes the place would be buzzing with life and energy. This charm, this energy, this ‘x factor’, would be inherited, above all, by her daughter Kathleen and her son Jack.

When she came to publish her memoirs in her eighties, Rose called herself Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. In her mind, she was always a Fitzgerald, and proud to be so. ‘There was no one in the world like my father,’ she wrote. ‘Wherever he was, there was magic in the air.’5 She quoted him so much that she earned the nickname ‘Father says’.

Honey Fitz had an eclectic, wide-ranging mind and a habit of cutting out anything in print that interested him: news articles, quotations. He would pin them to his lapel. Rose inherited this trait and her children remembered her wandering around the house with notes pinned to her dress. Later, she put together scrapbooks full of photographs and clippings. She was an inveterate writer and always kept a notebook by her side to scribble down interesting ideas or quotations from books or plays. When her papers were released in 2007, there were 185,000 items stored in 253 boxes. Among those papers are Kick’s letters and her own scrapbooks of cuttings, articles and photographs.

Rose Fitzgerald had grown up in the world of politics. Honey Fitz became a US Congressman, spending his weeks in Washington and returning home to the country at weekends and for vacations. Despite the fact that he was so often away working, Rose was far closer to her father than to her mother, Josie. Honey Fitz loved people, so long as they were interesting, whereas Josie was shy and preferred to surround herself with family members. She was the disciplinarian. She spanked her children if they misbehaved. She was also deeply religious and instilled her piety into her children. As a fervent and devout Roman Catholic she drilled the children in the catechism. During the month of May (the month of the Blessed Virgin) she kept a shrine and her children filled it with flowers and prayed every night. During Lent, the children would kneel in the dark and recite the rosary.6

Devoted wife Josie didn’t know, or pretended not to know, that Honey Fitz had a string of affairs. ‘Me for the pretty girls, brains or no brains,’ he told a Boston Post reporter.7 He would pick up any young attractive girl, particularly blondes, and barely bothered to keep it a secret. Josie Fitzgerald did a great line in denial. She learnt to smile graciously, dress stylishly and keep her feelings in check. This set a pattern for her daughter, who would repeat history when she made her own choice of a powerful but chronically unfaithful husband. Rose spent her life turning a blind eye, just as her mother had done. Trained well in the school of face-saving, she followed her mother in taking comfort from fashionable clothes and expensive jewels.

As the daughter of devout Catholics, Rose was encouraged to date only Catholic boys. A ‘mixed’ marriage was, in her parents’ eyes, unthinkable. In her memoirs, she describes Boston as having two societies, one of them almost entirely Protestant (mainly of English descent) and the other Irish Catholic.8 She recalled that ‘between the two groups feelings were, at best, suspicious, and in general amounted to a state of chronic, mutual antagonism’.9

Protestant boys were a rarity at dances and social events. But even when a suitable Catholic boy caught her eye, her parents were unimpressed. His name was Joe Kennedy. Rose and Joe had met once as children when they were on vacation in Maine. Eight years later they met in Boston and what began as ‘affectionate’ friendship turned to romantic love.10 Despite the opposition of her parents, who disliked Joe and thought him unworthy of their daughter, Rose continued to see him secretly.

Joe Kennedy should have been ideal son-in-law material. He had attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, Fitzgerald’s alma mater. He was a brilliant baseball player, president of the senior class and a natural born leader. He was a fabulous dancer. He didn’t drink or smoke, and was ‘a very good polite Catholic’.11 He was tall and handsome, with sandy-coloured hair, freckles and blue eyes. His best feature was a captivating smile. Rose said that when he smiled, he made everyone want to smile, too.12 She recalled that he had a knack of getting along with people from all backgrounds: ‘He could talk to anybody.’13

Joe was the son of P. J. Kennedy, a successful businessman and politician. But Fitzgerald was possessive of Rose, and no one was good enough for his daughter. The irony was that Joe Kennedy was all too much like Honey Fitz: tough, energetic, ambitious. In an attempt to keep the lovers apart, Fitzgerald forbade Rose to attend the renowned Wellesley College, where she had been offered a place. Wellesley girls often dated boys from nearby Harvard, and Honey wasn’t having that. Rose later said that not going to Wellesley was the great regret of her life. She was entered instead into the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in downtown Boston.

The Order of the Sacred Heart had been founded in the early nineteenth century in France for the education of upper-class Catholic girls. It later spread to London, the Netherlands and America. Rose found herself entering a very different world: early-morning prayer, silence during class and serious study. She was still in touch with Joe, though he was due to start at Harvard. Despite her father’s opposition to the romance, Rose refused to stop seeing Joe, and in order to separate them once and for all the Fitzgeralds whisked Rose and her sister Agnes to Europe for a two-month tour, after which she was deposited in the Sacred Heart Convent in Blumenthal, Holland.

She decided that she would surrender herself to her faith. But she was also determined to ‘marry Joe, too, no matter what anyone thought or said’.14 For his part, Joe was equally determined to marry the Mayor’s beautiful daughter. Her newfound piety only added to her allure. He was furious that Fitzgerald didn’t think him good enough for his ‘Rosie’. He hated to be underestimated, and it drove him harder in his ambition to succeed. He was the first and only son in his family, with three sisters and a strong mother, who was also a devout Catholic. His father, P.J., a quiet and more benign figure, was rarely at home, busy with his bank and with the world of politics.