Laurie Graham - The Importance of Being Kennedy

When Margaret and Ursie saw each other they never stopped picking.

I said, ‘I don't rub shoulders with anyone. There are days I hardly set foot outside the nursery. We've eight of them to see to.’

Margaret said, ‘Eight. Sweet Jesus. Could you not take my two as well? Just slide them in on the quiet? I'll bet they'd never notice.’

Mr K was away in California most of the summer of ’28 but when he did come home he arrived in style. Gabe Nolan would meet him off the train in New York City and drive him out to Queens, to where he kept his latest toy. An airplane that could land on water. It meant he could fly up to the Cape and land right on his own doorstep. The first time he arrived it caused quite a stir. People were running around, thinking a plane had crashed into the sea, but after they found out who it was and what it was they didn't pay any more attention. Hyannis folk were too dignified to get excited about Joe Kennedy and his trappings.

The house renovations were still going on and some of the new bathrooms had still to be finished, but the movie theatre was ready, downstairs in the old furnace room. Danny Walsh was taught how to work the projecting machine and Mr K kept us supplied with new movies, cowboy stories mainly, hot off the press. They'd arrive by special messenger once a week.

Fidelma asked him why it was always cowboys and Indians.

He said, ‘Because they're easy to do. I can make twenty of them for what those fur hondlers spend on one movie and folks are just as happy to watch mine. People in Scranton, Pennsylvania, would watch paint dry, they're so bored.’

Danny reckoned we saw things before they were in the picture palaces even in New York City, and we were all allowed down there to watch because, as Mr K said, he'd never allow a movie to be made in a studio of his that wasn't fit for his family to see, and the help too. Mrs K didn't care much for movies though. She'd sit at the back and after half an hour or so she'd slip out. She was happier pulling on an old pea jacket and going for a walk along the strand.

She said to me once, ‘Movies are so noisy. I don't like all the shooting. Peace and quiet are what I like. That's why I go to first Mass. It's worth getting up early. If you go later other worshippers can be so irritating. I love a room to myself, Nora, and stillness.’

Well, she was in the wrong family for that.

The house in Riverdale was a rental. We knew Mr K had told Eddie Moore to look out for a place to buy and in the spring of 1929 we moved again, to Bronxville, to a villa standing in its own park, Crownlands. I suppose the money was fairly pouring in by then. He owned the companies that were making the movies and he owned the picture houses where they were shown. For all I know he could have owned the celluloid factories and the popcorn machines too. Not that any of the help saw much of the money he was making. You only asked for a raise if you were prepared for a big performance from Herself. To hear her you'd think they were down to their last dime. She should have been on the stage, that one. By the time she was done with her sob story you felt you should maybe offer her a loan yourself.

So it wasn't the money that kept me with the Kennedys. I stayed because I liked the life and I loved the children. Anyway, blessed are the poor. As Mammy used to say, ‘If you want to know God's opinion of money you've only to take a look at them he gives it to.’

People like me and Fidelma and Gertie Ambler who cooked, and Danny and Gabe, we were the lucky ones, because we were permanent staff, kept on whatever the time of year. But the maids and the gardeners at Hyannis had to find something else when the house was closed up for the winter. Mrs K didn't see why she should pay people when she was finished with them for the year.

Crownlands was our grandest house yet. We had beautiful grounds and every convenience, and yet Herself still didn't seem happy. Thwarted, I always thought. She'd had her education and been the toast of Boston, riding with His Honour the Mayor. She had money and a fine family, but there was no joy in her. She could tell you the date of every doctor's visit and she could tell you to the last cent what we were spending on socks or baby bottles, but she didn't have anything to occupy her that would use all her brains and foreign languages. She was more like a head housekeeper than a mother, and she was so restless. She wanted to go back out into the world and make her mark, you could tell, but she'd eight children and her sacred duty hung round her neck like a sack of rocks. Mr K did take her along with him to California one time, which was how she happened to miss Jack and Rosie's first communion, but she never went again.

She said, ‘Mr Kennedy is so busy with meetings all day when he's travelling but I'm not the kind of wife who sits around waiting to be entertained. I shall take a trip to Europe.’

Fidelma said, ‘Do you think we'd ever move, to save Mr Kennedy all the travelling?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I do not. We're not California people.’

Still, he was so tied up there he didn't even come back for the burying of his own father. I'd have thought they could have kept the old feller on ice until Mr K had time to attend, but Mrs K said it wasn't necessary. She said it was time Joseph Patrick learned to represent his daddy on certain occasions and his grandfather's funeral was a very good place to begin. He was bought a new black suit from Alexander's. Only fourteen but he was already a head taller than his mammy, quite the young man when he offered her his arm and walked her to the car. I told Mr K when I saw him.

I said, ‘Young Joe did you proud. And my sister wrote me from Boston. She said there was a very big turnout for the funeral.’

‘So I heard,’ he said. ‘And I wish I could have been there, but I couldn't leave town. It's dog eat dog in the movie business. If you turn your back for five minutes those Jewboys rob you blind.’

Herself went off to Paris, for culture and shopping she said, and she was hardly out the door before Miss Swanson came visiting. I thought it was highly irregular, and Jack didn't like it either. He stayed out in the bay in his sailboat after everybody else had come in, and he had a monkey face on him when it was time to go in to dinner.

I said, ‘What's eating you?’

He said, ‘How come Mother has to go to France just when Dad's come home and we can all be together for a change? What kind of a family is this, anyhow?’

Miss Swanson was very nice. She remembered all the children's names, and she went along to the movie-star club Kick and Rosie and little Nancy Tenney had got up to swap photographs and act out scenes from the movies they'd seen. She climbed the ladder up into the attic over Mr Tenney's garage to say hello to Nancy and sign her autograph book, like a regular aunt might have done. But it still wasn't right that she was in the house when Mrs Kennedy wasn't.

Mr K took her for a ride through town in his Rolls-Royce but according to Gabe Nolan nobody paid them any attention. If people in Hyannis had money, they never flashed it, and most of them wouldn't have walked to the foot of the stairs to see even Tom Mix. Kick was film-star crazy though. That's where all her pocket money went. Rosie used to save hers to send to the missionary nuns and Euny just counted hers and then put it back in her piggy-bank, but Kick's went on movie magazines the minute the money was in her hand, and then she cut them up for photos of Douglas Fairbanks or Miss Greta Garbo to thumbtack to the wall.

Young Joe and Rosie both went away to school that autumn. It had been decided that Rosie would never catch up at the day school so she had to be boarded, at a special place for slow learners. I knew that wouldn't last five minutes. It was out beyond Philadelphia, and it could have been the far side of the moon for all that meant to Rosie. She sat with the map Mrs K had showed her, with her finger on the place, looking and looking at me, to see if I could save her from having to go.