Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (19 page)

Rose remained secluded in Maine until August 5, more than a week beyond her scheduled departure, while Rosemary suffered emotionally from the sudden removal from Fernwood and the transition to a new school.
Rosemary had been proud to be working as a “counselor” at the camp, where her self-esteem was buoyed by the perception of responsibility. She had left Fernwood and been whisked off to Ravenhill so quickly that she barely had time to pack; two duffel bags of clothes, books, pillows, and a
tennis racket were left behind.
On July 25, Rosemary sent two postcards and a four-page letter to the Sullivan sisters and the campers, expressing her deep sadness over and disappointment with her abrupt departure from the camp. “I tried to get up to see you [all], before I went, but Mr. Moore said there wasn’t time,” she wrote.
Compounding her distress, Rosemary feared her father was displeased by her departure from camp; she so desperately wanted him to approve of her. “I am going to work so hard for my Daddy,” she told her camp friends, “and he deserves it.” “I knew nothing about” the plan to leave the camp, she wrote, “until my father wired from Abroad . . . It’s not my fault, darlings . . . I have been crying over it. I know you all loved me so.”
Rosemary desperately wanted the campers and staff to write her and possibly arrange to see her in New York or Philadelphia during the upcoming school year. In his telegram, Joe had told her she was going to resume her Montessori training. “I am going to be a bit tired from all the studying, this summer and the fall,” she told her friends. “
Pray for me. God Bless You.
”
She poured out her feelings of love and gratitude to all the staff and begged the Sullivan sisters, “Write to me soon. I am lonesome for you.”

Ravenhill Academy had been established in 1919 in a large Victorian mansion donated to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Providing education for girls in first grade through high school, the school attracted the daughters of some of the most elite business, political, and social leaders of the day. Grace Kelly, the famous actress who later became one of Hollywood’s most illustrious stars before marrying the prince of Monaco, was a ten-year-old student there when Rosemary started classes that fall. The nuns spent their summers at Ravenhill Cottage, a Catholic retreat in Wildwood, not far from Atlantic City and Cape May, New Jersey. Since some of the boarding students at Ravenhill could not travel
home for the summer break, they moved to Wildwood with the sisters. Rosemary spent the last part of the summer at this retreat, where she joined other students spending their days swimming, walking, and studying.

Classes at Ravenhill Academy in Philadelphia started on September 17, and the nuns had agreed to enroll Rosemary in the fall if she had a companion or tutor, like Dorothy Gibbs at Belmont House, accompany her. As she had done in the past, Rose sent inquiries to potential candidates for private tutor for Rosemary, and was still corresponding with some of them in late August.
It is unclear whether a tutor was actually hired; within two months, at any rate, Rosemary was transferred out of the school. Ravenhill did not have a Montessori program similar to the one at Belmont House, nor a Mother Isabel. Still, the circumstances surrounding the failure of the sisters at Ravenhill to satisfactorily replicate the environment that had worked so well for Rosemary at Belmont House can only be imagined.

Rose anticipated the failure. By mid-September, when Rosemary was meant to be transitioning into classes at Ravenhill, Rose was making inquiries about committing her to a psychiatric hospital. Roseneath Farms Sanitarium was a private, fifty-bed psychiatric facility established in the 1920s on property abutting Ravenhill, a fact suggesting that staff at the Assumption school might have been involved in the recommendation to place Rosemary there. James J. Waygood, a highly respected psychiatrist, had been director of the hospital for nearly ten years. Rose clearly required letters of reference. The Reverend Thomas J. Love, a Jesuit priest and president of Saint Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, told Rose at Dr. Waygood’s request that “during the past ten or twelve years we have had some of our men there . . . The physical facilities afforded, combined with the excellence of the med
ical staff, leave little to be desired. I feel quite sure that should you place your daughter there, you will be eminently satisfied.”
Edward Day, a lawyer from Hartford, Connecticut, assured Rose in a reference letter written on September 20 that “Dr. Waygood has had an abundance of experience and is very understanding and wise in his treatment.” Day had spent a year at Roseneath recovering from “a very severe illness . . . and as a result of it, I recovered my health completely and am as well if not better than I ever was.” Rosemary would “have to be prepared for a period of adjustment,” Day wrote cautiously, but she would find “genuine kindness and real understanding” from the staff. “If your daughter cooperates with Dr. Waygood and exercises patience . . . she will get well.”

Whatever transpired in those few months with the Ravenhill nuns, the decision to send Rosemary to a psychiatric hospital indicates a possible serious decline in her state of mind. Eunice recalled that Rosemary “had begun to get sort of emotional . . . She was high strung and had quite a lot of temper tantrums all the time.”
It seems the hospital was ready to admit her; Rose and Joe may have been the ones to change their minds—she did not in fact go to Roseneath Farms.

By the third week in October, Rosemary was instead enrolled at Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts, an innovative Benedictine convent school in Washington, D.C. Other historians have assumed that Rosemary was engaged as a teacher’s aide at the school, but in fact Rose and Joe paid tuition for Rosemary to take classes there, just as they had paid tuition for her to attend Camp Fernwood as a “junior counselor.”
Rose noted in her diary on October 29 that she and Joe, who had just been recalled from London by Roosevelt, “went to see the President in Washington.” Roosevelt and many of his staff had become increasingly frus
trated by Kennedy’s isolationism in the face of heightened Nazi aggression, and the president had decided to force Kennedy’s resignation. After having dinner with Roosevelt and spending the night at the White House, Joe went on to New York while Rose remained in Washington to visit Rosemary at Saint Gertrude’s.

Founded in 1926 by Paulist priest–turned–Benedictine monk Thomas Verner Moore, Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts was the fulfillment of a long-held dream on Moore’s part to provide services and educational opportunities to intellectually and developmentally delayed and handicapped children. Saint Gertrude’s was also a training ground where nuns and young Catholic laywomen could acquire clinical skills while training as nurses and social workers at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., and its sister institution for women, Trinity College.

Saint Gertrude’s enrolled girls ages seven to twelve who scored between 65 and 90 on IQ tests. Moore wrote that he hoped to “enable the retarded child to become a happy and useful member of society by placing him [
sic
] in an environment where the soothing and uplifting influence of religion will be constantly affecting him; where guided by this influence, he may develop right habits; where he can adjust himself as easily and happily as possible to the situations that arise; and where he can learn, if necessary, to become self-supporting through the achievement of work that is both interesting to himself and useful to others.”

The school offered small classes, with low student-teacher ratios, in the typical academic subjects, augmented by arts-and-crafts lessons, music, dance, theater, and homemaking skills. Moore, a “priest-psychiatrist” who had a PhD in psychology from the Catholic University and was a highly respected profes
sor there, believed that focusing on the “mentally disadvantaged” through the delivery of new techniques in psychiatric and psychological therapies combined with deep spiritual guidance offered a more holistic treatment for patients suffering from mental illness and disabilities. However small and incremental progress might be, Moore argued, the new therapies were worthwhile and should be part of Catholic social justice and pastoral care.
Moore stood at the center of a group of colleagues who hoped to “integrate a progressive world view with traditional faith” in service of humankind.

Moore considered girls to be the most at-risk population, based partially on the widely held view that mentally ill and intellectually disabled girls were more likely, left to their own devices, to drift into prostitution. By establishing Saint Gertrude’s for girls, Moore believed he was providing care and service to the most vulnerable in society.

When Moore first began developing his vision, in 1917, the Catholic Church offered little help to families with children suffering from a range of intellectual and physical disabilities.
Over the next decade, Moore cultivated a “clear vision of what the Catholic Church needed to do for its mentally disabled members,” and was determined to make the Catholic University a pioneer in achieving that goal.
He knew that at the intersection of science and faith stood the promise of new clinical and social-service methods that could provide effective treatment and support for the mentally ill and disabled and their exhausted families.
The close proximity of Saint Gertrude’s to the Catholic University and Trinity College perfectly suited Moore’s vision for an incubator that would test innovations in special education and would serve as a training ground for Catholic nuns and laypersons, who would
then take their education and work to Catholic schools and institutions around the country.

But the church hierarchy was cool to the idea. The archbishop of Baltimore, under whose leadership Moore and the Catholic University operated, was direct in his disapproval: “Get all the assistance you can for the work that you are doing at St. Gertrude’s, but for the present be good enough to drop all proposals for linking the University and Sisters’ College [Trinity] with the work.”
In spite of this resistance, Moore continued his work. He attracted student teachers willing to volunteer at Saint Gertrude’s, and colleagues and nursing students from the university and Trinity encouraged him to establish a clinical care center through which additional health services could be provided for mentally ill and disabled children. A sizable grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1939 and support from wealthy Catholic donors helped firmly establish the Child Center at the university.
The center became an effective training site for Catholic professionals conducting pioneering research, and for “the treatment of emotional and behavior disorders.”
Moore launched a working relationship with nearby Saint Elizabeths Hospital, and some of that institution’s psychiatrists were tapped to teach the Catholic University’s newly expanded course offerings in psychiatry. By 1940, when Rosemary enrolled at Saint Gertrude’s, the school’s integration with the Child Center was firmly established. For Rose and Joe, the school may have seemed ideally suited to Rosemary’s and their needs: a lauded therapeutic setting that could allow Rosemary to function as a teacher’s aide, both for her own self-esteem and for the sake of public appearances.

Rose later recalled that during this time, however, “disquieting symptoms began to develop.” There was a “noticeable re
gression” in Rosemary’s mental and physical stability, and her “customary good nature gave way increasingly to tension and irritability.” Her outbursts of rage came on more frequently and unpredictably.
Rose’s niece Ann Gargan—the daughter of Rose’s sister Agnes—later revealed that Rosemary had become incorrigible at Saint Gertrude’s. She defied the nuns, the staff, and their rules. “Many nights,” Gargan told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “the school would call to say she was missing, only to find her out walking around the streets at 2 a.m.”
The nuns would bring her back, clean her up, and put her to bed. Her explanations about where she had been or what she had been doing made no sense, or else they made frightening sense.
“Can you imagine what it must have been like,” Gargan recalled, “to know your daughter was walking the streets in the darkness of the night, the perfect prey for an unsuspecting male?”
Joe Sr. expected his children to keep “out of the [newspaper] columns,” granddaughter Amanda Smith recalled.
His fears that Rosemary would end up as fodder for gossip columnists profoundly informed his and Rose’s efforts to keep her sequestered. What happened to Rosemary during that time has remained a mysterious and complicated story, with a thin trail of evidence and mostly conjectured interpretation. Even family members remain mostly in the dark about what truly happened to Rosemary during her time at Saint Gertrude’s.

Rosemary remained at Saint Gertrude’s through 1941. Joe, no longer ambassador but living in Palm Beach playing golf and keeping up with news of the war in Europe, had looked into having Rosemary attend Wyonegonic Camp in Denmark, Maine, during the summer of 1941, but there is no record of Rosemary having attended.
That July, Joe sought the advice of Monsignor Casey at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City about find
ing a new convent for Rosemary, but as the family had come to understand all too well, Casey could offer nothing suitable for a twenty-two-year-old intellectually disabled and emotionally troubled young woman. Rosemary was reenrolled at Saint Gertrude’s, though Dr. Moore, worried about “her welfare and the effect of her behavior on others” at the school, seems to have been reluctant to have her back.
In October, Joe tried to persuade Rosemary to consider a new placement somewhere in Philadelphia. It seems likely the Kennedys were reconsidering Roseneath Farms, since both the Assumption and Sacred Heart schools in Philadelphia had already done what they could for her. “How is my old darling today?” he wrote Rosemary from Hyannis Port on the tenth. “Eddie and Mary are coming down and they were thinking perhaps that they might take you for a trip up to Philadelphia to look the situation over up there.” Fully aware that Rosemary might be resistant to the idea of making another transition, he offered what seems like a bit of a bribe. “Do you think Dr. Moore and the Nuns would like to have a picture show sometime this fall and also do you think the children would like it? If they would, what kind of picture do you think they’d like?”