Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (7 page)

Though Rosemary had repeated kindergarten at Edward Devotion and then moved up to first grade in the fall of 1925, her learning disabilities forced her to repeat that grade as well, in 1926. When the family moved to Riverdale, Rosemary was enrolled in second grade at Riverdale Country School along with her younger sister Kick, while Eunice entered first grade. Other girls of Rosemary’s age, nine, were entering the fourth grade.

Joe was wrong about New York’s being more tolerant. Riverdale had one small Catholic church, but most of its residents resembled the Brahmins he resented so much. Rose, who spent far more time in Riverdale than Joe, would remain an outsider. Joe’s absence from school and community functions isolated Rose even further. Neighbors viewed Rose’s devotion to Rosemary, and to the rest of her children, as a curiosity. Reserved and cloistered with her family at home—child number eight, Jean, was born five
months after the move to Riverdale—Rose rarely interacted with her neighbors. Though she “was one hundred percent mother, absolutely one hundred percent,” a neighbor recalled, Rose “had very little to do with local social activities.” Another neighbor, a childhood friend of Jack’s, recalled that the Kennedys “were like fish out of water” in Riverdale “because of their life-style, their close-knit family of eight children, their father’s non-participation in neighborhood activities, and the mother’s Catholic activities, which few if any of the neighborhood families shared.”
The neighborhood children cared little for these issues, but the Kennedy children drew them anyway. For them, the Kennedy home was the go-to place for outdoor sports and indoor games, dances, and roughhousing.

The financial indicators predicting the Great Depression—a financial collapse that devastated the economies of not only the United States but nations around the globe—were merely glowing embers in 1927 when the Kennedys moved to Riverdale. By 1929, when the stock market crashed, Joe was playing the market brilliantly and taking advantage of broad and unregulated practices that in fact helped cause the collapse. Through risky speculation and manipulation of prices, Joe produced huge gains for his portfolio. He masterfully shorted many stocks ahead of the collapse, cashing in on his bet that the market would decline. Rather than enduring tremendous losses like most other investors, Joe made a fortune for himself and his investors. Yet the new wealth of the Kennedys did not help them bridge any social distance in Riverdale.

By 1927, before the Kennedys’ enormous wealth was so fully secured, Rose had every material household support to settle the family into their new home. Rosemary, however, was not easy to settle. Her transition to school in Riverdale was fraught with
frustration and anxiety. Already labeled “slow” and “delayed,” Rosemary needed ever more demanding educational support. Rose struggled to accommodate her while also helping the rest of the children adjust to their new home, school, and neighborhood. This was a fresh opportunity for Rosemary, and no doubt Rose hoped the new environment would spur her on to do better in school.

To those outside the family, Rosemary seemed much shier and less polished and coordinated than her hyperactive, outgoing, and competitive brothers and sisters. Her soft-featured prettiness, seemingly happy disposition, and carefully disguised intellectual disabilities masked the seriousness of her condition. Rose made sure of that. In spite of Rosemary’s disabilities and the extra attention she required, Rose and Joe were determined that Rosemary be treated just like the other children. Expectations that she meet the social, academic, and physical demands placed before her as best she could became the hallmark of the Kennedy family’s determination to keep Rosemary from being viewed as “different.”

Once settled in Riverdale, though, it was quickly apparent that Riverdale Country School would not be the hoped-for fresh start for Rosemary. She struggled with the simplest of elementary studies while her younger sister and classmates were readily mastering reading, writing, and math. She had a tendency to write from right to left, rather than left to right—often called mirror writing—a clear indicator of developmental disorders. She struggled to shape her letters, and as she grew older she would fail to master writing in longhand. Her spelling was hit or miss. Sentences were often deficient and incomplete, and she could not write in a straight line unless using lined paper as a guide. A Riverdale classmate of Kick’s recalled that even though she’d been placed at
least two grades behind her age group at the school, “Rosemary just plugged along with the rest of us.”

Placement in the Riverdale classroom with younger children did not help, so Rose and Joe removed her from school. “Her lack of coordination was apparent and . . . she could not keep up with the work,” Rose recalled years later.
Rose organized scores of private lessons and tutors to work with Rosemary at home so that she could, they hoped, advance with her age group through school.

By the age of ten, Rosemary could not row a dinghy on the bay at the Kennedys’ new summer home, in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, acquired the year after they moved to Riverdale. She could not steer a sailboat in the many races in which her siblings competed at the same age. Though Rose spent hours playing tennis with Rosemary to help her sharpen her skills, she could not play with her physically more able siblings, even the younger ones. Years of dance lessons made little difference, and her poor coordination left her still “heavy on her feet.”
She could not cut meat on her dinner plate; her food was served to her already sliced.

Rosemary’s inability to decode the difference between left and right may have been a sign of dyslexia. This developmental disability may also explain her limited capacity to spell, to correctly form letters, and to master directions. These skills require levels of concentration and dexterity that were beyond her capabilities no matter how much tutoring she received. A diagnosis of dyslexia at that time was improbable. Treatment and educational resources that might have helped her cope with that particular disability were years away from being developed. Dyslexia, however, does not explain Rosemary’s other difficulties and limitations, indicating more severe but undiagnosed impairments and developmental problems. Rose took her to “experts in mental de
ficiency,” but their assessments and recommendations left Rose discouraged. The specialists told her that Rosemary had suffered from an unspecified “‘genetic accident,’ ‘uterine accident,’ ‘birth accident,’ and so forth.”

Some of Rosemary’s siblings believed that she also suffered from intermittent epileptic seizures. Eunice remembered sudden and hurried calls to the doctor, who would rush to the house and administer injections and medications to Rosemary. “I think she was partly epileptic as well as retarded,” Eunice recalled. “I can remember at the Cape the doctors coming in and giving her shots and then disappearing.” Whenever one of these episodes occurred, the children were whisked away to another room or sent outside to wait until the doctor left, and only then were allowed to resume their activities.
None of them dared ask what was wrong with Rosemary.

Gloria Swanson recalled Joe’s rage when she asked about Rosemary’s condition. Joe had met Swanson not long after the family’s move to Riverdale. At that time, she was one of the most famous movie stars in the world. Smart, ambitious, and hard-driving, Swanson had made some bad investment decisions and contractual commitments that threatened her financial solvency. Through mutual business associates, Kennedy was introduced to her as the man who could straighten out her disordered finances and take over the management of her production company. Joe’s experience with theaters, and now with FBO, enabled him to talk to Swanson with an expert’s understanding of the movie industry and a banker’s eye to financing and running a business profitably. They embarked on an illicit affair that lasted several years. Early in their liaison, Swanson overheard Joe talking on the phone with someone regarding the then ten-year-old Rosemary. He was “agitated” and annoyed with the person on the other end of the line.
Apparently, Joe was trying to get an unidentified doctor to treat Rosemary and “cure” her. He offered to purchase a new ambulance for the hospital if the doctor would take Rosemary as a patient. The telephone call ended abruptly. Swanson suggested that Joe bring Rosemary to meet with her personal physician in California, Dr. Henry G. Bieler.
Bieler advocated a therapeutic diet as an alternative to drug therapies to cure a variety of illnesses. Swanson, like many other Hollywood stars, had followed his regimen and believed he held the key to lasting good health and mental well-being.

“I had seen him [Joe] angry with other people, but now, for the first time, he directed his anger against me,” Swanson wrote in her autobiography. “It was frightening. His blue eyes turned to ice and then to steel. He said they had taken Rosemary to the best specialists in the East. He didn’t want to hear about some three-dollar doctor in Pasadena who recommended zucchini and string beans for everything.” Swanson persisted, encouraging him to consider Bieler. Joe reacted even more harshly: “I don’t want to hear about it! Do you understand me?
Do you understand me?
”
She knew never to ask Joe about Rosemary a second time, and Joe never mentioned her again, either. Later, Swanson approached Eddie Moore about the scene. He warned her that Rosemary was “a very sore subject with the boss.” Tapping the side of his head, he looked at Swanson and said of Rosemary, “She’s . . . not quite right.”

Educating Rosemary at home was not ideal. The lack of social interaction with other children outside of home denied her a typical childhood experience. Watching her siblings now go off to school every day was difficult for her. In spite of Rose and Joe’s efforts to treat her as if she were unimpaired, Rosemary had dif
ficulty understanding why she was treated differently than other children.

With Rosemary’s disabilities becoming more evident and the gap between her and other girls her age ever widening, Rose and Joe reconsidered advice to place their daughter in an institution.

During Rosemary’s childhood, the distinction between the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill was rarely made. Instead, according to psychological definitions of the day, “idiots” were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; “imbeciles” as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and “morons” as those with an eight- to twelve-year-old capacity.
These labels limited society’s understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities, and lacked nuanced interpretation of the causes and conditions of various disabilities, including the many types of simple and complex learning disorders. Within this limiting framework, mentally disabled and learning-disabled children and adults had few options and bleak prospects for education and for leading autonomous or semi-independent lives.

Many institutions, both private and public, became warehouses for the insane, the disabled, and the addicted. There were hundreds of state and private hospitals and homes for the mentally ill and the mentally and physically disabled across the country. Wealthier families, like the Kennedys, could afford private institutions, whereas those with fewer financial resources often turned to state-run or private charitable or church-owned facilities. Regardless of who ran these institutions, many of them were houses of horror. One former inmate of the Fernald School, a notorious Massachusetts state hospital, described the facility as “purgatory.”

Dark, dirty, and disease- and rodent-infested, many institutions for the insane and disabled provided little more than shelter and some food. Medical care was spotty; occupational therapy and educational and vocational training were nonexistent. Patients and residents would sometimes spend their days and nights caked in their own excrement. Orderlies, doctors, and guards sometimes raped women residents, while others were forced into prostitution businesses organized on institution grounds. The intellectually disabled were often housed side by side with the mentally ill, the suicidal, the alcoholic, the drug-addicted, and those adjudged “criminally insane.” Cries for attention or relief from suffering and pain usually went unanswered. Physical and emotional abuse were rampant, dehumanization and intimidation commonplace.

Rose’s consultations with a variety of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, academic specialists, and religious leaders took on a new urgency. None offered Rose what she thought was best for Rosemary, making her “terribly frustrated and heartbroken.”
Rose was accustomed to controlling her children’s social and intellectual lives, and she was determined that Rosemary would not be separated from the family. Joe Sr. believed, too, that keeping Rosemary at home or enrolled in nearby private schools provided her with more benefits than an institution for the mentally disabled would.

Both of them clearly understood that in the socially elite circles of Boston, New York, Europe, and elsewhere the pressure to institutionalize Rosemary, a choice many of their similarly situated wealthy counterparts made for their disabled children, would be great. Rose and Joe’s peers had been influenced by the powerful eugenics movement that swept Western societies during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eugenics was fueled by pseudoscientific claims that the human race con
sisted of “two classes, the eugenic and the cacogenic (or poorly born).” The cacogenic, eugenicists claimed, “inherited bad germ plasm, and thus as a group . . . at the very least, should not breed.”
African Americans, immigrants, the poor, and criminals were often deemed cacogenics; fears of the “immigrant hordes” streaming into American cities and the migration of African Americans out of the Deep South into northern and western cities led some native-born white Americans to embrace these beliefs.

The intellectually and physically disabled were another category of “defectives.” Eugenics scientists and their followers believed that these individuals were also the products of inherited bad genes and should be treated much the same way as the mentally ill, criminals, and the chronically poor. Forced sterilization, they argued, was society’s cure. Some believed that spending money on insane asylums, poorhouses, and other charitable and social institutions and programs serving the mentally ill and disabled only encouraged the propagation of “bad seeds.” The parents of “defectives” carried these bad genes—an idea that placed the blame and shame squarely on families. Some of the most prominent industrialists, scientists, and political leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including President Teddy Roosevelt, supported these views. Wealthy industrialists John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, John Kellogg, Mary Williamson Harriman, and early feminist Victoria Woodhull became advocates of eugenics, funding spurious research promoting racial and ethnic discrimination through false claims of genetic deviance in nonwhite and ethnic minorities.