The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (19 page)

As a young man, Jack wanted an audience for his sexuality. He was at his most aggressive when there were other men around whom he wanted to impress even more than he did the woman of the moment. She was interchangeable; they were not.

These letters then should be read in part as Jack’s vision of what he could be or would be. He created a Don Juan image of himself long before he became one in reality. In sexual conquests, there are few things as helpful as a bad reputation, and in the end Jack became the sexual being he thought he wanted to be.

Jack was “getting rather fed up with the meat here, if you know what I mean,” he wrote Lem, though he knew his friend didn’t know. “They haven’t found anything as yet except that I have
leukemia
and agranulocytosis. Took a peak
[sic]
at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.”

But two sentences were quite enough on the dark subject of a disease that probably meant his death. “Eat drink and make [out], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral,” he continued. “I think the Rockefeller Institute may take my case. Flash! Got the hottest neck ever out of Hansen Saturday night. She is pretty good so am looking forward to bigger and better ones.”

The doctors tinkered away a few more weeks after they decided that Jack did not have leukemia. Many patients would have been infuriated that the doctors could make such a mistake, but for Jack it was just another pratfall visited upon him by men in white. Finally, after almost two months, he left the hospital at the end of February 1936 knowing as little about his malady as when he arrived. At least he was free to sun himself in Palm Beach and then to spend a few weeks at the Jay Six Cattle Ranch in Benson, Arizona. While there he applied for admission as a transfer student to Harvard College. He gave his father’s birthplace as Winthrop, a more socially acceptable address than the déclassé East Boston where he was in fact born.

Jack preened in the sun and the desert air. His narcissism grew out of not only his immense vanity but also a natural obsession with his star-crossed health. “If you could see what a thing of beauty my body has become with the open air, riding horses and Mexicans, you would stuff such adjectives as unattractive when you are speaking of my body right where they belong,” he wrote Lem from Arizona. He seemed to be flirting with his friend, taunting him with his alluring physicality. And yet there was a hint of self-mockery in his narcissism, for as much as Jack bragged about his beautiful body, something always went wrong. “I woke with a hacking cough,” he noted in another letter. “It will be the fucking last straw if I come down with TB in addition to a good load of clap in this my health cure.” That latter disease was a decided possibility, for he claimed he had ventured south of the border in search of his
favorite pleasure. “I ended up in this 2-bit hoar-house
[sic]
and they say that one guy in 5 years has gotten away
without
just the biggest juiciest load of claps … so boys your roomie is carrying on … upholding the motto of ‘always get your piece of arse in the most unhealthy place that can be found.’ “

I
n the fall of 1936, Jack joined Joe Jr. at Harvard, where his father had thought he belonged in the first place. That he was willing to transfer suggested that Jack was moving closer to accepting the family destiny that his father had laid out for him. Joe Jr. was a young man of rare popularity, a football player and an exemplary Harvard man, and at first Jack had to nestle into what was his brother’s world.

“Dr. Wild, I want you to know I’m not bright like my brother Joe,” he told Payson S. Wild, an assistant professor of government and the acting master of Winthrop House. Jack placed his feet in his brother’s large footsteps, even sleeping often on a couch in Joe Jr.’s suite at Winthrop House. If Jack had been too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Choate, then he was too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Harvard. He was a Kennedy, though, and he had to play football. He had gained weight, but even at 160 pounds on his tall, still-weakened frame, he remained a gnat that runners swatted away as they dashed down the field. He was quickly demoted to the freshman “B” team, which was beaten by the likes of a prep school such as Exeter.

Jack found a different and more familiar way to stand out among his football teammates. He invited five of them down to Hyannis Port, enticing them with the prospect of dates that his father’s aide, Eddie Moore, had set up for them. “Four of us had dates and one guy got fucked 3 times, another guy 3 times (the girl a virgin!) + myself twice,” Jack wrote Lem. The former virgin had the considerable audacity to write her date “a very sickening letter letting [him know] how much she loved him etc + as he didn’t use a safer he is very worried. One guy is up at the doctor’s seeing if he has a dose + and I feel none too secure myself. We are going down next week for a return performance, I think.”

Few Harvard freshmen could provide such splendid weekends for their classmates, and they doubtless spread tales of their wonderful new friend, a swordsman who understood the true meaning of hospitality. When the coaches heard about the famous weekend in Hyannis Port, Jack found himself not only berated but also demoted even further to the third team. He might not ever win his crimson “H,” but there were other kinds of honors. “I am now known as ‘Play-boy,’ “he wrote Lem. It was a label that would stick with him the rest of his life.

“I swear I don’t think he ever made love to a girl, told her how wonderful she was, how sweet she was,” reflected Rip Horton. “I just don’t think he ever did that. I don’t know but I don’t think so. I don’t think he was sentimental. I don’t think he was ever dependent on the companionship of a girl. He always felt they were a useful thing to have when you wanted them, but when you didn’t want them, put them back.”

Jack further enhanced his reputation as “Play-boy” Kennedy by chairing the Freshman Smoker Committee. Jack not only snared Gertrude Niesen, a stunning singing star, but also had the considerable audacity to think that the singer might put on two performances that evening in Cambridge, one before his classmates, and a second for him alone. He wanted to fly down to New York to escort her back to Boston but lost the coin toss to his classmate Hunt Hamill. Jack was there, however, at the airport to greet Niesen and, with his friends, spent several hours with her before the performance.

Joe Jr. had made a triumph of his own freshman smoker, and he considered Niesen his droit du seigneur. “Get lost, Baby Brother,” he told Jack abruptly. “I’ll take over.” That was a phrase that Jack had heard more than once, but after all, it was Miss Niesen’s choice. “I was very young,” she recalled decades later. “And it was very exciting, very flattering, very wonderful. Joe was a
terribly
good-looking guy. He was much better looking than Jack at that particular time. If I’d been a little older and really understood what was going on—”

Jack had a wondrously wry sense of humor. With women he could be playfully piquant and flirtatious but rarely crossed over the border into rudeness or vulgarity. His wit cascaded out of him. Niesen matched him rejoinder for rejoinder. Her performance that evening was a triumph for the singer herself, but equally so for Jack. “Gertrude Niesen was just enjoying the hell out of it, and Jack Kennedy was joking with her the whole time,” Rousmanière recalled. “Suffice it to say that Jack was not there at the end. Hunt Hamill was there at the end with Gertrude Niesen. But it was the culminating social event of the year, and Kennedy was the chairman of the committee. That was his first political success.”

In his sophomore year, Jack moved into a Winthrop House in which his brother was one of the leading figures. Like his father before him, Jack’s overwhelming concern that year was not his class work but his admission to a proper club. The clubs had stayed as they were since his father’s day, places where a gentleman ate and drank and socialized. Those with social aspirations still roundly desired membership. The clubmen were invited to all the fancy debutante events in Boston—dances at the Somerset, the Ritz, the Women’s Republican Club, and the Brookline Country Club.

Despite the unchanging rituals of the final clubs, life outside of them was
moving away from the purview of the good gentlemen of the clubs. Jack’s profound identification with the club world, and his calculated and diligent quest for membership, set him far apart from an emerging new Harvard that sought to break down not only the walls within Harvard but also the walls that enclosed it.

Jack’s approach was not that much different from his father’s. He surrounded himself with a mix of the socially prominent leavened with star athletes. The blue-blooded Rousmanière was one of his close friends in Winthrop House. Jack had also befriended Torbert “Torby” Macdonald, a football star, who became his roommate their sophomore year. When the ten clubs started sending out their invitations to their socials, where the clubmen had an opportunity to assess possible new members, Jack and Torby were rarely asked. Half a century later Rousmanière could say simply: “I guess he [Macdonald] wanted to be part of it, but Torby would have been a hard sell,” leaving the implications unsaid.

Not only was Torby a Catholic, but his father was a high school football coach. As the clubmen saw it, Jack was a hard sell too, with his ethnic background, his dubious faith, his questionable father, and the fact that not all playboys were gentlemen. In his favor were his wit and charm. He was a devotee of New York clubs and the high life, and undeniably wealthy. In sum, he was a plausible candidate, but just barely. Rousmanière and two of his eminently acceptable friends, Peter E. Pratt and William C. Coleman Jr., agreed that they would go together with Jack as a package. “It was obvious that only a couple of clubs were going to accept Jack Kennedy,” Rousmanière recalled. “And we, the three of us, said okay, we’ll play it out. In the end the Spee Club became the one place that seemed to be acceptable. So that’s what happened.”

Jack was a clubman of the first order, spending most of his free time at the handsome ivy-covered building at 76 Mount Auburn Street and taking most of his meals there. There was no one-way mirror at Spee, as there was at the Porcellian, from which the clubmen could stare unwatched at the outside world, but Jack and his friends looked on from afar at much of the Harvard world. The intellectual climate of Harvard in the thirties had been immensely broadened since Joe’s days, both by the greater diversity of the students and faculty and by the dangerous world that lay outside the open gates of the college. Of course, there were still such undergraduate endeavors goldfish gulping, reported on the front page of the
Harvard Crimson,
or a kissing contest, but these activities were nothing but the spring silliness of any college generation. The students were at times confronted with a diversity of ideas as wide as that in the outer world. The faculty included Granville Hicks, a 1923 graduate and a Communist, as well as Earnest A. Hooton, an anthropology
professor and eugenicist who believed that robbers could be discerned by such distinctive marks as “attached ear lobes, heavy beards, and diffused pigment in the iris.” New Dealers shuttled down to Washington, trading in their professional gowns for the mantles of power. In Cambridge, students and faculty alike debated Roosevelt’s reforms. A few Communist undergraduates met regularly, while on the right-wing extreme a group calling itself Yankee-American Action held discussions at the university.

At Winthrop House, Galbraith was intensely interested in the debates of his time and surrounded himself with students of like mind. The young professor made a quick judgment that Jack was not serious, but an amusing dilettante, whose main elective was the opposite sex. Though it might have been pleasurable being around Jack, pleasure was a dangerous business for an ambitious young scholar, hardly a commodity of value in his academic world. “One did not cultivate such students,” Galbraith reflected.

Even some of Jack’s fellow students kept a wary distance from him, lest they too suffer some dreary consequence. One of them, Blair Clark, watched in appalled fascination as Jack hustled waitresses from Dorchester in and out of Winthrop House. Clark was convinced that sooner or later Jack would find himself expelled.

“Jack devoted himself to personal enjoyment, social matters, but Joe Jr. sought out members of the faculty, sought me out, particularly perhaps, and was enormously interested in world affairs, much more so than Jack,” Galbraith recalled. “Jack had a social agenda to pursue. Joe Jr. had a much stronger scholarly bent.”

Joe Jr. may have impressed his professors with his high seriousness, but he was hardly the kind of student to bury himself in the bowels of Widener Library. Even Jack was impressed with his brother, the swordsman. “Did you see about Joe in Winchell’s column—Quote—‘Boston Romance—J. P. Kennedy Jr., The Wall Street’s lad, and Helen Buck of the Boston Back-Bay bunch, are keeping warm,’” Jack wrote Lem. “Fucking gold-fish is the way I would describe it.”

For Joe Jr., a football weekend was exactly that, and after the Harvard-Princeton game he and his friend Tom Bilodeau jumped the team train in New York and headed out for an evening in the most elegant boîte of the city. Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the Stork Club, practically invented cafe society, that spirited mix of the wealthy amiables of both sexes, stunning young women, stars, politicians, and the transitory celebrities of the gossip columns. To gauge one’s place in this new society, all a person had to do was show up at the Stork Club without a reservation.

Joe Jr. did not have to wait behind the velvet rope but was immediately shown to a good table. As he scanned the room, his eyes tended to focus on
the most beautiful women in the club. There at a ringside table sat a gorgeous young woman, and next to her none other than John F. Kennedy. Joe Jr. thought of the Stork Club as his club, and he was hardly amused that his brother should have usurped what he considered rightfully his. Joe Jr. went immediately to a pay phone and paged Jack. As Jack threaded his way back through the tables to take the call, his brother hurried to ringside and, with a dialogue as original as it was duplicitous, talked the young woman into leaving with the two Harvard football players before Jack returned. Later that evening, when the two young men arrived at the Bronxville house after escorting the woman to her apartment, Jack was already there, angry enough to want to fight his big brother.