The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [171]
Bobby went to Billy’s grave and what struck him was how routine the death was to the villagers. “They went through all the motions of how Billy was killed and how he fell, etc., which was a little much for me,” he noted in his diary. “The farmhouse he was killed attacking and into which he threw his grenade now houses a couple of little children and parents with the man having difficulty keeping his pants up. The people all tell their stories of the war as if they just came out of a wild western movie.”
When Bobby reached London, he stayed in Kathleen’s townhouse. One evening he went to see The Chiltern Hundreds, a play by William Douglas-Home. The playwright, who had been in love with Kathleen before the war, had re-created her on stage as a central character of the play. Bobby’s beloved sister was resurrected as an exquisite, ethereal character walking across the stage of the Vaudeville Theater. The actress playing Kathleen had soft, vaguely aristocratic features and was beautiful in the way that Kathleen was only in the memory of her friends.
Bobby met Joan Winmill, the twenty-one-year-old actress playing his sister, and fell in love. His father and brothers had all had flings with actresses; to them, the very word “actress” had a vaguely erotic connotation and was the preferred category for casual dalliances. Joan belied all that. She took the moral mandates of the Church of England as seriously as Bobby took those of the Church of Rome. Her mother had died in childbirth, and she had been brought up largely by relatives. She had a trusting innocence and was a woman of the strongest character. She was as taken with this idealistic young American as he was with her.
For the next weeks, Bobby met Joan every evening after the play for dinner, finishing the evening in his late sister’s house. Joan did not see Bobby as a shy, socially inept young man, but as a dashing American with a “freckled face and white, toothy grin.” For Bobby, this romance was as great an adventure as any of his escapades in Palestine or Berlin, and as healthy a tonic to his sense of well-being. No woman had ever had such an exalted conception of him. No woman had ever listened to his dreams, not as unlikely reveries, but as the road map of his tomorrows. “He talked about wanting to do good things for his country,” Joan Winmill recalled. “He wasn’t more specific about that, but that’s what he wanted to do.”
As soon as Joe heard about the romance, he sent up every distress signal. He had lost one daughter to England; he was not about to lose a son. When Bobby’s father heard the word “actress,” he thought of Gloria Swanson and the romantic misery of that misbegotten affair. Beyond that, Bobby was unlike Jack, who moved from woman to woman so rapidly that Joe rarely had time to worry about whether one momentary alliance was appropriate or not. Bobby was serious about this woman and Bobby was a young man who used language as a tool of his truth. Bobby dismissed his father’s concern with a chuckle to Joan, but he could hardly remove Joe’s grasp on his life. “He was so controlled by his father,” Winmill reflected. “He was clearly in the shadows of his brothers, and his father dominated much of his life.”
Bobby’s other problem was more immediate, and that was his relationship with Ethel Skakel. His sister Jean had introduced him to Ethel during the winter of 1945/46 on a ski trip to Canada, but he had been less impressed with the skittery, intense Ethel than with Pat Skakel, her earnest, serious, older sister.
Both young women were students at exclusive Manhattanville College in upper Manhattan. There they were taught by the nuns of the Sacred Heart that educated Catholic women should not only be good wives and good mothers but also do good work in the world. Both women were deeply religious, Ethel so much so that she at one time contemplated becoming a nun. Pat became president of the student body and after graduation worked