The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [218]
Joe had met Des Rosiers back in the fall of 1948 in his suite at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Boston, where she interviewed to be his new secretary. By
the time Des Rosiers walked into the living room, Joe had already talked to at least forty candidates. Twenty-four-year-old Des Rosiers had a sweet sensuality, a gentle demeanor, modest downcast eyes, brown hair, and a soft voice that one had to strain to hear. Joe told her later that as soon as he saw her he decided to forget the other candidates.
For Des Rosiers, it was no small commitment to take on this job at a salary far from munificent. She was a single woman. Her father had died when she was only twelve, taking away most of her childhood with him. From then on, she had learned to live as an adult, helping to take care of her four younger brothers and sisters. She had worked at various secretarial jobs, but she had never had much time to date or hang out with a gang of young friends. Now she was expected to move down to a small apartment in Hyannis Port that Joe provided for her. In the winter she would have a cottage in West Palm Beach. It would be even harder to develop a life apart from her work.
Each morning at precisely nine o’clock, Des Rosiers had to be at the Kennedy house in Hyannis Port when Joe had finished his horseback ride and breakfast. He walked into the living room wearing a stylish lounge suit, sat down in a large chintz chair, and began to answer letters, dictate, and talk for lengthy periods on the phone. Since Kathleen’s death, he had backed off from many of his business activities and was semiretired.
Joe called his new secretary in the evenings and began to make gentle overtures. Des Rosiers did not think that there was anything crudely predatory in a sixty-year-old man propositioning an employee less than half his age. Joe was elegantly appointed, with manners as impeccable as his dress. He was strong and well built and youthful. He was not suggestive or vulgar. He was an astute student of human beings and all their vulnerabilities and he sang a gentle song of wooing.
“He’d say, ‘Well, you know, we’ve got our house in West Palm Beach,’” Des Rosiers recalled. “Because I had the house that every other secretary rented. It was just a little cute cottage in West Palm Beach. And he started calling it ‘our house.’ Well, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to understand what he has in mind. Little innuendos like that went on the first two months. I didn’t see that much of him. And then I went to Florida in December, and that’s when it started. He was marvelous, you know. It would be very difficult for any woman to not succumb to his charm. He had a lot of charisma. But it was a shock to me because I was young and I didn’t take that job with this in mind. My God, you can imagine. It’s hard to fight off a man of his authority and experience and his ability, so I was gone right from the beginning.”
Des Rosiers’s account of her first evening with Joe in West Palm Beach three months after meeting him has an eerie similarity to Gloria Swanson’s account of her initial sexual encounter with Joe. Gloria recalled that Joe had come rushing into her suite, practically tore her clothes off, and “kept insisting in a drawn-out moan, ‘No longer, no longer, now.’ He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free.” Des Rosiers recalled that Joe had come rushing into her little house one evening