The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [219]
Joe was possessive with his young mistress in a way he had never been about his wife. He wanted to know where she was and what she was doing and whom she was seeing. “One night I wasn’t home when he called,” Des Rosiers remembered. “And he said, ‘Where were you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I stopped off at the driving range to hit a few golf balls.’ He was mad. He didn’t like that at all. I think he was afraid maybe that I’d get attracted to somebody else or something, I don’t know. But he wanted me to work and go home, be there when he called me at night, and we’d speak for about an hour after being together all day.”
Joe was a man of terrible vulnerabilities that he would never admit to another man. But Des Rosiers would never seek to barter his words for advantage. “He confided to me about how he wanted to end his life,” Des Rosiers said. “He told me practically in tears that he never wanted to end up dependent on people to have to take care of him. He just wanted to die very quickly and quietly and get it over with. He didn’t want to have a stroke or something like that. And he said, ‘I don’t want to linger and be dependent.’
“Yet he wouldn’t give me any freedom. Once in Hyannis Port, Rose was not there, and I went to a party. And when I got back, I think it was maybe nine, ten o’clock, he was in bed and he was crying, and he said, ‘Why did you do that to me? Why did you do that to me?’ And he was so upset because I went to this party. He was dependent on me because he needed somebody around him. And in all my innocence and immaturity, I happened to fill the bill for him at the time. I was a very nice girl. And I wish I knew then what I know now in life.”
Des Rosiers asked for nothing from Joe, not jewels or furs, not secret accounts or promises, not a raise or a bonus, nothing, and Joe gave her precisely what she asked for. She identified with Joe and maneuvered comfortably around Rose, whose gift of seeing only what she wanted to see had reached such rarefied heights that she appeared oblivious to the fact that Joe’s mistress was in her own house. “Have a long, happy holiday, dear Janet, and be assured always of our affection and our deep gratitude,” Rose wrote Des Rosiers in June 1956 as the secretary headed off on her vacation. Rose kept to herself, going off each morning to mass, keeping little notices pinned on to her blouse to remind her of what she had to do.
In relentlessly social Palm Beach, Joe and Rose rarely went out and almost never entertained. Indeed, in an eight-year period, Des Rosiers remembers only one dinner party at the house, and that was for the duke and duchess of Windsor. In large part because Joe never went out in Palm Beach, a legend grew up that he and Rose had been socially ostracized, banned from the exclusive clubs. This was simply not the case. The Kennedys had been members of the restricted Everglades Club, though Joe rarely went there.
One summer Des Rosiers was riding with Joe in the chauffeured Rolls-Royce along the French Riviera for an afternoon of gambling. Joe leaned toward Des Rosiers and whispered, “You know, I would like to divorce Rose and marry you.” Des Rosiers reached over to hold Joe’s hand, but he pulled it back so the chauffeur would not see this mark of intimacy. Des Rosiers took this as a sign of Joe’s discretion, but if he could not even accept this gesture, he could hardly leave his wife of four decades. He spoke one other time of marriage, but it is unlikely that he was serious. He was a man who could place a value on anything, and he surely understood that there are few cheaper gifts than a promise you did not keep. He had not forgotten that years before he had made another promise to Rose, an arrangement that had allowed them together to build one of the great American families. A divorce would not only bring shame to his deeply religious wife but also might harm his sons’ brilliant futures. That he would not risk,