The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [55]
Jack was getting over his shyness toward the opposite sex and slowly developing a lustful, cynical self-assurance. To Jack and many of his classmates, one of the major allures of attending Choate was the inspired presence of the wife of one of the masters. “Queenie,” as she was known by the boys, was a voluptuous young woman, and perfectly aware of the dry-mouthed attention she received when she strolled into the dining hall. The highest honor that several of the boys dreamed of was not the Choate Prize that Joe Jr. had just won but the bedding of Queenie, a fantasy so unthinkable, so daring, so impossibly sweet that it could scarcely be whispered about.
One of Jack’s classmates, Larry Baker, has the distinct recollection that Jack bragged that he had that honor. That claim was doubtless one of Jack’s first forays into fiction, for what rankled him, as it did several others, was that often Queenie invited Maurice Shea, the Choate quarterback, to her house for tea. Jack was so irritated by the sheer unfairness of this that he turned to a song he had written:
Maury Shea, Maury Shea
Drinking tea every day
Maury Shea, what’s your appeal?
Queenie, we want a new deal.
Queenie had never had a song written to her before, at least not by one of her husband’s students, and one day she asked Jack and his friends to sing it to her. “We damn near died,” Horton recalled. “Why we weren’t thrown out of school, I’ll never know.”
During spring break of his junior year Jack and a group of students drove down to Palm Beach in three cars. The youths roared southward, the cars playing tag with each other, roaring along the macadam at seventy miles an hour. In North Carolina they were stopped for speeding. Jack pleaded poverty to the small-town judge, displaying his empty pockets. The magistrate cut their fines, and off they roared again. Jack and his friends did not suffer the mild discomfort of stopping at anonymous motels. They lived in their private world of privilege. They knew people all along the route, and they stopped at several estates.
At Sea Island a tollbooth blocked their way. One of the boys picked up a fire ax that happened to be lying there, and they roared past, waving the ax at the tollbooth keeper. Later in the day the young men drove Larry Baker’s new Model A convertible into the ocean, a mild diversion that upset only the car’s owner. Larry already had one souvenir from his friendship with Jack—a dark front tooth that had been deadened when Jack shoved him against the stucco wall of their house at Choate.
In Palm Beach, after a meal at the Kennedy home, Jack insisted that the group make a visit to the Cuban Tearoom, a brothel in West Palm Beach. Larry waited in the car while the others went inside. “They made fun of me,” Baker recalls. “The kids went deep-sea fishing the next day. They teased me because I hadn’t gone to the brothel, and decided to make me seasick.”
Baker was far from the only detractor among Jack’s classmates. One of his former friends accused Jack of telling the dean that he, the friend, and another student had a motorbike hidden in the countryside, a motorbike that Jack had ridden. Others felt that Jack was nothing but a spoiled snob, tooling off to Miss Porter’s School to pick up his date in his father’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and limiting his friendships to those of social or athletic status.
For Jack, the illnesses continued. Over Christmas 1933, he had another relapse. His condition was now so “interesting” that it merited a discussion before the American Medical Association. After his recovery, Joe wrote Joe Jr.: “It is only one of the few recoveries of a condition bordering on leuchemia [sic], and it was the general impression of the doctors that his chances were about five out of one hundred that he ever could have lived.” If the youth’s father wrote his eldest son such a terrifying letter, surely Jack knew his prognosis as well. He could hardly help knowing, for when it was thought that he had leukemia and would die, back at Choate