The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [61]
“Get out this room!” Joe Jr. shouted even before Reardon had the name “Fitzgerald” out of his mouth. As Reardon hurried out the door, Joe Jr. attempted to give him a last good-bye with a kick in the posterior.
Reardon was the son of a barrel-maker who had lost it all during the Depression. He made the daily jaunt to Harvard from his modest home in Somerville. The young man had everything Joe Jr. had except for money, panache, and boundless self-confidence. In the end he settled into a position of subservience. He played the archetypal role of a Kennedy “friend,” one not that much different from the relationship Joe’s father had during his Harvard days with Robert Fisher, or that between Jack and Lem Billings. “I always thought that Joe’s father was putting Ted Reardon through college, paying for him,” recalled Robert Purdy, one of their housemates. “Ted just waited on Joe like he was a valet. He took care of his car, took him home every night.”
Joe Jr. was good at everything, from catching a pass thirty yards down-field to waltzing a debutante across the dance floor, from debating the latest New Deal policy with assurance and knowledge to carousing over beers with rowdy friends down at the pub. He did not care about grubbing grades, but the implication was clear that Joe Jr. could have bested the greasy grinds if he had wanted to and had chosen to take time for such silliness.
Joe Jr. might have spent his weekends at deb parties and postdeb gatherings, squiring around the most eligible and beautiful young Catholic women. But the games that he enjoyed playing were not on those dance cards, however, and good Catholic that he was, Joe Jr. went elsewhere for his pleasures. When it came to women, he had the natural predatory instincts of his father but the good sense to play his games of momentary romance primarily among women who had played before: actresses, showgirls, and cafe society women of certain means and uncertain morals.
Often Joe Jr. left Cambridge on Friday to spend his weekends in New York. When he returned, he had stories to tell of a sophisticated world that would have spurned most of his college mates. To him, women were short-term lovers, not long-term friends. They were perfumed beings put on earth for the pleasure of men like him.
Joe Jr. treated romance as a game that had few limits. Not until Robert Purdy married his college sweetheart did he learn that his friend had made an unsuccessful pass at his fiancée. “My impression of Joe was that he would never date the same girl twice,” recalled Purdy. “He was rough on girls, I gather. He was not apparently the kind of guy that nice girls liked to date.”
Joe Jr. had his claque of admirers. During freshman year he chaired the committee for the annual “smoker” and became a minor college legend by obtaining the services of the famous Rudy Vallee and his orchestra. He served on the student council and the Winthrop House Committee, including the chairmanship his senior year. He was a member of Hasty Pudding and Pi Eta but did not make one of the exclusive final clubs. This did not appear to rankle him in the least. He was a proud Catholic American, a member of the St. Paul Catholic Club. He espoused a passionate but manly Catholicism in which he prayed on his knees but winked at the sins of the flesh and of human corruption.
In the years since his father’s graduation, Harvard had attempted to democratize itself in part by forcing freshmen to live in the Harvard Yard dormitories and then creating seven houses for upper-class students. One of them, Winthrop House, was a sprawling red-brick structure by the Charles River. The resident tutors included such young instructors as B. F. Skinner, who would become the father of behavioral science, and John Kenneth