The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [63]
Outside of his father’s purview, Jack had a little adventure on the crossing that would have appalled Joe. “I have had a very strange experience,” he wrote Lem. “There is a fat Frenchie aboard who is a ‘homo.’ He has had me to his cabin more than once and is trying to bed me.” Strangest of all was that Jack was intrigued enough by the man’s entreaties that he ventured back to his cabin. There was a preening, narcissistic quality in young Jack, and he clearly found it flattering that a man would be so attracted to him.
Jack had hardly arrived at Claridge’s in London when he was stricken again with some mysterious malady and sent off to a hospital for tests. He wanted Lem to know that Jack Kennedy was not some self-pitying wretch, but an adventurer of such daring that he could turn even a hospital bed into a playground for his manhood. Only Jack would think of naming his penis “JJ Maher,” after his much-hated nemesis at Choate. “Today was most embarrassing as one doctor came in just after I had woken up and was reclining with a semi on due to the cold weather. His plan was to stick his finger under my pickle and have me cough. His plan was quickly changed however when he drew back the covers and there was ‘J J Maher’ quivering with life. As the nurses were 3 deep around the bed, I was rather nonplussed for a time.”
Jack’s visitors included “a very good looking blond whom Dad seems to know, about 24 who is a divorcee…. She is going to St. Moritz with me at Christmas but I have not as yet laid her.” Once again Jack’s room stirred with sex, not sickness, the borderline between fantasy and reality perhaps not even visible to Jack. There were the nurses, always the nurses, “very sexy and the night nurse is continually trying to goose me so I have always to be on my guard.”
Jack knew that not only Lem but also Rip and their friends would read his letters. There was nothing of the antiseptic smell of a hospital on these pages, nothing of fear, nothing of prayers or bewilderment, nothing of the sheer unfairness of his plight. His friends would laugh about Jack and “J J Maher” and wish him back among them, when life would be just a little more brilliant.
His friends got their wish, for Jack’s father decided that his son would be better back in the States studying at Princeton. Lem and Rip shared their modest fifth-floor quarters with their former Choate classmate. As Jack lumbered up those stairs, he had a strange patina to him. Bud Wynne, a friend, remembered him “turning yellow, a yellowish-brown tan, almost as if he had been sunbathing.” He was hardly at Princeton for six weeks before he left, victim of this undiagnosed, mysterious illness. To the doctors who examined him, he had become, in that most ominous of phrases, an “interesting case.”
After the new year of 1936, Jack was back in the familiar surroundings of a hospital room at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. From his bed, Jack wrote jumbled, scribbled missives to his friend Lem. Once again it was suspected that he had leukemia. By now his friend was used to the blend of scatology, sexual boasts, medical descriptions, and putdowns in Jack’s letters, but there was a fever pitch of intensity to them now, the sexual imagery even uglier, the assaults on poor Lem more merciless, the sexual boasts larger.
Jack’s penis was his nasty, irreverent friend, always ready to perk up at the most morbid of moments. He had scarcely arrived at the hospital when he suffered what he called “the most harrowing experience of my storm-tossed career.” The doctors