The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [66]
“I swear I don’t think he ever made love to a girl, told her how wonderful she was, how sweet she was,” reflected Rip Horton. “I just don’t think he ever did that. I don’t know but I don’t think so. I don’t think he was sentimental. I don’t think he was ever dependent on the companionship of a girl. He always felt they were a useful thing to have when you wanted them, but when you didn’t want them, put them back.”
Jack further enhanced his reputation as “Play-boy” Kennedy by chairing the Freshman Smoker Committee. Jack not only snared Gertrude Niesen, a stunning singing star, but also had the considerable audacity to think that the singer might put on two performances that evening in Cambridge, one before his classmates, and a second for him alone. He wanted to fly down to New York to escort her back to Boston but lost the coin toss to his classmate Hunt Hamill. Jack was there, however, at the airport to greet Niesen and, with his friends, spent several hours with her before the performance.
Joe Jr. had made a triumph of his own freshman smoker, and he considered Niesen his droit du seigneur. “Get lost, Baby Brother,” he told Jack abruptly. “I’ll take over.” That was a phrase that Jack had heard more than once, but after all, it was Miss Niesen’s choice. “I was very young,” she recalled decades later. “And it was very exciting, very flattering, very wonderful. Joe was a terribly good-looking guy. He was much better looking than Jack at that particular time. If I’d been a little older and really understood what was going on—”
Jack had a wondrously wry sense of humor. With women he could be playfully piquant and flirtatious but rarely crossed over the border into rudeness or vulgarity. His wit cascaded out of him. Niesen matched him rejoinder for rejoinder. Her performance that evening was a triumph for the singer herself, but equally so for Jack. “Gertrude Niesen was just enjoying the hell out of it, and Jack Kennedy was joking with her the whole time,” Rousmanière recalled. “Suffice it to say that Jack was not there at the end. Hunt Hamill was there at the end with Gertrude Niesen. But it was the culminating social event of the year, and Kennedy was the chairman of the committee. That was his first political success.”
In his sophomore year, Jack moved into a Winthrop House in which his brother was one of the leading figures. Like his father before him, Jack’s overwhelming concern that year was not his class work but his admission to a proper club. The clubs had stayed as they were since his father’s day, places where a gentleman ate and drank and socialized. Those with social aspirations still roundly desired membership. The clubmen were invited to all the fancy debutante events in Boston—dances at the Somerset, the Ritz, the Women’s Republican Club, and the Brookline Country Club.
Despite the unchanging rituals of the final clubs, life outside of them was moving away from the purview of the good gentlemen of the clubs. Jack’s profound identification with the club world, and his calculated and diligent quest for membership, set him far apart from an emerging new Harvard that sought to break down not only the walls within Harvard but also the walls that enclosed it.
Jack’s approach was not that much different from his father’s. He surrounded himself with a mix of the socially prominent leavened with star athletes. The blue-blooded Rousmanière was one of his close friends in Winthrop House. Jack had also befriended Torbert “Torby” Macdonald, a football star, who became his roommate their sophomore year. When the ten clubs started sending out their invitations to their socials, where the clubmen had an opportunity to assess possible new members, Jack and Torby were rarely asked. Half a century later Rousmanière could say simply: “I guess he [Macdonald] wanted to be part of it, but Torby would have been a hard sell,” leaving the implications unsaid.
Not only was Torby a Catholic, but his father was a high school