As a girl, what Rose prays for most ardently is handsome, charismatic Joseph Patrick Kennedy. She first set eyes on him at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where Boston’s wealthy “lace curtain Irish” spent their summers.
She was six and he was eight.
They start dating when she is sixteen, perhaps the happiest year of Rose’s life. “I wish I was sixteen” again, she declares on her one hundredth birthday.
But although Rose invites Joe to a graduation dance at Dorchester High, theirs is a forbidden courtship. Her father, Honey Fitz, detests the mediocre—in academics and athletics—member of the Harvard class of 1912, and he bans Joe from his house.
“My father didn’t think I should marry the first man who asked me, and still I was very much in love, and I still didn’t want to offend my parents—so we used to have these rendezvous,” Rose recalls in the BBC documentary Rose Kennedy Remembers.
Rose will have to part temporarily from Joe, however, and for an important reason. She’s been accepted by Wellesley College, the prestigious liberal arts school less than twenty miles from her home in the Boston suburb of Dorchester.
She’ll miss Joe of course, but this will be her first adventure all her own. She plans to learn French and German, get her degree in music, and become a teacher.
The evening before she’s set to leave for Wellesley, Honey Fitz sits his seventeen-year-old daughter down and tells her to unpack. She won’t be going. He and her mother, Josie, have decided that Rose is too young.
It’s a selfish lie.
The mayor wants to save his own political skin. In the midst of a challenging reelection campaign, the local bishop has warned Honey Fitz that his daughter’s attendance at a “modernist” secular college might cost him the Catholic vote.
Honey Fitz nevertheless loses the 1908 election and breaks his daughter’s trust in him.
“There was screaming and yelling and absolute madness,” Rose recalls to her niece, the writer Kerry McCarthy. “I was furious at my parents for years. I was angry at my church. As much as I loved my father, I never really forgave him for not letting me go.”
Instead she enrolls in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston but refuses to stop seeing Joe.
Honey Fitz takes drastic measures. He sends Rose and her sister Agnes to a Sacred Heart convent in the Netherlands for the next school year.
But when the homesick sisters return to Boston, Rose secretly starts seeing Joe again.
When they go ice skating, she wears a veil to hide her face. She’ll allow other men to sign her dance card, but as soon as she is out of her mother’s chaperoning sight, Rose partners with Joe. When he invites Rose to his 1911 Harvard junior prom, the Fitzgerald family once again collapses into turmoil.
Honey Fitz may be serving his second term as mayor of Boston, but his daughter is a citizen lost. He reluctantly gives Rose permission to marry Joe.
On October 7, 1914, after seven years of clandestine courtship, Rose, then twenty-four, and Joe, twenty-six, have their wedding day in the private chapel adjoining the home of Cardinal O’Connell, who officiates the modest ceremony.
Dressed in tails and a top hat, the ambitious young bank president looks the perfect groom. But as a husband, Joe will fall woefully short.
Rose’s expectations of marriage are quickly dashed, especially in terms of sex.
“Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong. It was not part of our contract at the altar,” Joe tells her. “And if you don’t open your mind to this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”
Rose remains a dutiful wife. In the Brookline house on Beals Street, Joe Jr. is born in 1915, followed by Jack in 1917. Obstetrician Dr. Frederick L. Good delivers the eldest Kennedy sons, as he will all nine children in the family.
But the birth of their third child goes terribly wrong.
It’s September 13, 1918. World War I rages on, and so does a pandemic of Spanish influenza, infecting approximately five hundred million people, and killing fifty million worldwide, including six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans. Nearly seven thousand Bostonians have already died. To prevent further contamination, movie houses, churches, and other public gathering places are closed.
Rose goes into labor at home, as planned. But Dr. Good is detained. All physicians have been pressed into service to treat the sick and dying.
As biographer Kate Clifford Larson recounts, Rose was willing to wait, but the baby is not.