CURSED OR UNLUCKY? exploring the misfortunes of America’s Kennedy family

★ ★★★★★★★

Is the Kennedy family unlucky or cursed? Neither, says author James Patterson, whose new book unlocks the truth. In a revealing interview he tells Juliet Rieden the answer is much closer to home.

There’s something celestial about the Kennedy family. They are America’s royalty, a clan of seductive, beautiful people whose impeccably styled technicolour daily lives are shrouded in myth, rumour and simultaneous deification and condemnation. The most tumultuous moments in the family’s life changed the course of history, while the seeming bad luck – which began 105 years before John F. Kennedy’s assassination when his great-grandfather was felled by cholera, age 35, and continues to this day with his grand-niece and her eight-year-old son tragically losing their lives in a canoeing accident only three months ago – has been mythologised into a curse.

It’s no wonder then that thriller writer James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors of all time, decided to examine the rise and fall of the dynasty in his new book, The Kennedy Curse. Patterson mostly writes fiction and has transferred those skills to this non-fiction pageturner which boasts the pace and lustre of a gripping epic. “I have written it with a novelist’s tone: it’s just story after story after story, there’s drama to it,” he opines.

Before reading the book, I thought there was nothing more to be said about the Kennedys – no stone unturned, no conspiracy theory untapped – but the intimate detail Patterson reveals revives the family for a new generation to pore over. “It’s just an unbelievable tale. I thought that nobody had told the whole family’s story,” he explains.

We are talking on the phone. James Patterson is “staring at the ocean”, he tells me and working up a storm while in COVID-19 lockdown in his home in Palm Beach, Florida. He’s rightly chuffed with the book and feels it has all the makings of Netflix hit The Crown and is already working on a screen adaptation. “It’s the American Crown. The Kennedys are a lot more interesting than Elizabeth [Princess, then Queen Elizabeth II] was – in my opinion – and as well as their story, you are also telling the story of that era. There’s so much in my book that people didn’t know,” he continues. “What’s more, there are a lot of people under 40, under 30, under 20, who don’t know the story at all.”

He’s right. The Jack and Jackie story happened a half a century ago and is ripe for revisiting while the wider family is still evolving. Patterson’s prologue sets an extraordinary scene that is certainly new and, he suggests, can easily be imagined as a movie opener.

A frail old man wakes up screaming in the middle of the night and his niece Anna grabs the nearest cover, which she places over him. It’s Joseph (Joe) Kennedy Snr, President John F. (known as Jack) Kennedy’s father. “Joe has had a stroke,” explains Patterson. “He has been convalescing at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, too ill to attend his son’s funeral.” After that iconic state occasion when the whole world mourned, a distraught Jackie Kennedy comes to see her father-in-law, kisses him goodbye and leaves the flag that was draped on Jack’s coffin near

Joe Snr’s bed. She wants him to have it.

“Joe can’t communicate beyond moaning words and he’s freezing cold. Finally, Anna comes in and is rummaging around in the bedroom and covers him with this flag ... to me it’s just such a telegraphic scene,” says Patterson. “Trapped inside his early paralysed body, he struggles to pull himself free from the flag,” he writes.

Sense of doom

At the heart of Patterson’s interpretation of the Kennedy journey is the familiar concept of a doomed dynasty with a dark curse that has forever hung over its offspring. Four of Joe Snr’s nine children died too soon, while daughter Rosemary’s life was devastated by a botched lobotomy. Jack and Jackie’s only son, John Jnr, was killed with his wife in a plane crash in 1999, two of Jack’s assassinated brother Robert’s sons also died young and the tragedies continue to this day striking down through the far-reaching tentacles of the family. “The Kennedy curse is an idea that endures,” Patterson concurs. But for him it’s not really true; at least not in the sense that continues to feed newspapers headlines.

“One way of looking at this ‘curse’ is that yes, there are all these tragedies. But the other way – which is how I look at it – is that Joe Kennedy Snr unwittingly put the curse on the family. He stressed that his children and grandchildren had to overachieve. You had to be superior, you had to push, push, push. And the other piece in the puzzle is that he always encouraged his kids to take risks. ‘Go climb that tree. If you fall and break your arm, climb it again.’ And that risk-taking, it’s all through the story of Kennedys, including with sons Joe and Jack who both took tremendous risks in the war. It was built into them.”

Joe Snr’s eldest son, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jnr, who Patterson says the patriarch called “the star of the family ... the slender, handsome, athletic, blue-eyed Harvard student” was a pilot in World War II and in 1944 sought out a special assignment “requiring what his brother Jack would later describe as ‘the most dangerous type of flying’.” Joe was admired by his fellow airmen for his unparalleled zeal to undertake daring missions and was killed in 1944 when his plane exploded mid-air. His death meant the focus for Joe Snr’s political ambition to have a Kennedy in the White House now fell on Jack.

“I think the extent of the father, Joe Snr’s influence is [marked]. I don’t think he meant to damage the kids, but oh how much it did damage them. That whole thing about you must be better than you can be, and that’s the only thing that matters ... That’s tough. And then, take the risk. Do it! It’s interesting that a couple of the family members seem to have escaped it. Caroline [Jack and Jackie’s daughter] has lived a somewhat normal life. But for pretty much all of the immediate family, ‘the Kennedy curse’ affected all of them.”

The dream

The Kennedy dream was the vision of Joseph Kennedy Sr, whose grandfather arrived on one of the so-called ‘coffin ships’. Patterson describes them as “overcrowded, disease-riddled, barely seaworthy sailing vessels” that transported millions of impoverished Irish fleeing the potato famine to a hope-filled new life in the US.

Thirty per cent died en route.

Patrick Joseph Kennedy was 27 when he arrived in Boston and died at 35, but the Kennedys were on their way. “On a state visit to Ireland in 1963, President Kennedy states: ‘When my greatgrandfather left here to become a cooper [a maker of beer casks] in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”

Joe and Rose Kennedy created “the century’s most historic family”, with Rose bearing nine children. And while she was having his children, Joe was pursuing another dream, to buy into Hollywood. He became a studio head and also a notable philanderer. “Joe’s appetite for bedding young women is known to be insatiable,” writes Patterson. He was especially obsessed with screen siren Gloria Swanson.

“Joe is smitten ... Their intimate affair begins one afternoon at the Hotel Poinciana in Palm Beach. He slyly arranges to have his friend and business associate Edward Moore take Swanson’s third husband, the French Marquis Henri de Bailly de La Falaise, on a deep-sea fishing trip while Joe makes a surprise visit to Swanson’s room.”

In her memoir Gloria recalls: “He moved so quickly his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak.”

How did Kennedy matriarch Rose react to the torrid Swanson affair and others her husband failed to hide? Patterson says the couple lived increasingly separate lives, only coming together for the children with an outward show of propriety, and this worked for them. Then when Joe swapped Hollywood for finance and politics his children became a key part of his ambition.

Patterson grew up with the Kennedy story bubbling in the background of the national psyche and says he was aware of John F. Kennedy’s aura from an early age. “He was a god. I grew up Catholic and at that point people found it inconceivable that a Catholic

could be president. So the whole rise of JFK [meant something to me]. I wasn’t totally shocked when Kennedy was elected president, but it was a big deal. Then I was in high school when we got the news that President Kennedy had been shot and died. That was stunning. And my memory is that they then gave us some time off from school and I was actually watching television with my parents when, live, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald [Kennedy’s alleged assassin]. It was horrifying.”

Imperfect Rosemary

One of the most affecting parts of the book tells of Joe Snr’s catastrophic decision to have his daughter Rose Marie lobotomised. Rosemary, as she was known, was the eldest daughter, born in 1918 when the Spanish flu pandemic was raging. Doctors were overburdened and as Patterson tells it, when Rose went into labour at home the obstetrician was delayed. “The nurse orders Rose to squeeze her legs tightly together to delay the birth and incredibly goes so far as to push the baby’s partially exposed head back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours – depriving the fragile baby of oxygen.”

She was a beautiful baby, but her development was affected. She grew to be a loving teenager, but early on fell far short of the Kennedy need for excellence. “Poor Rosemary,” says Patterson with a sigh. “She was perfectly fine, just a little slower than the rest of the family ... but oh no, that wasn’t acceptable.” When she reaches 21, Rosemary’s moods have become erratic. She suffers “depression punctuated by violent verbal and physical outburst,” he writes.

Rose is concerned that her daughter may form dangerous liaisons that could bring shame on the family. “My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically and mentally as perfect as possible,” Rose stated. So, when Joe Snr hears of “this amazing operation” to separate the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain, he feels it’s the cure they long for. “It was a lobotomy,” says Patterson. “Rosemary wound up in a mental hospital for the rest of her life and for me this was one part of what I consider to be ‘the Kennedy curse’. It was all Joe.”

I ask if he thinks Joe Snr ever accepted responsibility for what happened to Rosemary. “I don’t know, he’s such a strange guy. You’d have to figure on some level, yes. But he seemed to be able to compartmentalise everything and keep moving forward. He was the most fascinating of all the Kennedys, the most complex, probably the smartest and also the most damaged. He was capable of some pretty dark stuff.”

Sins of the father

Joe Snr’s womanising was something else he famously passed on to his sons, especially Jack. “Over time, you find out that although he’s this god, Jack’s a human being, with foibles, and part of it is what his father passed down. The father was this incredible womaniser and for some people that seemed to be accepted in those days, for movie stars and politicians,” says Patterson.

When writing the book, he was amazed at the details he uncovered and it is these that bring new drama to the Kennedy soap opera. “They are stunning, like JFK having Judy Garland sing Over the Rainbow to him over the phone when he was president because he loved the song. And Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline being written after he saw a photo of [JFK’s daughter] Caroline riding her pony. It’s all about these little details,” he says. “That Bobby Kennedy saved his young son David’s life from drowning, and that night he was assassinated [June 6, 1968] ... Actually, a friend of mine is Harry Benson, a photographer who was in the kitchen when Bobby was shot. He took that well-known shot where Ethel [Bobby’s widow] held her hand up to camera. Bobby’s body is on the floor, and Ethel is trying to stop the photographer. Harry and his wife Gigi were great friends of Bobby and Ethel. But Harry told me that Ethel never forgave him for taking that picture.

“I think this is going to be an amazing story. For some people it’s a nostalgia and the sense of ‘I didn’t know all that stuff’, and then for others, it’s like ‘Oh my God, what an unbelievable story!’” AWW

“Although he’s a god, Jack’s a human being with foibles.”