• U.S.

The Home: Kennedy Living

9 minute read
TIME

“Long before it ever became a slogan,” says Joseph P. Kennedy, “my family and I had togetherness.”

Nowhere is that fact more apparent than in the 14 remarkable homes (including two apartments) owned or rented in the U.S. and abroad by the Kennedy clan. They are not remarkable as showpieces of architecture, interior design or luxury—in fact, considering the Kennedy wealth, they are relatively modest. The establishments are far beyond average pocketbook, and they have the kind of unobtrusive casualness that is far more expensive than it looks, but their total effect is one of warmth, not wealth. What their fellow citizens can see in the Kennedys’ homes is taste—not of the avantgarde, pace-setting type, but the kind of taste that has the courage of its comforts. They are, for the most part, the homes of people who know what they like, who will not sacrifice ease to style, but whose style lies in their ease.

Each of the Kennedy homes has been planned with children in mind; no room is, or ever has been, off limits to any child, and the fact shows. One decorator has complained that a Kennedy decorating job consists mainly of replacing slip covers and turning rugs so that the bad spots do not show. Each house abounds in roomy, overstuffed and not necessarily stylish chairs, because all the Kennedys seem not so much to sit in chairs as to bivouac in them. Since most members of the family are prodigious readers, reading lamps are scattered everywhere. Another must in every room is an electric clock. “I always insist on this,” says Mother Rose Kennedy, “because then no one has an excuse for being late for meals.” One real sign of luxury in the Kennedy homes is the platoon of servants necessary to keep things straightened up; none of the family have ever been especially concerned with general tidiness. Says Rose Kennedy dryly: “You might say that we don’t overemphasize it.”

Elegant & Salty. Most informal gathering place for the Kennedy family is the 4.7-acre Hyannisport compound on Cape Cod, where President John Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and their father each have a weathered, roomy summer “cottage.” Nerve center of the compound is Father Joe Kennedy’s “Big House” overlooking Nantucket Sound, a rambling, shingled, 18-room structure with a three-gabled roof and wide porches that is as New England as a swallowed r. The Big House is both elegant and salty. In an illuminated, glass-paneled display case is Rose Kennedy’s collection of more than 200 costumed dolls from all over the world. Inside the front door is a hooked “welcome” rug and a doorstop of a bearded fisherman dressed in a yellow sou’wester; the furniture is mostly Early American and 18th century English, bought by Rose Kennedy more than 30 years ago. Hung on the wall are Currier & Ives prints and a Grandma Moses. Inscribed photographs are scattered around the sitting room, in the place of honor on the baby grand piano is a framed photo of Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who visited the Kennedys in 1936 and later became Pope Pius XII.

Set behind a newly constructed, six-foot cedar fence, the President’s eleven-room, five-bathroom summer White House reflects the tastes of Jackie Kennedy. Yellow. Jackie’s favorite color, dominates the decor. The walls are light and are hung with seascape paintings, including a few of Jackie’s own, and one determined primitive by the President himself, showing the Riviera port of Villefranche.

Far more crowded than either the Big House or the summer White House is Bobby Kennedy’s twelve-room cottage: some of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s seven children have to double up. Because the children spend so much time out of doors, Ethel has made their playroom over into a brightly colored second living room. In every bedroom are bunches of petunias, snapdragons, gladioli and cosmos from the Kennedys’ carefully tended flower gardens. At night, hurricane lamps light the dining room.

Children & Charts. Not far from the compound is the summer home of Stephen and Jean Kennedy Smith, who also maintain a rented home in Georgetown. Only a mile and a half away is Edward Kennedy’s newly bought ten-room cottage on Squaw Island. The house is typically Kennedy Eclectic—Modern and Early American. For a better view of the ocean, Joan Kennedy and her decorator had one wall removed and replaced with sliding glass doors. Two rooms remain to be decorated, but Joan and Ted Kennedy are waiting until the birth of their second child in November before they select the colors for the baby’s room.

To the 19 Kennedy grandchildren, the best places at Hyannisport are the tennis court, the dock and the newest social center, the trampoline. The mothers—Jackie, Ethel, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Pat Kennedy Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith—have divided the children into two groups to avoid confusion and to make swimming, riding and sailing lessons easier: Group I includes the children in the six-to-nine age bracket: Group II. those aged five and under. A master chart details where which children are supposed to go on which days at what time. Despite her youth, Caroline Kennedy has one advantage over all the rest of the children: she has her own Secret Service man, one of whose unexpected chores was to sing a song about “Little Peter Rabbit,” with appropriate rabbit gestures, during a sailing expedition.

Manors & Estates. Outdoor living is also stressed at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s 15-room, seven-acre estate, Hickory Hill, in McLean. Va. Once the Civil War headquarters of Union General George McClellan. Hickory Hill has two swimming pools, a tennis court, pony stables and, says one visitor, “the only treehouse in the world that looks as if it were designed by an architect.” A major attraction of the house is the huge kitchen, which might have been lifted out of the pages of Gone With the Wind; it has no chrome or eye-level ovens, but an old gas stove large enough to have turned out food for a whole regiment of McClellan’s troops. Actually, the kitchen does not get as much use as it might; because the press of his duties so often makes him miss dinner at home. Bobby Kennedy once a week herds Ethel and the children to a nearby Howard Johnson’s for a family treat of hot dogs and ice cream.

Estateliest of the Kennedy homes is Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s rented, 14-room French Provincial winter weekend retreat, Glen Ora. in Virginia’s tweedy hunt country. Built in 1810. Glen Ora is decorated in manored elegance: Louis XV and Regency chairs in the drawing room, a Duncan Phyfe table and Hepplewhite chairs in the dining room. The President’s bedroom is off-white with a three-quarter mahogany sleigh bed, a mahogany bureau, and a red and white slipcovered lounge chair; Jackie’s bedroom has twin beds, a French desk, and is papered in a mixed pink-on-white flower print. Outdoors, one modern contraption terrifies passersby: a hidden, wired loudspeaker, manned by a security detail, that thunders “What do you want?” at would-be visitors. In spite of Glen Ora’s baronial atmosphere, some presidential staffers have complained that it offers no place to loll about during a meeting, except on the floor.

Villas & Beach Houses. Splashiest of the Kennedy homes is Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford’s nine-room, neo-Spanish beach house in Santa Monica, Calif. The former home of Movie Magnate Louis B. Mayer, the house is done in Metro-Goldwyn-Modrun. It has marble bathrooms, and in the living room, a movie screen rises from the floor at the touch of a button. To accommodate their four children, the Lawfords have converted Mayer’s garden greenhouse into a playhouse; though the Pacific is right off their front door, they have a fresh water swimming pool that is the envy of such neighbors as Actor Brian Aherne and Septuagenarian Siren Mae West.

Cold weather hangout for the Florida-vacationing Kennedy clan is Joe Kennedy’s 16-room winter home on Millionaires’ Row in Palm Beach. Modest by local Taj Mahal standards, the house has a simple, lived-in look. The living room furniture is slipcovered in durable green and white flowered chintz and is arranged, says one reporter, so that “there are aisles for the children to run through.” As in all the Kennedy homes, the center of activities is outdoors, by the tennis court and swimming pool. From poolside, Joe Kennedy telephones around the U.S. to his children and business associates. “I used to work hard,” he once said. “Now I just sit here by the pool and make more money than I ever did.”

Waystop for the Kennedys abroad is the villa Vista Bella, rented every summer since 1957 by Joe Kennedy (for $2,000 a month) at Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. The interior of the villa is as dark as a cave, and is an idle mixture of Louis XV, Louis XVI, Chinese and Magyar decorative styles. Plumbing is in the classic French tradition: huge tiled arenas with a tangled network of pipes and valves from which issue alarming gurgles and lukewarm, pale-beige water. The main attraction of the house is its distance from the crowded resorts at Cannes and Juan-les-Pins and its proximity to the swimming, sunning and water skiing at the Riviera’s chic Eden Roc beach.

Contemporary Jungle. Only ultramodern Kennedy home is Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s duplex in Chicago’s Lincoln Park section. Much of the furniture was designed by Denmark’s Finn Juhl and the U.S.’s Eero Saarinen; the living room is a jungle gym of iron chair frames and brass lamp poles, set off by modern paintings by Josef Albers and Hugo Weber. The paneled library with its early 19th century English desk is the only noncontemporary room in the apartment. “I didn’t want to make the library modern,” says Eunice Shriver, “because I think a library should have the charm of an old room.” Cork floors have been laid in the downstairs hall and the dining room so that the three Shriver children and one foster child can haul their toys around and run their electric trains with out damaging the flooring. Explains Eunice Shriver: “You don’t ordinarily use your dining room for this sort of thing, but you have to make use of all your space in an apartment.”

Few decorators would pick any one of the Kennedy houses as a model of gracious living or inventive design. But the best indication that the Kennedy establishments succeed as homes—as thoroughly comfortable “machines for living”—is the almost invariable reaction of visitors: “I’d like to live there.”

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