Kennedys

PALM BEACH• BY: AUGUSTUS MAYHEW
The Kennedy family’s public personas and private indiscretions make for shelves of biographies and reimagined histories. Disparate efforts have produced books with conflicting narratives authored by writers unable to stipulate even the most verifiable events as irrefutable historical fact. Just mentioning the name of the family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, the focus of critical accounts as husband, father, diplomat, and businessman, can touch off a wave of conflicting sources, grudges, and perspectives.

Bespectacled banker, expert stock speculator, erstwhile movie mogul, liquor distributor, political power broker, tactless diplomat, real estate magnate, a family man with a wandering eye — Kennedy’s ad hoc quest for fame and fortune took him from Boston’s political wards to London’s Court of St. James. And like other 20th-century money-mad tycoons and princely philanthropists, Joe Kennedy’s balancing act found refuge on Palm Beach where he became one of the town’s legendary figures whose life story is most often told riddled with as many implied probabilities as facts, making for a puzzling historical maze.

Several years ago, I mentioned Rose Kennedy at the end of a lecture on the “Great Dames of Palm Beach” delivered at an Ocean Boulevard penthouse meeting room. When I touched on the Kennedy family’s club affiliations, including the Bath & Tennis Club, my talk was suddenly interrupted.

“They were not,” declared a stylish woman wearing cobalt-blue glasses. Yes, it was none other than Anne Slater. I was aware the Kennedys can be a polarizing subject at Palm Beach as some think of Joe Kennedy as no less than “El Diablo.” Even so, I decided to double-down after Slater’s comment, stating, “In 1936, Joe and Jack won a Bath & Tennis Club tennis tournament …” Again, Slater chimed, “They did not ….”