John! Robert! Ted! Caroline! The glittering Kennedy dynasty is sprinkled with overachieving politicians, lawyers and cultural icons whose influence on postwar America has earned them quasi-royal status across the pond. But beyond the glitz and glamour lie the names of the forgotten Kennedys, including Rosemary, JFK’s tragic younger sister whose life has inspired a new opera.
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Least Like the Other, a production by Irish National Opera at the Royal Opera House, charts the early years of Rosemary: the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a businessman, politician and one-time Ambassador to the UK, and Rose Kennedy, the domineering socialite and philanthropist. From the outset, the couple, who both descended from political powerhouse fathers, had clear dreams for their nine offspring – Joseph Jr. John, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean and Edward – and were single-minded in their pursuit of familial greatness.
While their eldest sons, Joseph Jr (a future US Navy Lieutenant who was later killed in action during World War II) and John (the 35th President and husband to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) thrived in childhood, their first-born daughter reportedly displayed developmental delays from an early age after a bungled delivery led to oxygen deprivation.
‘She was slower to crawl, slower to walk and to speak than her brothers, and she experienced learning difficulties when she reached school age,’ reads her online entry on the JFK Presidential Library website. ‘Despite her apparent intellectual disabilities, Rosemary participated in most family activities. In the diary she kept as a teenager she described people she met, dances and concerts she attended, and a visit to the Roosevelt White House. When her father was appointed US Ambassador to Britain in 1938, Rosemary went to live in London and was presented at court along with her mother and sister Kathleen.’
It is her teenage years, pieced together using archive material, that forms the basis of the new critically acclaimed 75-minute production from director and designer Netia Jones, which stars Amy Ní Fhearraigh as Rosemary and features music by Brian Irvine.
The opera leads up to the defining moment in Rosemary’s life: the lobotomy she received aged 23, on her father’s instruction. The horrifying surgical procedure – which involved severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain – became popular in the 1940s and 1950s with American and British doctors who claimed to be seeking a ‘cure’ for patients with certain mental health conditions that were deemed socially unacceptable.
According to the JFK library, Rosemary’s behaviour began to change once the family returned to the US in 1940. ‘Rosemary was not making progress but seemed instead to be going backward,’ her sister Eunice later wrote, according to the JFK Presidential library website. ‘At 22, she was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult.’ The entry claims that Joseph Kennedy Sr. was ‘persuaded that a lobotomy would help to calm his daughter and prevent her sometimes violent mood swings’ and authorised for the relatively new procedure to be performed on his daughter.
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Others have questioned the severity of any mental illness prior to the procedure. ‘She was never an obstacle, embarrassment, or anything very negative. It has always been my feeling that her mental condition was borderline, and that the lobotomy that her father Joe authorised really messed her up,’ Harvey Rachlin, author of The Kennedys: A Chronological History 1823-Present, told The Independent in the wake of Rosemary’s death in 2005.
Barbara Gibson and Ted Schwarz wrote in their book about the family's matriarch, Rose Kennedy and Her Family: The Best and Worst of Their Lives and Times, ‘Joe had two principal concerns about Rosemary. She was not the competition-oriented ideal of Kennedy womanhood, and he thought her sexuality was too intense and untempered by the moral strictures to which the other daughters had adhered. Joe destroyed a portion of her brain rather than risk what she might become if allowed to follow her own path in life.’
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Whatever the circumstances, the results were undeniable. The lobotomy was an unmitigated disaster; it left Rosemary with the capabilities of a two-year-old, she was permanently incapacitated and unable to care for herself.
In the wake of the procedure, Rosemary was sent to St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she spent the rest of her life being cared for by Catholic nuns in a cottage on the grounds of the institution. Reports suggest Rosemary was separated from her family: Joseph Kennedy Sr. reportedly did not visit his daughter, while Rose did not make the journey to St. Coletta’s for 20 years. There are even claims that Rosemary’s siblings were initially not told about their sister’s whereabouts. Certainly, her condition and location was kept out of the public sphere for decades. It was only in 1961, after John was elected president, that the family properly explained her absence. The lobotomy did not become public knowledge until 1987.
In the later years of her life, Rosemary had a relationship with at least some of her surviving siblings. ‘Eunice Kennedy Shriver had a particularly close relationship with her older sister, and great empathy for Rosemary and others who faced similar challenges,’ according to the JFK Presidential Library. ‘In 1962, Mrs. Shriver started a summer day camp in her own backyard for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, a camp which evolved into Special Olympics.’
Rosemary Kennedy died on 7 2005, aged 86. None of her tortuous later years, however, feature in the opera. Instead the focus is on the early years of a girl who was airbrushed out of her own family’s story.
Least Like The Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy at the Lindbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, until 19 January www.roh.org.uk
