The Kennedy clan’s darkest secret – what happened to Rosemary?

1937: Joseph Patrick Kennedy (right), ambassador to the UK, with his wife Rose Kennedy (second from right) and eight of their nine children, in London. From left: Edward, Jeanne, Robert, Patricia (1924 - 2006), Eunice, Kathleen, Rosemary and John F Kennedy who later became the 35th President of the United States. Photo / Getty Images

The “curse of the Kennedys” is part of American folklore. John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, then that of his brother Robert F Kennedy in 1968, are only the most notorious of the myriad calamities to have befallen the dynasty. Then in 1969 came the infamous incident at Chappaquiddick, when Teddy Kennedy’s passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after he drove into a lake.

Posterity, however, has had less to say about Rosemary Kennedy. She may not have died in her prime, like JFK and RFK, her two most famous brothers, but for more than 60 years she suffered a living death, confined for most of that period in St Coletta of Wisconsin, an institution for the mentally incapacitated. For many Kennedys, the curse struck via a bullet, or engine failure, or another act of God. Rosemary’s particular tragedy is that her instrument of fate was her own father.

In 1941, Joseph P Kennedy, until the previous year the US ambassador to the United Kingdom, secretly arranged for his oldest daughter, aged 23, to have a pre-frontal lobotomy. According to developing medical thought, the treatment would reduce her violent mood swings, and calm her convulsions, even if the cost was a loss of intellect. The crude and brutal operation was a catastrophe. Rosemary became, in effect, a two-year-old, in speech capacity and continence; she walked with a limp, and lost the full use of one arm. She was immediately consigned to care, where she remained until her death at 86. Her surgeon later admitted that Rosemary suffered not from “retardation” but depression.

Kathleen, Rose, and Rosemary Kennedy, in formal gowns and carrying bouquets for their presentation at Buckingham Palace, May 11, 1938. Photo / Getty

Lobotomy was one of the earliest psycho-surgical treatments to break with the prevailing credo that those with mental disorders were beyond medical help. Artistically, the procedure casts its longest shadow across the work of Tennessee Williams. His sister Rose, also lobotomised in her early 20s, haunts many of his plays. Yet while a biography, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, by Kate Clifford Larson, was published in 2015, artists have stayed away from this particular Kennedy. (A cinematic biopic, announced in 2016, has had the names of actresses Emma Stone and Elisabeth Moss attached to it, but remains unmade).

This is perhaps because her inner life has always been a mystery, even to her own family. Her father stopped visiting her before she turned 30. Her mother, Rose, who was not informed of the lobotomy until it had happened, couldn’t bring herself to see her daughter until after her husband suffered a stroke in 1961. That same year, John F Kennedy became US president, and Rosemary’s disappearance, previously attributed to a reclusive nature, was explained for the first time – albeit as a mental disorder. Only after her father’s death in 1969 was she reintegrated into the family; the lobotomy was not mentioned in the public domain until 1987. Her main legacy today is the Special Olympics, founded by her younger sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver with the aim of changing public attitudes to mental disability.

The first work of art to approach Rosemary’s life is not a film or a play, a novel or a television drama. Appropriately for such a tragic horror story, it’s an opera – and appropriately for a Kennedy, it’s an Irish opera. Least Like the Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy was commissioned and developed by the Irish National Opera and premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2019. It comes this week, for a short run, to the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre.

The idea first took root in Northern Irish composer Brian Irvine, who proposed it to INO’s artistic director Fergus Sheil, who in turn suggested working with the British director-designer Netia Jones. “I was very resistant,” says Jones. “I thought, ‘You can’t possibly make an opera about this story. It’s too difficult, too intrusive.’” Yet she relented, and plotted to turn tradition on its head.

“Opera is the most misogynistic artform it’s possible to conceive. The repertoire’s treatment of women is heinous. We were interested in looking at something from the point of view of a young girl and all the expectations of how a young woman fits into a patriarchal view of society.”

Rosemary’s sufferings began in the birth canal. Her mother went into labour at the height of the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic, and was told by a nurse to close her legs for two hours until a male doctor could be summoned. She pushed the baby’s head back, causing a loss of oxygen. The lasting damage to Rosemary would be measured developmentally; she was slow in learning to walk, read and, eventually, to behave with the decorum her father expected.

Like her siblings, Rosemary had that dazzling Kennedy smile. “She loved compliments,” Eunice wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1962. “Every time I would say, ‘Rose, you have the best teeth and smile in the family,’ she would smile for hours.” She unfurled it at Pope Pius XII’s coronation, at a visit to Roosevelt’s White House and at her presentation at court in London in 1938, after which she began training to be a Montessori teaching assistant. But when the family returned to America after the outbreak of war, her condition dramatically worsened.

“Rosemary was not making progress, but seemed instead to be going backward,” Eunice recalled. “At 22, she was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult.” Their father feared her so-called backwardness and potential vulnerability to sexual predators might undermine the political ambitions he had for her brothers. “I would do anything to make you so happy,” Rosemary had written to her father, aged 15. It reads as a desperate plea for love, but he seems to have taken it as an instruction.

“It wasn’t that long ago that this happened,” Jones says, “and yet it’s deeply shocking to us. As we were looking through the archive at all the fragments of information that you can get about this story, it became obvious to us that we could only tell it in fragments. [Least Like the Other] is an opera documentary told in bits and pieces.”

While it has a tragic heroine at its heart, INO’s production isn’t opera in any traditional sense. Probably the most old-school thing about it is Jones’s signature, the video design, in this case projections of text and imagery. There are roles for two actors who deliver spoken text alongside a lone soprano whose nearest forebear is perhaps Elle, the solitary lovesick woman in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine.

“I’m not sure where you could fit this into the standard repertoire,” explains soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh. “It is its own beast. I’m not playing a character but a vessel that everything happens through.”

Irvine experimented with different sizes of ensemble before alighting on a unique solution to convey Rosemary’s uncontrollable mind. “I conduct 11 regularly classical-trained musicians playing totally scored, really tricky music,” explains Sheil. “Brian’s at the back with three improvisers subverting what we’re doing. I never know what’s going to come out of them at any given time.”

The opera does not go beyond the defining event of Rosemary’s life. “We went through the top of the head,” Dr James Watts told Joseph Kennedy’s biographer. “We just made a small incision, no more than an inch. We put the instrument inside. We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded.” As the operation proceeded, Rosemary was asked a series of basic questions – to recite the US national anthem, to count backwards, to say the Lord’s Prayer. When she stopped giving coherent answers, her surgeons stopped cutting.