strryhaze

[strryhaze]

this quote from laura dern’s book, honey baby mine, is so them ☹️☹️

her baby :(

[strryhaze]

jfk would’ve been so down bad in the most repressed, annoying way ever as a divorced man. he would be the type to nod and smile, ever so polite, when you tell him you’re engaged to someone new. he’d take a casual look at your bejeweled finger, give a strained nod of approval, and say the fellow did alright with the ring, but also drop some charged comment that leaves you reeling. questioning if he really said what you think he said.

he would subtly remind you that no one will ever know you as intimately as he does, certainly not the man whose name he pretends not to remember; he was the president of the united states. nothing gets past him.

on the rare occasion that your fiancé finds himself in your ex husband’s presence and talks about you like he knows you, jack gets ticked off: his jaw clenches, and he begins toying around with his glass like he’s already tired of hearing the guy’s voice. he even huffs at some point like a rankled horse, so unlike the sensible man that he has so carefully crafted himself as, though he covers it up with a smile that he doesn’t think looks sharp enough to cut and a swift swig of his drink.

the entire ordeal is torturous. and of course, jack can’t help himself. there’s a part of him that believes no one else should know you the way he does. no one ever could. it’s just plain common sense, not jealousy from his part per se. and when your beau, as jack amusedly calls him, speaks like his knowledge of you is simply and truly unassailable - well, jack gets just a little cruel in his charm, too polite to be considered decent, because this new man of yours can’t know every inch, and it’s audacious to even presume he does.

and it’s only after you’re divorced that he makes his knowledge of you more notable than ever. he brings up little facts about you, things you forgot you’d ever told him, details you wouldn’t have ever believed he remembered, like it’s nothing. he brings them up in the middle of a dinner, or a rare get-together of some kind, or when you’re handing off the kids, casually so and sporadically.

you never realized he’d paid that much attention to you. that’d been part of the problem.

there’s a late afternoon when you’re picking up the kids from his place. midsummer has already drifted on by, and you’ve been planning to take them to the italian coast for months, but not without them spending the first half or so of summer with their father first.

they’ve packed their most valuable necessities to get themselves through the next few weeks, and you’re all ready to go. you’re relieved to have gotten out clean until your youngest groans that they left a backpack inside, possibly by the staircase. your shoulders drop. you consider sending one of the older kids, or the chauffeur, but you’ve never been the detached kind, even now. it’s just jack, you remind yourself. so you go.

you walk up the steps to jack’s house and knock on his door once again, sighing to let out the odd, meddlesome nerves swirling around in your chest. he opens the door, visibly bemused to see you back and alone at that, but welcomes you back in with ease, listens while you ramble about a backpack and offer too many apologies for comfort. by the third apology, you spot the backpack exactly where it should be - by the staircase - and pluck it off the third step. aha! you give him a quick smile, a little bashful, and try to book it out of there without seeming obvious, but he notices. obviously. it’s jack.

the manner in which you speed right past him and apologize one more time like some harried stranger and not his wife - ex wife - of sixteen years chafes at him. so before you leave, jack says your name. that’s enough to stop you. and since he didn’t get the chance before what with the kids and the commotion, he stirs up small talk neither of you are any good at. you both bumble through the motions before he relates a rosy, whimsical blur about the last month and a half he spent with the children, something familiar, more or less safe, to enthrall you with that kindles a real smile out of you. a laugh even.

and when your guard drops, just a little, he shifts slightly closer, his hands inside his pockets, finally deigning to ask about the trip - how long it’s gonna last, where exactly on the coast you’re all gonna be sailing through. he asks you minuscule details, stuff he already knows because he either heard it from you on a phone call or already prodded it out of the kids, until he asks with a too-casual air of nonchalance if he’s gonna be there.

and that’s the thing about jack. technically, he’s being charming. technically, he’s behaving. but despite having no grounds to call him out, you know better.

you tilt your head at him, giving him a look, a warning, silently pleading him not to go there. you reach for the doorknob, ready to turn away from him, but that just won’t do. not to him.

before you know it, in just a fraction of a second, he’s right there, merely inches away. what, can’t ask about your friend? the last word drops with that dry sarcasm of his, accompanied with an ounce of petulance that is so uncharacteristic of the man you know that you almost laugh. it’s as if he can barely stand to toe the line any longer.

something real though, finally.

three years have passed since the divorce papers were signed, and he’s still not completely used to toeing anything with you. it doesn’t help that this might be the first time in a while that you’ve both been alone long enough for him to arrive at that particular realization. the polite smiles, the casual bordering on intimately pointed comments, the clenched jaw, the queasy feeling in his stomach - they’ve all been building up to this moment.

your eyes flick upward, cautiously. one thing is for sure: he’s gotten bolder, much bolder, now that he’s not tied down to you. that figures. he’s already scanning your face with his gaze, a goading spark beneath that infuriating statesman polish, edging you towards the echo of something ancient and raw and starved.

and you’re just frozen there; one hand still on the doorknob, the other slightly raised, like you forgot what you were about to do. that pull, you haven’t felt it in so long - you haven’t let yourself feel it.

a part of you feared it had been plunked into weakness and eventual death by all the disappointments, bouts of loaded silences, betrayals, and the heated moments where all the anger and frustration began crackling into an intoxicating, intense intimacy. the kind that left you both breathless and blistered at the end. somewhat empty too. it became unmanageable. late-night arguments and furiously whispered accusations would dissolve into breathless kisses and searing touches; and he started it. he always started it. and for that reason, you always gave in. the proof of still being wanted was too much of a sore relief to give up, but not without a cost.

it was as if all the fury, all the hurt, all the sacrifice on both your ends had coalesced and catapulted into a series of raw, desperate moments, knowing bitterly that the end was only a corner away.

this moment now is nothing like those, but your nerve endings crackle just the same. he’s so close now, unbearably close, and you can’t think. your nerves are past swirling now, they’re scrambling. you only utter his name through a small, weary sigh and murmur something about how impossible he’s being, intending to sound stern, but it comes out softly instead. somewhat fond and simultaneously annoyed in that familiar way of yours that has always left him, admittedly, feeling slightly off-balance. no one says his name like that. no one has earned it like you have.

past the goading spark though, there’s something quietly familiar in his gaze, something you can’t ignore. you’ve missed it. it’s the way he used to look at you in hushed moments like these when the plain, natural drunkenness of summer, of time, and of you fell upon him like a drowsy, lovesick veil all at once. you felt the most beautiful then, loved too, when he looked at you like that.

his lashes flicker as he takes you in piece by piece, letting himself catalogue every slight difference that time has tacked onto you since the divorce now that he has you so up close; the longer, more casual fall of your hair against your collarbone, some fine lines that crease against the sides of your eyes, the different scent that another man basks in. well, shame, he’s the one basking in it now.

there’s something else too. in the years after, a certain steadiness has settled into your posture that wasn’t there before, definitely not in those last years. another type of confidence that settles nicely in the bones with age and wisdom. after a divorce.

you’ve found your footing. and you’ve found it without him. it’s not like he resents it, really. in fact, he respects it, but his stomach twists oddly all the same, especially when you still say his name like that. soft and worn-in. a memory you still savor past its expired bitterness.

as for jack, you notice a looseness to him that wasn’t there before. even when he wasn’t in front of the cameras, he always felt on. but now he has no reason to be. for the first time in a long time, possibly ever, he has the space to breathe and its effect is noticeable. he looks impossibly younger, more vulnerable; his hair is unkempt, the way you always liked it, and he’s let it grow out - the politician haircut long gone. your fingers ache to reach upwards, but you don’t give in. it physically hurts not to, and you wonder if he feels the same with those hands of his safely tucked away. he must.

his eyes haven’t left you. the sensation leaves you dizzy with how fresh it feels, his green-blue focus. the unnameable warmth behind his eyes trickling down onto you, lulling you out of your safe spot. jack’s unabashed gaze whenever he’d look at you instead of looking through you, it always left you somewhat breathless, a bit guileless. evidently, that hasn’t changed. but there’s also a part of you that hates what he can do to you with just a flicker of his gaze. even now.

jack shifts and you catch it just then. something you wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t shifted, just slightly, for you to catch a whiff of his cologne. the cologne you picked out for him ages ago: at some point seven years into your marriage when things had finally reached an idyllic point, and before it all went irreparably south, of course. he hasn’t stopped wearing it.

you swallow as your gaze dips down, tracing - not at the center - but only the edge of his mouth, the corner that always twitches before he’s about to smile. not quite damning, but damning enough. and he catches it. his eyes flicker with a hint of knowing satisfaction, like he’s won a game you didn’t even know you were playing, a prize he didn’t know he still wanted. it’s only been five ridiculous minutes, and somehow his foot is already inside the door. perhaps, it never really left.

he leans in even more now, one step forward and then inching his body closer, slow and sure as ever, closer than he’s been in a long, long time, but with his hands still tucked carefully inside his pockets because he wouldn’t get close enough to touch you, really touch you. it’s his turn to torture you now and you accept it like you always have.

still, his barely-there stubble lightly grazes your cheek as he dips low and whispers in your ear with that warm, steady lilt of his that makes his words burn low in your stomach, give the beau a nice hello for me. he leans back slowly, gaze flickering down to your lips before shrugging loosely, his smirk growing. you feel the ghost of his lips as he says, not too nice, of course.

[strryhaze]

the day that i finally get to edit jackjackie to crush by ethel cain in the way that they deserve will be one of the best days of my life

[strryhaze]

Kate Clifford Larson's book on Rosemary imo also does such a good job talking about her relationship with her siblings and how much they cared about her and she really does give such a sympathetic portrayal of them which i thought was so nice.

Like no...Rosemary was not somewhere giggling happy that her brothers died in tragic ways because of "KaRmA" that some ignorant people on tiktok would like you to be believe or that her revenge was the "Kennedy Curse"

yes, getting a more insightful and nuanced view into rosemary’s relationship with her siblings was so lovely. every detail was like a little speck of gold.

kick and rosemary’s relationship i found interesting too - rose asking kick to investigate the effects of a lobotomy, which kick did, even enlisting her reporter friend john white to help her. when she was told about the awful results, she quickly told her mother, “oh, mother. no, it’s nothing we want done for rosie.” kick was very likely the only sibling who may have really known exactly what happened to rosemary. there’s an excerpt of a letter she wrote a couple months to her father after rosemary’s lobotomy and it was a little bit…. brazen, but subtly so. like she knew. and he knew she knew.

and oh you will never see me opening the comment section of a kennedy tiktok from a random account ever ever ever! they’re always saying the most purposefully obtuse things that i just sigh and scroll at this point.

rosemary was a real person who suffered greatly at the hands of her father, and the manner in which some people talk about her, even when they think they’re doing her some sort of justice, is so dehumanizing. they turn her into a caricature that she was most certainly not.

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Can I ask of instances when people would visit the Kennedy family and they would think the dynamic was odd? Like their impressions of Joe Sr.?

I knew that Joe Sr. was intense but SHEESH.

yeah, for sure! white house by the sea is the first kennedy book that i’ve seen say it in such overt terms: “inside the walls of the big house, things just seemed to make the most sense to the kennedy kids. but as they became adults and started their own lives, they brought people from the outside into their sanctuary. their little world, which revolved around joe, didn’t always seem so idyllic to those seeing it for the first time—in fact, it could seem peculiar.”

she brings up an instance where jack and eunice brought washington friend mary pitcairn to the big house for a couple days. she divulged that when joe sr was in town, he had a reputation for taking the women jack was dating out to dinner. it struck many women, including pitcairn, as unusual. she tried to write it off as “the eccentricity of a man from another generation,” but she said that he’d intrude into his children’s personal lives, and with the women they brought around, he’d ask them very invasive questions.

mary revealed that he was “very curious about my personal life. he really wanted to know. he asked a lot of personal questions—extraordinarily personal questions […] one night i was visiting eunice at the cape and he came into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight! i was in my nightgown, ready for bed. eunice was in her bedroom. we had an adjoining bath. the doors were open. he said, “i’ve come to say goodnight,” and kissed me. really kissed me. it was so silly. i remember thinking, “how embarrassing for eunice!” but beyond that, nothing. absolutely nothing. i think all this confused jack. he was a sensitive man and i think it confused him. what kind of object is a woman? to be treated as his father treated them. and his father’s behavior that way was blatant. there was always a young, blonde, beautiful secretary around. i think it was very confusing to jack.”

“[joe sr.] flaunted his affairs in front of his wife and children, made crude passes at his sons' dates …”

and then there’s kenneth o’ donnell “who regarded the senior kennedy as a martinet, a “drill sergeant” who pushed around his sons, or tried to. o’ donnell and the other varsity club men teased bobby about his father’s pretensions. and they badgered rfk to stand up to his autocratic father. “why don’t you tell him off once in a while?”’ rfk’s response: “oh, you tell him off. i like it the way it is.”

there’s a lot that’s been said about how much joe sr. instigated the rivalry between jack and joe jr. but i also find it odd how he would later meddle in not only jack’s love life, but bobby’s too. there was a girl bobby had been dating who was quickly swept up by jack, k.k. hannon. when she visited hyannisport, joe sr. had a chat with her about how she was much better suited for bobby and whatnot, you should marry him. that one. and when she recalled that period of time, she would say joe was “tough and terrible.”

rip horton, one of jack’s choate mates, also talked about how if he asked any questions at the dinner table, he’d either be cut off curtly or entirely ignored by joe sr.

a friend, paul chase, who crewed for jack as a replacement, caught a half hour lecture from “the old man on our return to shore. he said he watched the race and that he was disgusted with both of us.”

historian r.w. johnson describes the kennedy boys growing up in an environment suffused with sexual bravado: “glorifying in his own never-ending string of conquests; regaling his sons with intimate boasts about such subjects as gloria swanson’s genitalia. he encouraged them in the rapacious pursuit of sex-object women.”

there are many more i’m sure, but these are the most recent ones i’ve come across and could quickly access!

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Okay, in the tags of a recent post, you said “theee first four siblings also close in age who had a shared experience that differed from the rest of the siblings” and I can’t just leave that in the tags. I’m sorry. I’m gonna have to ask you to expand on that and if you would be so kind as to share with me, and everyone else of course, how those four had a particular shared experience between them as the oldest that was different from the rest.

Thank you in advance! 

this made me cackle bc i meant this more hypothetically, just me being parasocial! so i’m sorry to say that there aren’t any direct quotes that really go into this, at least not any that i’ve seen - it’s always more of a description of the dynamic in biographies than an overall generalization if that makes any sense? but what i meant was that they were the oldest and super close in age - that immediately bonds you especially when you have parents that are absent from time to time and occupy more time expecting things from you than really nurturing you.

one may be close with their younger siblings too, but there’s just a special type of bond that older siblings have when they’re all close to begin with. and the older kennedy siblings - they were essentially a little pack that navigated childhood together, and you can see this in their super early pictures. rose and joe sr. also made sure that they had those bonds in the first place by instilling in them an us against the world tribe mentality. as little ones and certainly as adolescents, they depended on each other for companionship, a sense of stability, and lighthearted fun. they raised each other in a way, and that goes for all the kennedy siblings really, but i’d reason that they’re the ones who set the foundation and carried the responsibility of taking care of the younger ones and setting a certain example for them.

and because they were close enough in age, they inevitably overlapped in the same social orbit. they either went to the same schools or attended the same school dances with each other. they raced together, played together, and they certainly attended the same hyannisport parties, which were usually hosted at the wianno club. jack always brought rosemary to the weekly twelve-and-over dance parties, which drew in a bundle of teenagers. jack and kick would usually pair off, sometimes with rosemary too. jack was quite shy and so kick would bring him out of his shell and introduce him to everybody else. joe jr. was the dancer, the life of the party. he would really, and i mean really, get into it, and when he wasn’t busy dancing, he’d be the one teasing his sisters, saving them from unwanted dance partners at the very last minute with a mischievous smirk. when rosemary wanted to dance, joe jr. or jack would step in, but it was almost always jack. and when it wasn’t one of her brothers, it usually tended to be one of their friends on her dance card. they all had certain roles in their hierarchy with rosemary being their beating heart.

on top of that, joe jr, jack, rosemary, and kick were all old enough to really participate in the london upheaval as a unit, moving together through english high society before the war. rosemary and kick entered elite boarding schools and were thrown into debutante circles. joe jr. and jack were in harvard at the time, but they enjoyed the privileges that their father’s ambassadorial position granted them. they knew how far they had come and enjoyed it to the fullest.

they hadn’t been dirt poor by any means, but they acquired more privileges as they got older whereas the younger kids always grew up within a more privileged world. and because they were the first four, they carried more of the torch and pressure of their parents ambitions - yes, including rosemary. i’d argue that things may have been slightly different if she had been a younger kennedy, but that’s another conversation for another day.

lastly, there are certain things that the four of them witnessed and were privy to and therefore understood inherently better than the younger ones - the early and visible strain of joe and rose’s marriage in relation to their father’s infidelities, rosemary’s disability, all the social change occurring in the 30s and 40s, their family’s upward climb to the top. it all shaped them hence why they were seen as a different mold than the rest of the kennedy siblings.

[strryhaze]

not a lot. just forever. intertwined. sewn together,

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jackie throwing her bouquet i literally feel like her mother looking through old photos with an ache in my chest 😭❤️

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ttpd (bobbyjackie album) era over.

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Your recent post about Rosemary had me wondering if there are any good books about her that you would recommend? I know there are at least two biographies about her (that I know of) but I’m always hesitant to purchase a Kennedy book. There’s just so much written about them that is merely sensationalism or speculation that I have a hard time differentiating between the books that are actually worth my money and those that are not.



i totally get that feeling. coming across one of those has become one of my newest but greatest pet peeves. as time has gone by, it’s gotten easier for me to suss out the sensationalist books from the more objective and researched ones. so fear not!

books about rosemary that i’d recommend - and the ones you probably already know of - are rosemary: the hidden kennedy daughter by kate clifford larson & the missing kennedy: rosemary kennedy and the secret bonds of four women by elizabeth koehler-pentacoff.

the former is a carefully researched, respectful, and detailed account; the latter is written by someone who actually met rosemary as a young girl in the 60s and went on to become a fixture in rosemary’s life. the author was the niece of sister paulus, rosemary’s caretaker, and she provides an incredible amount of details about rosemary post-lobotomy, as well as pictures of rosemary that i wouldn’t have ever seen anywhere else, including ones of rosemary with her family.

and i’d also say that kate larson pieces together the most sincere picture of rosemary ever. she was such a light, such a spark of energy and love, and yearned to fit seamlessly into the kennedy mayhem. all of that shines through, sometimes painfully so. the books i’ve read about the kennedy’s in the past don’t tend to linger on her all that much, so reading the book, both books honestly, which were very emotional reads, felt like rosemary finally made it out of the vignette in my head.

the only complaint i have is that the second book intertwines rosemary’s life with the author’s, and while i think it works well with the author’s intention, i found myself skimming through her own personal chapters. nonetheless, the book is still worth reading for the insight you get into rosemary after she was institutionalized + her relationship with her caregiver and the sort of second family she ended up having + tidbits of rosemary with her kennedy family later in life.

and if it’s of any help - there’s a wonderful site called anna’s archive that offers epubs, pdfs, etc. for a multitude of resources, including books, that i sometimes resort to, especially if there’s a biography i’m a little skeptical about wasting money on but want to scope out (and possibly read) !

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the girls looking back 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ that’s my mama!

Jackie Kennedy

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Jacqueline Kennedy setting flowers on the graves of her baby son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, and her husband, John F. Kennedy after they were moved to their permanent gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery.

March 14, 1967

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some protector, role model.

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noah wyle there is a shy sparkle in your eyes and a world weariness in that lanky frame of yours that hasn’t been seen since the likes of jfk

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It’s very telling that once Jack came into prominence of his own (aka the literal President) and Eunice herself, that they (and the rest of the siblings) went and looked for Rosemary. Joe Sr couldn’t control them any longer at that point.

yeah very, very telling. so many other families might’ve preferred to forget and maintain their distance and it might seem as if the kennedy’s did that - but they didn’t. rosemary lived in so many of their actions even while she remained far away from them. and when they could finally visit her and have her nearby and embrace her once more, they didn’t waste a second.

the way that they bided their time shows how much of an iron grip joe had on the family. they adored him, but there was always an innate fear, a sense of paralysis almost, when it came to their father. something that speaks to this is how teddy himself was very troubled by rosemary’s sudden disappearance and feared that he “had better do what dad wanted or that same thing could happen to me.” like that is chilling. there’s no way that that doesn’t drastically impact a child’s entire worldview or cause cracks in the family’s core. it took power of their own and the eventual debilitation of their father to finally get loose.

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I didn’t know Jack was Rosie’s favorite brother. He seemed to have a really sweet relationship with his sisters. He was such a wonderful big brother, it is no surprise he ended up being such a wonderful dad.

yes and from what i’ve read, he and eunice were the ones who included her the most growing up. she was really the first sibling he ever had to look out for :(