Archive of Our Own

The New York Times

Sunday, August 26, 1956

SENATOR KENNEDY'S INFANT DAUGHTER DIES; MRS. KENNEDY RECOVERING IN PHILADELPHIA

Daughter Stillborn After Surgery

Special to The New York Times

Louella's Movietown

Louella Parsons · Los Angeles Examiner · August 27, 1956

Hedda Hopper's Hollywood

Hedda Hopper · Los Angeles Times · August 28, 1956

Western Union Telegram

WASHINGTON DC · SEP 3 1956 · 1847EDT
TO: MRS. J. F. KENNEDY · 3901 HENRY AVE · PHILADELPHIA PA

SONGBIRD STOP HOUSE IS STILL HERE STOP DOGS ARE FED STOP MY MOTHER IS WELL STOP I AM NOT STOP NO NEED TO REPLY STOP JUST LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I AM DOING EACH WEEK SO YOU KNOW STOP ALL MY LOVE STOP JACK

Overheard at Sardi's last night: two producers of a certain vintage speculating, over scotch, whether Mia Kelly (Kennedy) might return to Broadway before she returns to Washington. My sources at MGM say the lady is indeed returning to work — but to Culver City, not Times Square. She is scheduled to begin filming Aquitaine in October. She plays a young Eleanor of Aquitaine. Location work in France in November.

Between you and me, folks: I ran into Mrs. Kennedy once, at Delmonico's, eighteen months ago. She was a few weeks into being Mrs. Kennedy and still had stars in her eyes. She ordered a Singapore Sling and her senator was at the table. It was one of the prettiest things I ever saw.

I wish her well. God knows she deserves it.

Mrs. John F. Kennedy, wife of the junior senator from Massachusetts, departed Washington by train for Los Angeles yesterday. Mrs. Kennedy, known professionally as the actress Mia Kelly, will reside at her residence in Los Angeles during the filming of her next motion picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, tentatively titled Aquitaine, in which Mrs. Kennedy will portray the young Queen Eleanor.

Senator Kennedy, it is understood, will remain in Washington during the fall legislative session and will travel to California "as his schedule permits," according to a spokesman for the senator's office. Mrs. Kennedy is recovering from the loss of the couple's infant daughter Kathleen Grace, who died in late August.

Asked at Union Station if she had a message for her supporters, Mrs. Kennedy, in a gray traveling suit and a small black hat, said only: "I am very grateful for the thousands of letters. I cannot answer all of them personally but I have read every one. I am going home to work. I am going home to rest. Thank you very much."

AP Wirephoto · Union Station, September 17

Mrs. John F. Kennedy, leaving Washington for Los Angeles. The former Mia Kelly carries a small bouquet, a gift from her husband's secretary, and is accompanied by her cocker spaniels, Goldie and Primrose. The Senator, who was called away to a committee hearing, was not present at the station.

Mia Kelly Kennedy is back in California. Her dashing senator is not with her. The Washington set is asking questions. This columnist is inclined not to speculate, out of respect for the family's loss, but will note that there are two separate households at the moment, and that a Kennedy and a Kelly do not live apart without a reason.

Her Hollywood friends are rallying. Mrs. Humphrey Bogart (Lauren Bacall) was seen arriving at Mrs. K.'s house with a casserole on Tuesday. Audrey Hepburn, in town between pictures, reportedly spent three hours there on Thursday. The Sinatras dropped by Wednesday with what appeared to be a pound cake.

No comment from the Senator's office. No comment from MGM. No comment from anyone who knows anything. Which is, of course, the story itself.

I had lunch Tuesday with Mia Kelly at the Brown Derby — just the two of us, at her invitation. I am not ordinarily given to reporting on lunches with friends, but she looked so beautiful I must tell you about it. She wore a navy Balenciaga with pearl earrings the size of robins' eggs and she ate her Cobb salad and drank her iced tea and she talked to me for an hour and a half about Eleanor of Aquitaine, who she is going to play in her picture. This is my opinion: Mia Kelly is one of the finest actresses of her generation and she is only just getting started. Mark my words.

As for the unpleasantness in certain other columns (and we know whose) about whether a mother should be on a picture set, I will simply say this: Mia Kelly is permitted to live her life however she sees fit. I, for one, am glad she is working. Work is the great healer. Any woman who has lost something and kept going will tell you so.

Her husband, the good-looking senator, is by all accounts in Washington. I have known Jack Kennedy since he was courting his wife, and I have always considered him a philandering sort of handsome boy. I mean it exactly as I say it. Mia deserves the world. I do not know that she has it yet. But she has me. And she has a great many others. And that, for now, will have to do.

My dear colleague Miss Parsons used the word philandering in her column on Tuesday, about a sitting United States senator, and has not been sued. This is because the senator's father, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, is in California at the moment and has more pressing business than his son's reputation. Perhaps his daughter-in-law's.

I note, with interest, that Mrs. Kennedy — who has filed neither for divorce nor separation, though she and the senator have been residing at opposite ends of the country for three weeks now — is suddenly, after four years in pictures, the most visible woman in Los Angeles. Lunch Tuesday with Parsons. Lunch Wednesday with Lauren Bacall. Cocktails Friday at Ciro's with Sinatra. A photograph in this morning's Examiner of her laughing in a red dress at La Dolce Vita with a martini in one hand and Miss Bacall in the other. A martini, dearies. I am not the one who raised her. But I know a mother who has lost a child, and I know what a mother who has lost a child does not do. She does not laugh on a Friday night in a red dress.

This columnist has sources at MGM who do not entirely share the studio's enthusiasm for Mrs. Kennedy. One of them told me Tuesday, off the record and over the telephone, something I shall not, at the present moment, print. But I am watching. Mr. Kennedy the elder, if you are reading this column — and I know you are — I have my eye on California. I have my eye on all of it.

Los Angeles Examiner · October 6, 1956 · p. 18

Mrs. Kennedy, center, dining at Romanoff's on Friday evening with Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Bogart and MGM producer Pandro Berman. Mrs. Kennedy wears a gown by Givenchy and the pearl-and-diamond earrings given to her by her husband on their wedding night. Mr. Bogart was discharged from hospital on Tuesday and is said to be in good spirits. 

by Shana Alexander · photographs by Leonard McCombe

Mrs. Kennedy opened her front door herself. She wore navy trousers and a white cashmere sweater and no shoes. She is smaller in person than onscreen, and thinner than she was in August — the grief is in the face, around the eyes, but she wore it the way a woman of her generation is taught to wear grief, which is with her shoulders back and her hair combed. She had a dog under one arm and a cup of tea in the other hand and she said, smiling with what looked like genuine warmth, "Oh, come in, I've been looking forward to this all morning."

Her house is a low Spanish revival above the Pacific, full of books and a piano and a great many fresh flowers. Lauren Bacall had come by the day before, she explained, and left the calla lilies on the table by the window. On the piano, in a silver frame, was a black-and-white photograph of an infant in a hospital blanket. She saw me looking. She did not move the photograph. We sat in her garden and I asked my questions.

Q. How are you, Mrs. Kennedy?

A. I am going to be all right. I say that because I have been asked it approximately eighteen thousand times in the past month and I have had to learn how to answer it without making the other person more uncomfortable than they already are. Some days I am all right. Some days I am not. Today I am all right. Thank you for asking.

Q. You've returned to work.

A. I have. I am very lucky. I have a job I love and colleagues I love and a character to play who lived eight hundred years before me and was quite possibly the most fascinating woman of the twelfth century. It is, I think, the most effective medicine I could be prescribed. I would recommend it to anyone in my circumstance who has the luxury of it, which I recognize is not many women.

Q. There has been some criticism of your return to work, and of your being seen socially.

A. I know. I have read it. (She laughed, quite suddenly, and then apologized.) I'm sorry. It is funny to me that women who have not lost what I have lost have so many suggestions about how I ought to behave. If I stayed in my house I would be accused of self-pity. If I went out I would be accused of not caring. If I wept I would be accused of making a spectacle. If I smiled I would be accused of frivolity. I have decided to do what I want to do, and to take the criticism as it comes. It is a luxury I could afford a year ago and I find I can still afford it.

Q. Your daughter.

A. Kit. Her name was Kit. Kathleen Grace. She was four pounds. She lived, as the doctors define living, for about six minutes after she was born. She had her father's hair and I will tell you, because I am asked and because I want people to know, that she was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. I held her for almost three hours in the hospital before I let them take her. I am telling you this because women lose babies all the time and they are told, by the world, to keep quiet about it, and I do not want to keep quiet about it. I want women who have lost babies to know that I lost mine, too. And I want them to know that there are doctors at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia who are trying to understand why this happens to mothers and how to prevent it from happening to others, and I would like, if you print anything else I say to you today, for you to print that address, and to ask the readers of this magazine, if they are so moved, to send a dollar.

Contributions may be sent to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, 1740 Bainbridge Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, marked for Stillbirth Research in memory of Kathleen Grace Kennedy.

Mrs. Kennedy asked that the Senator not be interviewed for this article. The Senator, reached at his office in Washington, declined to comment and sent, through his secretary, his deepest personal thanks to the editors of LIFE for their care with his wife.

 -- 

Within a week of publication, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia had received over fourteen thousand dollars in individual contributions. By Thanksgiving, the figure had risen to sixty-two thousand. By Christmas, it was something over a quarter of a million.

Mr. and Mrs. America, let's go to press…

The Kennedy marriage — splitsville? Not so fast. My sources say Senator J. is flying to L.A. the weekend after the election for what a friend of the family calls "a long-overdue conversation."… Mia K. and Frank S. were seen leaving Romanoff's together at 1 a.m. Thursday — separately, by separate doors, but you know what they say: Thursday.… Papa Joe K. has been burning up the long-distance line between Hyannis and Culver City. The subject? You guess.… This reporter hopes they work it out. Nobody, but nobody, looks better in a white dress than Mia Kelly. Excluding the Princess of Monaco.… MORE LATER.

Sources at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, speaking to this newspaper on condition of anonymity, say former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy visited the residence of his daughter-in-law, Mrs. John F. Kennedy (the actress Mia Kelly), on the evening of Thursday, October 25. The visit lasted approximately ninety minutes. Mr. Kennedy arrived and departed unaccompanied.

One source, who says she was present in the household that evening in a staff capacity, reports that Mr. Kennedy raised his voice at Mrs. Kennedy in the course of the meeting, and that the subject of the conversation concerned a possible dissolution of the marriage between Mrs. Kennedy and her husband. This source further alleges — and the Reporter has not independently corroborated this — that Mr. Kennedy stated, in the course of the argument, that any decision on Mrs. Kennedy's part to file for divorce would be met with "every resource at my disposal" to end her career in motion pictures, and that the Ambassador named specific executives at three studios with whom he claimed to have "a word or two" in reserve.

A spokesman for the Kennedy family, reached yesterday at the Ambassador's office in New York, denied that any such conversation had taken place. "Ambassador Kennedy did visit his daughter-in-law," the spokesman said. "It was a social call. He brought flowers. They spoke at length about the late Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish, for whom Mrs. John F. Kennedy's late daughter was named. Any characterization of the meeting as adversarial is fabricated."

MGM declined to comment.

Well, well, well.

This column was approached last week, and again on Monday, and again yesterday afternoon, by a source at MGM who wished to remain nameless and who told me a rather unbecoming story about the Ambassador and the actress. I declined to print the story until another publication had the courage to print it first. The Hollywood Reporter, bless it, has now obliged.

What I will add — what I will add, because I believe my readers have a right to know — is this. My own source has told me that Ambassador Kennedy did not only threaten his daughter-in-law's career on the evening of the twenty-fifth. He also, reportedly, suggested that certain particulars of Mrs. Kennedy's private conduct — a late-summer friendship with Mr. Sinatra, for instance — might be of interest to photographers, gossip columnists, and certain other parties, should the lady fail to see reason.

Every word of this I have been told. Not a word of this I can prove. The Ambassador's office has denied it. Mrs. Kennedy's representatives refuse to comment. But I print it because, my dear readers, if a man of such stature can squeeze an actress in Hollywood this Thursday — what, pray, might he do the Thursday after?

I have never liked Mrs. Kennedy. I do not pretend to. She is, to my eye, a spoiled girl who has had the world handed to her on a pearl tray. But a woman is a woman. And I will not sit in my drawing room with my hats in their boxes and watch a man use his fortune to threaten a grieving mother. Whatever else I am, I am not that.

Ambassador. I am watching you.

--

The MGM employee who spoke to the Reporter was identified internally within three weeks but was not dismissed. She had been Mia's dresser on two previous pictures and she did not, when confronted, apologize. "Mrs. Kennedy is my friend," she reportedly told the head of studio publicity. "I'd do it again tomorrow."

Dinner at "21" Saturday. Frank Sinatra at the corner table with a party of six. At ten-thirty he rose, walked to the front of the room, took the microphone from the bandleader, and said: "I'd like to dedicate the next number to a friend of mine who cannot be with us tonight. She is in California. She is working. She is the best of us. This is for Mia." He sang "I've Got You Under My Skin." The room applauded. The bandleader gave him back his microphone. He sat down. He ordered another drink.

Say what you will about the man. He knows how to deliver a lyric.

Mrs. John F. Kennedy, with her director Mr. Anthony Mann and a small production unit of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, departed Los Angeles yesterday for four weeks of exterior photography in France. The unit will film at sites associated with the historical Eleanor of Aquitaine, including Poitiers, Fontevraud, and the ruins of the twelfth-century abbey at Grandmont. Mrs. Kennedy will portray the young Eleanor, later Queen of France and of England.

Miss Audrey Hepburn, who resides with her husband Mr. Mel Ferrer in Paris, has announced that she will host Mrs. Kennedy at the couple's Left Bank residence during the production's base-of-operations week in the French capital. "Mia is a dear friend and she is coming to stay with us," Miss Hepburn told reporters at Orly on Monday. "We will take very good care of her. She does not need to be taken care of very much. But what care she does need, she will have."

Reuters · Orly Airport, November 16

Mrs. John F. Kennedy (left) arrives in Paris and is embraced by her friend Miss Audrey Hepburn. Mrs. Kennedy wears a camel-coloured Balenciaga travelling coat and a Hermès silk scarf; Miss Hepburn, a black Givenchy suit. The two women were photographed later that evening at Maxim's for a quiet dinner. Mrs. Kennedy has been commended by French fashion writers for what Le Figaro on Tuesday called "une chic américaine de la plus grande discrétion" — "an American chic of the greatest discretion."

The Americans are conquering Paris again. Mia Kelly Kennedy has arrived at the Hepburn-Ferrer apartment on the rue de l'Université for a fortnight's stay, and the French capital has, as is its custom, gone quietly and thoroughly insane for her. She has been photographed at the Louvre. She has been photographed at the Musée Rodin. She has been photographed in the gardens of the Palais Royal in a navy swing coat with her hair done in a low chignon and not a speck of make-up. It is, I am reliably informed, impossible to get a table at Le Grand Véfour this week on account of her dining there on Thursday with the Ferrers. Mrs. Ferrer (known as Miss Hepburn) is the only woman on the Continent whose presence does not entirely upstage Mrs. Kennedy's. When they walk into a room together, Parisians report, the city experiences a small, audible, collective sigh.

The French, who are realists about marriage in a way we Americans are not, have been so good as to not ask about the senator.

 --

The gift that arrived at the Crillon on Thursday morning was a first edition of Robert Browning's Dramatis Personae, 1864. Mia opened it alone in her room at seven in the morning and read the inscription and did not come down to breakfast for an hour.

She arrived on a Monday afternoon in November with three leather suitcases and no entourage, and she has conquered the sixth arrondissement without having to raise her voice once. This is the gift, perhaps, of having been born an American but raised a Kelly of Philadelphia — a city, our correspondent is reliably informed, which takes its manners rather more seriously than New York. She is staying at the apartment of her friends Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer and has been seen every morning at the café on the corner of the rue Jacob, drinking her coffee alone with a book of poems, replying in her careful, un-ambitious French to the patron and to no one else.

The Parisian woman has taken notice of her clothes. She dresses exclusively in black and navy and camel and white, and she appears never to wear a new coat when an old one will do. She wears pearls in the mornings and nothing at the throat in the evenings. She is the most photographed American in France this season and she has granted not a single interview, except for a private conversation with our sister publication Elle on the subject of a children's hospital in Philadelphia, to which, as every magazine reader now knows, the whole world is sending its dollars.

Asked by our photographer on Wednesday morning whether she was happy to be in Paris, she said, in French: "Heureuse, non. Mais je suis, aujourd'hui, à Paris, et cela suffit." Happy, no. But I am, today, in Paris, and that is enough.

Paris Match · Spread, pp. 14–17

Mrs. Kennedy at the Café de Flore, in a grey wool coat over a black turtleneck; at the Musée Rodin beside Le Baiser, in a camel Balenciaga with her hair loose; on the steps of Sacré-Cœur, laughing at something Miss Hepburn has said, in a navy beret and a Hermès scarf; at the Hôtel de Crillon, waving at the photographer through a glass revolving door, in a white silk blouse and no make-up.

So now we have an American senator's wife cavorting in Paris while her husband works in Washington and his father — as this column has exhaustively noted — runs damage control on two coasts. I have it on authority that a prominent New York attorney has drawn up separation papers. I have it on further authority that the papers have not been signed. What we have, my dear readers, is a holding pattern. And a holding pattern, in my experience, holds only until one of the parties decides otherwise.

My source further reports that Mrs. Kennedy will travel from Paris to Monaco to spend Christmas with her sister the Princess, who as all of America knows is due to produce an heir in January. Mrs. Kennedy will stand godmother. Mrs. Kennedy will stay through the birth. Mrs. Kennedy will do, I have no doubt, every little thing her twin asks her to do. What Mrs. Kennedy will not do — and what my source says the senator has asked her repeatedly to do — is come home for Christmas to Massachusetts.

I would make a remark, my dears, but I am saving my breath for the new year.

Our Mia wrapped Aquitaine yesterday in France, on schedule and under budget, and flies directly from Paris to Monaco on Wednesday to be with her beloved twin for the holidays. Princess Grace is due in late January and Mia has agreed, the palace confirmed yesterday, to be godmother to the new little heir or heiress.

Her director Mr. Mann sent me a cable Friday. I will quote the gentleman in full: "She is the most professional actress I have worked with. She has never been late, never wrong, never unkind. She has done the job of her life in the worst year of her life. I will walk over hot coals for her from this day to the day I die."

That is a rave, darlings. Write it down.

And if I may, a word to the Ambassador: keep your threats to yourself and go bother someone who deserves them.

 --

Jack opened the telegram at his father's house on Christmas Eve, standing in the front hall at Palm Beach in his overcoat, and he read it twice, and he did not come into the parlor for a quarter of an hour.

Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, the former Miss Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, gave birth to a daughter at 9:27 a.m. this morning at the Palace of Monaco. The child, given the name Caroline Louise Marguerite Grimaldi, weighed eight pounds three ounces at birth. Mother and child are reported by the palace to be in excellent health.

The Princess's fraternal twin sister, the American actress Mia Kelly (Mrs. John F. Kennedy), who has been in residence at the palace since mid-December, will stand godmother at the infant's baptism. Mrs. Kennedy was photographed this afternoon on the palace balcony holding the new princess in her arms, beside Prince Rainier and a seated Princess Grace. The American Mrs. Kennedy wore a pale blue Givenchy and pearls.

Mrs. Kennedy, asked by a reporter from Le Figaro whether she would now be returning to the United States, said only: "I am going to stay with my sister as long as she wants me. After that I am going home. Thank you."

AP Wirephoto · Monaco, January 23, 1957

Mrs. John F. Kennedy, godmother, holding the newborn Princess Caroline of Monaco on the palace balcony following the child's presentation to the gathered crowd. Princess Grace, seated in a cream silk dress, watches her sister. Prince Rainier stands at Mrs. Kennedy's right shoulder. Mrs. Kennedy, who has not been photographed with her own husband in five months, is smiling in this picture. It is the first photograph in which she has smiled since August.

Our Mia is flying home. I had this yesterday morning from a source I will not name, who tells me Mrs. Kennedy will board a plane at Nice on the first of February and transit New York later that evening. She has not, I am told, given a return date.

Read that again, darlings.

I do not know what this means. I have stopped pretending I do. For five months this column has told you what I hoped for this girl, and I am saying now, for the record, that I have talked myself hoarse and I am going to be quiet for a while and let the lady live her own life.

What I will say is this. She has survived a year I would not wish on any woman of any age. She has lost a baby. She has been libeled in columns that shall go unnamed. She has buried her daughter, made a picture, and charmed the city of Paris. Whatever she decides to do on the second of February, or the third, or the fourteenth, she has earned the right to decide it without the rest of us looking over her shoulder.

I am not going to tell you what I hope for her today. Perhaps next week. Perhaps never.

Come home safe, Mia. Whatever home is going to mean.