Rose Kennedy's Husband CHOSE Gloria Swanson Over HER

In October 1914 Rose Fitzgerald married Joseph Kennedy in the private chapel of Cardinal William O'Connell in Boston. Fifteen years later the same cardinal was sent to New York to tell the actress Gloria Swanson to end her affair with Rose's husband. Swanson asked who had sent him. He refused to answer, then and for the rest of his life. This is the story of a marriage that has been told for a century as the story of a woman who did not know - and of a record that says otherwise. Rose Kennedy left her husband in 1920, pregnant with her fourth child, and went home to her father, who sent her back. She never left again. What she did instead was learn to know everything and say nothing, for fifty-five years, and then write five hundred and thirty-six pages in which Gloria Swanson appears as "poor Gloria." Sources John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Fast Facts about Joseph P. Kennedy Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) David Nasaw, The Patriarch (2012) Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Times to Remember (Doubleday, 1974) Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (Random House, 1980) Contemporary reporting on Cardinal William O'Connell, the 1927 Savoy Plaza meeting, and the Queen Kelly and The Trespasser productions