Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family by David Batcher Amber Hunt, David Batcher

woman with a sweet smile and long, lustrous blonde hair. She came from a poor, uneducated family, whose ancestors had left Ireland during the 1840s potato famine. She’d been working in the office at William Howe Co., a coal distributor, where George briefly worked, when the two met. Ann was a tad taller than George and a bit heavier as well, but George liked the cute, boisterous “Liverpool Irish” girl who lived in the blue-collar South Side. He liked less her religion. Ann was a devout Irish Catholic. Her mother, Margaret Brannack, had converted from Episcopalian to Catholicism at her husband’s request when Ann was ten years old. As latecomers to faith tend to be, Margaret became die-hard in her religion, and Ann was required to attend early morning mass every day, even if it meant trudging through Chicago in a snowstorm.
    “It was a very religious environment that Ann lived in,” her lifelong friend, Florence Ferguson Kumpfer, later said. “We used to go to church together every day. The nuns were very strict. Ann was a Catholic’s Catholic. Her mother instilled that strong, strong religion in her.”
    Ann’s father, Joseph Brannack, seemed destined to fit an unfortunate stereotype: the hard-drinking Irishman. “He was rarely around,” Oppenheimer wrote, “and offered little security for the family, jumping from one menial job to another—hotel worker, night watchman—supporting his family as best he could.” Like Curt Skakel, Brannack had issues with drink—a hardship that would lead him and his wife to separate.
    Despite George’s misgivings about Ann’s religion, he courted her, and she believed in him. She was certain he would someday be a success, and so they were married on November 25, 1917, by a Catholic priest. They moved into a house in a Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, and within three months, Ann was pregnant. With each pregnancy, Ann seemed to keep the weight she’d gained, eventually reaching nearly two hundred pounds. In all, she had seven children—four girls and three boys—which she initially raised in a large home on University Avenue in Hyde Park. The first child was Georgeann—a merging of the parents’ firstnames—followed by brothers George Jr., Jim, and Rushton. Next came Patricia, then Ethel—named after her mother’s sister and born April 11, 1928, in Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital—followed finally by Ann (known as “Little Ann” to her mother’s “Big Ann”).

    The children were young when the family moved east to New York in 1933, hopping from one high-end rental home to the next. For a while they settled in the well-to-do suburb of Larchmont in Westchester County north of Manhattan, renting a mansion on twelve acres of land. The house was impractically huge—so enormous that the family didn’t even use many of the rooms. “It was a fabulous place, so big none of us could believe it, and mind-bogglingly beautiful,” Rushton Skakel would later recall.
    George used the home often to entertain business associates, and Ann was an admirable host. “The parties were always impressive, with a hired staff to serve the finest foods and liquors—especially liquor,” wrote journalist J. Randy Taraborrelli. Sometimes the parties lasted all day, beginning when George had breakfast meetings in the morning, and ending after dinner, cocktails, and more drinks at night. George used the house as an extension of his business, and he considered his children—unruly bunch though they were—assets. They weren’t ordered to their bedrooms; rather, they were on full display for guests. Potential business partners and clients seemed to embrace the vision as proof that George was a wholesome, happy family man. He became so reliant on the image that it extended outside of the home. “My father practically never went to a business meeting without one of us,” Rushton Skakel said. “We’d go into major board meetings at the big companies and we’d be sitting there with all