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The younger Shevlin prepped at the Hill School, attended Yale only briefly. Says a relative: "Tommy might have been at Yale a week—not even long enough to get his golf clubs unpacked." He worked briefly in the family lumber business, skippered a PT boat during World War II. A friend of the late Ernest Hemingway, Shevlin is an avid big-game hunter, polo player, deep-sea fisherman and golfer. Durie and Tom Shevlin now own a white colonial mansion across North Ocean Boulevard from the Joseph P. Kennedy estate in Palm Beach.
Oscar for Romance. Durie had known the Kennedy family even before moving to Palm Beach; she dated young Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. before the war. No one is now inclined to reminisce on how long she and Jack knew each other, but they dated each other in the winter of 1946-1947.
At that time, Kennedy was 29, a freshman Congressman and an eminently eligible bachelor. Durie was 30, separated and soon to be divorced from Desloge. The two were linked romantically in at least one society column. Wrote the New York World-Telegram's Charles Ventura on Jan. 20, 1947: "Jack (John F.) Kennedy, who won the Navy's highest award for heroism by swimming through a sea of flame to rescue two of his PT boat crew, has just been voted another outstanding decoration. Palm Beach's cottage colony wants to give [him] its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance . . . giving Durie Malcolm Desloge the season's outstanding rush. The two were inseparable at all social functions and sports events. They even drove down to Miami to hold hands at football games and wager on the horses. Durie is the daughter of the George H. Malcolms of Palm Beach and Chicago. She is beautiful and intelligent. Tiny obstacle to orange blossoms is that the Kennedy clan frowns upon divorce."
"Environment of Strangers." In 1948, shortly after Durie's marriage to Shevlin, ex-Husband Desloge filed suit contesting her custody of the only daughter of their marriage. He charged that Durie had "failed to give said child motherly love and affection by reason of extended absences," was raising the girl "in an environment of strangers," and "was being courted by various and sundry men" before her marriage to Shevlin. An out-of-court agreement split the custody.
Mrs. Henry Huelskamp, who was the child's nurse at the time, says that Durie met Jack Kennedy in the winter of 1946-1947 in Palm Beach. No admirer of Durie, she recalls that Durie was then being squired by "at least three or four other eligible men." Mrs. Huelskamp derides the notion of any marriage. Says she: "We didn't see enough of him to give me the idea that anything like that could have happened. She was very frank with me, and after all I have eyes, and it doesn't strike me that she was very much interested."