Black Diamonds (52 page)

Kick heard nothing from Rose and Joe on the day of the wedding.

That morning, Rose left New York for a retreat in Virginia. At the airport, swamped by reporters, she issued a terse statement. The family, she said, had been unable to communicate with Kick, much as they would have liked to, due to wartime cable restrictions. She herself, she added, was ‘physically unfit to discuss the wedding with Kick or anyone’.

The following day, Kick read her mother’s statement in the newspapers. Aware of its fallacy, knowing the number of cables that had been sent to and fro across the Atlantic in the course of the previous week, she immediately called Joe. He responded by sending a one-line telegram to their father: ‘
THE POWER OF SILENCE IS GREAT
.’ Kennedy senior relented; breaking the silence, he sent a cable back by return. While there is no record of its content, Kick was immensely relieved, evident in the telegram she composed in reply: ‘
MOST DISTRESSED ABOUT MOTHER PLEASE TELL HER NOT TO WORRY YOUR CABLE MADE MY HAPPIEST DAY WIRE NEWS COMPTON PLACE EASTBOURNE SUSSEX HAVE AMERICAN PAPERS BEEN BAD ALL LOVE KICK
.’

It would be two months before Rose could bring herself to speak to her daughter.

‘
Dearest family
,’ Kick wrote on 18 May, twelve days after her wedding, ‘I have now become a camp follower. Am living in a small hotel near to where Billy is stationed. It is very comfortable and we have the prize suite. I wouldn’t compare it to Daddy’s set-up at the Waldorf Towers, but as I often said it takes all sorts of experience to make life worthwhile …’ Writing five days later, she told them, ‘I am feeling better now than I have since I left America. This is the first really good rest I have had for a year. Have put on some weight and am getting plenty of sleep. MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!’

After a five-day honeymoon at Compton Place, the Devonshires’ seaside home at Eastbourne, Kick and Billy had moved into the Swan Hotel at Alton in Hampshire, a modest half-timbered building in the village. Preparations were in full swing for the Normandy landings; Billy’s regiment, the Coldstream Guards, was due to take part in the invasion. It was simply a question of when.

While Billy spent his days training with his regiment at the military camp outside the village, Kick explored the countryside on a bicycle and delighted in the comedy of manners that unfurled at the Swan during their stay.

[It] gets funnier and funnier every day. Little did we know what we were in for when we arrived in this town. There never has been a funnier assortment of people in one spot than in this hotel. The little bellboy, a native of Dublin, informed me that his name was Kennedy and we might be related. Every time Billy or I stick our noses out of our room – there he [is] waiting to march in front of us, flinging open doors and saying ‘This way, Marquess’ at the top of his lungs. Last night we went to call on the Chef, as he had put us up such a delicious picnic on the Sunday. The Chef told me a long sad story about how he almost came to work for us in the Embassy days. He said one of the secretaries had gotten the letters mixed up so he never came. The food here is exceptionally good and much better than any London restaurant. Last night he christened the dessert after Billy by calling it ‘croûte Cavendish’. I must say it was most disgusting but we had to grin, eat and bear it.

There is another old retired Army man here who has had his house taken over by the Americans so he lives here. He collects prints and happened to have one of the 3rd Duke of Devonshire. He has already given it to us as a wedding present.

D-Day, the anticipated invasion of Europe, finally came on 6 June. Wave upon wave of British and American troops were to follow the battalions that had landed on the beaches of north-west France. On 17 June the Coldstream Guards received orders to leave for the Front.

It had been ‘
the most perfect month
’, Billy wrote later that evening. ‘How beastly it is to be ending things … This love seems to cause nothing but goodbye. I think that that is the worst part of it, worse even than fighting.’

Kick missed Billy dreadfully in the weeks after he left for France. Returning to London, feeling lonely and isolated, she was also profoundly disturbed by her mother’s silence. Since her wedding day, she had done all she could to win Rose back. She had sent messages of love to her via her father and her brothers and sisters and written her numerous letters – all of which her mother had ignored.

Rose was incapable of seeing beyond Kick’s apostasy. The idea that a daughter of hers was living in sin was unbearable, her horror validated by the reaction the marriage had provoked among leading Catholics. In the weeks following the wedding, she had received many letters offering nuptial condolences. ‘May the Blessed Mother give her the necessary grace to see the error of her ways before many weeks have passed,’ Father Hugh O’Donnell, an influential Catholic priest, had written. Across the Atlantic, the reaction was equally strong. At Chatsworth, the Devonshires were inundated with letters from irate Catholics accusing Kick of having sold her soul for a title. Writing to his wife with the zealotry of a convert, Evelyn Waugh had remarked, ‘Kick Kennedy’s apostasy is a sad thing. It is Second Front nerves that has driven her to this grave sin and I am sorry for the girl.’

On 6 July Kick sat down to compose yet another letter to her mother. It merely repeated thoughts and sentiments she had expressed in others she had written to Rose since her wedding – letters her mother had failed to answer. In the same way Rose could not bring herself to see beyond Kick’s apostasy, Kick refused to recognize her mother for the rigid, overbearing and emotionally frigid woman that she was. On the contrary, Kick absolutely adored her. As Kick’s abject letter reveals, her happiness depended on her mother’s approval.

Darling Mother

This letter is just meant for you. It’s a birthday letter – Hope it arrives by July 23rd.

By now I hope you are happy about my marriage, I suppose I really always expected to marry Billy. Some day – some how.

However you and Daddy know that I never would do anything against your will. You two have been so wonderful to me as well as to every member of the family. The older I get and the more I see makes me realize this and a lot of other things. First, that you are the most unselfish woman in the world. Any house where we have all been has been difficult to run and you have always put us before any of your own desires or pleasures. We all have happy personalities and get along with people far easier than most people – this is due to the happy atmosphere which has always surrounded us.

When I see some homes I marvel at you more and more.

Certain qualities I have – people admire. They are all traits that you have instilled in me.

In the matter of my marriage – I knew you would be upset, but I felt sure you would see the ultimate good. I knew you would never forbid anything if you felt it meant my happiness. It must have been hard for you to resign yourself to the idea of my doing something quite against all your principles – I repeat, the one thing I don’t want you ever to think is that my religious or moral education has ever been lacking. You have done more than enough to show me the gateway to Heaven. Please God I can do half as well for the little Cavendishes.

I miss you so much and long to see you. We have so much to talk about. There wasn’t anyone to really take your place at the time of the wedding and it seemed so odd that at the time, the moment, the period of one’s life which one has looked forward to for so long, the dearest person in the world wasn’t there –

Please have a wonderful birthday. Think of me and always remember that if I spend the rest of my life trying to repay you for everything it will be very little. All love to you, from Kick

Seven weeks after the wedding Rose finally contacted her daughter. Her letter was in part duplicitous; privately, in conversations with Archbishop Spellman, she was still contriving to have the marriage annulled. ‘
Here it is
the fourth of July again, and another summer is almost half over,’ she wrote to Kick.

We are all looking forward now to having Joe home and we only wish you and Billy were going to be along too …

… I really didn’t expect that you would be married until after the invasion or at least until I knew more definitely of your plans. However, that is all over now, Dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will receive him with open arms …

Joe Junior never did come home. On 12 August, the reality of war was brought home to the Kennedy family when Joe was killed after his plane, a Liberator bomber, exploded on a secret mission over the North Sea. Kick was devastated. Joe was her favourite brother, her ‘pillar of strength’, the one member of the family to have supported her through the months of anguish over Billy. ‘When he felt that I had made up my mind he stood by me,’ she later wrote. ‘In every way he was the perfect brother doing, according to his own lights, the best for his sister with the hope that in the end it would be the best for the family.’ The evening she heard of Joe’s death, she spoke to his great friend Mark Soden. ‘I’m so sorry I broke down tonight,’ she wrote after the phone call. ‘I still can’t believe it. It’s hard to write. I don’t feel sorry for Joe – just for you and everyone that knew him ’cause no matter how he yelled, argued, etc, he was the best guy in the world.’

On 16 August, Kick flew home to America to grieve with her family.

32

‘
I’ve got a telegram
here,’ Joe Kennedy said to Eunice, his twenty-two-year-old daughter.

‘Is it about Billy?’ she asked.

‘Yes, he’s been killed.’

Billy Hartington was killed in action on 10 September 1944. It was three months after he had left his new wife to rejoin his regiment in France. They had spent just five weeks together.

The telegram reporting Billy’s death was delivered to Joe Kennedy’s suite at the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan. Kick, still in deep mourning for her brother Joe, who had died barely four weeks earlier, was eight blocks away, shopping at Bonwit & Teller, the department store, where she had arranged to meet her younger sister, Eunice, for lunch. Under Joe’s instructions, Eunice went in search of her, finding her on the second floor.

‘Before we go I think we ought to go back and talk to Daddy,’ she said.

‘Something’s happened?’ said Kick, searching her sister’s face for an answer.

‘Why don’t you go talk to Daddy?’

Eunice did not tell Kick what had happened on the walk back to the Waldorf. When they got there, Joe was waiting for them at the door to his suite. Ushering Kick in, he closed the door. After he had told her Billy was dead, she remained alone in the room. She did not emerge until later that evening when the family gathered for dinner, her eyes red and swollen from crying. The meal was tense. Neither Billy’s death nor his name was mentioned.

The following morning, Patsy White, Kick’s closest friend, flew up to New York from Washington, to be with her. After she had met Joe Kennedy at the Waldorf, a driver took her over to the Plaza where Rose and Kick were staying with the rest of the family. The room she was shown into was in a state of upheaval. Rose, Kick and the other Kennedy girls were sitting there with clothes strewn all around them. Kick was deathly pale: ‘
A great cloud
of misery was hanging over everything,’ Patsy recalled. When she finally got to be alone with her friend, Patsy asked her what she had been doing since she had heard the news. ‘Mostly going to Mass,’ Kick murmured, barely looking at her. ‘Mother keeps saying, “God doesn’t send us a cross heavier than we can bear.” Again and again she keeps saying it.’

That evening, Joe Kennedy took them all out to a French restaurant on Park Avenue. During dinner he suggested getting tickets for a show on Broadway and seemed surprised when no one jumped at his offer. As the meal went on, Patsy was unnerved by the way Kick was expected to behave as if nothing had happened. But then she remembered that Kick had once told her that Kennedys were brought up not to cry. For the next two days the charade continued. The two friends were hardly given a chance to be alone. In the whirl of frenetic activity laid on by the other Kennedys, Patsy remembers Kick’s silent grief. She often caught her staring uncomprehendingly at a photo of Billy in uniform that she always kept at her side. There was to be no future, no children. Later, talking about Billy, Kick told her, ‘The amazing thing was that Billy loved me so much. I felt needed, I felt I could make him happy.’

A few days later, Kick was comforted by a letter she received from Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devonshire, its warmth a startling contrast to the chilliness she had experienced from her own mother. ‘My Darling Kick,’ the Duchess wrote,

I want you never, never to forget what complete happiness you gave him. All your life you must think that you brought complete happiness to one person. He wrote that to me when he went to the front. I want you to know this for I know what conscientious struggle you went through before you married Billy, but I know that it will be a source of infinite consolation to you now that you decided as you did. All your life I shall love you – not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world. May you be given strength to carry you through these truly terrible months. My heart breaks when I think of how much you have gone through in your young life.

Slowly, the details of Billy’s death emerged.

In the weeks before he died, his battalion had been engaged in heavy fighting in Northern France. They were exhilarating times: the Germans were in retreat. In early September, the battalion crossed the Somme River, pushing east towards Brussels. Billy’s unit was one of the first to liberate the city: as the German retreat was driven on, victory seemed within grasp. Thousands of locals from the towns and villages turned out to cheer the Allies on, festooning the soldiers’ tanks and armoured vehicles with garlands of flowers. Writing to Kick shortly before his death, Billy admitted to feeling ‘
so unworthy
of it all living as I have in reasonable safety and comfort during these years … I have a permanent lump in my throat and I long for you to be here as it is an experience which few can have and which I would love to share with you.’