Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (16 page)

The extent to which Kick’s sights had altogether shifted from caves to castles is suggested by Jack’s March 10, 1942, response to Billy’s question about whether he still believed that the British were “decadent.” Addressing her, as he liked to do, in a fanciful strain, Jack cast his reply specifically in terms of Kick’s recently revived travel plans. “I would advise strongly against any voyage to England to marry an Englishman,” he wrote at once archly and unrepentantly to his sister. “For I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it has come time to write the obituary of the British Empire.” Jack painted “the English way of life” that he and she had witnessed on the eve of the war as very much a “dying” phenomenon. Far from impressed by Britain’s ability to stand alone, as Billy had expected him to be, Jack pointed to Churchill’s reliance on the Americans to defeat Hitler as a sure sign that the Britain of old could not possibly survive the war. Though of course, in a very different tone, Joe Kennedy had been saying as much for years.

John White, rather than acknowledge that at this point Billy and the life he offered had become an insurmountable obstacle to his intentions, much preferred to look upon Kick’s father as his principal nemesis. When White lamented that he was sick of fighting with her about their relationship; when he countered her claims about what the Roman Catholic Church prohibited her from doing with indignant demands that she seek a dispensation; when he vowed to renounce her, only to resume hysterically chasing and quarreling with her shortly thereafter; when he spoke in a desultory manner of hoping that they might marry one day; when he finally gave up begging and badgering her for sex, insisting that he would happily settle for kissing and cuddling instead—he seems to have had no clear comprehension that whatever window of opportunity he may have enjoyed between late October 1941 and early January 1942 had shut swiftly and forever as soon as she’d learned that Billy was free. She did not wish to hurt John, but she could not give him what he wanted, either—certainly not now. When Lem Billings visited Kick and Betty Coxe soon after they inherited Jack’s apartment, he observed with amusement that among the young men’s photographs displayed on the living room table, there was not a single image of Kick’s current suitor, John White.

Inga, too, regarded old Joe as her particular enemy, but in her case this was not a misperception. When he learned that she and his son had been rendezvousing in Charleston and, worse, that Jack was contemplating marriage, he went into overdrive to end the affair. He knew about it partly from Kick, who now admitted to being jealous about the depth of Inga’s intimacy with her brother, and partly from the detailed reports that the FBI regularly sent on to him. The agency bugged the Charleston hotel room where the lovers’ pillow talk included, among other matters, Jack’s belief that “the British Empire is through,” his annoyance with Churchill “for getting this country into the war,” his bitterness about his father’s political downfall, and his sense that old Joe had finally quit speaking out against intervention because he feared that were he to persist he “might hurt his sons in politics.”

This last concern, or so the old man claimed, was what motivated him now to do all that he could to compel Jack to give up Inga. She was a married woman, after all, and even were she to divorce her husband and marry Jack, she threatened to prove a significant liability should he run for office as a Catholic candidate who hoped to appeal to the Catholic vote. Jack initially sought to resist his father. He brought Inga to meet the old man, who, by Inga’s account, made a pass at her when his son was out of the room.

After Jack learned about the FBI surveillance of his trysts with Inga, he reluctantly agreed to see her no more. Inga seems to have accepted the end of the affair with an air of stoicism. She told Jack that were she “but 18 summers” she would “fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you.” As it was, she considered herself too old, and Jack’s bond to his father and to his family too strong. Not long after the breakup, Inga left the paper, where Kick inherited her column.

In the end, Jack had capitulated with regard to the woman he had hoped to marry. Kick, though no less attached to her father and family, was unwilling to lose Billy in the same manner. Presently, she told her parents of a letter that Nancy Astor had sent to the Brands, calling on Kick to stop the foolishness and come back to marry Billy without delay. Was Kick’s mention of Lady Astor’s remarks her way of preparing her parents for the inevitable? Certainly, she made no effort to hide the fact that the possibility she might marry the heir to the Duke of Devonshire was still very much in play.

Intent on going over in the capacity of a journalist, Kick made the rounds of various U.S. State Department offices in Washington in quest of the special permissions that would be necessary for a trip that, she told Inga over lunch one day, she was prepared to undertake at her personal expense. In the beginning, she was confident that her status as Joseph P. Kennedy’s daughter would open all doors. However, that proved to have been a miscalculation. Kick complained of the futility of her efforts to Jack, noting that the U.S. government had an agreement with London about the number of correspondents they could send over. She, unfortunately, had failed to make the cut. Also, one’s visa had to be approved by the British Embassy, which, she noted sardonically, she did not believe the British would be “too happy to do” in her case.

After he had lost Inga, Jack, despite his privately stated antipathy to the war, began an officers’ training course in Chicago in eager anticipation of finally being reassigned to sea duty in the Pacific theater. John White, powerless against the magnetic pull that Billy and Britain seemed to exert on Kick, joined the Marines. By this point, White had abandoned his efforts to persuade her to sleep with him, or even merely to cuddle and kiss. He reasoned that her convictions with regard to premarital sex were so deeply ingrained that to seduce her would be truly to violate her, and that he loved her too much to knowingly do that. Instead, he asked for no more than to be allowed to spend chaste but affectionate evenings with her at Dorchester House. At bedtime, Kick would rush into the bathroom to change into a flannel nightgown. Then she would position herself in bed in anticipation of permitting John to tenderly massage her back until she fell asleep, or at least until she pretended to sleep in the interest of hastening his departure.

Finally, John White left Washington for boot camp in South Carolina and later a stint at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. Prior to his being shipped out to Northern Ireland, Kick invited him to spend the Labor Day weekend with her family at Hyannis Port. There he would have an opportunity to encounter for the first time the Kennedy patriarch who had loomed so powerfully and ominously in the younger man’s imagination.

The meeting between old Joe and his self-appointed nemesis proved anticlimactic, to say the least. It took place outside the main house, where John White, who had missed his bus to the Cape, was making a tardy and somewhat awkward arrival. Joe Kennedy, walking past the hired car that had delivered his daughter’s houseguest, uttered but two clipped words of welcome: “You’re late!” The shabby newspaperman, clutching his little overnight bag, was left to scurry up to the main house on his own.

Directly, he found himself drawn into the vortex of game playing and frenetic activity that epitomized life among the younger Kennedys. He could not possibly have known it, but as he saw Kick match, if not exceed, the savage ferocity and competitiveness of her siblings on the tennis court, he was witnessing the identical phenomenon that had riveted the attention of a very different group of young people one long-ago prewar day at Hatfield House. At last, it was not really old Joe, or even Billy, who had thwarted John White. He had been defeated by Kick’s high-mettled spirit, the inner demon that drove her to keep pounding for what she wanted when less obstinate souls might have long since given up.

When, in November of 1942, she heard from Billy that he might soon stand for the Devonshire seat in Parliament, she conspired with the former Hearst correspondent in London, William Hillman, to get her over to England so that she could put her journalistic experience to work in helping to advise Billy, and to assist him with his speeches. When Hillman’s efforts came to naught, she approached the publisher of the
Woman’s Home Companion
monthly about signing on as its London correspondent.

Finally, after three years of failed attempts that had invariably been followed by hopeful new efforts, Kick found the path back to London that she had been seeking. Early in 1943, Betty Coxe proposed that they travel together to England as part of a Red Cross program that was then recruiting young women to assist in aiding American military personnel overseas. When Kick quit the
Times Herald
to enroll in the Red Cross training school, she could not be certain that she would be assigned to London, of all conceivable destinations. Nonetheless, she expressed confidence that her father could be cajoled into calling in the necessary favors, opposed to Billy though he remained.

When, in the waning phase of Kick’s relationship with John White, she had spoken to him of Billy, she depicted Billy as still pining for her, and she painted his great need for her as but one factor among many in her calculations about England. Almost certainly that had been her way of bringing poor, dear, mad John White back down to earth as softly and gently as possible. By contrast, in the course of many conversations with an important new friend whom she acquired during this period, Lord Halifax’s son Richard Wood, she made it clear that she was nothing less than, in her word, “desperate” to be with Billy again.

Richard Wood had never met or seen Kick before when, in 1943, she came to the British Embassy in Washington, where his father had been appointed ambassador on the death of Lord Lothian. But the twenty-two-year-old Richard had certainly heard and read and thought a great deal about her in years past. As he would recall more than half a century later, Kick’s legend had utterly captivated him in 1938 and 1939, when there was so much talk, at his school and elsewhere, of the “fabulous Kennedys,” and especially of Kick’s triumphs among the aristocratic cousinhood. In those days, Richard, handsome and athletic, a superb cricketer, had been a student at Eton, where he was a classmate of Andrew Cavendish.

Kick, when Richard first learned of her existence, had seemed somehow achingly out of reach, a girl far more likely to be interested in Oxford and Cambridge fellows, who were all slightly older than he. One of Richard’s own elder brothers, Peter Wood, was friendly with most of the young grandees who admitted to being besotted by her. Peter had been with David Ormsby-Gore, Jakie Astor, and Hugh Fraser in the car crash of 1937 that figured prominently in the myth of their group. Now, he regaled young Richard with stories of Kick. Andrew Cavendish supplied other tantalizing details. At a time when Joseph P. Kennedy was at the pinnacle of his popularity in London, Kennedy came to Eton to address the school’s Political Society on the theme of “America.” The ambassador was accompanied by Joe Junior and Jack, both of whose dashing good looks and air of glamour had the effect of stoking young Richard’s dreams about their fabled sister.

Richard longed to meet or even simply to glimpse Kick in person. To his immense frustration, however, by the time Kick returned to the U.S. with her mother and siblings, any such encounter had yet to take place.

Meanwhile, the British declaration of war had led to a major change in Richard’s plans for life after Eton. Instead of going up to Oxford as previously intended, he worked briefly at the British Embassy in Rome, prior to enlisting at nineteen years of age in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Later, as a member of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he fought with the 8th Army in North Africa. In the course of a raid in the Libyan desert in December 1942, Richard was pinned beneath a bomb that had been dropped by a Nazi Stuka bomber. The bomb failed to explode, but both of Richard’s legs were crushed, and had to be amputated under primitive conditions. At length, brought to Washington to possibly be “fitted up” for a pair of artificial limbs, he resided at the British Embassy, where Lord and Lady Halifax encouraged him to have groups of young people in to dine.

For all the world, Richard strove to appear to cheerfully accept what had happened to him on the sands of Libya. He liked to jest that he had survived only because he had been hit by a bomb that anti-Nazi Czech munitions workers had deliberately misassembled. The remark was lent pathos by the fact that Richard’s brother Peter had been much less fortunate, losing his life in the Battle of El Alamein, two months before Richard’s ordeal. But what sort of life could Richard expect to have?

Despite Richard’s carefully maintained outward air of acceptance and good humor, he was, by his own subsequent account, privately in crisis. Could he really ever enjoy anything approximating a normal existence? He insisted to others that he could and would, but he experienced many agonizing moments of doubt. It was in this tumultuous condition of mind that Richard finally found himself face-to-face with the very girl whom he had once ached to meet. But so much had changed for him since that earlier time. Could he possibly relax and enjoy himself now, as though he were any twenty-two-year-old in the company of a highly desirable young woman?

Many years afterward, he would reflect that it was Kick who first taught him to answer that question in the affirmative.

She began to restore his sense that he was a man like any other. By Richard’s lights, in the days and weeks that followed their initial encounter, Kick plunged him back into vibrant life. She reintroduced him to a world of young people partaking of ordinary pleasures. Early on, she escorted him to his first baseball game, an experience that he would long treasure, not because of any great passion on his part for the American sport, but rather because it was such simple, everyday fun, light-years away from all he had endured in the war zone.