Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (17 page)

Also coincident with Kick’s Red Cross training program, she and Richard enjoyed many spirited conversations. They spoke about their life-changing experiences, his in the Libyan desert and hers in fashionable London society; about Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism; and about their nations’ cultural and political differences. In these discussions, there was nothing of the combativeness associated with the talks that she had had over the course of many months with John White. John had been hectoring and argumentative; Richard’s nature was genial and contemplative. John had been a freethinker; Richard was deeply religious. John had a permissive attitude toward sex; Richard was a man of exacting morals.

Unlike John, Richard had no illusions about the intensity of Kick’s feelings for Billy. He understood that his conversations with Kick were a prelude to her return to Britain and the man she loved. Richard had finally met Kick, after all, at a time when every element was at last in place for the transatlantic journey that, she made clear, she had long been struggling to arrange. To his perception, she regarded their talks as a means of working out certain of the issues of religion and national identity that were about to confront her in England. So, as generous as she had been with Richard, their friendship proved a boon to her as well. The trouble, from Richard’s perspective, was that she saw him wholly as a friend, nothing more. In view of Kick’s impending departure, Richard resigned himself to the necessity of concealing that he, too, had fallen hopelessly in love with her.

On the evening of June 23, 1943, Kick, habited in a tin helmet and raincoat, with a canteen and first-aid kit fastened to her waist, sailed for the port of Glasgow, Scotland, whence she was due to proceed by train to London. Nearly four years had passed since she’d returned to the U.S. from England at the start of the European war. At the time of that earlier voyage, she had not yet been twenty years of age. In the autumn of 1939, whether she would be able to retain her new sense of herself as a person in her own right had yet to be tested. Whether in the face of much familial opposition and many new obstacles and distractions she would persist in her determination to be with Billy again was still to be seen.

First love is often meteoric. One minute it dazzles and dominates the thoughts and senses, and then, in a twinkling, it is no more. But in 1943, Kick’s very presence on the liner
Queen Mary,
along with a contingent of Red Cross girls, seven of whom she shared a cabin with, and some eighteen thousand U.S. troops attested to the fact that her feelings for Billy had endured, after all. Indeed, she didn’t even have Betty Coxe by her side, her friend having been dispatched to North Africa instead.

Kick, when Betty first spoke to her of the Red Cross, had viewed the job as an expedient, like all the expedients that had come before, including her work as a journalist. And now it is not too much to suppose that she saw herself less in a tin helmet than in a tiara, the former being the necessary prelude to the latter.

Meanwhile, in a round-robin letter to her family from the
Queen Mary,
she complained about the crowded conditions in her cabin; about the annoyance of her “giggling” female cabinmates, who liked to sit up until about half past one every night; about the “pathetic” living conditions of the American soldiers who seemed to be “packed in all over the ship”; about the “crude circumstances” in which she and other worshippers had been forced to have Mass; and about the limited deck space available for her daily mile-long walk. “Mother,” Kick declared, “you wouldn’t recognize this boat as the same one you made that comfortable luxury cruise on in 1936.” Life on a military troop transport, she went on, “seems so unreal and far removed from anything I’ve ever known that I can’t believe I’m part of it.”

She insisted that she recognized that much in England had altered in her absence.

Still, after so much carping, the very fact that Kick felt compelled to portray herself as “quite prepared for the changes” suggests that she had perhaps begun to fear that she was not.

Seven

On June 28, 1943, Kick arrived in London on a crowded troop train from Glasgow, where the
Queen Mary
had docked earlier in the day. Though Kick was technically part of the same military buildup as the soldiers, she and they were operating in terms of two decidedly different narratives. For Kick, London was the end of the journey, the destination she had been fighting to get back to, where she would finally be reunited with Billy and resume the life she had been forced to leave behind in 1939. For the soldiers, the war-scarred city, large sections of which had been destroyed in the Blitz, was to be but a stopping-off point.

One month before, in Washington, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to a plan for an expedition across the English Channel, with the aim of invading France. Prior to that, there had been much contention between the British and American sides about how best to attack the Germans. Churchill had preferred to go in through what he called the “soft underbelly”—that is, via Italy and up through Southern Germany. Among other reasons, the British prime minister maintained that this approach would have important political ramifications in the postwar world. Also, mindful of the tremendous loss of life sustained by the British in the First World War, Churchill believed that his plan would result in fewer Allied casualties than would the strategy favored by the White House, which had argued for crossing the English Channel and going in through France.

Finally, in May of 1943 a compromise had been reached whereby the main thrust would be an assault through France, to be preceded by a subsidiary attack via the soft underbelly.

The eighteen thousand soldiers who had just come over on the
Queen Mary
were the latest installment of a gigantic massing of American troops that had begun one year before. The objective at this point was to have an estimated one and a half million U.S. soldiers in place by the time of the cross-Channel invasion, to be undertaken in conjunction with divisions of British and Canadian troops, as well as more modest contingents from other countries. Every fiber of the troops’ collective being was concentrated on this make-or-break operation, in anticipation of which the new arrivals would shortly join their many American predecessors in a program of intensive military training.

Kick had not told Billy in advance that she would be coming over on this particular ocean crossing. He knew about the Red Cross scheme that she had hatched in collaboration with Betty Coxe, but she had given him no specific date on which to expect her.

So now Kick sent word through the Ormsby-Gores that she had managed to return at last. David, who was in training near Hatfield with the Territorial Army, knew how to get word to Billy without delay, precisely as Kick had expected. She further assumed that when Billy learned that she was in London he would come to her instantly.

Instead, it would be nearly two weeks before he could obtain leave. He could not simply break off from his training maneuvers and rush to Kick in London whenever it pleased him to do so. Whether Kick liked it or not—and, as would become increasingly clear, she most certainly did not like it—that was the stark new reality that confronted her upon her return to England.

Meanwhile, she also had much to be dissatisfied with in her new Red Cross posting. A good many strings had indeed been pulled to win her a choice assignment at the Hans Crescent Club for soldiers, located behind Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. Through a contact at U.S. Army Headquarters in London, old Joe had managed to prevent Kick from being sent off, like most other new girls, to military encampments far from the nation’s capital for a six-month preparatory program. Though Kick was pleased to be able to remain in London, she was unhappy about the requirement that she live at the club, where her responsibilities would consist of talking to homesick soldiers, helping them to write letters, playing cards and Ping-Pong with them, and otherwise ministering to their spirits.

Eager to see old friends in and about London, she was dismayed by the mere one and a half days per week that she had off from her duties. In turn, her coworkers and superiors were not entirely delighted with her. There was resentment that another Red Cross girl had had to be transferred out of London so that Ambassador Kennedy’s daughter might take her place; and there was annoyance that Kick received too many personal phone calls at the club and had too many visitors.

Hardly had Kick’s old friends heard of her return than there was a great rush to see her, take her up, invite her out, and otherwise incorporate her back into the aristocratic cousinhood. There were evenings out at the 400 Club, where Tony Rosslyn, William Douglas-Home, and other of her former devotees again paid court to her, though as Tony lamented in a letter to Jack Kennedy: “As far as I can see, she is not particularly interested in any of them.”

Advised by the Hans Crescent Club management to scale back her social life, Kick wrote home that both the club director and the program director were driving her “nuts.” She mocked the former as “a very second rate kind of person” and the latter as a “Jewess” who was “very jealous” of her. Kick left no doubt that she would have preferred a job in Red Cross public relations, but for fear of losing her London perch she’d decided to put up with “a tough situation,” at least for now. All of which led to further complaints from colleagues that she treated her duties at the soldiers’ club as though they were an imposition, that she had come to London in pursuit of the duke’s heir, and that for a Red Cross worker she seemed oddly oblivious of the war.

These charges were by no means without foundation. German bombs had transfigured the face of the city, where more than a million buildings, including ones that Kick knew well, had been reduced to rubble. Yet in a letter to her brother she wrote, rather oddly, that London appeared “quite unchanged” since last they had seen it and that the blitzed areas were “not obvious.” In 1939, when Kick had returned to the U.S. after eighteen months abroad, she had anticipated that much at home would have changed in her absence, as she perceived herself to have changed. So, when life in Bronxville had struck her as “just the same,” that plaintive phrase, in a letter to her father, was freighted with her longing for all that she had just been forced to give up.

By contrast, in 1943, as she had remained constant to them during her prolonged absence, she seemed to want the world and the people she had left behind in 1939 to be quite as she remembered them. Most of Kick’s anxiety in this regard was naturally concentrated on Billy.

Certainly, he did not look entirely the same when, on Saturday evening, July 10, 1943, he arrived at the Hans Crescent Club to collect Kick for a night out in London. There had been a time, when Kick first met him in 1938, that Billy had appeared as one who had not yet quite grown into his large body. Five years later, his six-foot frame was covered with lean muscle, the consequence of what his brother liked to call the Army’s “toughening up” program. This consisted of training maneuvers that were often as arduous as and at times even more punishing than anything one might encounter on an actual battlefield, exercises in the course of which men were known to die. One moment the troops were scaling cliffs and clearing minefields, and the next they were being sprayed with blood from a slaughterhouse and being forced to eat almost-raw liver.

At twenty-five years of age, Billy was, in his sister-in-law Debo’s phrase, “film star handsome.” In the wake of his return from France, Jean Ogilvy had begun to notice that wherever she went with Billy in London, heads turned to stare at him because he was “suddenly so attractive.” Though Billy was not literally taller than he had been before the war, he was unquestionably more physically imposing; and when he and Kick were reunited now, he appeared to loom over her even more than he had in 1938 and 1939.

But it was not anything to do with his physicality that caused people to, in Kick’s phrase, “put their heads together” when he and she appeared in public together that first night. As reported to her family, there was already “heavy betting” in London on when she and Billy planned to announce their engagement. Many people seemed to believe that she was prepared to give in on the religious issue, but she firmly denied to her family that she had any such intention. By evening’s end, however, one thing had become evident. As Kick would much later tell her mother, that night she and he discovered that they still loved each other as before.

Though at this early stage Kick was loath to disclose this to her parents, Billy had no such compunction about speaking frankly to his mother. At his request, the duchess invited Kick to Compton Place for the first weekend that he could manage to obtain leave. In London, he and Kick had had but a few hours together. At Compton Place, where they had first become an established couple, they had the consummate luxury of an entire day to themselves.

“For twenty-four hours I forgot all about the war,” Kick later wrote to her brother Jack of her idyll with Billy at Eastbourne. “Billy is just the same, a bit older, a bit more ducal but we get on as well as ever.” In other words, aside from the newly imposing physical presence that she registered as ducal, Billy struck her as being quite the fellow he had been before the war. Or at least he behaved that way when he was with her. Billy looked upon the delightful hours he spent with Kick as, in his brother’s carefully considered phrase, “a return to innocence.” He welcomed the opportunity she gave him to become again, if only for a short while, the person he had been of old, before his entire world had been upended in the war zone. The strange, almost obdurate blindness that had annoyed and angered Kick’s coworkers at the Hans Crescent Club was, by contrast, immensely appealing to Billy. She saw him as he longed to be, undefiled by the experiences that had in fact changed him forever.

Strange to say, before Kick’s letter had had a chance to reach her brother, Jack had had a traumatic confrontation of his own with killing and death, when a PT boat he was captaining in the Pacific theater was split asunder by a Japanese destroyer, killing two of Jack’s men and leaving him and the surviving crew members stranded in dark waters. Seamen on other PT boats in the area spotted the flames, but gave Jack and his men up for dead. Meanwhile, Jack rescued a badly burned member of his crew from a patch of flaming gasoline. Then he swam out once more from the wreckage of the PT boat and saved two additional crew members. Finally, perceiving that the wreckage was about to sink, he ordered the survivors to make for a small island some four miles distant. As the burned man was unable to swim, Jack placed the straps of the man’s life jacket between his teeth and towed him to safety, a journey that took five hours to complete.