Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (18 page)

Kick called the news of her brother’s heroism “the most exciting thing” she had ever heard. “There wasn’t a very big piece in the English newspapers,” she wrote home to Hyannis Port, “but quite big enough for me to gather that he did really big stuff. Loads of people here saw it and they were all thrilled.”

Then and later, Jack was much applauded for his bravery, but the praise and publicity meant little to him. He obsessed about the crew members he had lost. He tearfully dwelled on the possibility that if the other PT boats had come to assist early on, he might yet have been able to avert the two men’s deaths. He blamed himself for not having put one of the men off the PT boat earlier, after the fellow had been deeply affected by the killing of a crew member who had happened to be standing next to him when death came. Jack, far from taking pride in the lives he had managed to save, focused on what he perceived as his personal failures in the course of the ordeal, and on all that he might have done differently.

Meanwhile, after that first weekend at Compton Place, Billy was determined to see Kick as much as possible. As far as he was concerned, quiet meetings at his family’s homes, Compton Place and Churchdale Hall, were best. So he was displeased when she accepted invitations to Cliveden and to another house where she was to become increasingly in demand—Sledmere, the residence of Joe Junior’s onetime girlfriend, the former Virginia Gilliat. Virginia was now Lady Sykes, the wife of Sir Richard Sykes, who was more than a decade her senior. The tumult of life at Cliveden had long been repugnant to Billy. He objected to weekends at Sledmere, because the Sykeses and the set they gathered around them in their Georgian country house in Yorkshire were too “racy” to suit his austere tastes. To his consternation, Kick rather liked the gatherings at Sledmere House and the opportunity that weekends there afforded her to encounter interesting new people. As Billy’s cousin Jean would point out years afterward, Kick “liked to experiment”; Billy decidedly did not.

If he absolutely had to see Kick among people other than his parents and sisters, Billy much preferred that the setting be Pimlico House, the residence of Fiona and Arthur “Boofy” Gore, where the company tended to be familiar to him and where he could usually count on having Kick more or less to himself. Fiona was then working in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, Boofy in the Ministry of Information. The Gores, who had bought the Hemel Hempstead property in 1936, had yet to fully occupy the main house, so at that point most of their living and entertaining took place in a diminutive, redbrick gardener’s cottage.

There was not much furniture, so Billy would pass the night in a sleeping bag on the floor of the cottage’s tiny dining room, which was barely able to accommodate a man of his height. Kick, by contrast, was herself so petite that she slept quite contentedly in an upstairs bathtub, which she insisted was “more like a bed.” During the day, the couple tended to spend a good deal of time together, merrily teasing one another in a manner that their hostess regarded as “childlike” and otherwise talking the hours away.

Despite such happy interludes, as the autumn of 1943 progressed Kick and Billy seemed to be operating on drastically different timetables. She had spent the past four years plotting and planning to get back to him. Now that she had succeeded, she appeared utterly relaxed and in no particular hurry about anything. She was not driving forward anymore, and for the moment she seemed to want only to be with Billy and to have fun.

His situation was a good deal more complicated. Though when he was with her he contentedly playacted at being very much the boy he had been before the war, at other times the unfinished business of 1940 continued to obsess him. When he was in the latter state of mind, it was as if he were living entirely for the fast-approaching day when he would return to battle. Much as he sought to keep Kick uncontaminated by all that, before long he began to perceive a connection between his desire to spend his life with her on the one hand and his need to finish the fight on the other. Given that his orders might come at any time, Billy became convinced that if he and Kick were to be married, the great step must be taken without delay.

Yet, despite his sense of urgency, he hesitated to explicitly broach the subject of marriage. It was not that he feared that Kick would refuse him. It was that he knew that in proposing marriage, he must also ask her to capitulate in the matter of religion. Whatever Kick may have thought or hoped at the time, and whatever she may have suggested to her family, a compromise on Billy’s part was never a possibility. In view of the traditional role and responsibilities that would one day fall to him, he knew that he could never agree to raise his children in any but the Anglican faith. That being the case, before he formally approached Kick he wanted to be sure that she could really be happy were she to make the great sacrifice he was about to demand. As Billy later explained his reasoning to her mother, if in fact he believed that he was condemning Kick to live the rest of her life with a sense of guilt, he would not be justified in asking her to be his wife.

During all this time, Billy at least had the comfort of being able to speak of his concerns in confidence to his cousin Jean, who now lived in Yorkshire, not far from where he was stationed. Though Jean had long been in love with Nancy Astor’s son Michael, in 1942 she had married David Lloyd, the 2nd Baron Lloyd of Dolobran. The parents of a baby girl, Jean and her husband had rented a small house some three miles outside of Scarborough, where David was serving in the Welsh Guards. The cramped, comfortless, unheated dwelling lacked a telephone, so Billy would often arrive unannounced to talk to Jean for a few hours, and, whenever he could, to stay the night with her and her husband.

One afternoon early in November of 1943 Jean, responding to an unexpected knock at the front door, discovered Billy in something very much like the state of frenzy that she had witnessed three years previously upon his return from the fighting in France.

On the present occasion, the cause of Billy’s outburst of emotion was Andrew’s having received his orders to leave immediately to fight in Italy. Though by this time it had been agreed between the Americans and the British that the invasion of France had priority, Churchill had insisted that Rome must yet be taken. Some of the most seasoned troops were coming home from the Italian campaign in anticipation of the invasion of France, and reinforcements like Andrew were being sent over to replace them.

Again, Billy was almost in tears. Again, his words poured out in a torrent. He insisted that it should not be Andrew, who had an eight-month-old daughter and a pregnant wife, who was called up to fight. “It should be me,” Billy repeated over and over.

Jean’s initial reaction was that Billy was being protective of his younger brother. She assumed at first that he was merely making the point that, as a bachelor, he ought to be the one at risk. But the more he talked, the more another possibility began to present itself to her. Somehow Billy seemed terrified that Andrew’s having been sent off to fight might prove an obstacle to the older brother’s receiving his long-awaited orders as well. The Cavendish brothers were not just any soldiers, after all. Whether Billy knew it or not, their paternal grandmother, Duchess Evie, had already attempted to ensure that the two brothers would not be at the front at the same time. Though the dowager duchess had been unsuccessful, her efforts in this regard reflected the family’s abiding concern that were both brothers to die in battle, there would not at present be a direct heir to the dukedom. So, Billy was far from wrong to think that Andrew’s presence in Italy might subsequently pose a problem for him.

Billy seemed absolutely frantic at the prospect of being held back. In the middle of talking about how unfair it was that the second son should go instead of him, Billy, who almost never raised his voice in any circumstance, suddenly began to shout about all the ghastly things he had seen in France. “Things you can’t imagine.” Then he repeated the lines Jean remembered from their fraught encounter at her home in London three years before. “We ran away! We ran and we ran!”

By the time Kick had lunch in London with Debo and Moucher on the eleventh of November, Andrew had indeed already embarked with the 3rd Battalion, to which he had been transferred. Debo had come in from the country to spend her young husband’s last few days of leave with him. And now, both she and her mother-in-law conveyed to Kick their immense sadness at his having gone. Andrew’s departure would cast a shadow over a large party that Kick was about to give, in partnership with Fiona Gore, in London on the thirteenth.

Kick billed the event at the Mayfair home of Mrs. Violet Cripps as London’s first young people’s party in two years. Particularly pleasing to Kick was that at least a dozen of the girls on her guest list had not been to a party of any sort since the beginning of the war. A number of the debs she had been friendly with in 1938 and 1939 were present, notably Fiona, Jean, Debo, and Sissie, all of whom were now wives and mothers themselves, living lives considerably less comfortable and felicitous than anything they had been accustomed to before the war.

For the most part, the dances, parties, balls, and country house weekends were but a memory. So were the more than a million servants who had been employed in 1939, some having entered the military and others having been moved to work that was deemed essential to the war effort. Even the nightclubbing and other revels associated with the early phase of the war were at best a rarity now. Girls who had been brought up in great luxury had had to learn to live with coupons, queues, and other forms of discipline. They had endured the bombing of London, and they all knew people who had been killed. By the late autumn of 1943, a general air of war weariness and exhaustion had palpably begun to set in, not just among the aristocrats, but among the whole population of Britain.

Kick, by her very obliviousness, seemed to offer an antidote to all that. Unlike her colleagues and critics at the Red Cross, her old friends found it refreshing that she had returned to London seemingly determined to pick up just where she had left off in 1939, as though nothing had altered in the intervening years.

Tonight she had hired a six-piece band; she had arrayed the tables with fragrant flowers; and she had issued a last-minute invitation to the composer Irving Berlin to perform at the piano for her guests. There was much drunkenness and not a little rowdiness. The evening’s guest of honor, Kick’s brother Joe Junior, recently arrived in England, entered the party in a visible state of inebriation; so did the members of his naval squadron who accompanied him.

But it was the excessive drinking of one of the young English soldiers, Ned Fitzmaurice, Charlie Lansdowne’s brother, that nearly led to disaster, when the Guardsman accidentally set a match to the new evening dress worn by Billy Hartington’s seventeen-year-old sister, Elizabeth Cavendish. Given the ill feeling many of the English soldiers harbored for the Yanks, whom they resented for, among other offenses, paying excessive attention to British women, Kick was pleased that on the present occasion it was one of the American boys who deftly extinguished the flames.

In the end, Lady Elizabeth seemed less upset than exhilarated by the incident. She had never been to a party before. Lest anyone fear that the episode might have scared her away from attending other such parties in future, she gaily declared to her mother, who had accompanied her daughter to Kick’s soiree, “Before I was set on fire the boys didn’t pay much attention to me, but afterwards I was very popular.”

All in all, Kick’s English friends delighted in her efforts to re-create, if only for a few blissful hours, the frivolity and freedom from care that they associated with the lost prewar world. Still, the very darkness that Kick had endeavored to banish from that large, crowded, noisy room on South Audley Street asserted itself forcefully and unavoidably in the form of two prominent guests who had already been horribly injured in the war.

Robert Cecil, the glamorous bad boy of prewar days, was at this point still recovering from a friendly-fire incident in 1942, in which twenty-three soldiers had been machine-gunned to death. Robert had been hit in both his lung and his right hand, the latter wound making it impossible for him to hold a cigarette. Despite his wounds, he was determined to participate in the invasion of France. Richard Wood, a double amputee who was still waiting to acquire his artificial legs, had lately returned from Washington with his mother, Lady Halifax. Through no intention of their own, Robert and Richard together served as a stubborn reminder to the revelers of what the war had already cost.

Taken on top of the inveterate partygoer Andrew Cavendish’s widely remarked upon absence from the festivities on the evening of the thirteenth, the sight of numerous young men in military uniform, both American and British, hinted at the bloodletting yet to come.

Indeed, even as Kick had been making last-minute preparations for the party the day before, Churchill had left for Cairo to confer with Roosevelt, after which the British and American leaders were due to meet Stalin in Tehran, Iran, where final arrangements for Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion of Normandy, would be completed.

Reminiscing about Kick’s famous party after more than half a century had elapsed, a number of attendees grimly remarked on how many of the boys who laughed and drank and sang that night were soon to die. Before the Germans were defeated, Mark Howard, Charlie Lansdowne, Ned Fitzmaurice, and Dicky Cecil (Robert’s brother) would all be dead. So would Kick’s brother Joe Junior.

So would Billy Hartington.

Not long after the party, Duke Eddy had a talk with Billy that, in unexpected ways, was to impact profoundly on Kick’s future. The duke reported that his brother-in-law, Henry Hunloke, who had taken his seat in the House of Commons when Eddy moved on to the House of Lords in 1938, had decided to divorce the duke’s sister Anne. In conjunction with his severance from the Cavendish family, Hunloke also intended to resign as MP for West Derbyshire, a seat that the duke looked upon as something of a family heirloom. With the exception of two painful interludes when the Liberals won the seat, in 1918 and 1922, it had long been a stronghold of Cavendish power. In conversation with Billy, Eddy proposed to arrange for him to obtain leave from the Coldstream Guards, so that Billy might stand as the candidate of both his party and his family in the by-election, a special election conducted to fill a seat that has become available between general elections. Eager to complete all of the delicate arrangements before anyone else could suggest an alternate Conservative candidate, and before any potential opposition had had a chance to mobilize, the duke was especially—and as it would turn out, disastrously—keen at this point to prevent any word of the impending vacancy from being made public.