Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (24 page)

The political agent reported her effect on the crowd to the duke, who wasted no time crowing about Kick’s triumph to her father. In a letter to old Joe Kennedy, Eddy Devonshire delightedly predicted that if Billy proved unable to win back the family seat in Parliament himself, Kick no doubt would “win it for him.” She had previously made clear how much she wished for a public role in England and for the power that would come with that role. Her success at the Bakewell Fair certainly suggested that she might be about to get exactly what she wanted.

But ironically, this first triumph, which seemed to bode so well, had come at a moment when Billy’s letter from Giberville had asked her to consider a starkly different outcome.

Indeed, since he wrote to her of death, the 5th Coldstream had been engaged in days on end of the “bitter and confused fighting” known as Operation Bluecoat, in the course of which Billy—now Major the Marquess of Hartington—had twice been called upon to replace a fallen commanding officer. On August 1, Colonel Adeane, who had only recently replaced Sandy Stratheden, was himself wounded in battle. Billy thereupon assumed temporary command of the entire battalion until Major B. E. “Buster” Luard took charge. The new commander remained in place for a mere twenty-seven hours, however—on August 2, Luard himself was wounded during heavy shelling by the Germans.

Yet again Major the Marquess of Hartington was left in command. The following day, Billy’s men encountered unexpectedly heavy fire. The Guardsmen, perched atop tanks driven by their Irish comrades, bounced up and down “like ships in a heavy sea” as they rode over the hedgerows. Throughout, “Billy was magnificent,” one of the soldiers, Lady Astor’s son-in-law James Willoughby, later recalled; “he never lost his head or his good spirits in spite of the hard time his Battalion was having, no sleep, no food and continual casualties.… On the last day we were counter attacked continuously from 6 o’clock in the morning until 10 o’clock at night and Billy’s Battalion had to stand the brunt of the attack.”

Finally, on the fifth of August, Major the Marquess of Hartington was relieved by Colonel Roddy Hill, aspects of whose technique Billy would subsequently have occasion to emulate. Billy and his weary, ragged men looked on in amazement and admiration as the impeccably attired, almost eerily serene new commanding officer communicated by his appearance and demeanor a sense that, in spite of all that the men of the 5th Coldstream had just endured, and in spite of all that they yet faced, everything was going to be “quite all right.” One of his men later recalled: “There was about him an air of unhurried disregard for the immediate alarums of the moment that was wonderful to see. We felt we’d never seen such imperturbability, and the effect on everyone was miraculous.” On the day Kick and Debo toured the stalls at the Bakewell Fair in the company of the dowager, Billy, under Colonel Roddy Hill’s command, was fighting near Estry, amidst the putrefying cattle, burnt-out tanks, and freshly dug graves that pocked the terrain.

Three days after Kick’s triumph at Bakewell, the mood of euphoria at Compton Place turned to horror when Duchess Evie’s twenty-two-year-old nephew, Ned Fitzmaurice, the soldier who had tipsily set fire to Elizabeth Cavendish’s dress at Kick and Fiona’s party nine months earlier, died in a burst of machine gun fire during his first battle. And the day after that, another relative who had been at the party, Dicky Cecil, an RAF pilot, died in a motorcycle accident in England. At the dowager’s behest, Duke Eddy immediately began efforts to arrange for Ned Fitzmaurice’s older brother, Charlie Lansdowne, to be brought back from the fighting in Italy, lest their father, Evie’s brother, be left without an heir. It was in the midst of this desperate undertaking on the duke’s part that further appalling news reached the household on the same day that Dicky Cecil died.

On Sunday, August 13, 1944, Kick had a call informing her of the presumed death of her brother Joe Junior, whose naval aircraft had exploded over the Channel the evening before. He had completed his antisubmarine missions and had been scheduled to return to the U.S. But he had volunteered to remain in Britain in hopes that by securing the European campaign medal, he might yet match the glory that had been won by his brother Jack. When Kick attended his birthday celebration dinner on the twenty-fifth of July at the home of Pat Wilson, he had said that he was going to be doing something secret for the next three weeks. It turned out that the mission on which he had pinned his great hopes aimed to destroy a V-1 launch site near Calais. The plan was for Joe and a copilot to parachute out of their explosives-laden aircraft, which from that point on would be guided to its target by a remote-control device. Instead, the aircraft had exploded before either volunteer had had an opportunity to parachute to safety. For his feat of bravery, Lieutenant Kennedy would be posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the Navy’s highest decoration.

Kick was with Billy’s family when she learned of young Joe’s death. In a letter to Joe Kennedy Sr. written the next day, the duke expressed gratitude that at least she had not been alone at the time. “I am afraid she will feel the loss of her brother terribly,” wrote Eddy Devonshire on the fourteenth of August, “and that it will add to the burden of her husband’s absence in France, but we will do the best we can to find a home life for her.” When the duke sent off this message he assumed that Kick meant to remain with her husband’s family. Eddy’s letter was intended both to offer condolences for the loss of young Joe and to assure the ambassador that Kick was being loved and taken care of at this terrible time.

Presently, however, Kick stunned the duke and duchess by expressing a wish to return to the U.S. as soon as possible. There was some feeling among her husband’s family and friends that her decision to leave England just then was a betrayal. It was not so much that anyone in England questioned the sincerity of Kick’s concern for her parents or her desire to comfort them in person. But there was a sense, which was by no means without foundation, that she was also fleeing the war, the mounting toll of young men, the terror of the V-1 attacks, and a household environment that was then dominated by the duke’s frantic, fruitless efforts to bring Charlie Lansdowne home from the war zone. And there was sentiment that at such a time, her duty as Lady Hartington was to remain with Billy’s parents and sisters—and not fly to the Kennedys.

Even after more than half a century had passed, Debo, Jean, and Billy’s sister Anne all expressed perplexity and disappointment about Kick’s decision to go “home” that long-ago August of 1944, while her husband remained in peril in France. When she agreed to marry Billy, had she not tacitly promised that from then on she would regard Britain as her home?

Whether or not Kick sensed the distress she was causing in the Cavendish family circle, once again she asked her father to use his connections, and before long Joseph P. Kennedy had arranged for her to travel to New York on a troop transport aircraft.

Kick, attired in the same summer-weight Red Cross uniform that she had worn on the day of her triumph at the Bakewell Fair a little over a week before, stepped off her plane at LaGuardia Airport in New York on August 16. She thereupon boarded a flight for Logan Airport in Boston, where her brother Jack was waiting to collect her. If indeed, as Billy’s people sensed, she had hoped to escape their “summer of death” to whatever degree possible, Jack’s war-ravaged appearance when she beheld him for the first time since his ordeal in the Solomon Islands plunged her back into the very sort of horror from which she had just fled.

Until this moment, Jack’s heroism in the Pacific had been little more than an abstraction to her. She had rejoiced in the glory and the publicity that he had managed to win. Since childhood, she had frequently observed him in the throes of one grave illness or another, but nothing in her brother’s sickly past could have prepared Kick for the sight that confronted her now. His face and body were cadaverous. His skin had a yellowish tint, owing to a bout of malaria. He was in constant, wrenching pain, the consequence of a botched operation he had had that spring for a herniated disc. He was physically and psychologically traumatized—burdened, despite a Navy and Marine Corps medal and other honors and accolades that had been heaped upon him—with a sense of guilt about the crew members he had been unable to save. Kick embraced her brother. Then she dropped her head onto Jack’s shoulder and wept.

Though old Joe encouraged his children to get on with their lives despite the family’s great loss, he himself grieved deeply and passionately for his son, and often shut himself away in his room in despair. Kick’s father could not seem to get over his feeling that young Joe had died in spite of all of the patriarch’s efforts to avert this war, which, no less than it had in years past, still struck the elder Kennedy as pointless and misguided. Time and again he had implored London and Washington to find a way to come to terms with Hitler. But his efforts had been in vain, and he seemed to blame his eldest son’s death on his own failures in the diplomatic arena. Rose, meanwhile, threw herself ever more deeply into her religious devotions, intent, as always, on numbing the pain.

Kick viewed herself as having come home to comfort her parents at a terrible time. Still, to Jack’s eye, even in this mournful atmosphere Kick could not entirely suppress her “great happiness” as a newlywed. As Jack would later recall, Kick’s immense pleasure in having recently married Billy “even shone through her sadness” about her brother’s death. Kick’s delight in her marriage and in all that the future held for her as Billy’s wife “was so manifest and so infectious,” Jack wrote, “that it did much to ease the grief of our mother and father.”

Still, there could be no denying that Kick felt more strongly bonded to her new young husband than to the brother she had just lost. For, as she would later write in a different context, whereas Joe and Rose Kennedy had lost a part of themselves when young Joe died in the war, it was Billy—not her late brother—with whom Kick had felt as one.

In England, Kick had opened a breach between herself and the Cavendish family by her controversial decision to go back to the U.S. while her husband was still in jeopardy in France. In America, the intensity of her emotional connection with Billy inevitably distanced her from her parents, focused as they were on the death of young Joe.

Kick had carried with her to the U.S. Billy’s July 26 letter from Giberville, in which he had bid her to face the possibility that he might not survive the war. For all of her outward air of happiness, there were times now, as her father told Eddy Devonshire, that she seemed “distraught,” craving as she did some news of “Billy’s hazards.” Unfortunately, hardly had Kick gone back to America than the duke and duchess suddenly stopped receiving letters from their son. His silence greatly alarmed the duchess because, as she later said, “he was always so wonderful about writing and saving as much anxiety as he could.” Presently, word of the August 20 death of Charlie Lansdowne, whose return from Italy Eddy Devonshire had been desperately trying to secure, caused immense sadness and further heightened concerns at Compton Place.

The Allies entered Paris four days later, sparking hopes that the war might soon be at an end. The news confronted Kick with a new decision about where her duty properly resided. If, as she suspected, the liberation of Paris meant that her husband was about to return home, she wanted to be at Compton Place to welcome him back. But she was also eager to stay in the U.S. as long as possible in hopes of repairing her relationship with her mother.

In the end, Kick chose to risk not being in England when Billy came home. Lest he appear in her absence, she’d asked Marie Bruce to explain her decision both to him and to his parents.

For all of Kick’s efforts, however, her mother seemed never to recover fully from the shock and disappointment of her marriage. Early on, Billy’s mother had written tenderly and understandingly to Rose, and had thereby perhaps embarrassed her into making at least a polite show of acceptance and approval. Now, however, Kick persisted in feeling, and at times rather resenting, what she took to be an element of censure in some of her mother’s pointed looks and remarks. Particularly hurtful was the hint of regret in Rose’s tone whenever she proposed that they attend Mass together. To Kick’s perception, it was as if her mother were tacitly commenting on the fact that, though Kick was still allowed to go to Mass, she was no longer permitted to take Communion.

Kick spent the Labor Day weekend with Jack and a group of his naval buddies, whom he had invited up to the Cape. As far as he was concerned, these men—who would in effect constitute his new claque—seemed to understand him as no one in the civilian world appeared capable of doing. To Jack, they alone comprehended the ordeal that even now he persisted in endlessly replaying in memory in a futile effort to determine if there was anything he might have done differently. Jack’s obsession with the two PT-109 crew members whom he had failed to save had driven him to further damage his own health when, in the wake of the episode, he had insisted on serving four months more in the Pacific in the belief that he might somehow avenge them, though in view of his condition he ought to have been sent to the U.S. immediately for medical treatment.

At Hyannis Port that September of 1944, there was much laughter and merriment when Jack and his naval buddies got together—sailing, golfing, tossing a football about. But there was also a palpable sense that, for Jack, a great deal remained excruciatingly unresolved.

At the very same time, quite the opposite was proving to be the case for Billy. The advance toward Brussels, one of the great advances of the Second World War, began at the end of August. The Guards Armored Division, after passing various landmarks familiar to British soldiers who had been there in 1940, made its triumphant entry into the Belgian capital on the third of September. Singing, cheering Belgians greeted the British with champagne and flowers, kisses and embraces, and words of gratitude that they chalked on the liberators’ tanks. For the British in general, the taking of Brussels was a glorious moment, a reversal of past humiliations and a resumption of the noble project that had had to be set aside temporarily at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation.