Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (28 page)

On Monday, March 19, 1945, Kick was among the family members to be reunited with Andrew in London. She expressed joy at seeing him; and in fact she was delighted that Andrew had come home alive. Still, seven years after Kick had first beheld Andrew on the staircase at Cliveden, she found that she was pained by the very sight of the second son. As far as the widow was concerned, Andrew’s homecoming provided a sense of finality to her plight. “It nearly kills me to see him,” Kick wrote afterward in a letter to the Kennedys, “not that he is really at all like Billy, but the whole idea of seeing Andy makes Billy’s absence so much more noticeable.”

To Kick’s eye, Andrew, like Duke Eddy, who had brought him home, was “in terrific spirits.” Andrew had not seen his adored wife since he embarked with the 3rd Battalion in November of 1943. His daughter, Emma, had been a baby when he left. He had never yet beheld his son and heir, Peregrine, who had been born while Andrew was fighting abroad. And, though Billy had always been their mother’s favorite, Andrew positively worshipped Moucher and was thrilled to fall into her arms again. Apart from his feelings for individual family members, Andrew was palpably pleased by the love that they showered upon him collectively, and by their happiness and gratitude that he had survived.

Still, Kick’s sense of the surviving Cavendish brother’s mood was only part of the story. At that moment, Andrew and Debo seemed to have everything, but the truth was a good deal more complicated. By Andrew’s own account, happy though he was to have been reunited with his family, he felt somehow that he did not belong in this scene, that the people he really belonged with were his fellow Coldstream Guardsmen. He felt more comfortable with the men of his battalion than with anyone else, even his own family. Rejoicing as he did in his parents’ immense pleasure at his safe return, Andrew strove to hide from them that much of the time his thoughts were unavoidably elsewhere—on his men, on the battles they had fought and were fighting, and above all on one soldier, Sergeant King, for whose death he continued, however irrationally, to hold himself responsible. Though Andrew was gratified that the duke and duchess were exceedingly pleased about the Military Cross with which he had been decorated, he persisted in the belief that in fact he deserved no such honor.

He felt guilty about the soldiers who were still fighting. He was ashamed to have been allowed to return to Britain with his father, ahead of his own battalion. And he was tortured by his superiors’ decision to separate him from his men shortly before they reached Bologna, and to send him to a training camp in Italy where he would be out of danger for the duration—an arrangement for which he would later blame Harold Macmillan, who, acting in his capacity as minister resident, had been seeking to assuage the fears of Moucher Devonshire that her only surviving son might be killed. Andrew had been returned to his battalion in advance of its scheduled trip home, and he would never forget the sense of mortification he had experienced upon being reunited with the men he had once commanded, and the reluctance he had felt to so much as look them in the eye.

Though Andrew had long coveted Billy’s position as heir to the dukedom, it pained him now to be called upon to take his fallen brother’s place. Andrew was tormented by a feeling that the good things he stood to inherit one day—the title, the palace, the riches—ought to have been his brother’s, and that for the rest of his life he would be acting, in his phrase, “by proxy.” As he would recall many years later, seeing Kick that first day, he could not help but feel that he and Debo were about to inhabit a life that should have been been hers and Billy’s.

And there was worse. Billy had always been their parents’ favorite, and the second son would long be deeply unsettled by the conviction that his mother and father would have far preferred that it had been Billy who came home alive, not he. According to Andrew’s sister Anne, whenever, then and later, the duke was in the presence of the second son he strove to conceal the magnitude of his grief for Billy, lest Andrew perceive himself to be less valued than his brother.

But that first day, Andrew, rather than spoil the occasion for the others, endeavored to mask and suppress the tumult of his emotions in much the same way, and for the same reasons, Kick did what she could to hide hers. She evoked her duality of mind in a letter to Jack. “Am pleased but rather agonized,” she told her brother. “Seeing Andrew and all the others come home.”

Since the move to Westminster Gardens, Kick, encouraged by the duke and duchess, had made it her custom to accompany Billy’s family to Eastbourne at the end of her workweek. But that first weekend following Andrew’s return, she chose to steer clear of it, on the explanation that she had things to do around the flat. In the weeks that followed, the duchess attributed Kick’s reluctance to come to Compton Place to the fact that during March and April of the previous year Kick had spent a great deal of time there with Billy, and that as a consequence the house was “too closely connected” with him in her thoughts for her to be happy there just now.

What the duchess did not say—though Kick made it abundantly clear in her letters to her family in the U.S.—was that the presence of the second son was a no less formidable obstacle. Kick needed time to get used to seeing Andrew again and to grapple with all that his homecoming meant for her. Meanwhile, she did spend Easter with Billy’s family at Compton Place, but the holiday was marred by the arrival of a telegram from the editor of
The Boston Globe
inquiring as to whether or not Kick was going to have a baby. The American newspaper’s query bore directly on Andrew and Debo’s prospects, of course. The telegram infuriated Kick, and otherwise provoked a good deal of embarrassment and upset all around.

If March and April had been heartbreaking for Kick, the beginning of May brought with it, in Moucher Devonshire’s phrase, “the agony of her wedding anniversary.” In flight from the painful memories that the sixth of May threatened to unseal, Kick spent the day as the guest of Virginia Sykes, at Sledmere. Perhaps because Billy had disliked Sledmere and the raffish set with which Lord and Lady Sykes customarily surrounded themselves there, it would be easier for Kick not to think of him and of what this day had meant to her just twelve months before.

According to the duchess, the timing of Kick’s return to London on Monday, May 7, proved to be most unfortunate. Kick arrived at Westminster Gardens to find the city in jubilation over word of the Nazis’ surrender. As the evening progressed, raucous festivities erupted in the streets below in anticipation of Victory in Europe Day, which was to be celebrated on the morrow. Kick had previously acknowledged that the fact that the European war seemed to be drawing to a close left her feeling somehow “rather cold.” Now that Germany had indeed been vanquished, Billy’s widow discovered that she was oddly ambivalent. On the one hand, she was “as thankful as any” for the Allied victory. On the other hand, she was not a little resentful about Billy’s death, when so many other women’s husbands had the good fortune to be coming home. As it happened, only one other young woman in her immediate circle—Hugh Fraser’s sister Veronica—had lost her husband. Kick was pleased, of course, that Jean, Sissie, Debo, and the rest had their husbands back. At the same time, she found herself feeling terribly isolated and uncomfortable amidst the continuous rejoicing of friends.

Coming as it did but two days after her wedding anniversary, the mood of mass celebration that dominated London on V-E Day exacerbated Kick’s painful sense of solitude. In the company of friends, she made a show of participating in the revelry. Bells tolled, fireworks exploded, bonfires blazed, and celebrants sang and danced in the streets. With Hugh Fraser and Sissie and David Ormsby-Gore, Kick stood amidst a crowd of as many as one hundred thousand cheering, screaming people in front of Buckingham Palace as King George and Queen Elizabeth emerged onto a gold-and-purple-draped balcony.

Churchill, in his victory broadcast earlier in the day, had made a particular point of reminding Britons that, while Germany had at last surrendered, the Japanese remained to be defeated. Still, there was a prevailing sense in the streets that the war was at last at an end, the postwar future about to begin. In her own case, Kick as yet had no real sense of what that future might comprise. The surge and roar of the crowds that evening seemed only to make her feel her own uncertainty and distress the more sharply.

The following evening, Kick dined alone with Billy’s mother. These days, Kick and the duchess made it their habit to see one another in London, because, as the older woman understood, the memories that Compton Place held for the younger woman were still too painful and intense. The duchess anticipated that Kick would resume her regular visits to the family residence in Eastbourne sometime after June, when, Billy having by then gone abroad the previous year, it would simply be “easier” for her emotionally. In the wake of the sadness that the duchess knew the V-E Day celebrations to have caused her daughter-in-law, she made it clear to her that the time had come to face life “without the best ones,” by which she meant Billy, of course. In the war years, people had had to live in “a state of flux,” but now it would be necessary to “settle down & make definite plans.”

But, for all of the duchess’s sincere love for her daughter-in-law, and for all of the desperately needed tenderness and understanding that she provided, what exactly was on offer to Kick at this point? With the best will in the world, Billy’s mother had endeavored, in her daughter Anne’s phrase, to amalgamate his widow into the family and to make it her family. In all of this, the duchess was nothing if not kind. But was Kick likely to be satisfied for long with a new, all-enveloping family identity?

On the eve of the Second World War, Billy’s mother had taken up Kick because she possessed the prodigious energy and vitality that would be needed to reinvigorate the stock. In 1945, was it realistic to expect that all of that energy could possibly be contained by a dowager’s duties, however brilliantly performed, in representing her late husband and his family in nostalgic speeches and other public appearances?

At twenty-five years of age, was Kick likely to be content emulating that other noted dowager in the family, Billy’s seventy-five-year-old paternal grandmother, Duchess Evie?

Eleven

Kick begged her brother Jack for advice, but, she complained, none was forthcoming.

Should she remain in Britain? Should she return to the U.S.? What would be best for Billy’s family? For the Kennedys? For her?

When Duke Eddy heard Kick mention that she might like to have a house of her own in London, he offered her one of his properties there. Shortly however, she judged that the house belonging to the duke was too small to accommodate the various Kennedy siblings when at length they visited from America, so she set about to find something larger. She anticipated that when Jack came over to cover the upcoming British general election as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, he would look at houses with her.

Mindful that her father could not fathom why she would possibly choose to stay in that economically devastated country after the war, Kick sent assurances that of course she did not mean to make England her full-time home, but that she hoped to be able to spend part of the year in both countries. She intended to return to the U.S. for a visit in the fall, but it was evident to her English friends that she was quite keen to acquire a property in London before she left. Once Kick was back in America, her parents were likely to exert strong pressure on her to remain. If the lease of a London house were already a fait accompli, she would have the perfect excuse to return to Britain when she liked.

In the meantime, she was carefully monitoring, and reporting to Jack, the details of the postwar political reckoning that had already begun in Britain, though the Japanese, as Churchill had taken pains to point out in his V-E Day broadcast, had yet to be subdued. The watershed 1945 British general election, the first in a decade, had tremendous personal resonance for Kick. That her brother-in-law Andrew Cavendish, along with a good many of the boys in her prewar London set, such as Robert Cecil, Michael Astor, Tom Egerton, and Hugh Fraser, were standing for Parliament seemed only to highlight the fact that, to her abiding anguish, Billy’s name was absent from the list.

Billy had been so passionate about postwar Britain and the part he hoped to play in the process of shaping it. It pained his widow to observe his contemporaries excitedly embark on precisely the sort of political careers that, she felt certain, would have been his had he lived.

And what role, if any, was Kick to have in all of this? There had been a time when she anticipated being constantly at Billy’s side when, after the war, he returned to the political fray. There had been a time when Eddy Devonshire had predicted that she would have a brilliant political future as her husband’s helpmate. Now that she was a widow, she thought of possibly assisting Andrew, who was standing for Chesterfield. Or perhaps she would canvass for Richard Wood’s brother Charles, who was standing for York.

Kick wrote to Jack that none of their English friends, all of whom were of course standing as Conservatives, had any real expectation of getting in, for “a terrific swing to the Left” was anticipated. On April 26, 1945, the Tories had experienced an overwhelming defeat in a by-election held in Chelmsford. Reporting that the Conservatives were all “very shocked” by the rout, Kick went on to note that the poll numbers were of particular interest because Billy had been defeated by the Common Wealth Party by a considerably smaller majority. All of which prompted her to add: “With the war nearly at an end & doing so well this result was amazing.” Like the 1944 West Derbyshire by-election, Chelmsford did not bode well for the political future of Churchill and his party after the war. The numbers in Chelmsford seemed to bear out the claim made by Common Wealth the year before that Billy’s loss in West Derbyshire foretold that when Britons at last defeated the enemy, they would not be content to return to the old 1939 world.