Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (3 page)

Rather than a stratagem on her part, her visible enjoyment of the boys’ talk, then and later, was sincere. Kick had grown up in the company of a brother, Jack, who had read many of the same English books these young men had; who, like them, had avidly followed Winston Churchill’s campaign in the House of Commons for British rearmament; and who had tracked the original King and Country debate and its aftermath in the pages of
The New York Times
. In the wake of the 1933 Oxford Union resolution, Jack—who at the time had been a sickly, bookish sixteen-year-old prep school student in Connecticut—had concluded that the British, whose traditions of honor and duty he had previously come to revere, had grown “decadent.” He had often addressed these and related themes in the course of political discussions at the family table in Hyannis Port and elsewhere, which were also attended by Joe Junior, their father … and Kick, though as a girl she was thought to be without the possibility of a future in politics. Seeking to train and test his sons, the eldest of whom he was determined would be U.S. president one day, old Joe Kennedy saw this give-and-take as a crucial part of their political education. The patriarch encouraged all three children to interrupt him at any point, to ask questions, to offer their opinions, and even to challenge him.

Hence Kick’s readiness with Hugh, David, and the other English boys not just to listen, but also at moments to gamely interject questions and declarations of her own. The young grandees were enchanted. For the remainder of the weekend, the young people of both sexes played tennis and croquet, rode horses in the woods, and boated on the Thames. Still, it had been quickly established that whenever the urgent talk of international events resumed, Kick, alone among the females, would linger conspicuously with the fellows.

On Monday morning, the country house weekend that Kick later described to Nancy Astor as “the best thing that ever happened to me” concluded. As a consequence of that weekend, Kick wrote, “All the loneliness I had for America has disappeared because now England seems so very jolly.” Kick returned to a London that remained largely shut down for the holiday. She was scheduled to go to Paris presently on a shopping expedition with her mother. By the time Kick came back from France, Jean Ogilvy would herself have left for Cortachy Castle, where she was due to remain for two weeks.

Unwilling to wait that long to continue the fun, Kick again did something that Jean or the other English girls would never have considered doing. In Kick’s position, Jean would have regarded it as a matter of etiquette that one did not ask people out to lunch after having encountered them but a single time. Thus the shiver of surprise and delight that Jean experienced when she picked up the telephone at her family’s London home to hear Kick excitedly proposing that she join her for lunch that very afternoon at the American Embassy residence in Prince’s Gate. Much as Jean longed to go, she felt that she must decline because she had her father with her in London. But obstacles that seemed insurmountable to Jean were as nothing to the Little American Girl.

“I’ve got my dad, too,” Kick rejoined, before going on to suggest that Jean simply bring Lord Airlie with her.

Two

On a quiet Monday afternoon in London, in April of 1938, a rather unlikely foursome were enjoying a leisurely lunch in the large dining room at the American Embassy residence in Prince’s Gate, near Hyde Park. At intervals, the two teenaged girls in this ebullient party, Kick Kennedy and Jean Ogilvy, would mischievously, laughingly, rush off to yet again crank up the gramophone on which a recording of the popular American song “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones” had been playing “over and over” throughout the course of the meal.

Whether or not it had been the girls’ intention, the insistent music competed with the voices of their fathers, one the recently arrived U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, and the other the patriarch of a family of ancient Scottish lineage who, in his capacity as the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, oversaw the monarch’s household. As both men, Joe Kennedy and Joe Airlie, had the same first name, their adoring daughters would forever fondly and lightheartedly refer to the occasion of their meeting as “the lunch of the two Joes.”

Watching Kick’s tall, redheaded father, who had a booming laugh, a loud voice, and a large fund of slangy phrases, Jean could not but be struck by the qualities of energy and directness that he shared with his daughter. Joe Kennedy was a man who simply charged forward in life. He went around obstacles, precisely as Kick had done when she arranged this very lunch; and he seemed to accomplish it all with a delightful outpouring of jokes and a “twinkle” in his vivid blue eyes.

Just as Kick had enchanted the young people at Cliveden by how different she was from the girls of the set, so too her opinionated, outspoken father contrasted markedly with other diplomats, notably with his predecessor, Robert Bingham, whom Lord Airlie and his wife had known well and had often visited, sometimes in this very dining room. But, as their daughter would point out many years later, whereas Lord and Lady Airlie might have encountered Robert Bingham socially even if he had not been the American ambassador in London, they almost certainly would never otherwise have met Joe Kennedy, who was of a lower social class than his predecessor and was—to Jean’s sense—possessed of a personal “coarseness” that seemed highly unusual in a diplomat.

Indeed, it had been Kennedy’s own intense consciousness of matters of class in American society that had led him to covet the London posting in the first place. Fueled by no little amount of savage indignation due to a history of social slights and snubs, Kennedy hoped to assuage and avenge some of that hurt, as well as to elevate himself and his family socially. He had sought the ambassadorship by way of compensation for his key political support of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election.

Strange to say, the very background and personal qualities that had provoked a good deal of controversy in Washington when Kennedy was given the embassy in London would, at least at first, make him seem a refreshing change to many British aristocrats. Most particularly, they shared his belief in the wisdom of coming to terms with the European dictators, and admired his willingness to speak his mind about that controversial topic whether or not the administration in Washington agreed with him on every point. Though not all aristocrats supported the policy of appeasement, many were eager to make an ally of the Reich. The record of casualties sustained during the Great War had been especially high among Britain’s patrician elite, which regarded itself as having sacrificed the flower of a generation. A broad swath of aristocrats further believed that Nazi Germany, by its very existence on the map, provided an indispensable bulwark against Soviet Russia, which they, like Kennedy, saw as the far greater threat.

The two Joes, therefore, had been getting on very well indeed when Kick suggested that while their fathers happily talked on, she take Jean to meet her six-year-old brother, Teddy, who was the Kennedy family’s much-spoiled and beloved baby. Heretofore, Kick’s impending presentation at Court—alongside her older sister, Rosemary, aged nineteen, whom she described to Jean as “a little backward”—had been regarded as the event that would officially launch her in London Society. But, already, with her triumph at the country house weekend at Lady Astor’s, and with her having consolidated the friendship with Jean at “the lunch of the two Joes,” Kick had in effect launched herself far more successfully than any Court presentation could possibly have done.

As soon as she and Jean were back in London following their sojourns in France and Scotland, respectively, Jean began to include her in lunches with leading debs, who were constantly in and out of one another’s houses, strategizing about their next moves in the matrimonial market, planning their costumes, and gossiping about the young nobles with whom they had danced, or failed to dance, the night before. Notable among this group was Jean’s cousin, Lord Redesdale’s daughter Deborah Mitford, known as “Debo,” who lived in Rutland Gate, just around the corner from Kick; Gina Wernher, the “frightfully beautiful” and immensely rich granddaughter of a Russian grand duke; and Jean’s younger sister Margaret, whom Debo had indelibly dubbed “Maggot.”

Accordingly, by the eleventh of May, when the actual presentation took place, Kick was already so thoroughly immersed in the world of the cousinhood that an air almost of anticlimax crept into her diary entry, which noted with a certain disappointment and disillusionment how quickly she had walked past King George and Queen Elizabeth before the much-anticipated ceremony was at an end. Of far greater significance to the narrative of Kick’s social emergence was her visit three days later, in the company of her parents, to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

After dinner at the English Baroque residence of the Marlborough dukes, four “drunken youths from Oxford,” as Kick described them in a diary entry, suddenly appeared on the scene. Two of the fellows—Hugh Fraser and Jakie Astor—she had of course previously met at Cliveden. The other two boys were quite new to her. On the present occasion, twenty-year-old Dawyck Haig, the 2nd Earl Haig, son of the late commander of the British Expeditionary Force in the Great War, was so inebriated that he managed to break a statue when he flung a champagne bottle in its direction. But it was Kick’s introduction to the fourth rabble-rouser, Lord Robert Cecil, the twenty-one-year-old future head of one of England’s premier Protestant dynasties, the house of Cecil, that would at length prove to be of the greatest consequence.

Tall, darkly good-looking, supremely entertaining, and often scandalously ill-behaved, Robert was the grandson of the Marquess of Salisbury and the son of Lord Cranborne, a leader of the Conservative opposition to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Widely regarded as one of the two most eligible bachelors in London, Robert had previously demonstrated a taste for the “forbidden fruit” of Catholic girls in the persons of Hugh Fraser’s sister Veronica Fraser and of Winston Churchill’s niece Clarissa Churchill.

Robert was a great favorite of his cousin Jean Ogilvy, who, then and later, loved few things better in life than to recount his exploits with a mixture of admiration and alarm. Because of Robert’s prodigious drinking, Jean was forbidden to drive with him anywhere. Lord Airlie, when he supplied his car for her outings with Robert, had to arrange for not one but two chauffeurs, due to Robert’s habit of remaining out so late that more often than not a second shift was required. Lady Airlie, exceptionally strict with her daughters, was known to sit along the ballroom edges watching Jean through a lorgnette lest she violate the cardinal rule of never dancing more than two dances with the same young man. On one particular evening that became legend among the members of the set, Robert Cecil, gliding past with Jean in his arms, suddenly produced a lorgnette of his own, through which he satirically peered back at Lady Airlie, to the mother’s outrage and the young people’s exhilaration.

Kick had an opportunity to meet her rapidly widening circle of Oxford admirers again a few days hence. Ambassador Kennedy took her along with him to Oxford, where there was to be a reception in his honor during Eights Week, the occasion of the annual intercollegiate rowing races. As she had done at Cliveden, Kick impressed the boys with her difference from the other girls they knew when she made a point of actually listening to her father’s address. One undergraduate member of the cousinhood who soon confessed to being infatuated with her was twenty-one-year-old Tony Loughborough, heir to his grandfather the Earl of Rosslyn.

By the time Kick materialized at Oxford, Tony had already heard much about her from his mother, who had been a guest at Blenheim Palace when the Kennedys were there. Tony was quick to pursue Ambassador Kennedy’s daughter, whom he presently treated to her first outing at a glamorous London nightclub, Ciro’s. By and by, he perceived that Kick, however fond of him in turn, was interested solely in their being close friends and nothing more. In years past, Kick had displayed a gift for adroitly enlisting as “pals” those of her brother Jack’s friends who insisted that they had fallen in love with her—and at length she managed to do so with Tony, who would long remain devoted to her.

Meanwhile, Tony faced a good deal of competition for her attentions. Viscount Duncannon, the heir to the Earl of Bessborough, had made early claims, taking her off to dinner at his parents’ residence, as well as escorting her to various parties. Lord John Stanley, grandson and heir to the Earl of Derby, had met Kick at Blenheim Palace and afterward spent Derby Day at Epsom in her buoyant company. One notable absence from Kick’s dance card during this period was the name of Lord Andrew Cavendish, from whom there had been no follow-up in the aftermath of their meeting at Cliveden. Andrew had disappeared for a reason. His grandfather, Victor, 9th Duke of Devonshire, had died on the sixth of May. Upon Duke Victor’s demise, Andrew’s father became the 10th Duke, and Andrew’s older brother Billy Burlington had become the Marquess of Hartington, and was thereafter known as Billy Hartington. A period of mourning had ensued for the Cavendish family, at the conclusion of which Andrew Cavendish, as he continued to be called, had been shipped off to Lyons to study French.

At the whirligig of parties, balls, and dinners that comprised the 1938 London Season, Kick was often frustrated by the code that governed the young people’s behavior. To Jean Ogilvy had fallen the task to—in Debo Mitford’s words—introduce Kick “to her English contemporaries and to the unwritten rules and nuances of social life.” Still, nothing that Jean said by way of explanation seemed capable of assuaging Kick’s puzzlement at a young man’s being prohibited to ask one to dance unless there had previously been a formal introduction. Kick also failed to comprehend why the notion of a boy’s cutting in on another fellow on the dance floor seemed so utterly to horrify her new English friends. No matter how many times she was informed that this or that was simply the custom of the country, Kick’s diaries and letters attest to the fact that she found many of the rules absurd. She wanted things to move. She lived for fluidity.