Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (31 page)

Also pursuing Kick during this period was Seymour Berry, the thirty-seven-year-old deputy chairman of
The Daily Telegraph
in London, which was owned by his father, Lord Camrose. Rich and powerful, with access to a level of British society that greatly appealed to Kick, Berry seemed a formidable candidate for her affections. After she had rejoined her family in Palm Beach, he invited her to accompany him as part of a select group set to escort Winston Churchill to the Miami Orange Bowl, where the former prime minister was to receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Miami. Churchill was then on holiday in Florida in anticipation of traveling to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver his game-changing Iron Curtain speech, in which he would at once warn the world of the Soviet menace and make it clear that, despite the outcome of the 1945 British general election, he had no intention of retiring. On the morning of the Orange Bowl ceremony, Kick went with Seymour Berry to collect Winston and Clementine Churchill at the private residence where they were houseguests. Later, she marched in the academic procession and sat onstage between Seymour Berry and the British Conservative politician Leslie Hore-Belisha while Churchill, resplendent in a copious scarlet gown and cap, accepted his honorary degree before an audience of eighteen thousand people. Afterward, she swam with Churchill at a private beach club and sat at the head table at the large official luncheon that was given in his honor.

Berry’s newly conspicuous presence in Kick’s life was not exactly welcome news at Compton Place. The duke and duchess, eager that Kick remain in the role of their son’s widow but loath to interfere in her personal affairs, found themselves in a most delicate position. When at length they learned that Berry would be waiting for Kick when the SS
Queen Mary
docked in Southampton on April 30, 1946, they elected not to be there. And when Berry, in turn, discovered that Billy’s parents and sisters were planning to be at the boat, he decided that it would be wisest to avoid appearing there himself. Thus, in the end neither Kick’s in-laws nor her suitor were present when she emerged from the liner. There was only Berry’s chauffeur. As the duke and duchess were nowhere in sight, Berry’s man organized a grateful Lady Hartington’s extensive luggage and drove her in to town.

Twelve

Late in the afternoon of April 30, 1946, Seymour Berry’s limousine pulled up in front of 4, Smith Square, just opposite the wreckage of St. John’s Church, which had been hit by a German bomb in 1941.

While the chauffeur collected her bags, the tiny figure of Lady Hartington walked past the centuries-old iron fencing and through the heavy wooden front door of the Georgian house, where, at twenty-six years of age, she was about to begin life on her own. Entering a narrow hallway, she climbed two flights to the sitting room. To her immense pleasure, tea was waiting on the table, amid great quantities of flowers that, on the orders of the Duchess of Devonshire, who had herself just returned from a holiday in Monaco, were arrayed throughout.

Because of the misunderstanding on both sides that Kick professed to find most amusing, neither her in-laws nor her gentleman friend had materialized at the ship. Still, from the outset, what henceforward were to exist as subtly but no less powerfully competing forces in Kick’s life—her Cavendish in-laws and those who hoped to lure her away from them—were represented in the form of the tea and flowers and myriad other welcoming niceties on the one hand and the car and driver on the other. Though Kick had chosen, much to the consternation and perplexity of the Kennedys, to live in austere postwar socialist Britain, she was unabashed in her fondness for comfort and luxury and in her attraction to those who were in a position to offer it to her.

Initially, it seemed as if, for all of her excitement about her new house, she might yet be content to sequester herself as much as possible under the warmth of the wings of the Cavendishes. Kick spent her first weekend back in Britain at Compton Place, and she gladly agreed to accompany the duke a few days hence to stay with his mother, and afterward to attend a ceremony at the University of Leeds, where he served as chancellor and where Kick would be known for the day as “Chancellor’s Lady.” It was obvious from the duke’s invitation, and from the many others that were soon to follow, that the father who had once dreaded Kick’s arrival in the Cavendish family had developed a deep emotional attachment to her. That attachment had grown more intense in the course of the five months that his daughter-in-law had just spent in the U.S. Kick’s absence seemed to make the duke feel the more acutely the loss of Billy. Increasingly, it would seem as if he simply could not abide the thought of losing her as well.

So while Billy himself, in the letter written from Giberville in the aftermath of Operation Goodwood, had urged Kick to marry again soon in the event that he failed to survive the war, the duke appeared to take a very different view of what would be best for his son’s widow.

On the ninth of May, Kick and the duke set off together by train for Chesterfield, in Derbyshire. Duchess Evie had taken up residence at Hardwick Hall, the Elizabethan Renaissance palace that Bess of Hardwick, ancestor of the Devonshire dukes, had built in the final decade of the sixteenth century. Seated before a fire in Duchess Evie’s sitting room, Kick composed a letter to her family in the U.S. that expressed the mixture of delight and dismay with which she responded not just to Hardwick Hall, but also, more generally, to her adopted country: “It is like an old museum, full of the most lovely furniture and pictures, but quite uncomfortable. It’s odd how people in this country who possess so much have no idea about things which Americans consider quite essential to the ordinary way of life. There is no soap in one’s bathroom, sugar or butter at breakfast.”

By turns Kick marveled at the perfection of the old tapestries and furniture and complained of the discomfort of her “lovely, historical Elizabethan bed.” To judge by her letters home, Kick’s thoughts were ever darting between England and the very different life she had left behind in the U.S. In this regard, her comments on the “pageantry and color” of the traditional ceremony in which she and the duke soon participated at Leeds University are telling: “I think that this is the sort of thing I most enjoy because it is so entirely different from anything I’ve ever done,” Kick reported to the Kennedys. “I do enjoy contrasts.”

In contrast to her life with Billy’s family, Kick was also fashioning a separate new existence of her own in London. As her sister-in-law Elizabeth observed, Kick, rather than persist in dwelling upon the painful past, finally “turned it off and moved on.” For Kick to have done otherwise, Elizabeth judged, would have been unbearable. In June, therefore, she presided over her first dinner party, attended by a group that went on afterward to a dinner dance that Seymour Berry gave for his sister. With the help of a new cook and butler, Kick was soon hosting frequent lunches and dinners, but the focal point of her hospitality, at least when Parliament was in session, were the weekday evenings between six and eight when she was “at home” to politically minded friends.

Not long after Kick had returned from the U.S., intimates such as Jean Lloyd began to notice her habit of haphazardly stuffing one chair after another into the tiny drawing room, an odd decorating scheme that had little to do with aesthetics but everything to do with accommodating as many guests as possible, with the objective of making conversation primary. Hugh Fraser, Tony Rosslyn, William Douglas-Home, Michael Astor, Jakie Astor, David Ormsby-Gore, and other of the young men who, to varying degrees, had been besotted with Kick in the days before Billy claimed her for his own soon established themselves as regulars at what came to be known as “Lady Hartington’s salon.” The crowded drawing room, whose three windows gave pretty views of the old square, echoed with talk of the great and controversial issues of the day.

That spring of 1946, no subject was discussed with greater fervor in London political circles than government efforts to desecrate and destroy the largest of the eighteenth-century houses, which were regarded as emblematic of the old social order. The particular edifice under official assault was Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, the family seat of the Fitzwilliam dynasty. That venerable Whig family had a history of vying with the Devonshire dukes over which of their noble houses possessed the greater splendor. On the first day of the Doncaster races in 1827, both the Duke of Devonshire and Earl Fitzwilliam appeared with a coach and six, and a dozen outriders. The next day, Fitzwilliam, intent on besting his rival, famously arrived with two coaches and six, as well as sixteen outriders.

More than a century later, as Elizabeth Cavendish recalled, no one any longer lived at quite the level of grandeur displayed by the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. His father had nimbly eluded the economic devastation that had stricken the landed classes after World War I. When the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam’s fellow aristocrats endeavored to sell off property at a steep discount, he had been quick to claim the spoils. But whereas the father had been known and admired for paying too little for things, the son in turn would be much reviled for paying too much. During the Second World War, the latter had paid eight thousand guineas for a racehorse, the highest price then on record at Newmarket. As the 8th Earl’s postwar socialist nemesis, the Labor government’s minister of fuel and power, Manny Shinwell, scathingly pointed out in 1946, the sum had been the equivalent of about forty years of wages of what was generally regarded as a well-paid workman.

After the war, the coal industry, on which a good portion of the Fitzwilliam family’s riches were based, was nationalized. The family remained immensely wealthy nonetheless, with broad acres and other holdings. Intent, it would seem, on making the 8th Earl, Peter Fitzwilliam, the reviled symbol of the very social and economic injustice that the socialists had pledged to eradicate, Manny Shinwell decreed that the park and gardens of the earl’s family seat be mined for coal. Peter Fitzwilliam himself was hardly alone at the time in suspecting that Shinwell had issued the order not in spite of the fact that the extensive mining operation would gravely disfigure the historic property, but rather precisely because of it. The government minister had endeavored to transform the nationalization fight into a battle of personalities—and so he very much succeeded in doing.

Still, if Shinwell presumed that, in keeping with the tenor of postwar public opinion in Britain, the miners whose families had toiled in the area for generations would regard Fitzwilliam’s persecutor as a hero, he miscalculated. Unlike the electors in the 1944 West Derbyshire by-election, whose votes had constituted a forceful statement against traditional aristocratic governance in general and (as Billy Hartington had perceived) against the Cavendishes in particular, the Yorkshire miners, believing themselves to have been treated fairly by earls Fitzwilliam past and present, were outspoken in their support of Peter Fitzwilliam. By that support, they seemed to ratify the Whigs’ traditional view of themselves as being on the side of the people, not in conflict with them. Number 10 Downing Street, however, persisted in backing its histrionic minister of fuel and power. Fitzwilliam had returned from the Second World War a hero, whose valor had earned him a Distinguished Service Order, but, finally, that high military honor did nothing to protect him against his own government.

With dramatic flair, Manny Shinwell had endeavored to cast Peter Fitzwilliam as a villain. Still, for not a few Britons, the spectacle of the ravaging of the nobleman’s magnificent park and gardens had quite the opposite effect. No matter that Fitzwilliam was an unfaithful husband, a notorious womanizer who had fathered several illegitimate children, a compulsive high-stakes gambler, and a heavy drinker. In some Conservative quarters, Fitzwilliam’s impassioned defense of his property against the socialist minister’s bulldozers had made him very much the hero of the hour.

In Kick’s story we catch a first glimpse of Peter Fitzwilliam—“dashing and flirtatious and gay and attractive,” in the words of Jean Lloyd—as he dances with Kick at a ball in honor of Britain’s wartime Commandos, of which he had been a distinguished member, at the Dorchester Hotel on June 12, 1946. His oft-betrayed wife of thirteen years, Obby—once among the prettiest debs of her year, but now, as described in another context by the diarist James Lees-Milne, “rather dumpy and awkward”—is also present at the gala. Kick has chaired the event’s organizing committee at the invitation of Fitzwilliam’s close friends Robert and Angie Laycock, who happen to be her friends as well.

To look at, Earl Fitzwilliam and the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington make a curious couple. Peter is thirty-five years of age; Kick nearly a decade his junior. He is more than six feet tall; she is diminutive, like her mother. He is—in the phrase of Billy’s sister Anne—“an astonishingly handsome man,” with a history of pursuing women of exceptional beauty; Kick, to say the least, is far from beautiful. Deep creases in his forehead and faint shadows beneath his eyes project an air of dissipation; she is fresh-faced and innocent. He has the well-earned reputation of a sybarite and a seducer; she persists in regarding herself as a devout Catholic. Indeed, at the time of the Commando Ball, Kick has only recently returned from a group retreat at a nunnery organized by Hugh Fraser’s sister Lady Eldon, at the conclusion of which Kick, by her own account, discovered that she was “rather sorry to leave the protecting walls of the convent.”

Hardly had Kick met Fitzwilliam than her relationship with Richard Wood began to intensify. Did Richard, who had held back for so long, sense that it must be now or never? Was Kick, whom Billy had urged to marry “someone good & nice,” seeking to do precisely that at a moment when a rather different option had suddenly presented itself? All that can be known for certain is that, by Richard’s own account, he had been in love with her since Washington. He had cared for her enough to selflessly support her as she made some of the most difficult decisions with regard to her future course with Billy. Kick, in turn, had come to view Richard as “the soul of honesty” and “one of the best and most understanding friends I have in all the world.” She had been a frequent houseguest at Garrowby, where she existed on intimate terms not just with him, but with his parents as well. Affectionately, she had monitored Richard’s progress as he mastered his artificial limbs; learned to ride again; endeavored to reemerge, nervously at first, then more confidently, in London life; and set his sights on a career as a Conservative politician.