Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (34 page)

In the meantime, at Christmas of 1947 Kick arrived at Churchdale Hall fresh from a stay with Eden in the country. She was to celebrate the holiday with “just the family”—by which she meant Billy’s family, with, as it happened, the curious addition of Debo’s mother, Lady Redesdale, and sister Unity. Eight years after the notorious Unity Mitford had attempted suicide in the wake of Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany, she persisted in declaring herself a fascist. Kick judged Unity to be “slightly more sane” than the year before, but unhinged nonetheless. When Unity told the family circle of her latest plan, to enter a convent, one of the guests suggested that if she did that, she might go mad. “But I am mad,” Unity replied, with a look of utter seriousness upon her face.

Unity and her mother were staying in Edensor with the Hartingtons. Debo and Andrew had just returned from South Africa, where, as part of the heir’s ongoing apprenticeship, Eddy Devonshire had sent him to explore investment opportunities. Andrew was proving to be an apt pupil, but there were grave problems as well. Far from diminishing over time, the aftereffects of the trauma that Debo knew him to have experienced in Italy seemed only to have become the more deeply ingrained.

Andrew had always had a taste for alcohol, but these days he drank even more, apparently to dull his excruciating guilt over the soldier, Sergeant King, for whose death he still held himself responsible. He felt guilty as well for the life he had inherited—stolen, as far as he was concerned—from his brother, and he insisted repeatedly that it was he who ought to have died rather than Billy. This twofold instances of survivor’s guilt disastrously fed into each other. By turns Andrew was depressed, irritable, explosive.

He and Debo, who had once been so ineffably happy together, saw their marriage begin to unravel. At moments, the sweet, loving, sensitive man Debo had married would reemerge, only to sink without explanation into the mists of distant unreachability. The darkness that pervaded Andrew had exacerbated the couple’s anguish when, within a year, Debo lost two babies, one by miscarriage and the other a few hours after birth. By Debo’s own account, at a certain point early on she concluded that in order to protect her living children she must “choose” them over Andrew, always putting their needs before those of the erratic, self-flagellating husband whom she had never ceased to adore.

At the same time, as Lord Holderness would point out many years afterward, through the decades Debo, in countless ways the stronger spouse, did much to shape Andrew, to help make it possible for him to play the public part that fate had assigned him. Lord Holderness further reflected that had Billy survived the war, Kick, like Debo the stronger partner, would no doubt have done the same for her husband. Kick’s miscalculation, her friend sadly went on, was to assume that she would be able to accomplish anything like that with the already fully formed and exceedingly strong-willed Earl Fitzwilliam.

That Christmas of 1947, Andrew sorely wanted to warn Kick about the folly she was about to commit were she to marry Fitzwilliam. However, he worried that it might seem as if he were acting not out of sincere concern for her well-being, but rather out of familial loyalty to Billy. So, to Andrew’s immense frustration, in the end he chose to say nothing.

Kick also initially found herself quite unable to confront the inevitable, when, shortly, she was reunited with her parents in Palm Beach. Her visit to the U.S. was scheduled to last for two months, so again and again she found herself putting off any announcement to her family of her wedding plans. In the meantime, she and Elizabeth enjoyed a visit to Washington, where Jack and Eunice were sharing a house in Georgetown that seemed to be constantly filled with people, popular music, and—most of all, Elizabeth remembered—joyous laughter. Since last Kick had seen Jack, at Lismore Castle, he had fallen gravely ill in London, been diagnosed with Addison’s disease, been given no more than a year to live, and received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Remembering his and Kick’s high spirits in Washington that year, it seemed inconceivable to Elizabeth that Kick could have had any particular knowledge of his recent ordeal.

Here, as in Florida, Kick and her sister-in-law shared a bedroom, and at night they delighted in the sound of pebbles being thrown at Eunice’s window from the street by a young man named Sargent Shriver, who was then courting her. Also during this time, Kick took Elizabeth to meet her bohemian friend and colleague from her
Times Herald
days, John White, who still lived and entertained amid piles of books in “the cave.” When Kick told him the story of her affair with Peter Fitzwilliam, John White, ever the egoist, saw the liaison as the culmination of his own long-ago efforts to awaken and enlighten her sexually. Though it was another man who had succeeded in breaking down her defenses, White exulted that Kick was liberated from her parents’ values and views at long last.

But was she really? For all of her outward air of worldliness, certain of those inculcated beliefs, notably the prohibitions against divorce and against marrying a divorced man, remained as intrinsic to how Lady Hartington, aged twenty-eight, viewed the world as they had been to Kick Kennedy’s perspective five years before. In advance of Kick’s showdown with her parents, it was not any decline in her powers of retort that seemed to worry her. It was that, however much she wanted this marriage to take place, she could not help but regard it as wrong. In spite of herself, everything in her training and background led her to see it that way. When, previously, David Ormsby-Gore had raised the character issue with her, Kick had been able to argue with conviction that David simply misperceived Peter Fitzwilliam. With her mother, however, the ground was certain to shift to Peter’s status as a married man. Anything Kick said on that count was likely to put her in a false position.

Kick was booked to return to England on the liner
Queen Elizabeth
from New York City on April 22, 1948. Shortly before her departure, she joined Joe and Rose on the occasion of the reopening of the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where they had had their honeymoon thirty-four years ago. On the present occasion, Kick postponed the disclosure of her wedding plans until the final night of their stay there. Immediately, there were hot words between her mother and herself. Rose Kennedy stipulated that if Kick committed the sin of marrying a divorced man, she would promptly be cut off from the family—not just from her parents, but from her siblings as well. The threat, whether or not Rose would be able to carry it out in its entirety, left Kick reeling. To her further anguish, her father, also in the room at the time, appeared by his silence to agree with Rose, both about the marriage and the banishment.

When Kick returned to London without having agreed to break off with Fitzwilliam, Rose did not resort to intermediaries, or retreat to a hospital bed, as she had done when she frantically sought to prevent her daughter’s marriage to Billy Hartington. This time, the indignant matriarch pursued Kick, all the way to Smith Square, where the women battled on for four days. In the unlikely event that Kick had forgotten either point, Rose laid out yet again the Church’s position on divorce and renewed her threats of expulsion from the Kennedy family circle. She demanded that Kick give up her life in London and accompany her to the U.S. at once. Still, when their war of words had died down, the mother had not succeeded in swaying the daughter from her purpose.

Nor had Rose extinguished Kick’s hope that there was something old Joe might yet do on her and her lover’s behalf. However much Kick had changed and grown through the years, she had never ceased to believe in the powers of “Darling Daddy” to make everything right.

Soon, the news that Joe Kennedy planned to be in Paris in May seemed to provide an opening. Kick and Peter were due to be in Cannes around that same time, and she asked the old man if they might come to see him. Her father agreed to have lunch with her and her lover at the Ritz Paris hotel on Saturday, the fifteenth. During Kick’s convent school years, Joe had often been willing to influence the nuns to bend the rules in her favor by offering them a film screening or some other gift. Now, half in earnest and half in jest, Peter Fitzwilliam declared that in the event her father persisted in his opposition to the marriage, Peter would himself travel to the Vatican and propose to the Pope that he build the Catholics a new church. One way or another, Peter was determined to marry Kick as soon as he could divorce his wife.

Two days before they were to see Joe at the Ritz, Kick and Peter were en route to Cannes on a chartered ten-seat de Havilland Dove plane when they stopped at Le Bourget airfield, near Paris, to refuel. On an impulse, Peter called some racing world friends in Paris and invited them for lunch on the Champs-Elysées. When he and Kick returned to the aircraft some two and a half hours later, the pilot insisted that turbulent weather conditions ahead made it unsafe to take off; any attempt to reach Cannes would require flying directly into a massive thunderstorm. Peter, however, simply would not hear of postponing the flight until the danger had passed. In defiance of the elements, he angrily demanded that the aircraft take off without delay. At twenty minutes past three in the afternoon, the plane, carrying Kick, Peter, and a two-man crew, departed for Cannes.

Jean Lloyd was asleep when the telephone rang very early Friday morning. She had gone to bed late because Andrew and Debo were staying with her and her husband in London. Between children and adults, the small house in Chelsea was packed to overflowing, but no one seemed to mind very much. On the contrary, the difficulties presented when four adults sought to bathe and prepare for the evening, with but one bathroom available to them, had proven to be a source of mirth to both couples. The previous day’s visit had been a happy one, at the end of which Debo had been assigned a bed in an upstairs room, while Andrew had been shown to a cot in David’s tiny dressing room.

In later years, Jean remembered being confused about who might be calling at this hour. Shaking herself awake, she picked up the phone and heard the familiar voice of Tom Egerton, Andrew’s closest friend. Tom explained that Kick had been killed in a plane crash in France with Peter Fitzwilliam. Before Jean had had a chance to register quite what Tom had said, he asked her to awaken Andrew and tell him what had happened.

Jean rushed to the dressing room and stood before the door behind which Andrew lay asleep. All she could think of then—she recalled long afterward—was Kick as she had looked that first evening at Cliveden in 1938, all aglow and full of energy and expectation, as Andrew bounded wildly up the staircase to greet her. Jean’s reverie lasted for no more than a few moments, but at the time she felt as though she were frozen in place “for an eternity.” Finally, she managed to lift her hand and knock at the door.

Andrew’s reaction to the news was immediate. There had been no need for Tom Egerton or anyone else to tell him what he must do; Andrew seemed to know instinctively. He pulled on his clothes and left the house before dawn in anticipation of making the rounds of newspaper proprietors in London. His aim was to ensure that both Kick and her late husband’s family were shielded against any mention in the press of her affair with a married man. Thanks to Andrew’s intervention, it was generally written only that Lady Hartington and Earl Fitzwilliam had been passengers on the same ill-fated aircraft. Kick was reported to have been en route to Cannes when, in Paris, she had a chance encounter with Peter Fitzwilliam, who, also on his way there, offered her a ride in his private plane.

Meanwhile, Joe Kennedy, in Paris when he learned of the accident, had set off at once for the town of Privas, some ten miles from where the plane had crashed in the midst of a thunderstorm. At the time of his arrival, the bodies were still in the process of being transported to Privas in an oxcart. Kick, whose corpse had been discovered on the sodden ground not far from the shattered aircraft, had been identified with the aid of her American passport. Still, it remained for Joe Kennedy to make the final definitive identification of the daughter he had long designated, in Rose’s words to Nancy Astor, his “favorite of all the children.” Until he actually saw her, old Joe yet retained a faint hope that there might be some mistake. But when, on Friday night, the four bodies—Kick’s, Peter’s, the pilot’s, and the radioman’s—were brought in at last to the town hall in Privas, Joe acknowledged that the young woman with the broken jaw and the deep laceration on the right side of her face was indeed his child.

In Washington, when a reporter telephoned the Georgetown house shared by Congressman Kennedy and his sister with the news that “Lady Hartington” had died in a plane crash, Eunice, who took the call, initially seized on the fact that there were actually two women in Britain who bore that name. To Eunice’s horror, she found herself wishing momentarily that it was Debo who had been killed rather than Kick. The newsman quashed that possibility by noting that the deceased woman’s passport bore the name “Kathleen.” Jack thereupon joined his mother and other family members in Hyannis Port. At that point, old Joe seems to have assumed that Jack was arranging to have Kick buried in the U.S. But when, on the fifteenth of May, Joe telegraphed his son to learn the details of the burial arrangements, to the patriarch’s frustration none were forthcoming.

Only weeks before, when she’d gone to London, Rose Kennedy had urged Kick to come back with her to the U.S. at once. Now, no one on the American end seemed to be in any great hurry to bring back Kick’s remains. When it became agonizingly apparent that the Kennedys were making no move, the Duchess of Devonshire intervened. Billy’s mother offered to bury Kick in the family plot in Edensor village, near Chatsworth. The duchess promised, moreover, to do everything in strict accordance with the requirements of the Roman Catholic Church. She made it clear that every detail of the Requiem Mass at the Farm Street Church in Mayfair, London, and of the burial service that followed, would be precisely as Kick’s mother might have wished.