Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (6 page)

On the fifteenth of September, Chamberlain flew to Germany in hopes that the Fuehrer might yet be appeased. In Berchtesgaden, the British prime minister discovered that Hitler had escalated his demands. He was no longer insisting simply on autonomy for the Sudeten Germans, but rather on the full annexation of all Sudeten areas to the Reich.

Four days later, when Kick arrived at Cortachy Castle, overlooking the River South Esk in Angus, Scotland, it seemed as if Europe might be about to erupt in another war.

“We listened to the radio for news flashes,” Kick wrote in her diary that day, referring to herself, Jean Ogilvy, and the other young people who were just arriving for Jean’s birthday party, which was set to take place two days hence. “The international situation grows increasingly worse.”

Three

On the evening of September 21, 1938, Kick found her assigned place in the dining room of the cream-colored castle, which had been used as a hunting lodge in the fourteenth century by Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, and had been enlarged numerous times since. The dining room’s extensive windows overlooked what had come to be known as the American Garden, a reference to the ornate plantings that had been brought over from the U.S. Among the other young people who were just then finding their places at Lord Airlie’s dinner table on the occasion of his daughter Jean’s twentieth birthday dinner were her sister Maggot, Ivar Colquhoun, and Rene Haig.

When all were seated, two chairs remained conspicuously empty.

Billy Hartington and David Ormsby-Gore had been due to begin the long drive up early that morning. For most people, the trip would likely take about twelve hours. But with David at the wheel, it had been expected that the boys would require considerably less time.

Which was just as well, for Jean perceived that Kick had been keenly anticipating her reunion with Billy for far longer than merely the two days she had already been in residence. Indeed, Kick appeared to have regarded her time in the South of France as but a necessary interlude before their next encounter. She was a good deal thinner than when Jean or the others had last seen her, and she had acquired a mannerism of emphasizing her newly svelte waist by delightedly spanning it with both hands, a gesture she could not possibly have managed before. Kick insisted that the substantial weight loss had been the consequence of its having been so warm in the South of France that she had had no appetite for weeks. Jean, who noticed that Kick seemed not to have regained her appetite at Cortachy, guessed that like countless young women in love before and since, she had in fact been dieting madly in anticipation of seeing her young man again.

So when that young man proved to be late in making his appearance, and worse, when Lord Airlie angrily decreed that the birthday festivities begin without Billy and David, Kick was as distressed as Jean was embarrassed. Lady Airlie was the parent known to be gruff and difficult with her daughters, as well as with their friends. The curly-haired, colorfully kilted Lord Airlie tended to be good-humored, and was much beloved by the young people in the cousinhood. Yet when, partway through the meal, the butler came in to inform Lord Airlie that the missing guests had arrived at last, he was instructed to tell Billy and David that they were too late for dinner, then show them to their rooms. These orders notwithstanding, the butler later brought up plenty of food for both young travelers, at Kick’s and Jean’s frantically whispered behest.

As the girls understood, Lord Airlie’s wrath was less a reflection of any rigid insistence on his part upon promptness or proper attire than of how affected he was by the terrible tension of the moment, the British government having been engaged in days of discussion and debate about Hitler’s demands at the Fuehrer’s meeting with Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden.

Unlike Joe Kennedy, who, to the horror of certain of his Harvard classmates, had managed to evade military service in the last war, Joe Airlie had fought bravely in the trenches. He bore the scar of a wound to his leg, and he had been awarded the high honor of a Military Cross. Joe Kennedy wanted Britain to come to terms with Hitler because, among other reasons, he feared another war might wipe out his personal fortune and impede his plans for assuring the political futures of his eldest sons, particularly of young Joe. In any case, Ambassador Kennedy did not think the decadent, depleted British capable of fighting, let alone winning, a new military conflict with the Germans. As always with Joe Kennedy, matters of honor and principle were simply not factors in his calculations.

Joe Airlie, though he too supported the policy of appeasement, was another matter altogether. He was acutely sensitive to the questions of honor and duty raised by the Czech crisis. He had met Hitler and—unlike some aristocrats who professed to admire the Fuehrer—he found the German’s policies and politics abhorrent. Nonetheless, as one who had personally endured the agony of the last war, he could not bear the prospect of that agony being visited upon the next generation. Lord Airlie’s fit of temper when Billy and David arrived late expressed his monumental upset at the prospect that these two childishly undisciplined young men, as he viewed them, might soon be leaving a Scottish shooting party, where grouse were the targets, for the fields of death where they themselves would provide targets for the Germans.

While Jean’s father reacted to the prevailing anxiety with irascibility, Kick responded by striving to concentrate on the pleasures of the moment now that she and Billy had been reunited at last. To watch them together that week—as Kick sat directly behind Billy while he shot grouse each afternoon; as she and he enjoyed noontime picnics and moonlight walks on the moors; as, dressed in evening clothes, they danced to records played on Jean’s old windup gramophone—was to observe a young couple who were unmistakably in love.

To Kick’s dismay, however, it was impossible to shut out the dramatic international developments that were threatening to snatch Billy away from her at the very moment when she and he were really just discovering each other. She who had previously enchanted the boys of the aristocratic cousinhood by her readiness to listen to their animated talk of politics and world affairs was suddenly and conspicuously a good deal less than enthusiastic about those topics.

On Friday, the twenty-third of September, Kick wrote to Jack’s friend Lem Billings in America: “All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come. Am so darn sick of it.” At the time she voiced that sentiment, Chamberlain had returned for a second round of discussions with Hitler, this time in the Rhineland town of Bad Godesberg. Again, the Fuehrer drastically augmented his demands. He stipulated that if the Czechs failed to vacate the Sudetenland by September 28, German troops would march into the disputed territories on the first of the month. Though in Bad Godesberg he had objected to Hitler’s terms, Chamberlain, when he returned to London, urged his cabinet to accept them.

Lord Airlie, meanwhile, persisted in going out every morning with the boys to shoot, a voluminous plaid wrapped round his broad shoulders against the chill. On one occasion during this nerve-jangling period, the older man snapped when the fellows began to pepper one another with shotgun pellets. Immediately he ordered all of them into the cars and back to the castle. “You are all dangerous and you are coming home!” Lord Airlie shouted, saddened, as he was later heard to grumble, that these young fools might soon find themselves on an actual battlefield for which they were in no way prepared.

On Sunday the twenty-fifth of September, the day after Chamberlain returned to London with Hitler’s ultimatum, the young people at Cortachy drove some eight miles to Airlie Castle, the home of Jean’s grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Airlie, who was a sister of Lady Alice Salisbury. Accompanying them now were Robert Cecil and Debo Mitford, who had joined the party in the meantime, and whose presence in the group highlighted how very divided the country in general, and the upper class in particular, remained with regard to the policy of appeasement.

Robert’s father, Lord Cranborne, was an outspoken antagonist of the European dictators on the one hand and of the British appeasers on the other. By contrast, two of Debo’s sisters were fanatical supporters of the Reich. Unity Mitford, a close personal friend of Hitler’s, had been a member of the dictator’s entourage at the Nuremberg party rally. In Germany, Unity was threatening to take her own life in the event that the country of her birth went to war against her beloved Fuehrer. Another Mitford sister, Diana, had secretly married the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, at the home of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, where the wedding guests had included Hitler himself. Not all of the Mitford sisters, however, favored the Nazis. Two, Nancy and Jessica, embraced socialism and communism, respectively. Debo, the youngest Mitford girl, professed to be uninterested in the politics of the day. Other patrician families were divided as well, though none perhaps as spectacularly as the Mitfords. In Billy’s household, for instance, the Duke of Devonshire, who served as Chamberlain’s Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, supported appeasement. The duchess privately preferred the views of her brother Lord Cranborne, though publicly she deferred to her husband’s opinion on the matter.

Centuries-old Airlie Castle was said to be haunted, and Granny Airlie, a dramatic figure who favored outdated ankle-length skirts and elaborate, wide-brimmed “picture hats,” did her best to encourage her young visitors’ talk of ghosts. She was full of stories of young people’s hair having suddenly turned gray on the premises and of the appalling fate that had befallen past visitors who dared walk down to the river at night. But, as Debo would point out many years afterward, even in this romantic setting, where history and legend were so deeply woven into the fabric of daily life, some of the young people could not help but act out the acute anxieties connected with the threat of imminent war. The determined silliness and laughter appeared to go too far at times. Once, swaying jerkily and erratically as they crossed the river on a suspension bridge, the merrymakers succeeded in accidentally catapulting Jean into the rushing waters, so that she had to spend the rest of the day in one of the dowager countess’s kilts while her own garments dried.

That evening at Cortachy, where the radio reports from London were nothing if not alarming, the boys seemed to reach an apex of wildness. Ivar Colquhoun sprayed the drawing room with a fire extinguisher, and Jakie Astor, who had now joined the party, insisted very late at night on going downstairs to fetch some more alcohol. Drunkenly gathering not just a bottle or two, but rather Lord Airlie’s entire drinks tray in his arms, Jakie headed up the wide wooden staircase—whereupon he slipped, loudly smashing every item on the tray to pieces.

On Kick’s final day at Cortachy Castle, the twenty-sixth of September, she and Billy attended the races in Hamilton, where they had a few last hours together. The couple made a date to see a play in London on the thirtieth, the day she was scheduled to return from Scotland. Still, as she and Billy parted, Hitler’s deadline loomed, along with the possibility that by the time of their anticipated reunion, London might already be in flames. Chamberlain, who had encountered staunch opposition from within his cabinet, had been left with little choice but to notify Hitler that should France, in keeping with her treaty obligations to the Czechs, enter into hostilities with Germany, Britain would feel obliged to support her.

Finally, Kick set off, rather gloomily, to spend a few more days in another Scottish household, where, the following night, she listened to a despairing radio address by the prime minister. In a weary-sounding voice, Chamberlain well nigh confessed to having failed in his peacemaking efforts, though he stressed that he would not hesitate to make a third trip to Germany if he believed it would do any good.

In London, meanwhile, trenches were being dug, antiaircraft guns deployed, and gas masks handed out in anticipation of a feared aerial assault, to take place as early as the twenty-eighth, which had come to be known popularly as Black Wednesday. That morning, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy called his wife, who was on a golf holiday in Scotland at the Gleneagles Hotel. Old Joe instructed Rose to return to Prince’s Gate at once in anticipation of preparing to return to the U.S. with the children in the event of war.

As it happened, that same day Kick went to the Perth races, where she met up again with Jean Ogilvy, who was now accompanied by a second wave of Cortachy houseguests, including Andrew Cavendish, Tony Loughborough, and Charlie Lansdowne, as well as Debo Mitford and Robert Cecil, who had stayed on from the previous week. Suddenly, an unexpected shaft of light pierced through the general foreboding, when Chamberlain, in the midst of an address to the House of Commons, reported that he had just had a message from Hitler, agreeing to postpone his mobilization for twenty-four hours, and proposing to meet with the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy the next day. In the House, Chamberlain’s announcement was met with silence at first, then a roar of cheers. So, too, at Perth, the young people in Kick’s group were jubilant, leading her to write in her diary: “I have never seen such happiness.” Following the races Kick and her friends went on to a cocktail party, where, Jean remembered, Munich and the war were the only topics of conversation.

That night, Kick boarded a train for London, uncertain about what the morrow might bring—would there be peace or war? She arrived in London “to find peace and everyone deliriously happy.” In the wake of Chamberlain’s triumphant declaration to the British people that he had brought back with him from Munich “peace with honor” and “peace for our time,” Kick and Billy went off for an evening of theater and further celebrations at the Café de Paris with David Ormsby-Gore and other friends.

For Billy and his circle, however, as for many others, the euphoria did not last long. Three days hence, Billy and Kick, along with David Ormsby-Gore and Tom Egerton, went to stay at Churchdale Hall, the duke’s house in Ashford-in-the-Water, which they planned to use as a base for expeditions to the Nottingham races. Andrew Cavendish, accompanied by Debo Mitford, was already in residence at Churchdale, where the duchess was to serve as the young people’s chaperone, the duke being in London at the time in connection with his governmental duties. Kick was soon noting in her diary that she and Billy talked for hours every night. And no wonder: Her October 3, 1938, arrival at Billy’s childhood home coincided with the opening, at the Palace of Westminster in London, of a furious debate about the wisdom of the prime minister’s deal with Hitler. Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden—all denounced what they saw as Chamberlain’s betrayal of the Czechs, as well as his wishful thinking that Hitler would keep his word about this being the last of his territorial demands.