Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (8 page)

The opinion of the world meant much to Rose Kennedy, who, however improbably, chose to regard her family as exemplary Catholics whose behavior set a standard for others to follow. She was particularly keen to have the approbation of those people whom she regarded as her social superiors in elite Catholic America, families such as the James F. McDonnells of New York City, whose daughters, Anne and Charlotte, had been classmates of Kick’s when she attended a convent school in Connecticut. The McDonnells visited the Kennedys in St. Moritz that holiday season. In the course of their stay, Charlotte McDonnell wrote a poem about her friend Kick’s romantic dramas, which included references to the fellows whom Kick had previously spurned, such as Peter Grace, and to the one young man whose next move she was then so eagerly awaiting: “Such is Kick! God’s gift to Billy!!!/Will he … won’t he? won’t he??/Billy…” With Charlotte so aware of Kick’s feelings, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Rose Kennedy learned of them as well, with all of the domestic fireworks that were sure to follow her discovery.

Meanwhile, it was a source of distress to Kick that her Swiss sojourn made it impossible for her to attend an event that Billy had been keenly anticipating for some time. On the seventh and eighth of January 1939, Billy’s cousins and friends descended upon Derbyshire on the occasion of his first young people’s house party at Chatsworth. Immediately, Billy had taken possession of the quarters known as the State Dressing Room, which gave long views of the Emperor Fountain, the Cascade, and the vast landscape that would one day be among his possessions. The cousins remarked among themselves that his choice of accommodation spoke volumes about his love for the good things that fortune promised him, and about his love of personal comfort; Billy had claimed for himself a room with its own private bath, leaving his guests to line up for what was at that time the only other working bathroom in the ducal palace.

Jean Ogilvy would later remember Billy’s party as having been great fun, despite the inconvenience. She also recalled it as a time when, precisely because they were at Chatsworth, her beloved Cavendish cousin was forcefully confronted with the duties that he would one day inherit along with all of those possessions, duties that were religious as well as secular. Among these duties, for instance, was the appointment of various Protestant clergymen, which as Billy’s sister Anne pointed out, he felt he would be unable to perform if he had a son of a different faith. And if that son were indeed a Catholic, how could the boy, when he became duke one day, possibly interview and say whom he would have as a clergyman in a Protestant parish? So, at a moment when Kick, in St. Moritz, was confronting the impact that marriage to a Protestant would have on her family, Billy, in Derbyshire, faced tough questions of his own about how marriage to a Catholic might impact on his ability to perform his bounden duty as a Devonshire duke.

Despite questions on both sides, as soon as Kick and Billy went out to dinner on the night of her return to London, January 13, 1939, they immediately resumed the easy, playful rhythms of their relationship. However much the religious issue continued to loom, this was still an exceedingly happy time for them. In the weeks that followed, they saw each other constantly. There were more dinners in London, trips to the races at Newmarket and elsewhere, and dinner parties in his rooms at Cambridge, where he served pâté de foie gras from Fortnum & Mason in London. Billy’s charm was becoming more obvious to all as he acquired the ability to laugh at himself when Kick enumerated the absurdities and pomposities of “the Marquess,” as she at once satirically and fondly referred to him. She teased him about his excessive concern for his appearance; about his tendency to boss his younger brother around; about his upset when she wanted to snatch up a souvenir ashtray after dinner in a Spanish restaurant, as she would have thought nothing of doing in the company of her elder brothers in Palm Beach. He in turn pointedly refrained from teasing Kick when, pretending that she had not become aware of the etiquette in such matters only recently, she grandly labeled a hostess “nouveau riche” for writing out her dinner guests’ titles in full on their place cards.

Those who saw Kick and Billy laughing and jesting, as they liked to do, could not but suspect that she was very much his for the taking. Still, the question that Charlotte McDonnell had posed—“Will he … won’t he?”—remained emphatically in play. So much so, in fact, that despite Kick and Billy’s status as an established couple, other prospective suitors, headed by Hugh Fraser, Tony Loughborough, and William Douglas-Home, had not yet abandoned all hope with regard to her.

In the meantime, romantic developments among other members of the set were alternately encouraging and discouraging to Kick’s own hopes. The February 1939 marriage of the couple’s close friends, Ann de Trafford and Derek Parker Bowles, seemed to suggest that the religious obstacles could be overcome. Ann was Catholic, Derek Protestant. Nonetheless, they had been married in a Catholic church—the Brompton Oratory. That, Kick noted pointedly in her diary, would not have been permitted in the U.S. Moreover, one of the ushers at the Catholic wedding ceremony had been none other than Billy Hartington—another hopeful sign.

By contrast, the experience of a second couple in their group had been a good deal less happy. Lord Salisbury had asked his grandson, Robert Cecil, to bring Veronica Fraser to see him in London. That day, the head of the house of Cecil explained to Veronica why the family’s position as leaders of the Anglican community stood in the way of Robert’s marrying her. Rather than ask Veronica to abandon her faith, Lord Salisbury gently requested that both young people wait a year and refrain as much as possible from seeing each other during that period. Such was the austere, silvery-white-haired old man’s authority that the lovers agreed to do as he asked. Lord Salisbury, of course, was Billy’s grandfather as well. The precedent of his intervention in Robert Cecil’s life suggested the possibility that he might soon take similar action to sunder his Cavendish grandson from Kick. Among the young members of the aristocratic cousinhood who had lately embarked on romances with Catholic girls, Robert’s position was closest to Billy’s, in that both fellows were in line to become the heads of illustrious Protestant houses. If the often rowdy and rebellious Robert had capitulated to their grandfather, was Billy, whose nature was so much milder than his cousin’s, not likely to do the same?

More and more, Kick’s marathon talks with Billy when she and he wandered off together at a party or a dance seemed to assume a graver tone. They found themselves chatting “about life,” which, as their friends came to understand, was their code phrase for imagining possible futures as a couple. What sort of life might they have together in the event that the religious obstacles could be overcome? What might he and she accomplish as Duke and Duchess of Devonshire? At Chatsworth, Billy had become absorbed in the collection of letters written by the eighteenth-century Devonshire duchess Georgiana, who had dazzled the London of her era. In particular, it was Georgiana the political hostess who fascinated Billy, and whom he began to see as a model for the influential figure Kick might become one day as his wife.

Before long, however, the future seemed more uncertain than ever. On March 15, 1939, Kick was still in Rome with her family following the coronation, three days previously, of Pope Pius XII when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia, in violation of the terms of the Munich Agreement. No one in Britain, not even at length the prime minister himself, could go on pretending that Hitler was to be trusted. The Fuehrer, by his actions, had proven that Cooper, Churchill, Eden, Cranborne, and other government critics had been right to decry the prime minister’s gullibility at Munich. Even Chamberlain’s most stalwart supporters began to abandon him. In Eastbourne, on the sixteenth of November, the Duke of Devonshire, a minister just below cabinet rank, declared apropos of the fall of Prague: “The Prime Minister is striving manfully, but warm supporter though I am, I am bound to confess that his policy is not bearing fruit, and is not meeting with the reception which we hoped it would.” To some ears, that last phrase seemed almost comical in its understatement.

Though Chamberlain initially resisted admitting to failure, on March 17, 1939, he delivered a radio address in which he confessed that his foreign policy was now in tatters. Hitler, the British prime minister conceded, was no longer to be believed. “If it is so easy to discover good reasons for ignoring assurances so solemnly and repeatedly given, what reliance can we place upon any other assurances that come from the same source?” Chamberlain went on to ask whether the conquest of Czechoslovakia was the last attack upon a small state or whether it was to be followed by others.

The same day that Chamberlain made those remarks, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, back from Rome, returned to his London post to discover a political climate that had been radically transformed. Previously, his views had harmonized with those of many Britons, who, like him, preferred to make a deal with the European dictators rather than have to undertake another war. While old Joe had been away in Rome, however, a massive shift in public opinion had occurred. Britain seemed united at last in its sense of shame over what the prime minister had done in pursuit of peace. In Andrew Cavendish’s phrase, shame had “taken the safety catch off the hunting rifle,” and Britain, reluctant though it had long been, was finally ready to again confront the Germans.

By this time, a year had passed since Kick’s first English country house weekend, at Lady Astor’s, around the time of Hugh Fraser’s and Julian Amery’s efforts to reverse the Oxford Union’s notorious King and Country resolution. The boys’ defeat, that spring of 1938, had been a reflection of the power that the argument for appeasement continued to exert on the nation. Now again, in 1939, both young men returned to the charge at the debating society. This time, however, they were making their case for conscription in the wake of the fall of Prague.

In keeping with the national symbolism of the debate, more than a thousand spectators filled every last inch of floor space, the windowsills, and even the presidential dais, and many more had to be refused admission at the front door. Hugh Fraser asked Julian Amery to propose the motion, “In view of this country’s commitments and the gravity of the general situation in Europe, this house welcomes conscription.” Julian Amery thereupon made the case that after eight years of fatal mistakes in British foreign policy, it had become clear that “only a policy of power can save the situation.” He argued that peace could not be preserved till the dictators were persuaded that they could be beaten in war. Similar arguments had been made in the past, but they read very differently in the wake of recent events. It was not just British foreign policy that Hugh Fraser and Julian Amery sought to alter; it was the image of British decay that the King and Country resolution had helped create. Following a debate that lasted into the night, the 1933 decision not to fight for King and Country was overturned.

Six months previously, Kick had rejoiced when Chamberlain seemed to have averted a new war, thereby assuaging her fears in the aftermath of Cortachy that she would soon have to return to the U.S., and that Billy would be sent off to fight. Since then, however, the phrases “peace with honor” and “peace for our time” had been revealed as nothing more than illusion and wishful thinking. In recent weeks, Britain had begun to live within a time lock, waiting anxiously for the moment when Hitler acted against his presumed next target, Poland. Whatever personal decisions Kick and Billy were to make had to take place within that breathing space of as-yet-undetermined length.

But first, Billy wanted to speak to her of his feelings about the ideals that he ardently believed to have been betrayed at Munich. It was not simply whether or not the British prime minister’s foreign policy had been efficacious that preoccupied Billy; it was whether or not it had been moral. At a moment when Joseph P. Kennedy was insisting that a war with Nazi Germany would be suicidal for the British and that even now London would be wise to look to its own interest and make additional concessions to Hitler, Billy sought to convey a very different perspective to the ambassador’s daughter. He undertook to make Kick understand the traditions of honor and duty that, in his view, had been egregiously betrayed at Munich, traditions that, he maintained, had long made Britain great. Since the time of Kick’s first meeting with Billy, much had, and would long be, made, and justly so, about all that she was capable of doing for him. Yet it is also the case that Kick drew substance from Billy, whose values and ideals were unlike anything she had ever had a chance to absorb from her father. In the course of their many long talks during this period, Billy by slow degrees bequeathed to Kick a way of looking at the world that, more and more, would open a substantial, often painful breach between herself and her family.

Already, that breach had disclosed itself on the occasion of a dinner party that Kick gave at Prince’s Gate, which was attended by Billy Hartington, David Ormsby-Gore, Jean Ogilvy, Fiona Gore, and other members of their set. Following the meal, the group repaired to a screening room, where Kick’s father showed them a movie about the Great War. As images of slaughter in the trenches began to play, Ambassador Kennedy suddenly leapt in front of the screen. Pointing to the pictures of soldiers being mown down by gunfire, he warned Billy and the other young men, “That’s what you’ll be looking like in a month or two!”

Both Fiona and Jean would long remember the moment when Kick, angered and embarrassed by her father’s performance, undertook to distance herself from him. “You mustn’t pay attention to him,” Kick assured Billy, who was seated beside her at the screening. “He just doesn’t understand the English as I do.” Kick understood, as her father apparently did not, that for Billy and the others, fighting was a matter of honor and that they well knew the price that they as soldiers might someday be required to pay. Lord Airlie, even when he had scolded the boys for peppering each other with shotgun pellets, had never doubted that in the end they would perform as duty required of them; Joe Kennedy, by contrast, long persisted in the belief that the British might yet be persuaded that it was not in their interest to take on the Germans.