Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (9 page)

The year before, at Cliveden, Kick’s willingness to tag along when Hugh Fraser, David Ormsby-Gore, and the other boys spoke of the coming war had set her apart from the English girls, who were then far more interested in discussing the 1938 London Season. In a mark of how much had changed in a year, by the time of the 1939 Season those very same girls were avidly speaking among themselves about the imminence and inevitability of war. A sense that the boys would soon be going off to fight influenced not just Kick and Billy, but others in their circle, to, in Jean Ogilvy’s phrase, “grow up more quickly” than they would otherwise have done, and “not to waste a minute.”

Adding to the sense of radical upheaval were predictions that the aristocratic way of life as it had been known to date was likely to be among the casualties of the coming conflict. The misguided optimism with which the patrician elite had faced the onset of the Great War was nowhere in evidence now. In some of London’s great houses, the strange spectacle of festivities taking place amidst packing crates and furnishings covered in white sheets suggested a stage set in the process of being frantically disassembled before the play itself had quite ended. Were these houses being closed for the duration of the war—or for good? Not a few revelers were convinced it would be the latter. Many were the laments that the splendor of the 1939 Season would never be repeated. “I have seen much, traveled far, and am accustomed to splendor, but there has never been anything like tonight,” wrote the Conservative MP Chips Channon of the ball held on July 7, 1939, at Blenheim Palace for Sarah Spencer-Churchill, the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. “… Shall we ever see the like again?”

For Kick, who was also at Blenheim, the Season’s grandest evening resonated in a rather different way. That night, Veronica Fraser made her appearance on the arm not of the young man she loved, but of Julian Amery—their pairing in compliance with Lord Salisbury’s request that she and Robert Cecil refrain as much as possible from seeing each other.

In this fraught atmosphere, Billy made his move at last. Though the government had introduced conscription, sending out a clear signal to the Germans that Britain was serious about defending Poland against an invasion, Billy had no intention of waiting to be called up. He planned to join the Army as soon as he was done at Cambridge. In any case, were war to be declared, old Joe Kennedy would undoubtedly send his family back to the U.S. at once. When Kick and Billy spoke of this eventuality, they concluded that there was only one way she would be allowed to remain in England. He thereupon spoke explicitly to his father of his wish to marry Kick. The duke, reminding Billy of his future responsibilities, made it clear that it was out of the question that Kick should become his wife. Casting his argument in such a way as to carry great weight with his son, Eddy Devonshire portrayed the need to take a Protestant bride as a matter of duty.

Though his actual twenty-first birthday had been celebrated in December 1938, preparations were now under way for Billy’s coming-of-age celebration at Chatsworth. No one can have known that this August 1939 extravaganza, extending over several days, would prove to be the last great party before the war. At the previous, much smaller party in Carlton Gardens, the duchess had seated Kick in the position of honor, to Billy’s right. Eight months later, the duke need not have feared a similar public gesture of endorsement from his wife. Rose Kennedy, no longer oblivious to Kick’s romantic attachment to a Protestant nobleman, forbade her to be among the more than 2,500 guests who were to descend upon Chatsworth to celebrate the majority of the son and heir. Kick, required to remain with her family in the South of France, missed Billy’s party.

At the ducal palace, she was perhaps the more conspicuous by her absence from the festivities. On the present occasion, Billy’s Cecil and Cavendish relations had no opportunity to subject her to the “dirty looks” of which she had complained in the past, but they could and did persist in talking about her—and about the threat that she and other Catholic interlopers were believed to pose to the Protestant dynasties. One overheard snippet of conversation would long be cited by Billy’s contemporaries as encapsulating the anxiety that had gripped their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Pesky Lord Dick Cavendish, whose son had previously eloped with a Catholic, and Lady Alice Salisbury, three of whose grandsons, including Billy, were feared about to do the same, had been seated together talking, when suddenly Lord Dick was heard to loudly and agitatedly proclaim: “These Catholic girls are a menace!”

A little more than a week after the party at Chatsworth that Andrew Cavendish compared to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before the Battle of Waterloo, Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union that appeared to clear the way for the conquest of Poland. The following day, Billy Hartington officially entered the Coldstream Guards. Parliament, meanwhile, was recalled, the fleet ordered to its war stations, and a treaty signed formalizing commitments given several months before that Britain would defend the Poles against a German onslaught. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy directed all U.S. citizens who did not have essential business in Britain to leave immediately. He also instructed Rose Kennedy to vacate the family house in the South of France and come to London, in anticipation of traveling home. Within days of Kick’s return to Prince’s Gate, Hitler’s troops swept across the Polish frontier and German warplanes began to unload their bombs on military as well as civilian targets in Poland.

On Sunday morning, September 3, 1939, Britain warned the Germans to pull back. When Hitler failed to provide the necessary assurances, Chamberlain went on the radio to announce that Britain was “now at war with Germany.” Flanked by her brothers Jack and young Joe, Kick thereupon raced to the Palace of Westminster, where the prime minister was due to address the House of Commons. In this very setting, Kick had once danced with Billy at the Speaker’s party for his granddaughters. That prior occasion, hours after she and Billy first met, had marked the beginning of their romance. There was reason to fear that today’s events might signal its end. Despite Kick’s tearful pleas and protests to be allowed to remain in London, her father ruled that she was to return to America at once with her mother and siblings.

As Kick would later reflect, she had really always expected to marry Billy, “Some day—somehow.” She consented to go home in 1939, intent on finding a way back to him.

Four

On September 12, 1939, Kick, along with Rose, Eunice, and Bobby sailed from Southampton on the SS
Washington
. The other children—with the exception of Rosemary, who was being allowed to stay behind with the old man because she seemed to have thrived in her convent school—were to follow separately. The SS
Washington,
the flagship of the United States Lines, carried, among other passengers, 1,487 U.S. citizens, the greatest number of Americans to flee Europe on any vessel since the declaration of war. Due to acute overcrowding, many voyagers had to sleep on cots in the swimming pool area, the exercise room, the post office, the lounge, and other public spaces. Since the German torpedo attack on the British liner the
Athenia
a week and a half earlier, which had left twenty-eight American passengers dead, Ambassador Kennedy had been pounding the State Department to send more American ships to England for the use of all U.S. citizens who wished to escape.

Kennedy’s decision to leak his complaints to the press led skeptics in Washington to view him not as the hero he constantly portrayed himself as, but rather as a self-serving publicity seeker. However one regarded his motives, there could be no denying that he had successfully attached himself in the popular imagination to the general theme of the mass evacuation of Americans on the eve of cataclysm. Some travelers on the liner
Washington
claimed to feel a little safer making the six-day transatlantic crossing in the company of Ambassador Kennedy’s wife and children, whose presence they saw as protection against a potential German strike. Whether because the name “Kennedy” appeared on the passenger list or, more likely, simply because the liner
Washington
was a U.S.-flagged vessel, the voyage, blessed with fine weather, proved to be a safe one.

As the ship was about to dock in New York, Kick wrote to her father of her disbelief that eighteen months could have passed since she had been sailing in the opposite direction. The time she had spent in England seemed to her already “like a beautiful dream.” Though Kick’s father had had to wrest her away from London, and though the months and years that followed would be punctuated by her dogged efforts to be reunited with Billy, she persisted in treating her English sojourn as a gift like all of the others that old Joe had showered upon her in the past. “Thanks a lot Daddy,” she wrote on the eighteenth of September, “for giving me one of the greatest experiences anyone could have had. I know it will have a great effect on everything I do from herein.”

Indeed it would, and often in ways that would prove far from delightful to Ambassador Kennedy.

No sooner was Kick back in the U.S. than much of her former existence struck her as severely wanting. She had anticipated that things at home would have changed in her absence, as she knew herself to have changed. Instead, she wistfully told her father in a letter written after she had been back at the family home in Bronxville, New York, for a week: “Everything is just the same.” That was perhaps especially true of her old beau, Peter Grace, with whom Kick had already attended a polo match and a stage play in the course of that first week. Peter was as devoted to her as ever, but she could not but feel that she had outgrown him. Rejected by the college that had been her first choice, Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, Kick began classes instead at Finch, a junior college on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she made it clear that she saw herself as merely “killing time” until she managed to get back to London.

Meanwhile, she spent many weekends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Jack and Joe Junior were enrolled at Harvard, the former embarking on his undergraduate senior honors thesis and the latter pursuing a law degree. Other weekends, her brothers came to New York, where she made the rounds of nightspots with them and their friends. Torby Macdonald, Lem Billings, and other members of Jack’s claque danced attendance on her, and she was ardently courted by Zeke Coleman, George Mead, and other prospective new beaux. In Palm Beach, as in Boston and New York, Kick often turned up at fashionable events in the company of her siblings. She attended a society luncheon at the Bath and Tennis Club with Jack; a swimming party at the Seminole Club with Eunice and Pat; a private dinner dance at the Everglades Club with Jack and Eunice. But all of it paled in contrast to her memories of London.

It has been said that there are certain modes of life that, once they have been experienced, make it almost impossible to be content in any other situation. Residing in Manhattan in circumstances that many other girls doubtless envied, Kick could not but ruefully reflect that had she married Billy and had there been no war, she would have been inhabiting “a castle and not a 3 room apartment.” But England had provisioned her with something even more important, something intangible, something that she had been able to bring back with her to the U.S. In England, she explained to Lem Billings, she had emerged at last as, in his paraphrase, “a person in her own right, not just a Kennedy girl.” This new sense of herself, apparently, was not something that Kick intended to relinquish without a struggle.

All the while, the letters flew back and forth between Kick on the one side and Billy and various members of the aristocratic cousinhood on the other. The previous autumn Kick had been in Scotland for the Perth races. Now Jean Ogilvy sent word that their group had again gathered at Cortachy Castle. Andrew had been there with Debo Mitford. Billy had also been in attendance, but, sadly, without the girl to whom he persisted in considering himself informally engaged. That, even after Kick had returned to the U.S., Chatsworth continued to perceive her as a threat was suggested by the duke’s ongoing laments about his son’s romance. Following a lengthy September 23, 1939, conversation with Eddy Devonshire at a luncheon at the Spanish Embassy in London, Chips Channon recorded in his diary: “He is obdurate about his son Billy Hartington’s engagement to Miss Kennedy; he will not budge; the Kennedy alliance is not to his liking; he has an anti-catholic mania, and has forbidden the match.”

Nancy Astor wrote to Kick of a house party at Cliveden at which Billy, in a departure from his usual pointed avoidance of those raucous occasions, astonished everyone by suddenly joining Andrew, Jakie, and the rest. “They bemoaned your absence,” Lady Astor reported in an apparent effort to banish any fears on Kick’s part that she might already have been forgotten. “They tried to be cheerful and succeeded in part, but it was very difficult.” At other times, Kick’s old friends reacted with palpable delight to the merest mention of her name. In a subsequent letter, Nancy Astor noted that when her niece Dinah Brand heard Kick alluded to in conversation, the girl’s “face lighted up and her little ears stood straight on end like a rabbit’s.” So the connection with Britain that Kick still felt, the abiding belief that it was, in Jean Ogilvy’s phrase, where her real life and real friends were, was not just the product of a young person’s fanciful imagination. The cousinhood persisted in feeling that she belonged there as well.

Immeasurably exacerbating Kick’s frustration during this period was that the imminent bombing cited by her father as the reason she must leave London at once had failed to materialize. At a moment when Britain had been tensely geared up to defend itself; when there had been predictions of more than two hundred thousand British air raid casualties during the war’s first twenty-four hours alone; when countless additional hospital beds had been readied, and the mass evacuation of women and children from London and other cities undertaken, a strange, unsettling sense of anticlimax had ensued.