Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (2 page)

For a long moment, the three young people stood in place on the staircase, like figures in a frieze: proper, nervous Jean a few steps above Kick and eager, ebullient Andrew a step or two below. As ample as Kick’s experience of life had been to date, for all of her travels and for all of the people she had encountered, nothing in her past had quite prepared her for the particular world to which Jean and Andrew were about to introduce her.

This was the world of the aristocratic cousinhood, a world that more often than not remained hermetically sealed against outsiders. Its members shared feelings, books, manners, habits, history—and most of them, blood. In their rarefied milieu, cousin married cousin for generation after generation, until the web of interrelationships was so tangled that everyone seemed to be related to everyone else many times over. Yet for all of the apparent sameness, for all of the like-mindedness that seemed to have been bred into them, there were also important nuances that distinguished them from one another, critical differences bearing on such matters as politics and religion that, imperceptible though they might be to an outsider, were often the cause of tremendous conflict and pain. Jean was the ideal guide to this world, as she had had so little experience of anything else. To her the aristocratic cousinhood was, really, the only world.

That evening on a staircase in a great house overlooking the River Thames, an extraordinary story was about to begin. Kick Kennedy was poised to enter a centuries-old society of which she as yet had little understanding, a world in which, however improbably, she was at length to play an important—to some minds, emblematic—role. Among the surviving members of the tribe, her story would continue to resonate, to be passionately, even obsessively, discussed and debated, long after the Little American Girl herself was dead.

For the moment, however, as she laughed and bantered with Andrew, whom she seemed not entirely to comprehend, and who was himself not always quite certain of what she was saying, all that appeared to matter was that the young nobleman wished to claim her for his own. By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, however, with Jean in avid pursuit, Andrew realized that he was to have no further opportunity to advance that claim, at least not that night. Almost without transition, Kick was soon conversing easily with the other, somewhat older males waiting to go in to dinner.

Among these were nineteen-year-old Jakie Astor, an irrepressible jokester, as well as Andrew’s great friend; twenty-two-year-old Michael Astor, the incipient ladies’ man in the group, as well as a major crush of Jean Ogilvy’s; and David Ormsby-Gore, nearly twenty years of age, who had been brought up virtually as a brother to Andrew, their mothers, the granddaughters of the Victorian-era colossus Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, being sisters.

Kick possessed qualities that these young men had rarely if ever seen in a girl. The girls they knew, the eighteen-year-olds who were brought to London by their families from rural England and Scotland to be presented at Court and to make their social debut, tended to be silent and nervous when they encountered boys for the first time. They were girls who simply were not used to being around young males other than their brothers, and they made their discomfiture clear in everything they did and said.

Kick was notably different. She did not hang back shyly or demurely. On the contrary, she instantly propelled herself into the fray, laughing at the boys’ jokes, making teasing remarks of her own, and cackling with delight when, half in gaiety, half in gravity, Jakie Astor complained that her accent made it impossible for him to understand so much as a word that she was saying. The newcomer was willing to laugh at herself—her mistakes, her gaucheries, and even her physical flaws—in a way that was simply unknown among the English girls. Andrew later described that willingness (which, he pointed out, Kick shared with her brother Jack, but with no other Kennedy family member) as “the essence of charm.”

She was, moreover, a strangely blended character whose personal contradictions were of immense appeal to the boys in this particular set. On the one hand, Kick was clearly more outgoing and at ease than the girls to whom they were accustomed. She had grown up in the often raucous, at times violent, company of two older brothers, the eldest, Joe Junior, and the second son, Jack. She had traveled with them, accompanied them to nightclubs, been adopted as a mascot by Jack’s entourage of mischievous male friends. Racy talk, cabaret gossip, knowing references to Hollywood movies and Broadway shows—all these were as nature to her.

Paradoxically, Kick might also be said to have had a cloistered upbringing, owing to the doctrinaire Roman Catholicism of her mother, to whom she was devoted. Kick had attended convent schools, both in the U.S. and in France. At eighteen years of age, she had been long and deeply inculcated with Roman Catholic principles. Kick would no more consider missing Mass on Sundays and holy days than she would failing to drop to her knees and utter her prayers before she went to bed at night. In contrast to her older brothers, both of whom were sexually active, Kick was nothing if not innocent. Her brothers—Jack especially, careless though he might be of the sensitivities of a girlfriend—worked hard at preserving Kick’s innocence, which was as important to the brothers and to their father as it was to Rose Kennedy.

That Easter weekend of 1938, Kick’s unique combination of innocence and experience proved irresistible to the Astor boys and their young friends: “country-member bad boys,” as Andrew later characterized them, by which he meant fellows who, however wildly they might talk and behave, would, at this point in their lives anyway, probably have been terrified had a truly worldly American girl appeared among them.

The scene in the Great Hall was cut short by a summons to dinner. Meals at Cliveden tended to be chaotic affairs, with conversations conducted not merely with one’s dinner partners, but often literally shouted up, down, and across the table. Andrew and David, particularly, had the reputation of marathon talkers. Through their mothers, both boys were descendants of the Cecils, one of the great Protestant families of England, known through the generations for their acute minds and distinctive sparring manner of speech.

Capable like their forebears of producing more words in a minute than most other people can in five, Andrew and David typically raced from topic to topic, with barely a pause for breath. Once the duo had launched into one of these breakneck conversations, even their cousins often found it impossible to tell which fellow was speaking at a particular moment, so completely did their words and voices overlap and merge into one another. But rather than slow their pace, they often began to jabber even more quickly, as though struggling to keep up with the thoughts and images careening through their brains. At times, Andrew and David appeared to speak simultaneously, causing observers to question whether they were even attempting to listen to each other.

On a given occasion, their talk was likely to cover topics ranging from the bets they had placed with the Newmarket bookies, whose rakishly tilted felt hats and other elements of attire they were known to emulate; to the latest debates in the House of Commons, which they monitored with the same avidity that American boys followed baseball; to all the latest and choicest gossip of London Society, of which Andrew was a particular connoisseur.

In this antic atmosphere, Kick sparkled. It was not just that she was voluble. It was that she loved talking as much as they did, and that her speech was as unique and flavorful as the boys’. There was her Boston twang, of course. There were the slangy phrases such as “Oh, kid, what’s the story?” with which she spiced her conversation. But most of all, there was her way of talking on and on, regardless of whether or not she was quite making sense, that the boys found matchlessly endearing and entertaining.

Kick’s chatter, as she herself referred to it, was a social weapon that she had honed over time. It had long been the custom of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. to use his influence in the various milieux among which he moved—business, finance, politics, religion, entertainment—on behalf of his children. He thought nothing of requesting that busy people take the time to smooth the way for his offspring. Almost always, the individuals whom old Joe reached out to proved eager to ingratiate themselves with him. Kick discovered that no matter how naive and nonsensical her talk, her father’s associates all responded as though her every word were a nugget of wit and a source of delight.

That experience, oft repeated, led Kick to become at once conscious and confident of her effects. Mixing self-possession and self-mockery, the girl who came to Cliveden that Easter weekend acted as though there were never any doubt that, so long as she kept on talking and laughing, she would be universally liked and admired, as always.

Still, Kick had not yet played her full hand—far from it. The following day, with the much-anticipated arrival of the most ambitious, as well as the noisiest, member of the set, David’s twenty-year-old Oxford roommate, Hugh Fraser, the tenor of the conversation shifted drastically. As chance would have it, from then on all that the fellows seemed to want to discuss were topics that Kick had previously heard much about at home.

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, the Oxford Union, the university debating society known as a training ground for future British prime ministers and parliamentarians, had voted in favor of a motion that in the event of a war they would “in no circumstances” fight in defense of King and Country. The vote reflected the mood of a nation that recoiled from the possibility of another world conflict at a time when memories of the slaughter of the Great War (1914–1918) remained vivid.

Winston Churchill, the former First Lord of the Admiralty who since the previous year had been arguing in the House of Commons for rearmament measures aimed at preventing a new war with the Germans, did not doubt that were war to be declared, young Britain would do its duty. Churchill was concerned, however, that the King and Country resolution might influence the Germans and others to believe that “a decadent, degenerate Britain” would indeed refuse to fight, and he worried that that miscalculation could result in another world war, the very opposite of what the “foolish boys” of Oxford had intended.

Five years later, Kick’s first visit to Cliveden was occurring during the same month that Hugh Fraser, in collaboration with another member of the set, Julian Amery, was leading the fight at the Oxford Union to reverse the “ever-shameful” King and Country resolution, an undertaking that would not come to fruition till the following year, when Hugh was himself president of the Union. Just now, he and Julian were making the case for conscription at a moment when the question of Britain’s willingness to fight another war, should it prove necessary to do so, could scarcely have seemed more timely.

In 1936, Hitler’s armies had invaded the Rhineland, after which Churchill had predicted that the Germans would next target Austria. But when, during the two years that followed, Hitler failed to make another move, a state of denial appeared to set in among Britain’s governing class, many of whom wanted to believe that Churchill—that self-glorifying warmonger, as they saw him—had simply been wrong and that the Nazis’ territorial ambitions had been sated by the Rhineland episode.

In March 1938, however, a little over a week after Kick arrived in London, German troops overran Austria. Britain recognized the conquest within a matter of days but continued relations with Germany as though nothing had occurred. In the event that Hitler moved against his widely anticipated next target, Czechoslovakia, the French had a treaty obligation to come to the aid of the Czechs. Britain, for its part, was bound to France in the event that the latter went to war against Germany. But what in fact would Britain do?

Churchill argued that the British needed to state plainly their irrevocable commitment to join France in the defense of Czechoslovakia. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who yet had hope of coming to friendly terms with the dictators of Germany and Italy, preferred to keep the Germans and the rest of the world in suspense about British intentions. Hugh Fraser’s Saturday, April 16, 1938, appearance at Cliveden, coming as it did at a time when national attention was focused on his efforts at the Oxford Union, plunged the Astor brothers and their young guests into the very center of the controversy.

Since the time of the Rhineland invasion, the boys in this group had been persuaded that war was inevitable, despite anything that certain of their parents might say and insist. That expectation infused the boys’ lives with a special intensity. Never doubting that before long they would be called upon to fight, and perhaps to die, they believed that they were “entitled” to enjoy themselves in the precious months and years that remained to them.

As Andrew would later wryly acknowledge, he and the others seized upon the coming war as an “excuse” to drink more and drive faster than they might otherwise have done. Their record of spectacular car crashes became legend. At the time Kick first encountered him, David Ormsby-Gore boasted a new set of false teeth, which, Jean explained to her, was the consequence of his having crashed into the rear of a truck when he was driving at a speed of ninety-eight miles per hour on his way back to Oxford from the Newmarket races. Jakie Astor, who had been a passenger in David’s car—along with Hugh Fraser and another friend of theirs, Peter Wood—was left with a prominent dentlike facial scar. Both boys wore their injuries like medals. Far from chastening the young men in the set, this accident and others like it seemed only to encourage them to carouse the more vehemently. They rarely managed to forget the coming war, however, and certainly not when Hugh Fraser was about.

Hardly would Hugh and David, both of whom had protuberant noses, begin talking than they would, in the parlance of the set, be “nose-to-nose” about the perilous situation in Europe. At the start of these frenetic discussions, which were of compelling interest to all of the boys, the girls in the group tended to peel away, being more concerned with, in Jean’s phrase, “the next dance and what we were going to wear.” So, that Easter weekend of 1938, there was a good deal of fascination among both sexes when Kick, rather than go off with Jean, chose to remain behind with Hugh, David, and the other fellows. The previous evening, Kick had dazzled and delighted the group with her chatter. On the present occasion, she astonished them by her eagerness to listen.