Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (4 page)

Sometimes, however, she acknowledged the need to bow to traditions she did not like or understand. At the beginning of June, Kick and her sister Rosemary were to be feted at a coming-out party of their own at Prince’s Gate. Some eighty people were expected at dinner, with about three hundred more scheduled to join them afterward for the dancing. Kick admitted that she needed help with the seating arrangements at her own table for eight, but she mistook the problem of whom to include, and whom to place exactly where, to be a product of what she described in her diary as the numerous “petty jealousies” that existed in London. In reality, decisions of this nature were routinely based on matters of precedence that, however mysterious to her and her mother, were second nature to Jean Ogilvy. Delegated to help make critical decisions about the formation of the main table, Jean began by seating herself and Debo there. To Kick’s right, in the position of highest honor, she placed Prince Frederick of Prussia. Viscount Duncannon she set on Kick’s left. She further anointed Lord John Stanley and Lord Robert Cecil to be part of this premier grouping.

That night—while Bert Ambrose’s band played, the American nightclub entertainer Harry Richman sang, and young couples danced on the pavement outside in the early morning hours to the tune of “Moonlight in Manhattan”—Robert seemed taken anew with Kick. Whether on account of the young nobleman’s interest or merely by way of reciprocation, not long afterward she received an invitation from his grandmother Lady Alice, the Marchioness of Salisbury, to a young people’s house party at Hatfield House, the family seat in Hertfordshire—a party that was to transform Kick into something much more than simply a source of delight and diversion to the cousinhood.

For nearly four centuries, the Cecils of Hatfield House had been advising monarchs and in other ways exerting critical behind-the-scenes influence on their nation’s political life. They were noted for their gifts of vision and strategy, but also for their willingness, when the Cecil stock became, as the phrase was, exhausted, to endeavor to refresh and revitalize their blue blood by an infusion of red. At such times, instead of marrying aristocrats they chose their partners from other, presumably tougher and more vigorous strata of society. According to the family narrative, in the fullness of time the breed was thereby strengthened, and power and preeminence regained. At Hatfield House, Queen Victoria’s three-time prime minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury—great-grandfather of Robert Cecil on the one hand and of the Cavendish brothers, Billy and Andrew, on the other—was believed to have been the magnificent product of this replenishing process.

Kick, when she arrived at Hatfield House on Friday, June 17, noted with astonishment the number of Catholic guests—four, including herself—in a household known for its anti-Catholic animus. Veronica Fraser was there with her mother, Lady Lovat, who, in light of Robert’s reputation, had refused to allow her to come to Hatfield alone. Robert, however, had arranged to circumvent Lady Lovat’s ever-watchful presence by placing Veronica in a tiny room with a secret egress via a closet, through which she could steal as soon as her mother had fallen asleep in the adjoining, much larger bedroom. Also present that weekend was another beautiful Catholic girl, Clarissa Churchill, on whom Robert had danced attendance the previous year, until his mother, Lady Cranborne, intervened. For Lady Cranborne, the Catholic issue was then much in play, her twenty-two-year-old brother Richard having lately eloped with another Catholic beauty, Pamela Lloyd Thomas, to the monumental anguish of his and Lady Cranborne’s father, old Lord “Dick” Cavendish.

In the course of the house party, the tensions surrounding what was thought to be a group of conniving Catholic girls that had targeted the great Protestant families of England, supposedly with an eye toward making those venerable houses Catholic, would at length find expression in the rough treatment to which Kick was subjected—some of it at the instigation of no less a figure than Robert’s grandmother.

Kick’s weekend began happily enough, however, when, that evening, all the young people attended a dance at a neighboring house. The only complication was that by the time Robert and his guests returned, Hatfield had been closed for the night. They had a good deal of trouble getting in, and even then they had to find their way to their respective rooms in utter darkness.

Saturday began with tennis, a sport that Kick approached—as she approached all sports, in fact—with ferocity. She, like her siblings, had learned to play hard from a father whose maxim was, “We want winners, we don’t want losers around here.” Kennedys did not play for fun; they played to win. Whether the activity be tennis, football, or sailing, they regarded victory as a matter of life and death.

Robert Cecil had seen Kick play tennis just a few days before when he had unexpectedly turned up at Cliveden, where she had been a midweek guest of Jakie and Michael Astor. For some of the other young people at Hatfield, however, this was a first opportunity to watch all of that fierceness and aggression erupt from so tiny a girl. If her size had led any of them to assume that she was as delicate as she was petite, the morning’s exhibition surely dissipated all such preconceptions.

But whereas her performance in the course of that first Easter weekend at Lady Astor’s had endeared her to the Astor boys and the other fellows, this time she seemed to have provoked a rather different response. For Kick, things turned ugly after dinner, when, as she noted with alarm in her diary, “John Stanley got rather rough,” squirting a water siphon at her. In her place, another girl might have burst into tears, but it was also a dictum of her father’s that “Kennedys don’t cry.” Accordingly, at least in front of her host and fellow guests, she made a point of treating the incident as just another of the young nobleman’s jolly jokes.

Afterward, Kick saw fit to retire at an early hour. But when she went upstairs, she discovered that her enormous bed in the Oliver Cromwell bedroom had been short-sheeted as a prank, making it impossible for her to extend her legs beyond the middle of the bed. Still loath to exhibit any distress, Kick calmly searched out the one young man in the house on whose sympathy she knew she could depend absolutely. Tony Loughborough helped Kick to refold and rearrange the sheets as if the practical joke had never occurred in the first place.

The harassment continued the next evening, Sunday the nineteenth of June, when, going up to dress for dinner, Kick found that all of her left shoes had vanished. She thereupon squeezed into two mismatched shoes—one white and the other black—and limped downstairs to the dining room. Bullying was not a new phenomenon to Kick. After all, she had grown up in a household where the hot-tempered oldest boy routinely beat up the smaller, weaker second son, who had learned early on that for dignity’s sake it was best to pretend afterward that the brutality had never taken place. So, too, at Hatfield House, Kick acted as if nothing were wrong and laughed at herself and her plight, though secretly she was disconcerted and not a little horrified when she discovered that it was her host who had taken her shoes and his grandmother who had suggested that he harass her in this manner.

Kick’s refusal to crumble made a vivid impression on the members of the aristocratic cousinhood, both those who had been present that weekend and those, far greater in number, who heard about the episode later. Heretofore, she had been known and much admired for her high spirits. As a consequence of her eventful stay at Hatfield House, she also began to acquire a reputation for being tough. In effect, Robert Cecil and his paternal grandmother had tested her, and Kick had passed the test brilliantly.

After two months in London, Kick had met nearly all of the members of the group of young people to which Jean had set about to introduce her. At this point, however, one crucial bit of the puzzle remained to be put in place before the picture could be said to be complete. Kick had yet to encounter the one member of the cousinhood to whom Jean was closest.

On June 24, 1938, Kick and Jean spent much of the day together watching the tennis matches at Wimbledon. Afterward, they attended a small dinner party hosted by Lord and Lady Airlie, following which the guests were to go on to a large dance that the Speaker of the House of Commons, Edward FitzRoy, was giving in honor of his granddaughters, Anne and Mary, at the Palace of Westminster. It was on the occasion of the Airlie dinner party that David Ormsby-Gore introduced Kick to his cousin Billy Hartington, whose future grandeur caused him to be known as the other of London’s two most eligible bachelors, beside Robert Cecil.

At six foot four, Billy, then a student of history at Trinity College, Cambridge, towered over Kick, who was his dinner partner that night. Handsome, with a pale complexion, an intriguing half smile, and a quiescent manner that Jean affectionately described as “rather sleepy,” Billy was a large man who at that point gave the impression of not quite having grown into his body yet. Physically, indeed, in almost every respect, Billy bore little resemblance to his younger brother Andrew Cavendish, who was absent from the dinner party, but whom Kick of course had met previously, at Cliveden.

Though both Cavendish brothers were tall, Billy was bigger and broader than the slim second son. Andrew was dark-haired, Billy fair. Andrew was highly strung, Billy exuded an air of calm. Andrew was energetic to the point at times of seeming hyperactive, Billy so languid and lazy that he once refused a cup of coffee, because, as he protested to his mother, “I can’t be bothered to drink it.” Andrew talked at the breakneck speed associated with their mother’s family, the Cecils; Billy spoke slowly and deliberately. Andrew was outgoing, Billy reserved and not a little worried that girls wished to be with him solely because of all that he stood to one day inherit. Where the second son desperately envied Billy his status as their father’s heir, Billy was no less jealous of Andrew’s greater ease with members of the opposite sex.

Billy, who prized conversation above all other activities, had derived from Lady Alice Salisbury, his maternal grandmother, the tic of rubbing the palms of his hands together in keen anticipation of what grandparent and grandson alike delightedly referred to as “a good talk”—which, from the outset, was precisely what Jean observed Billy to be savoring in his first encounter with Kick. That evening at the Airlie dinner table, Billy and Kick talked and jested and talked some more. The two young people were absorbed in each other throughout dinner. It was as if their other dinner partners—indeed, the rest of the guests—had ceased to exist.

Both Billy and Kick were visibly distressed when it came time for the group to go on to the FitzRoy dance. An additional issue was that, rather than proceed with the others, Kick was scheduled to participate in another of the ceaseless photo opportunities arranged by her publicity-mad father. She was, she noted pointedly in her diary, “forced” to return to Prince’s Gate. David Ormsby-Gore rescued the situation by volunteering to pick her up there and take her to the dance after she had attended to her publicity chores. When at length David materialized at the embassy residence, it was of no small significance that he was accompanied by Billy Hartington. Ordinarily, Billy was not one to take action in this manner; it was more like him to wait for others to come to him. After that first encounter with Kick, however, nothing in his life would ever again be quite the same.

Many years later, Andrew would perhaps come closer than anyone to grasping Billy’s relationship with Kick. “It was,” Andrew would say, “difficult for each to imagine the existence of the other. They were so utterly different. They adored being with one another because each was a constant surprise to the other. What were they going to find out about this person? What was this person going to do next?”

At the Palace of Westminster that first night, the music and dancing went on till daybreak. For most of the young people at the time, the principal drama at the FitzRoy dance concerned not Kick Kennedy, but rather Debo Mitford. To the outrage of her mother, Lady Redesdale, Debo violated the rules by dancing every dance with her great friend Mark Howard of Castle Howard. Her feelings for Mark were by no means romantic. On the contrary, it was Andrew Cavendish in whom Debo was by this point exclusively interested. Having been seated next to an apparently quite fascinated Andrew at a dinner party earlier in the Season—as it happened, shortly before Andrew met Kick—Debo had anxiously looked for him at every subsequent dance and party that she attended. This evening, her consummate disappointment over Andrew’s absence had, by her own account, led to the display with Mark Howard.

Kick, meanwhile, spent as much time as possible at the Palace of Westminster with Billy. When Kick wrote about the evening afterward in her diary, the word “romantic” appeared there for the first time. And in the scrapbook she maintained separately, she preserved a first press photograph of him, dashing in winged collar and black tie, as he danced with the Speaker’s granddaughter, Mary.

A week later, Kick and Billy were both included in the July 1, 1938, coming-of-age celebrations for Billy’s cousin Charlie Lansdowne at Bowood House in Wiltshire. Immeasurably complicating the situation was the fact that both Andrew Cavendish and Debo Mitford were present at the ball as well. There had long been an undercurrent of tension between the Cavendish brothers, not least because of a custom observed by the British aristocracy, the purpose of which was to keep the family estates intact. According to the unwritten law of primogeniture, the firstborn male child could look forward to inheriting everything upon his father’s death, whereas the second son was entitled to expect nothing. It was not a question of who was better suited to lead the family; it was simply and strictly a matter of birth order.

The only way for a second son to advance to the primary position was by the death of his older brother. Charlie Lansdowne, who was being feted on the present occasion, bore the title of Marquess of Lansdowne because his elder brother had died at the age of twenty, three years before the death of their father, the 6th Marquess, in 1936. Another example of a second son who had catapulted to the number one position was David Ormsby-Gore, also present at Charlie’s coming of age, who, though he had grave reservations about his fitness for the new role and responsibilities, became his father Lord Harlech’s heir upon the death of an older brother, Gerard Ormsby-Gore, in an automobile accident in 1935.