Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (7 page)

Every beat of the proceedings was minutely analyzed and assessed by the Cavendish boys and their guests at Churchdale Hall. One speech, though, seems to have had particular resonance for the group. Lord Cranborne, the duchess’s brother, set out to dismantle Chamberlain’s claims to have obtained peace with honor. “Peace he certainly brought back to us, and there is not one of us who will not wish to thank him with a full heart for that priceless gift … But where is honor? I have looked and looked and I cannot see it. It seems to me to be a wicked mockery to describe by so noble a name the agreement which has been reached. The peace of Europe has in fact been saved—and we had better face it—only by throwing to the wolves a little country whose courage and dignity in the face of almost intolerable provocation has been a revelation and an inspiration to us all.”

Cranborne was equally dismissive of Chamberlain’s assertion that he had secured peace for our time. Hitler, Cranborne pointed out in acid tones, had failed to keep earlier promises with regard to Austria and Czechoslovakia. “These precedents do not justify us in abandoning our anxiety.”

So, the question of whether there might yet be war persisted in looming over Billy and Kick on the one hand, and Andrew and Debo on the other, when, in the course of the house party, the two couples visited nearby Chatsworth, the family seat of the Devonshire dukes. Though Eddy Devonshire and his family were not due to take up residence at the ducal palace until Christmastime, Billy seemed unable to wait to show Kick all that would one day be his. The great house—for the family always referred to it as “the house”—had been built in its original form by Sir William Cavendish and his wife, Bess of Hardwick, after their marriage in 1547. Now, much altered, enlarged, and enriched by the generations since, Chatsworth, its yellow stone facade glittering in the sunlight, had achieved a completely unique, and somehow magical, romantic perfection. Beyond its doors were 175 rooms and miles of corridors filled with the treasures accumulated over centuries: astonishing collections of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, books, minerals, furniture, and jewels. The house itself was situated in a thousand acres of parkland, and within the park there was a garden covering more than a hundred acres.

In the midst of wandering along garden paths lined with mysterious rock arrangements and towering trees, Kick, with her sense of fun, seemed to take special delight in the famous Squirting Tree, as it had been dubbed by the future Queen Victoria when she first happened upon it at thirteen years of age. Activated by a wheel hidden behind some adjacent rocks, the metal branches of what looked to be a willow tree squirted water on unsuspecting passersby. The Squirting Tree was a trick, a practical joke. But as Andrew would darkly reflect many years afterward, it was the future that was destined to play tricks on these four unsuspecting young people—tricks that neither couple had anticipated on that laughter-filled autumn day in 1938.

On the sixth of October, Kick and Debo headed back to London, and Billy and Andrew went on to Cambridge, where the elder brother was in his last year and the second son entered his first term. That same day, despite the attacks on the Munich Agreement that had riveted the young people’s attention, a motion supporting Chamberlain’s actions—“That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace”—passed by an emphatic vote of 366 to 144. Nonetheless, the words of the critics who questioned the morality and efficacy of the prime minister’s deal with Hitler had opened a national debate that would go on for months to come—until, in Andrew’s formulation, shame over what Chamberlain had done at Munich finally trumped fear.

Kick, in the meantime, no longer faced the imminent threat of being sent back to the U.S. because of war—and of thereby being separated from Billy. Initially, there was some talk at Prince’s Gate of her attending a school in England, now that she had decided to abandon her original plan of remaining for no more than six months. The problem, as her mother soon perceived, was that the English girls who had become Kick’s friends did not generally go on to college after they had made their debut. Instead, more often than not they returned to their parents’ country homes until London social life resumed at the time of the so-called Little Season, or they remained in the city and occupied themselves with charity work. In October, Kick, along with another of the popular debs of the 1938 London Season, Jane Kenyon-Slaney, volunteered at a day nursery for poor children.

Kick had a good deal more freedom about seeing her young man unchaperoned than, say, a friend such as Debo Mitford enjoyed with hers. In the waning days of October, therefore, it was no particular problem for Kick to travel to Cambridge in the company of Jane Kenyon-Slaney for an excursion to the Newmarket races with Billy and tea afterward in his rooms at Trinity College. Despite her freedom of movement, however, on this and other occasions her relationship with Billy remained innocent. That night, when the girls missed their train, Billy sent them back to London in a chauffeured car.

By the following month, Billy was ready to signal his romance with Kick to his relatives, unlikely though they were to be pleased. On November 23, 1938, members of the houses of Cecil and Cavendish convened at the Savoy in London for a coming-of-age party in honor of Richard Cavendish, who had previously scandalized his relatives by marrying the Catholic Pamela Lloyd Thomas. To the families’ further horror, since the time of Richard’s elopement two grandsons of Lord Salisbury, Robert Cecil and David Ormsby-Gore, had formed romantic attachments to Catholics, Veronica Fraser and Sissie Lloyd Thomas (Pam’s sister), respectively. It was in this context that the appearance at the Savoy of another of Lord Salisbury’s grandsons, Billy Hartington, in the company of a new Catholic interloper drew so many stares of agitation and alarm. When in her diary afterward Kick alluded to the wide disapproval with which she had been met, she struck a note of amused defiance: “All Billy’s relatives sitting about getting an eyeful.”

If the Cecil and Cavendish relatives were aghast at Kick Kennedy’s presence on Billy’s arm that night, there was one family member who was in fact exceedingly pleased. Kick’s visit to Churchdale Hall had consolidated the duchess’s sense that, despite the formidable religious difficulties, she would be the perfect partner for Billy. To the duchess’s perception, Kick possessed the life force that seemed at times to be woefully wanting in him. Sailing into an event such as this with Kick on his arm was so utterly unlike Billy, who was, in Jean Ogilvy’s phrase, “normally reticent.” On this and other occasions, Kick’s effect on the future duke was positive and palpable. That Eddy Devonshire had a virulent hatred of all Catholics did not impede the duchess. Though she deferred to her husband about politics, she had no intention of giving in to him on the issue of what woman would be best for their son. Ironically, Kick’s refusal to be cowed by the collective dismay of Billy’s relatives was a demonstration of precisely the strength that had attracted the duchess to her. Then and later, had Kick proven to be rather less tough, she would not have served the duchess’s purpose quite so well.

The duchess could hardly have made her support for Kick clearer than she did two weeks later, on the occasion of the December 9, 1938, family dinner that the Devonshires hosted at their art-filled London home, Carlton Gardens, on the eve of Billy’s twenty-first birthday. As Chatsworth was still in the process of being readied for them to move in, the duke and duchess put off Billy’s official grand-scale coming-of-age celebration until the summer. In the meantime, many of the same Cecils and Cavendishes who had previously been appalled to see Kick and Billy together at Richard Cavendish’s party at the Savoy reconvened at Carlton Gardens, where further horror was in store. In an audacious symbolic gesture, the duchess had placed Kick to Billy’s right—in the position of honor. For Billy’s relatives, there could be no mistaking what Kick’s position at the table meant. The seating was a tacit acknowledgment of the place that she now had assumed in Billy’s heart. Of no less importance was the fact that Kick would never have been given the position of honor without the duchess’s approval.

In the course of the evening, Kick was again intensely conscious of the displeasure with which Billy’s relationship with her was met by a broad swath of his family. There were “dirty looks,” as Kick described them in her diary, from various notables, including Billy’s paternal grandmother, the formidable and rather frightening Evelyn, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who was known in the family as Duchess Evie or Granny Evie.

Due to accompany her mother and siblings to St. Moritz, Switzerland, for a Christmastime ski holiday, Kick was much with Billy in the aftermath of his birthday dinner: Late that very night, we catch sight of them at the 400 Club. The following day, Billy’s actual birthday, they are at the racetrack, before they go on to a country house weekend at Mountfield, where they play “mad games on the lawn” with their host, Tom Egerton, as well as with David, Sissie, Andrew, and other companions. At a December 13, 1938, dance in London, Kick and Billy spend the better part of the evening talking exclusively to each other, apart from everyone else. And the following night, she breaks a previously arranged date with another fellow to go out with Billy. Meanwhile, Jean Ogilvy has returned to London from Scotland, and the friends have several long lunches where they talk of little else but Billy.

Before Kick left for the holiday, she and Billy had one final afternoon together, the twenty-first of December, shopping in a snowy London. Accompanied by Tom Egerton, they went on to Ciro’s, where the headwaiter came out to warn Billy that the duke was inside. Billy’s father might have been the last person Kick wanted to encounter that evening, aware as she was of his disdain for Catholics in general and for her in particular. Billy, however, seemed unfazed by the prospect of encountering the duke, and they went in. At one point, the duke came over to Billy’s table to talk a bit. He was, as always, exceedingly polite to Kick, but somehow his extreme disapproval of the relationship was palpable nonetheless.

That night, when Kick parted from Billy, she’d had a vivid reminder that no matter how very much in love he might be, if they were to have a future together he would in the end have to be willing to defy his father. Several weeks previously he had braved the disapproval of various relatives when he entered the Savoy with Kick on his arm; later, he had been palpably pleased by his mother’s decision to seat Kick to his right at his birthday celebration in Carlton Gardens; and tonight, he had disregarded the warning of the headwaiter at Ciro’s. Still, as she confessed to Jean Ogilvy, she wondered whether he would ask her to marry him—not because she doubted that he wanted to, but rather because she had no idea whether in the end he would be prepared to cause such monumental anguish to the duke.

The cataclysm, of course, would not all be on the side of Billy’s family. Presently, when Kick arrived in St. Moritz to spend three weeks in her mother’s company while her father visited the U.S., she confronted what was sure to be the other half of the problem: the inevitable opposition of the Kennedy family, especially of Rose Kennedy, to the very notion of marriage to a Protestant. To this point, Kick had mostly been dealing with the displeasure of Billy’s relatives, who—at the Savoy, Carlton Gardens, and elsewhere—had been directly confronted with evidence of his relationship with a Catholic girl. Rose Kennedy, for her part, had yet to really grasp the danger. Five months previously, Rose had exhibited some resistance to Kick’s wish to postpone her departure for the South of France in order to accept the duchess’s invitation to a country house weekend at Compton Place. In the end, however, Mrs. Kennedy had given her reluctant consent. If, in the interim, she had made no particular effort to prevent Kick from spending so much time with Billy, perhaps it was because the aristocratic cousinhood’s tendency to move and play very much as a group made it possible for Mrs. Kennedy not to perceive the speed with which her daughter’s relationship with a Protestant male was progressing. But Kick well knew what was happening, and as she had told Jean Ogilvy on several occasions, she dreaded the explosion that was sure to ensue when her mother perceived it as well.

Importantly, it was not simply, or even principally, Rose’s
opposition
that Kick dreaded. She knew that her involvement with Billy had the potential of causing great
pain
to her mother. And for Kick, who had long operated within the Kennedy family as the beleaguered Rose’s principal protector and defender, that prospect was almost as difficult to contemplate as that of being forced to break off with Billy. Rose lived with a husband who was not only compulsively unfaithful, but who went so far as to parade certain of his women in front of her; and she lived with sons, Joe Junior and Jack, who thought nothing of mocking and disparaging a parent they found cold and at times absurd. Kick adamantly refused to join her elder brothers in this harsh treatment of Rose. On one occasion, not long before the family had been transplanted to England, she had made a great scene when old Joe Kennedy brought one of his many girlfriends to the family table at Cape Cod. Risking the rage of the father she adored, Kick had indignantly objected to the mistress’s presence.

Rose, for her part, had long endeavored to armor herself against the potential for embarrassment. Even when Joe paraded his girlfriends in front of her, she simply “acted as if they didn’t exist,” in the phrase of his friend Arthur Krock. But Rose had not always seemed so weirdly at peace with her circumstances. In 1930, at the time of her pregnancy with Kick, she had gone so far as to attempt to flee from her husband. Heavy with child, she had sought sanctuary in the household of her father, who soon insisted that she return to Joe Kennedy and to the children she had left behind with him. Before she obediently returned, she attended a Roman Catholic retreat overseen by the Boston diocese, where, with newfound fervor, she embraced the religious practices that would thereafter help to numb herself against the enduring anguish of her marriage. Never perhaps was the haze of denial in which Rose dwelt more oddly manifest than in England, where the U.S. ambassador’s publicity people relentlessly billed the Kennedys as a model family, even as he persisted in openly and unashamedly betraying his wife.