Black Diamonds (57 page)

It was immediately clear
to Paul and his father when they prised open the door to the fuselage that the four people inside the plane were dead. The pilot and co-pilot were crumpled against the instrument controls in the cockpit, their earphones still on. The two passengers were in the rear of the plane. Peter Fitzwilliam lay beneath his upturned seat. He was badly disfigured. On his left side, the lower half of his body was completely crushed.

Kick’s was the only body Paul and his father were able to drag clear of the wreckage. The right side of her face was torn by a long gash: her jaw, pelvis and both her legs had been pulverized in the crash.

‘Chance Invite Sends Kennedy Girl to Her Death’.

Within hours, news of the accident was flashed around the world. But exactly why Peter and Kick were in the plane together – and the reason for their journey – was covered up: the Devonshires, the Kennedys and the Fitzwilliams closed ranks to conceal the circumstances that had led to their deaths.

Peter and Kick had been together for almost two years when they were killed. Yet unlike her relationship with Billy Hartington, the ebbs and flows of the affair are not charted in the voluminous collections of Kennedy letters. The public archives divulge no poignant testaments to their love: in fact there is no official record of the affair ever having taken place at all. The burning of the Fitzwilliams’ correspondence in the bonfires at Wentworth soon after their deaths ensured that none of their letters have been preserved. Not a single member of the Kennedy family ever spoke of the affair – or even acknowledged it. The Devonshires and the Fitzwilliams waited almost forty years before they broke their silence.

After the accident happened – as with the subsequent Kennedy tragedies that were to follow Kick’s death – numerous conspiracy theories were spawned. These were circulated in private and seldom publicly aired. Some said the couple were on their way to Rome to obtain special dispensation from the Pope to marry. Evelyn Waugh believed they were killed eloping; Lady Astor circulated the ridiculous rumour that the accident was engineered by Vatican agents to prevent another sacrilegious union.

There is nothing mysterious about why the plane crashed. The French air accident investigator’s report is conclusive, leaving no room for conspiracy or conjecture. Nor is there any mystery surrounding its destination: the privately chartered plane was en route to Cannes airport in the South of France. But the real mystery is why Peter and Kick were flying at all when one of the worst storms in years was forecast for the Rhône Valley. In 1948, only a handful of people knew the answer. Close friends and confidants of the couple blamed their families.

In part, the absence of letters on the Kennedy side is explained by the fact that Kick kept her affair with Peter secret from all but one member of her family until the very last. It was Jack Kennedy in whom she confided. The autumn before her death, staying at Lismore, the Devonshires’ estate in Ireland, during a quiet chat together on the banks of the Blackwater River, she whispered to her brother, ‘
I’ve found my Rhett Butler
at last.’

The affair seemed madness from the start.

35

It began with a dance. Peter and Kick met for the first time on the night of 12 June 1946 at a ball at the Dorchester Hotel, London’s most glamorous venue in the heart of Mayfair.

The Season, the first since 1939, was in full swing. Despite the tribulations of rationing and the piles of rubble that still littered the streets, grim reminders of wartime suffering, the capital was celebrating. The theatres in the West End had reopened; Latin American dancing – the rumba and the mambo – was all the rage. In the salons and ballrooms of Mayfair and Belgravia, evening gowns, tiaras and white tie and tails were beginning to return, in place of the usual drab sea of uniforms.

The ball at the Dorchester
was a fundraising event for the widows and dependants of Commando soldiers killed and seriously injured in the war. It was a glittering occasion, and the leading lights of London society turned out in force; even the future Queen Elizabeth was there.

Kick was chairing the Ball Committee and had helped to organize the dance. That night, she wore a pink taffeta ballgown and a pair of aquamarine and diamond clips. Eighteen months after Billy’s death, the greyness of bereavement had lifted. The previous year had been an introspective one: immersing herself in her voluntary work for the American Red Cross, she had also spent a number of months in retreat at a nunnery in Kendal in Cumbria.

The start of the 1946 Season marked her reappearance on the social scene. To her delight, she found herself as popular as she had been before the war. Aged twenty-six, she had lost none of her allure: at a party a few weeks before the Dorchester ball, an eighteen-year-old debutante was overheard to remark, ‘It’s absolutely maddening, Kick’s taking all my dance partners.’

‘What do you expect?’ her friend replied. ‘You’re just a deb. She’s an attractive American widow.’

Peter – a highly decorated war hero – was one of the star guests at the ball. Before joining SOE in 1942, he had fought with the Commandos in the Middle East. It was inevitable that he would be introduced to Kick, the Chairwoman of the Committee.

Inviting her to dance, he spun her round the ballroom. ‘
It was overnight
and it was the real thing,’ Charlotte Harris, a close friend of Kick’s, remembered many years later. ‘One got the impression that she’d discovered something she didn’t really plan to experience in life.’

John White, her old friend from Washington, was overwhelmed by the force of her passion. ‘As she talked of Fitzwilliam, the man sounded like the hero of
Out of Africa
, a professional Englishman, a devastatingly charming rogue,’ he later recalled. ‘Rarely in life do you see someone so bubbling over with love, everything that love should be, every bit of it. Poor old Billy Hartington. But again he probably would have been blown away if she had felt that way about him. Very few people could stand that much love, the sheer blast of emotion.’

From the outset, Peter and Kick’s affair ran a tumultuous course, scandalizing and dividing London society. In their exclusive close-knit world, few secrets remained secret for very long. Though the couple were discreet, confining their meetings to late-night trysts at Kick’s house in Westminster or at the homes of close friends, word soon got out. People were shocked, not simply because a titled Catholic war widow was having an affair with a Protestant married man, but because Peter was regarded as the antithesis of her late husband – kind, gentle, moral Billy.

Among Kick’s friends, Peter’s reputation had gone before him. An habitué of Whites Club in St James’s, he was known to belong to a hard-drinking, hard-gambling clique of wealthy philanderers. In austerity-shrouded Britain, their excesses were especially frowned upon. Games of baccarat for stakes of £10,000 were not unusual. Peter’s personal betting and racing losses were rumoured to amount to more than £20,000: the equivalent today of some £500,000.

Kick’s world was very different. In the months leading up to the ball at the Dorchester, she had acquired a new set of friends. A true Anglophile, she had chosen to base herself in London, rather than in America, and had bought a small Georgian townhouse in Smith Square, a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. Here, in the spring of 1946, she hosted a series of small and intimate literary and political salons for some of the leading figures of the day: Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh were regular guests.

Waugh was horrified when Kick confided her new love. He had known Peter in the Army when they were stationed together at a Commando training camp near Glasgow. As Waugh recorded in his diary,
one girl
, following a row at a party in the Officers’ Mess, called Peter and his friends – who included Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son, and Lord Stavordale, the heir to the Earl of Ilchester – ‘dandies’ and ‘scum’. Noting the girl’s remarks, Waugh was almost as censorious: ‘The smart set,’ he wrote, ‘drink a very great deal, play cards for high figures, dine nightly in Glasgow, and telephone to their trainers endlessly.’ Later, he confessed to finding ‘the indolence and ignorance of the officers … remarkable’. But, as a Catholic convert, it was the religious implications of Kick’s liaison with Peter that so upset Waugh. ‘If you want to commit adultery or fornication & can’t resist, do it, but realize what you are doing, and don’t give the final insult of apostasy,’ he admonished her.

Kick’s Protestant friends were equally opposed to the affair. Janie Compton, her great friend in London before the war, found it particularly upsetting. To begin with, she did not understand it at all: ‘Peter and Kick were absolutely different personality types with absolutely different friends. She was totally different to him. She had intellectual friends. His world wasn’t a bit like that. He belonged to a set where you gambled terrifically and drank a lot. He was terribly naughty – frightfully – with loads of girlfriends. And that was just not Kick. Not a bit Kick. As time went by, I got the impression that he must have been a very good lover. It was the only way to explain it. It’s awful, but it can have such a major impact.’

Peter’s friends at Whites were similarly perplexed. What could he possibly see in her, they speculated, clustered in a haze of cigar smoke in the club’s comfortable leather armchairs. Though she was reputedly charming, Kick’s devout Catholicism and unremarkable looks hardly matched up to their vision of the perfect mistress.

Besides the gambling set at Whites, Peter’s social circle included the forerunners of the ‘jet set’: an exclusive clique of predominantly English and European super-rich. In the winter, they went fox-hunting and horse-racing, flying to race courses and hunting fields in France, Ireland and England; in the summer, they villa-hopped, charting private planes to visit each other at a series of invariably beautiful homes dotted around the Mediterranean.

Theirs was a dazzling crowd, the money they lavished on entertainment a lure to Hollywood film stars, fashion models and raffish figures from the beau monde such as Edith Piaf and Truman Capote.

Peter’s closest friend – and a leading light in the set – was Prince Aly Khan.
Six months younger
than Peter, he was the son of the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an estimated 15 million Ismaili Muslims in Asia and Africa. Stories of the Aga Khan’s wealth were legion; on his fiftieth birthday, his followers gave him his weight in gold – 220 pounds – and on his seventieth, when he had grown even fatter, in platinum. Double-decker buses in London sported advertisements for a brand of chocolate that bore the slogan ‘Rich and Dark like the Aga Khan’. In Manhattan, the colour of Prince Aly’s skin was an object of similar fascination: Diana Vreeland, writing in the mid-1940s, noted that it was ‘exactly the colour of a gardenia. A gardenia isn’t quite white. It’s got a little cream in it.’

‘They called me a bloody nigger,’ Prince Aly once said of his upper-class English contemporaries, ‘and I paid them out by winning all their women.’ Suave and good-looking, the owner of six houses and a suite at the Ritz, the Prince was an international playboy and lothario known for his extravagant gestures. When he married the actress Rita Hayworth in 1949, he filled the swimming pool at his house on the Riviera with 200 gallons of eau-de-cologne for the wedding reception.

The close friendship between Peter and the Prince sprang from their common interests and similar temperaments. In the years immediately after the war, both their marriages were failing; in 1947, Aly, married to Joan Yarde-Buller, the former wife of Joel Guinness, had numerous affairs, including one with Pamela Churchill, who had recently separated from Winston’s son, Randolph. Like Peter, Aly’s passions were horses and women. Michael Wishart, the English artist, remembered staying at Château de l’Horizon, Aly’s gleaming white Moorish-style villa on the Riviera. Here the Prince held court ‘
resplendent as
a basking shark, surrounded by a claque of pretty girls wearing the lower halves of bikinis’; Aly wore, as Wishart described, a pair of swimming trunks ‘with the would-be tantalizing admonition “not to be opened until Christmas” embroidered down the fly’. Aly’s reputation as a demon lover was legendary. ‘I only think of the woman’s pleasure when I am in love,’ was one of his maxims. He was famed for practising a lovemaking technique called ‘Imsak’, an ancient Arabic art taught to him by an Egyptian doctor that reputedly enabled him to delay orgasm for hours.

Peter and Aly shared other attributes. Aly had also had a ‘good war’, serving in the French Foreign Legion and in British and American intelligence units. Brave and reckless, both men were known for the restlessness that drove their high-octane lifestyle. ‘I once left Aly at four in the morning at Deauville,’ remembered Jean Fayard, the Prix Goncourt-winning author. ‘When I got back to his house late that same day, he had ridden a horse in the morning, played tennis, flown to England to watch one of his horses, flown back, and then we played bridge until three the next morning.’ While Jean and the other guests went to bed, Aly, as Fayard recalled, got in his car and drove along the Grande Corniche to the Casino at Monte Carlo, finally returning at seven to snatch two hours’ sleep before beginning a new day.

It was to this decadent world that Peter whisked Kick: throughout 1947, their weekends were spent at Château de l’Horizon, and in private boxes at glamorous racing venues in France and England. ‘
I never imagined
it would last,’ remembered Janie Compton. ‘I was convinced Peter could never make Kick happy.’ As the months passed, and the affair showed no signs of cooling off, Janie did not hide her disapproval from Kick. ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know him,’ she would reply.

There was a side to Peter’s character that only his close friends knew. ‘Peter had all the charm in the world – to a rather dangerous extent, really,’ Harry Sporborg, his business partner and former SOE colleague, recalled. Peter’s accounts show that, although his gambling debts were huge, he was also extremely generous. In 1947, he stood as personal guarantor to four of his friends’ bank overdrafts: the total sum amounted to almost £38,000 – almost £1 million in today’s money. As Kick confided to her brother Jack, Peter made her laugh: she had found a man who knew how to play, who swept her along with him and with whom she could have fun after the sadness and sacrifices of the war.