Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (21 page)

During this period, Kick grew fonder than ever of Billy’s mother, who showered her with empathy and understanding. “The duchess is so wonderful and kind,” Kick reported to Joe and Rose. “She wants me to consider wherever they are as home and really couldn’t be kinder. She is writing to Mother.” Moucher Devonshire conveyed to Kick her understanding of how difficult it must be to be alone in England without her parents at a moment when she was going through so much. “I know how lonely you must feel and how forsaken,” the duchess wrote to Kick after the unproductive meeting with the clergyman, “but we must trust in God that things will come out for the best. I do hope you know how much we love you and if there is even the smallest thing we can do to help you have only to say—and always please come and see me at any time if you feel like it and come and stay. There is always a bed for you—you have only to telephone.”

Kick sought the counsel of, among others, Bishop James Matthew, the auxiliary bishop of Westminster. This prominent Roman Catholic endeavored to assuage at least one of Kick’s fears about what might happen were she to marry without the sanction of her church. “No one can say you are committing a sin,” he assured her, “because a sin is done from a selfish motive. What you are doing is done from an entirely nonselfish motive.”

Kick was much comforted by this interpretation. Far less satisfying was Bishop Matthew’s suggestion that, given what would almost certainly be the Vatican’s reluctance to move quickly and publicly in such an exceptionally high-profile case, it might perhaps be best if she and Billy were to marry first and then hope for a dispensation to be granted at some much later date. Kick judged that were she and Billy indeed to wait for Rome to act, the process might take years—time that, under the circumstances, she and he simply did not have.

The scarcity of time was further driven home to her when, in early April, Billy called to say that he did not believe that there was any hope of securing additional leave to visit her in London. The lovers still had so much to settle, yet from this point on the only way to see one another was for Kick to come to Billy. Fortunately, they both had access to Jean and David Lloyd’s cottage in Yorkshire, not far from where Billy was stationed.

So it was that on Wednesday, April 19, 1944, Kick, having obtained a brief leave of her own from the Red Cross, took a train up from London to spend three days as Jean’s houseguest. The plan was for Billy to join her when he was off duty in the evening, or when he otherwise managed to grab a few stray hours.

Kick associated Jean with the splendor of her upbringing at Cortachy Castle. Yet when Kick entered the Lloyds’ exceedingly modest cottage that first day, she found her hostess down on the floor, awkwardly sweeping the surface as best she could, given the heavy plaster cast that encased her left leg. Jean had broken the leg several days before as she dashed upstairs to make the bed for Billy, who had arrived unexpectedly to spend the night in the claustrophobic space that the Lloyds referred to with a dash of irony as “David’s dressing room.”

Visibly aghast at the picture that greeted her, Kick broke out, “What are you doing?”

Jean, usually the kindest and gentlest of souls, replied sharply, even angrily, “You can see what I’m doing!”

At that moment, all of the war weariness, all of the exhaustion and frustration, that had been pent up in Jean for so long erupted in her expression of displeasure with Kick. Since Kick’s return nine months previously, the aristocratic cousinhood had been charmed by her ability to remind them of what life had been like before the war. But on this particular spring night in 1944, Jean found herself bristling at Kick’s abiding, almost willful blindness to how much in British life had changed, a good deal of it perhaps forever.

Jean’s upset quickly dissolved, so pleased was she to see her old friend, with whom she was soon laughing, gossiping, and gaily talking about better times. Jean felt more than a little guilty about her outburst, so she was glad that she had already planned something of a feast to cook for her guest’s breakfast.

David Lloyd had to be off by seven
A.M
., so the next morning Jean was up at dawn stoking the fire for hot water and preparing a meal that almost certainly would have been beyond them in London. Kick, Jean, and David were sitting in the kitchen feasting on eggs and bacon when the front door opened and in came Billy, a sack of oranges in one hand.

Tossing the precious bag to Kick—in wartime, citrus fruit was a rarity—he looked at her with immense pleasure and declared, “We’re off!” As Billy uttered those words he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Jean, to whom he had often spoken of his abiding, at times all-consuming need to go back, knew at once that the long-awaited invasion was finally at hand.

Billy contentedly chatted with Kick and the Lloyds for a bit, but he had to leave almost as abruptly as he had appeared. He promised to return sometime that evening. Clearly, the moment for Kick to reply one way or another to his marriage proposal had also finally arrived.

Over the course of the day, Kick trailed Jean about as her hostess performed household chores. Kick later wrote to tell her family about how “fantastic” it was to think of the way Jean had lived before the war and “how easily” she had now adapted to her new role in Scarborough. Kick reported Jean’s opinion, which had been seconded by her husband, that there would be no returning to the kind of life they had once enjoyed. Though Kick made a point of assuring her family that, in her capacity as the Lloyds’ houseguest, she had been “most efficient around the house,” Jean would laughingly recall years afterward that beyond making a huge display of assisting her, Kick had actually been of little help. Jean felt it was not that Kick did not really want to help; it was that she simply did not know how.

That evening and the next, Billy appeared with a bounty of lobsters and champagne. Both nights, there was much table talk about the deprivations and depredations wrought by the war. Billy acknowledged that he did not expect to inhabit Chatsworth—ever. Kick could scarcely conceal from her hostess the feeling that such an idea was very difficult for her to accept. She had long been building castles in the air; now, she had to face the possibility that, though she might make the great sacrifice, the castle, and the opportunity to restore it to its previous glory, might never be hers after all.

Meanwhile, on both nights, when the Lloyds went up to bed, Kick and Billy remained behind in the sitting room. At daybreak, when Jean appeared downstairs to prepare hot water, she found the couple still conversing in an animated fashion—but not, she emphasized many years later, in the teasing, bantering style they had often exhibited in the past. Crucial decisions remained to be made, and though Jean did not hear what they had said in the course of the night, their talks on these occasions had an unaccustomed air of gravity about them that was not entirely dissipated by the hostess’s entrance.

There was no news that first morning, but at breakfast on Saturday Kick excitedly informed Jean and David that she had at last accepted Billy’s marriage proposal. Both she and Billy struck the Lloyds as wondrously happy. It was an occasion that called out to be recorded—and so it would be.

As Billy was about to return to his regiment, he and Kick wandered out into the garden. They were followed there by Jean, who had her old Brownie box camera in hand, the same apparatus that she had used to record a great many signal occasions in the prewar lives of their group of young people. In those days, many of the debs, as well as their mothers, had kept their Brownie box cameras constantly at the ready to register the various landmarks on the road to marriage and adulthood—house parties, dances, race meetings, picnics, and the like, images that the girls would later lovingly affix to the heavy pages of their scrapbooks. In 1944 Jean still possessed not only her Brownie, but also all of the reflexes that, now as then, drew her irresistibly to any moment that looked to be a beginning.

On the sunny April morning that Jean photographed the couple, Kick was at last truly about to become Lady Hartington. It had taken her six years to reach this point. She had had to overcome the numerous obstacles that warring nations, not to mention both the Kennedy and Cavendish families, had put in her path. Then, when the duke had finally conceded to his son that, even if Kick were to insist upon their children being brought up as Roman Catholics, the marriage would have his and the duchess’s blessing, it had been Billy himself who had presented Kick with one last, really formidable hurdle that she would have to surmount alone. In effect, he had asked her to abandon certain of the principles with which she had been inculcated from an early age. Without actually saying so, he had demanded that she give up the comfort of what she herself would later longingly refer to as “the protecting walls of the convent.”

In place of Catholicism, Billy had offered her an alternate way of making sense of the world and of creating order out of chaos. In the end, Kick had managed to find that new and necessary sense of meaning not in Anglicanism, but rather in the traditional societal structure that she had had an opportunity to observe firsthand in West Derbyshire.

As for Billy, he too had been hurtling toward this point for six years, though his trajectory had contained rather more detours than Kick’s, the most notable of which had been a much-regretted engagement to someone other than the girl of his heart. But it was also the case that, even now, Billy was traveling along a separate, but no less propulsive course, whose final destination he was achingly on the verge of reaching. As Jean understood, the picture she took of him with Kick on the morning of April 22, 1944, captured a moment of what was for Billy perfect satisfaction, as both his marriage to Kick and his return to the war zone were finally assured.

Back in London, Kick faced the ordeal of disclosing her decision to her family. Putting off the inevitable cataclysm for at least a few seconds, she began her April 24, 1944, letter to her parents and siblings by speaking not of the freighted subject of her impending marriage, but rather of a topic that was always a supremely happy one between her and her mother. She wrote of a package of clothes that had arrived from home two weeks previously, commenting that they were all “awfully nice” with the exception of an evening dress of her mother’s. Kick felt that the evening dress was “really too old for me,” and promised to bequeath it to “some deserving British soul.”

Stalling before she had to commit the dreaded words to paper, Kick went on to write in detail of the fate of a mirror that Rose Kennedy had recently sent over as a gift to the Queen. As no message of gratitude had been received chez Kennedy, Kick had recently made an inquiry of Tommy Lascelles, the King’s secretary, whose note of response she now had in hand and quoted to her parents and siblings in full: “The mirror certainly reached the Queen safely; and equally certainly a letter was sent to your mother within a few days of its arrival. But the letter seems to have gone astray—maybe through enemy action—and a copy of it is being sent at once to Mrs. Kennedy. Mind you, let me know if this too fails to turn up!” Kick proceeded to write at length of her visit with Jean and David Lloyd in Yorkshire, and of Billy’s nightly visits to the household. All of which led her to confess at last.

“I have definitely decided to marry him.”

She assured her parents that she would let them know the date in advance, once it had been set. “You understand that the ceremony would have to be performed in a registry office which is rather sordid but the only thing to do as I wouldn’t have an Anglican service.”

Rose, when she learned of Kick’s intentions, recorded in her diary that she was at once “horrified” and “heartbroken.” Tellingly, foremost among her considerations at the moment was the extent to which Kick’s marriage to a Protestant would constitute “a blow to the family prestige.” Once Kick had done it, Rose reflected, would not other young girls ask, “If K Kennedy can—why can’t I?” Rose insisted that prior to this, “everyone pointed to our family with pride as well behaved—level headed & deeply religious.”

As Rose expressed this sentiment in the privacy of a diary, it is worth asking to what extent she actually believed that the world perceived her family to be well behaved and religious. Had she refused to acknowledge the crude reality of her life for so many years that she had begun to confuse a personally and politically useful image with the truth? Had she been complicit in old Joe’s mythmaking for so long as to have become blind to the fact that his and his eldest sons’ behavior was often rather squalid? Far from being the problem, Kick was in fact truer to the idealized image than either of her older brothers. Yet now, as far as Rose was concerned, it was Kick whose actions threatened to heap shame upon them all.

Rose urged old Joe to fly to London immediately, but to her chagrin he seemed to think that such a trip would be impossible. Tortured by the thought that her husband really ought to have gone over a month or two previously, she barraged Kick with frantic telegrams, as well as with pleas and warnings transmitted through various envoys whom she tasked with extricating her before it was too late.

The dilemma that confronted Kick had to do with a good deal more than simply religion or rebellion per se. It had to do with her conception of herself as a kind, caring person. It had to do with her part in the fragile familial ecosystem that, since virtually the time of Kick’s birth, had helped to sustain Rose. Kick—who had long been Rose’s staunchest supporter in the family; who had refused to join her older brothers in mocking and disparaging their mother; and who had declined to countenance the humiliations to which old Joe by his relentless womanizing had callously and often publicly subjected his wife—suddenly found herself cast in a new and unwanted role. To her horror, Kick became the family member who was conceivably about to do greater harm to her mother than any of the others had ever even approached doing.

Bishop James Matthew had previously explained to Kick that were she to marry Billy, she would not be committing a sin. No one, however, could offer her comparable assurances that by going forward in the absence of a dispensation, she would not be wreaking havoc upon the mother whom she called “the dearest person in the world.” Given the poignancy of Rose’s life, Kick saw it as her duty to be always supremely caring and protective of her. Kick scoffed at Rose’s threats, which came aplenty that first week of May 1944, that if she went ahead with the wedding she would no doubt be damned and go to hell. According to Billy’s sister Anne, by this point Kick was at peace with her decision to marry and with the accommodations she had finally decided to make.