Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (22 page)

What Kick was by no means at peace with, however, was the prospect of hurting Rose, who, by all indications, was about to take her daughter’s actions very hard indeed.

An ambassador designated by Archbishop Francis Spellman to speak to Kick on behalf of her parents soon perceived that at this point there existed only one individual who might yet succeed in stopping the wedding, which was now scheduled to take place at the Chelsea Register Office on May 6. After conferring with Kick on the third of May, Archbishop William Godfrey, the apostolic delegate to Britain, sent word to the U.S. that his efforts had been in vain. Though Kick remained absolutely firm about her decision to marry Billy outside of the Roman Catholic Church, she was still, however, clearly very upset about her mother’s reaction. Accordingly, the archbishop suggested that the Kennedy family’s one last remaining chance to halt the ceremony was for Rose herself to “try again with all her power.”

Even as Rose was bombarding her daughter with pleas and threats, all of England was physically and psychologically in upheaval, as soldiers began to move en masse from bases throughout the nation. Their clockwork procession to southern England during the first week of May constituted the greatest mass movement of soldiers in British and American military annals. Restricted to designated marshaling locations, the troops would shortly be briefed about the Normandy invasion, which was now scheduled to take place at the beginning of June.

To his vast disappointment, Billy was not to be among these troops. He had expected to cross over the Channel with the first mighty wave of soldiers. Instead he was assigned to remain behind with his unit, which was set to be brought in as reinforcements at some point after the initial assault. Billy’s orders cast a blight on his happiness in anticipation of the wedding. But then, had his departure not been put off, the marriage ceremony could never have taken place when it did. Nor, obviously, could he have obtained leave for a honeymoon, confined as he would have been to one of the marshaling areas in southern England. As it was, the newlyweds were to have six nights together at Compton Place before Billy would be required to return to duty.

Meanwhile, the one Kennedy sibling who supported Kick unequivocally in her decision to marry outside the Roman Catholic Church was Joe Junior. Kick conferred with him by telephone each time a new angry or despairing message from their mother arrived. He saw Bishop Matthew on her behalf to determine if there was any way a dispensation might yet be acquired, and later he met with the Duke of Devonshire’s lawyers to read over her marriage settlement. He wrote to offer personal assurances to his parents that Billy was clearly “crazy about Kick” and that it was evident to all who saw them that they were “very much in love.” On the day of the wedding, young Joe would be the family’s sole representative at both the ceremony and the reception afterward.

Some observers at the time believed that the romantic relationship Joe had recently embarked on with Pat Wilson, the wife of an English soldier who was then fighting in Italy, a relationship Joe’s parents clearly would not approve of were they to have learned of it, made him more open to what Kick was about to do. Others connected it to his state of free fall within the Kennedy family hierarchy. Frantic that the second son, who was now not only a successful author but also a war hero, had displaced him in their father’s eyes, Joe seemed eager to at least take Jack’s place as the intimate of Kick, the patriarch’s favorite. He supported Kick within the family as she had once supported Jack.

In the current controversy, Jack proved rather less supportive of his sister than their past history might have led one to expect. When Jack weighed in on the subject of Kick’s wedding plans, it was only to say that he believed it was time for Billy to make a concession of some sort. That of course was scarcely what she would have wished to hear. Other siblings as well seemed to take their mother’s view of the matter. Twenty-two-year-old Eunice was indignant over what she regarded as her sister’s apostasy, and eighteen-year-old Bobby was, as he recalled to David Ormsby-Gore in later years, “very shaken and shocked.” There had been a time when Kick longed to find an identity apart from her family—but now, so much disapproval from her siblings was almost too much for her to bear.

Even more distressing was a newspaper report that her mother was extremely ill and had had to be hospitalized as a consequence of her upset over the impending nuptials. To make matters worse, Kick’s father seemed suddenly to have abandoned his long-established policy of backing her even when her views did not coincide with his own.

As far as Kick’s relationship with Billy was concerned, several times in recent months old Joe had conveyed to her that she ought to marry whomever she thought best. “I’ll gamble with your judgment,” he had told her on one occasion. “The best is none too good for you, but if you decide to marry a Chinaman, it’s okay with me. That’s how much I think of you.” He seemed to view matters differently, however, as soon as the actual wedding date was announced. At that point, the patriarch went disturbingly silent. Nor, despite Kick’s anguish, was there any reassuring word from old Joe as to her mother’s condition. “The power of silence is great,” Joe Junior would at length angrily telegram his father. And so, on the bittersweet occasion of Kick and Billy’s wedding day, it proved to be.

On Saturday morning, Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy, in naval attire, delivered Kick to the Chelsea Register Office. They arrived there some twenty minutes late, Joe Junior’s vehicle having taken a few wrong turns en route. Billy, in the uniform of a captain in the Coldstream Guards, met them there, as did his sisters, parents, and grandmothers, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the Marchioness of Salisbury. In the absence of Billy’s brother, who was in Italy, the young Duke of Rutland, also an officer in the Coldstream Guards, served as Billy’s best man. Debo, who had lately given birth to her and Andrew’s first son, Peregrine, was still recovering at Churchdale Hall and therefore unable to attend.

Other guests at the wedding ceremony included Nancy Astor and Marie Bruce. The latter was a London friend of Mrs. Kennedy’s, who, highly sympathetic and loyal to Kick, had done everything she could to act in loco parentis. Mrs. Bruce’s services to the young bride ranged from providing Kick’s simple, street-length, pale pink crepe wedding dress, to seeking to comfort her the night before in the face of her mother’s abiding disapproval.

Following the ceremony, which took but seven minutes to complete, the newlyweds were feted at a reception for some two hundred family members and friends, including some of the same Red Cross coworkers who had previously been so critical of Kick, at the home of Lady Hambleden. After the last champagne toast had been raised, Kick disappeared upstairs to change into a going-away costume that consisted of a black and white flowered crepe dress, a simple black coat, and a black and white halo hat. Before she and Billy left Lady Hambleden’s, they telephoned Jean Lloyd, who was in the hospital with a bout of jaundice and had therefore been unable to come to the reception. Kick and Billy took turns regaling his Ogilvy cousin with all of the day’s details.

At last, pelted by rose petals, the young marquess and marchioness departed for Victoria Station, where they boarded an unoccupied first-class compartment of a train headed for Eastbourne. In the course of the day, Kick had striven to smile and laugh whenever members of the press, British and American alike, pointed cameras and shouted pointed questions at her. Otherwise, such had been her agitation about her parents, especially her mother, that, after the festivities ended, Joe Junior, Lady Astor, and Mrs. Bruce all contacted the Kennedys, urging them to break their silence by wishing their daughter well.

By the time the newlyweds reached Eastbourne and began the half-mile walk between the train station and the family mansion at Compton Place, it had been an exceedingly long and worrisome day. At this point, Kick still had no idea how her mother was, or how to account for her father’s eloquent silence. Billy, who had previously avowed that, above all, he wished to do nothing to make Kick unhappy or guilt-ridden, could scarcely be sure that he had not done precisely that by forcing her to marry outside of the Roman Catholic Church and thereby alienating her from her family.

In her Washington days, Kick had made it clear to John White, when he attempted to lure her into bed, that she intended to remain a virgin until her wedding night. When at last she and Billy entered the bedroom at Compton Place that had been specially prepared for them, she was astonished and horrified by something that he did. In the room, two beds had been pushed together to form one large bed. Whether on account of fatigue, fear, a reluctance to deprive her of the innocence he prized, or some other reason or combination of reasons, Billy immediately pushed the two beds apart.

Kick wasted no time assertively pushing the beds back together. The gesture was the culmination of two narrative lines in Kick’s life. The first emanated from all of the arguments that she and John White had had about sex. She was a married woman now. It was time. This was the occasion she had long been deferring. But, to whatever degree Kick knew or sensed it to be the case, she was also at that moment enacting a scenario that had much more at stake than merely her own personal fulfillment. Joseph P. Kennedy’s daughter had been brought in, as other nonaristocrats had in centuries past, to improve the breed. The pressure on Kick was great, as the future head of the house of Cavendish was but weeks away from returning to the battlefield. If an heir to the dukedom was to be produced, there was very little time left to begin the process. But by Kick’s own account to both Fiona Gore and Jean Lloyd, the wedding night proved to be a disaster and a disappointment, mainly, she insisted, because of Billy’s inexperience.

The tumult of her emotions can scarcely have helped matters. When at last Kick received word from her father, she responded to say how much hearing from him meant to her, and how worried she remained about her mother. After old Joe sought to assuage her concerns, Kick wrote to her mother at once and at length, on Tuesday, the ninth. “A telegram arrived from Daddy this morning with the news that you are well. I was very worried about a newspaper report here that you were very ill. They made out that it was because of my marriage.”

Kick went on to assure her mother that the marriage in no way called into question the raison d’être that Rose had fashioned for herself around the time of her second daughter’s birth. “You did your duty as a Roman Catholic mother. You have not failed. There was nothing lacking in my religious education. Not by any means am I giving up my religious faith—it is most precious to me. Billy wants it to remain as such.”

Having addressed these spiritual matters, Kick moved along to the sort of material details that would no doubt interest her mother. Kick described the wedding and the reception, her pink crepe wedding dress, and the jewels and precious gifts that had been lavished upon her. She wrote of her engagement ring, a square-cut sapphire with diamonds on each side; of the diamond bracelet Billy’s father had given her; and of the gold-diamond-and-pearl pin she’d received from Fiona and Boofy Gore. She begged Rose not to be sad—about anything. “I’m very, very happy,” she emphasized, “and quite certain about what I’ve done.”

The resumption of contact with Joe and Rose began to lift the veil of anxiety that had clung to Kick since her arrival in Eastbourne. Still, matters were far from settled with her family. And three days after the wedding, Compton Place continued to be deluged with letters from what Kick described as “irate Catholics” who charged her with having sold her soul for a title. Unwilling to hear his bride disparaged, Billy took it upon himself to personally reply in writing to every one of Kick’s critics.

Despite all of this turbulence, however, the honeymoon, while far from idyllic, did prove to be a happy one. The weather was perfect. The newlyweds sunbathed in gardens lush with flowers. And, as Kick later confided to both Fiona and Jean, Billy finally, in her phrase, “figured out how to do it.”

Billy reported to his military camp on Friday. But he rejoined Kick in London on Tuesday the sixteenth of May in anticipation of their spending the night at Hatfield House as the guests of his Cecil grandparents. Since the days when Kick had famously shown her mettle there, the family seat had been converted into a military hospital for the duration of the war. Billy’s maternal grandfather and grandmother lived on the ground floor in one corner of the massive Jacobean edifice.

Neither grandparent had a history of welcoming Catholics into the family. Lord Salisbury was the family leader who before the war had objected to his grandson Robert Cecil’s relationship with Veronica Fraser on the grounds that a union between them would amount to the renunciation of the Cecils’ traditional role as leaders of the Anglican community. And it had been Lady Alice Salisbury who, at the time of Kick’s first momentous visit to Hatfield, in 1938, had instigated some of the rough treatment to which the Catholic newcomer had been subjected.

Now, six years later, Kick was returning as more than just a new member of the family. Like other brides before her who had come to Hatfield from diverse ranks of society, she represented the hardier stock on which the future of the line was thought by some to depend. When, as Kick reported afterward to the Kennedys, the various old Cecil relatives and their servants gave her “the eye,” it was probably as much with curiosity about whether she might already be pregnant as with the disdain and dismay that she herself seemed to perceive.

Following their visit to Hatfield, Kick and Billy moved to a small hotel on the main street in Alton, near to where Billy was stationed. The newlyweds were given the premier suite at the Swan Hotel, an English inn dating to 1554, where the staff were obviously delighted to have a marquess and marchioness in residence. The Irish bellboy happened also to be named Kennedy, and he insisted that he and Kick might be related. It amused and pleased Kick greatly that each time she or Billy so much as peeked out into the hotel corridor, there was the bellboy waiting to march in front of them. “This way, Marquess,” little Kennedy would loudly declare as he threw open some door for the noble guests, who were the future Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, after all.