Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (32 page)

Richard had refrained from speaking to Kick of his abiding love—until, that is, the summer of 1946, when he and she at last discussed the possibility that they might marry. In later years, he would assert that, in the end, they had decided against marriage because of the same religious differences and difficulties that had previously vexed Kick and Billy. Shortly before he died in 2002, however, Richard, known by then as Lord Holderness, would also disclose that, for Kick, there had been a far greater obstacle than religion. Longing as she did to become “a woman of influence,” she required a husband who could help her to attain what she believed to be her proper sphere. Lord Holderness, while clearly concerned always to present Kick in the best light and to avoid making it seem as if it were merely grandeur and glamour she was after, acknowledged that in the end he had not been in a position to offer her anything like the life she wanted. Quite simply, Richard Wood could not match the riches of a Billy Hartington or of a Peter Fitzwilliam.

Meanwhile, Fitzwilliam—who enjoyed, in the words of one American observer, “that curious air of glamour sometimes conferred by great possessions long held and a great place in the world long maintained”—had been discreetly visiting Kick at Smith Square, as well as enlisting his friends to arrange for him to meet with her. The settings for these encounters often plunged Kick into the worlds of horse racing and gambling that Fitzwilliam, always “wonderfully easy and jolly,” frequented. She went to Ascot for the Derby races, where she stayed with his friends Laura and Eric Dudley Ward, the Earl of Dudley. She accompanied Peter’s wartime commander Robert Laycock and his wife, Angie, to the casino in Deauville, France, traveling there in a private aircraft provided by Fitzwilliam.

More and more, Kick found herself at dinner tables that she knew her late husband’s family would have been sure to avoid. When Eddy and Moucher Devonshire, like a good many others in their social stratum, were pointedly refusing to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had come over to England for a visit, Kick accepted Eric Dudley Ward’s invitation to a dinner party at Claridge’s in honor of the controversial former king and his wife. Kick began to inhabit a milieu in which women, married and divorced, routinely had affairs with one or more married men. Laura Dudley Ward ran off with another member of Kick’s louche new set, Gerry Koch de Gooreynd, only to return pregnant to her much older husband Eric. Laura’s sister Ann, who was then married to the press lord Viscount Rothermere, carried on an affair with Ian Fleming, who subsequently became her husband. Pam Churchill, the former wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, resumed the affair with Averell Harriman that had previously torpedoed her marriage, this time adding the complication of a second lover, Jock Whitney.

During this time, Kick continued to live on the most intimate terms with Billy’s parents, a circumstance that seems to have held no little allure for her lover. She regularly spent the weekend at Compton Place, where Eddy and Moucher continued to involve her in as many public duties as possible in her capacity as Billy’s widow. She accompanied them to the Queen’s Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, where she was announced as the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington. She went with Billy’s sister Elizabeth to a Regency Ball in Brighton at the Pavilion of George IV, for which occasion the duchess loaned her the family diamonds. For Kick, “the most enjoyable part of the evening” proved to be the moment when a fellow guest “laid her eyes on the Devonshire diamonds on my chest. I could see she was absolutely fascinated.”

In August, Kick accepted her father-in-law’s invitation to shoot with him at Bolton Abbey. Despite the fact that other landowners were complaining of a general shortage of grouse that season, Eddy Devonshire insisted in advance that there would be no such problem on his estate. His remark led Kick to affectionately exclaim, “The certainty of a Duke!” Billy had often evinced the identical serene self-confidence, shading into hubris, associated with the aristocratic mystique. And, for all of the ways in which he otherwise differed emphatically from the Cavendishes, so did Peter Fitzwilliam.

But the duke’s optimism proved to have been amply justified. Afterward, Kick wrote home that shooting at Bolton Abbey could scarcely have been more successful. Amazingly, “there were more grouse there than on any other moors in Yorkshire or Scotland.”

At Bolton Abbey, moreover, Kick reveled in the ability of the few to live in a style that was not supposed to have survived the war. “The shooting is all done in a prewar manner with all the beaters, gamekeepers, etc.,” she exulted in a letter to her parents. “It’s so strange that although England is now governed by a Labor government, there still exists in this country so many remnants of the feudal past.” In the mouths of most other speakers, “feudal past” would almost certainly have had a negative connotation. Kick, on the contrary, meant it not as criticism but as high praise. It is notable that elsewhere in her correspondence of this period, the phrase “prewar standards” serves as a benchmark of excellence and approbation.

When, in the autumn, her twenty-five-year-old sister Eunice was the first of the Kennedys to stay with her in Smith Square, Kick undertook to show her the remnants of that all-but-vanished prewar world. During the summer, when the dates for Eunice’s impending visit were still being arranged on both sides, Kick had suggested to her parents that she and her sister might return to the U.S. together around the end of November. By the time Eunice actually appeared in London, however, Kick had drastically revised her plans. No longer prepared to leave in November, she made it clear that when her sister went home she intended to remain in England several months more. Kick attributed the change to how “interesting” London life had become for her just then. Perhaps, but in light of what followed it is not too much to suppose that by this point Kick was simply loath to break things off with Fitzwilliam. Kick’s relationship with him would escalate considerably during the course of Eunice’s visit, which culminated with Kick’s taking the piously Catholic sister who had once denounced her marriage to a Protestant to meet the married lord with whom she was having an affair.

Eunice’s sojourn in London began, however, with an opulent ball held at the Dorchester Hotel on October 4, 1946, four months after Kick first encountered Peter Fitzwilliam there. The hostess this evening was “the other Lady Hartington,” as Eunice referred to Debo, who, somewhat bewilderingly, now bore the same appellation as Kick. Debo, rather to her own embarrassment at times, had lately undergone a marked personal transformation. Eddy Devonshire had insisted that she and Andrew take up residence at Edensor House, in the village overlooking Chatsworth. Billy, of course, had been in training all his life for one day becoming master of the family seat. It now fell to the second son to learn everything, and to do it so much more quickly than his brother had. From the first, Andrew’s guilt about the manner in which the title and property had fallen to him made him ambivalent about his inheritance. He would not, perhaps could not, allow himself to develop the same instant emotional attachment to all that they were to one day possess that Debo evinced with regard to Chatsworth.

Whenever Jean Lloyd visited Debo during this period, the latter would propose that she and her Ogilvy cousin go over to visit Chatsworth. The routine never varied. Debo would bring with her a shooting stick whose handle unfolded to create a little seat. After the women had crossed the bridge over the River Derwent and walked on for a bit, Debo would stop suddenly, then plunge the sharpened end of her stick into the earth. From that vantage point, she would sit and gaze at Chatsworth for a long while, a woman “besotted.” Each time, Debo would tell Jean the same thing—that she must arrange to reopen the house and find a way to live there.

On the night of October 4, as on other such occasions, Kick was full of praise for Debo. She applauded the magnificence of the ball, where the oysters, grouse, and champagne flowed all night. Still, Kick’s affectionate words and pretty smiles did not mean that she was content to go on being a mere supporting player to Debo’s new star turn. In Kick’s private life, there was beginning to emerge an element of competition with her brother- and sister-in-law, a sense that though she had lost a great deal when Andrew and Debo became Marquess and Marchioness of Hartington, she might soon be in a position to have even more than they. The Fitzwilliams were richer than the Devonshires, after all, and Wentworth Woodhouse so much vaster than Chatsworth.

On Peter’s side as well, there was a distinct element of competitiveness, which in his case seems to have been rooted in the long-standing rivalry between the houses of Fitzwilliam and Cavendish. Andrew Cavendish knew Peter from the racing and gambling milieux, and actually liked him personally quite a bit. Billy’s brother was far from alone in noticing that Kick was hardly the sort of woman who ordinarily would have appealed to Peter. To Andrew, it was her status as the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington, as well as her intimate connection with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, that made her such a glittering trophy in Peter’s eyes. The Fitzwilliams had a history of seizing the spoils of other great houses that had fallen into decline and decay. For Peter to claim Billy’s widow for his own would be to assure and assert his family’s preeminence after the Second World War. Peter’s only child with the present Countess Fitzwilliam was a daughter. Complications at the time of the girl’s birth were said to have precluded Obby’s producing further children. Kick, who had previously been brought in to reinvigorate a ducal line, was still young enough to provide Fitzwilliam with a son and heir.

Eunice’s visit, that October and November of 1946, was comprised essentially of two parts. In the first, Kick took Eunice on a tour of the settings, all of them associated with the house of Cavendish, where she and Billy would have had their life together had he survived the war. Following a stay at Compton Place, the Kennedy sisters went on to Edensor House, where they explored not only Chatsworth, but also Churchdale Hall and Hardwick Hall.

There followed a ten-day driving tour of Ireland, in the course of which they were due to inspect yet another Cavendish family–owned property, Lismore Castle. First, however, Kick and Eunice stopped at Coolattin House in County Wicklow. One of the largest private houses in Ireland, the 120-room pile was owned by Peter Fitzwilliam. If the theme of Eunice’s visit to date had been “what might have been,” at Coolattin House it shifted to “what yet might be.” Still, Eunice could hardly be told that Kick was having an affair with their married host. There had been a time when Kick had adamantly refused to countenance the humiliations to which her father, by his womanizing, had cruelly and callously subjected her mother. Some ten years earlier, Kick had boldly protested when Joe Kennedy brought a mistress to sit at Rose’s table. Now, by agreeing to visit Coolattin House at a time when Obby Fitzwilliam was in residence—indeed, by accepting the countess’s hospitality—Kick had placed herself in the position of the very mistress whose presence in the Kennedy household she had once decried. Further, she had cast her unwitting sister in the role of a beard.

Kick’s stay at Coolattin House marked a considerable heightening in her affair with Peter Fitzwilliam. He had brought her into one of his numerous households. He had paraded her before his wife. He had put on grand display for Kick the mode of life that would one day be hers should she become his bride—as soon as he succeeded in divorcing the present countess, that is. The particular social order embodied by the Coolattin estate—whose tenants had long been exceedingly fond of the Fitzwilliam family—was precisely the sort that Kick most admired. Coolattin suggested more than just the pre-1939 world that the new Labor government had undertaken to obliterate; it summoned vividly to life the eighteenth-century society that, before she’d even met Peter, had fired her imagination so. In this setting she saw Peter as he wished to be seen, as a true “eighteenth-century lord.” Given her fondness for pageantry and color, she could not but savor the spectacle of her host, garbed in a red coat, riding off with numerous similarly habited horsemen and their many hounds—a picture she declared “one of the most lovely sights imaginable.” Kick left Coolattin on the afternoon of November 3 bedazzled by much that she had seen and experienced there.

In the wake of her visit, however, she was also much troubled and perplexed. It had been difficult enough when Billy had insisted that she be the one to compromise—though in the end, having consented to Billy’s stipulation about the religious upbringing of their children, Kick had finally come to believe that she had in fact done nothing sinful or wrong. What Peter was asking of her, by contrast, was so much more overwhelming to contemplate. “It was really too much for her,” remembered Elizabeth Cavendish, who, unlike Eunice, knew of Kick’s affair with Peter Fitzwilliam and of the wrenching decisions that confronted her. “It wasn’t just that he was a Protestant. He was a married man.”

Thirteen

On April 29, 1947, Kick was in a contemplative mood as the hour drew near that the liner
Queen Elizabeth,
on which she had been traveling from America, was scheduled to dock in Southampton, England. The cause of her meditations was the sight of an American teenager named Sharman Douglas who, with everything ahead of her, reminded Kick of the girl she herself had been almost a decade before. Lewis Douglas was the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the Court of St James’s, and his sprightly daughter Sharman was sailing over in the company of her mother to join him at the American Embassy.

“It made me feel rather sentimental to see the daughter age 18, going to London for the first time like I did,” Kick wrote from the boat to the Kennedys, whom she had just been visiting, “although the glories I found have vanished now.”

In her day, Kick had been one of London’s most popular debutantes. She had swiftly and skillfully penetrated the hermetically sealed world of the aristocratic cousinhood. She had been courted by various young noblemen. She had fallen in love with the heir to a dukedom, and by sheer persistence and obstinacy she had managed to keep that love alive in the face of monumental obstacles. She had struggled with ethical and religious dilemmas and she had finally taken a decision with which she, at least, could be at peace. She had become a wife and a widow in a matter of months. She had made a glittering future for herself and she had had that future abruptly snatched away by a German sniper’s bullet. She had endured and emerged from paralyzing grief. She had moved to a new home of her own and she had established a political salon there.