Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (33 page)

And now, though Kick spoke wistfully to the Kennedys of vanished glories, she perceived herself as having a chance not only to retrieve much of that glory, but perhaps even to surpass it.

One of Britain’s wealthiest peers, a man whom she found incomparably attractive and whom she regarded as a hero in the great societal struggle of the postwar era, wished to marry her. This time, however, should she finally consent to become Peter Fitzwilliam’s second wife, it seemed highly unlikely that she would ever discover a way, as before, to be at peace with her decision. Though Kick had defied both Hyannis Port and Rome in the past, she had never ceased to think of herself as a Catholic to whom the tenets of her faith were precious. When she married Billy Hartington, she had by no means agreed to abandon Catholicism, only to consent that any children she and he might have would be raised as Anglicans. By the time of Kick’s initial plunge into the world of the aristocratic cousinhood, in 1938, Catholic principles had been long and deeply inculcated in her—and so, for all that she had experienced in the interim, they remained.

Such were the contradictions of Kick’s nature that the same woman who had lately become a Whig grandee’s mistress also at intervals went on retreats to convents whose “peaceful and tranquil” atmosphere, as she described it that emotionally turbulent spring of 1947, were as a balm to her. Because as a committed Roman Catholic Kick was deeply troubled by the fact that Peter was married, her excruciating conflict was not simply with her family and with her church—it was with herself. This time, nothing anyone else said or did could alter her conviction that marrying him would in fact be a sin. Thus Elizabeth Cavendish’s sympathetic assessment that the dilemma was “really too much” for Kick.

In the course of her second postwar visit to the U.S., which had taken place between February and April, Kick had refrained from disclosing that dilemma to her family, who as yet knew nothing about her affair with Peter Fitzwilliam. She had, nonetheless, given signs that something might be different. Rather than wishing to rush about and see a great many people as she ordinarily would have done, she contrived to spend as much time as possible with her parents, whom she subsequently insisted she had actually “seen more of” on this trip than ever before. Kick’s “new schedule this year”—in her mother’s approving phrase—consisted of playing golf every afternoon with Rose, and conversing with the family at night. Whatever degree of calm she had thusly managed to attain did not last long, however. Hardly was Kick back in London when it seemed to her somehow as if she had never been away.

To an observer unaware of the tremendous decisions that faced Kick, her return to Britain in 1947 might have seemed little different from what it had been the previous year. Again, Seymour Berry’s car and driver collected Lady Hartington at the dock in Southampton. Again, the charming little house in Smith Square overflowed with flowers sent over by the Duchess of Devonshire. Again, Kick spent her first weekend in the enveloping company of Billy’s parents and sisters, at Compton Place. Again, the tiny drawing room in Smith Square soon echoed with the voices of her friends from prewar days.

Though the political talk still abounded with references to the nationalization of the coal industry, and to the government minister who had gone mano a mano with Peter Fitzwilliam, the mood and morale in Conservative quarters were substantially improved from the year before. Arctic weather conditions had beset Britain in the early months of 1947. Poor government planning had doomed the country to endure an inadequate supply of coal. Electrical shutdowns, business closings, mass unemployment, food and water shortages, and stalled train lines had led to broad suffering. Manny Shinwell was widely blamed for the administrative incompetence that had left Britain so woefully unprepared. The beleaguered minister of fuel and power had even had to be put under police protection on account of the myriad anonymous threats that had been made against him.

Beyond the mass resentment of Shinwell, there had occurred a diminution of public confidence in the Labor government overall, a development that Conservatives viewed as a matchless political gift. Previous predictions based on the 1945 Labor landslide had suggested that the party of Winston Churchill would have to wait two five-year election cycles at the very least before it could hope to be returned to power. The coal crisis scrambled all such calculations. Suddenly, the pundits were saying that the socialists could be vulnerable as early as the next general election. Churchill or, should the ongoing efforts to oust him as party leader prove successful, Anthony Eden could become Britain’s next prime minister a good deal sooner than anyone in the party had dared to dream.

Kick had not been back in England for long when she encountered Eden at a dinner party given by Margaret Biddle in London. She had previously met the Conservative crown prince, who was tall, slim, and debonair, with ice blue eyes and a well-tended gray mustache, in October of 1946. At the time, she had been seated between Eden and the Duke of Windsor at the Earl of Dudley’s dinner party for the Windsors. Emerald Cunard had been Eden’s other dinner partner, and in the course of the evening she had encouraged him to take a romantic interest in Kick. “Anthony, don’t you think Kick is pretty?” she asked. “Kick, don’t you think Anthony is wonderful?” Eden was then hoping to repair his broken marriage to the mother of his three sons, Beatrice Eden, with whom he was about to leave for a holiday in the Caribbean. So, though he and Kick had chatted happily about politics, by evening’s end Lady Cunard’s matchmaking efforts appeared to have been in vain.

Everything seemed very different, however, when Eden met Lady Hartington again six months later. His attempt to reconcile with Beatrice had come to naught. While Kick had been in the U.S., he had returned to England without his wife, who had refused to accompany him. He swiftly emerged as a conspicuous presence in Kick’s life. This was in sharp contrast to the secrecy that continued to characterize her overlapping relationship with Peter Fitzwilliam, who, to Kick’s anguish, persisted in regularly appearing in public with his wife. In retrospect, some of Kick’s friends wondered whether, coming as it did at a time when she was struggling with the issues that Fitzwilliam’s offer of marriage presented, the relationship with Eden—who was pursuing other women at the time as well—was an effort on her part to discover an appealing alternative.

If she longed to become a woman of influence, it could not but count hugely with her that Eden was in line to be his party’s next leader. If she dreamed of seeing the Conservatives returned to power, it was no small factor that he might soon reside at Number 10 Downing Street. When, that June of 1947, she sat beside Eden as he took the salute in his private box at the Royal Tournament, the world’s largest military tattoo, at the Olympia, she reveled in the “tremendous ovation” he received from the crowds. She was impressed when, after lingering with her at the 400 Club until five in the morning, he went on the next day to open the debate for the Opposition on foreign affairs in the House of Commons—an address that, she had it directly from no less an authority than Hugh Fraser, had been “first class.” Kick found Eden fascinating to talk with about subjects ranging from Churchill’s vagaries to the mysterious goings-on backstage at Stalin’s Kremlin. Eden was pleasing to look at, consummately charming, and hugely entertaining. Yet for all of his abundant attractions, he lacked, at least for Kick, the sexual magnetism that continued to draw her to Fitzwilliam.

It certainly did not help Eden’s chances with Kick that his London residence was, to her eye, “a rather squalid little house with very few comforts.” Peter Fitzwilliam, on the other hand, had “the largest house in England.” Wentworth Woodhouse was larger even than Chatsworth, which was located but twenty miles away. Peter seemed to be upping the ante when he invited her to stay at Wentworth, along with other houseguests including the film producer Alexander Korda and the Conservative politician Oliver Stanley, during the last weekend of July in 1947. The Whig palace had three hundred and sixty-five rooms (supposedly one for each day of the year), a thousand windows covering some two hundred and fifty thousand square feet, and the longest country house facade in all of Europe. The roof alone stretched for some two and a half acres. If one wished to walk completely around the house, one needed at least half an hour to do it, perhaps more.

For Kick, no less affecting than Wentworth’s splendor was the spectacle of the depredations to which the Labor government had subjected that splendor. For all of the gaiety and grandeur that prevailed at Peter Fitzwilliam’s dinner table, the incongruous scene outside assured that this was to be no idyllic country house weekend. “The gardens have all been dug up and taken over by the government for coal,” Kick reported afterward to the Kennedys. “I’ve never seen anything so awful as the machinery is right outside one’s window and these valuable old trees have all been uprooted and it will never be the same.”

When that August of 1947 Kick wrote to her family of her visit to Wentworth, she pointedly, and quite uncharacteristically, omitted any reference to the name of her host. The following month, Jack would be the first Kennedy family member with whom she broached the subject of her affair. Newly elected to represent the 11th District in the House of Representatives—a campaign that Kick had followed from afar with intense interest and enthusiasm—Jack Kennedy was in Britain on a congressional fact-finding mission. In the course of his visit, he joined Kick at a house party that she had arranged at Lismore Castle. Among her guests was Anthony Eden, with whom she had been eager that Jack have the benefit of, in her phrase, “an exchange of ideas.” Despite the conspicuous presence of Eden, however, it was Peter Fitzwilliam of whom she spoke confidentially to her brother in Ireland. She told Jack that she was in love with Peter, whom she compared to Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind;
and she urged her brother not to say anything of the affair to their parents until she had had a chance to speak to them herself.

More and more, however, other people—people whom Kick would have preferred at this stage to believe that if she was romantically interested in anyone, it was in Eden—were beginning to discover her secret. Indeed, it was not long after Kick returned to London following the house party that Jean Lloyd accidentally found out about Fitzwilliam.

Jean and Kick were alone at Smith Square of an evening when the telephone rang during dinner. Kick left the room to take the call. When she returned she said casually, “That was Peter.”

“Is that Peter Cazalet?” said Jean, referring to one of the young men from their prewar set.

“No,” said Kick. “Peter Fitzwilliam.”

Jean—who had come to know Fitzwilliam during the war, when he had been staying at the same hotel in Scotland as she and her husband while the latter pursued a two-month gunnery training program—was appalled. Now, nearly a decade after Nancy Astor had assigned her to “look after” Kick, Jean still felt bound by that charge, still felt hugely protective of her friend. But whereas the Little American Girl had been eager to be guided in matters she admittedly did not understand, Lady Hartington had seemingly earned the right to make her own distinctions. Jean therefore struggled to remain silent, though she would always feel that Kick could not but have perceived her alarm upon hearing Fitzwilliam’s name.

The next time she saw Kick, the meeting took place by chance. Happening upon her at Wilson’s, a bar where some of the younger aristocrats liked to have lunch, Jean ruefully remarked that Kick appeared to have “gone in a different direction,” an allusion—but no more than that—to her relationship with Fitzwilliam.

Sadly and softly, Kick insisted that she had not.

Yet even Kick could hardly deny that the affair had begun to open a breach between her and some of her old friends. Notably, David Ormsby-Gore, when he spoke to Kick of his concerns, proved a good deal more plainspoken than Jean had been. David passionately maintained that she could never be happy with a man as dissolute and self-indulgent as Fitzwilliam. With equal ardor, she countered that David simply did not know Peter as she did. As far as Kick was concerned, because of the public stand that Peter had taken against Shinwell and the socialists, her argument had the force of truth.

Even if her old friends failed to see him that way, she really had managed to cast him, at least to herself, in a most flattering light. Jean, David, and others in their circle regarded this as self-deception on Kick’s part. They judged that her passion for Fitzwilliam was as blinding as it was all-consuming.

Most complicated, perhaps, was the attitude taken by Billy’s sister Elizabeth. Like the others, she doubted that in the end any marriage to a man of Peter Fitzwilliam’s habits and propensities could possibly last. He had been willing to destroy his first wife; why would he not be prepared to do the same to her successor, should it suit him? Still, when late in 1947 Kick finally decided to accept Fitzwilliam’s marriage proposal, Elizabeth agreed to accompany her to the U.S. “for moral support” when she told Rose and Joe the news. Elizabeth could see that Kick was “absolutely terrified” of facing the Kennedys. In 1944, Elizabeth, rather than leave her recently widowed sister-in-law alone, had slept on the floor beside Kick’s bed night after night at Compton Place. Now, three years later, she was equally intent that Kick always have a loyal friend nearby in the difficult days to come. The plan was for Kick to fly to the U.S. in February 1948, rather than travel by boat. Elizabeth would join her there at the beginning of March.

At this point, Kick’s parents had no idea that the impending visit was to be anything other than routine. If her letters home had given the Kennedys reason to worry, it would have been about her relationship with Anthony Eden, of whom she spoke openly and warmly. She wrote of visits to Eden’s country house in Chichester and of the political talk she had heard there. She threw out tantalizing bits of gossip about the Conservative Party’s internecine power struggles, and she suggested that when she arrived home presently she would have a good deal more to tell. She expressed the hope that her father was prepared to sit at home every night in Palm Beach listening to her talk her “great big head off.” She suggested that her theme would be postwar British politics, though she well knew what the true subject of those conversations must inevitably be.