Black Diamonds (47 page)

The
Queen Mary
was one of many luxury liners to be commandeered as a US troop carrier in mid-1943. ‘Heavy fighting is coming before autumn leaves fall,’ Winston Churchill warned the British people at the end of June. Persistent cloud and light rain had hovered over the Atlantic for weeks: under the cover of the propitious weather conditions, wave upon wave of the troop ships – grey misty shapes slipping through a grey mist – stole from ports along America’s East Coast carrying their precious cargo: reinforcements of men and materials – the build-up to the Allies’ invasion of Europe.

Kick was one of a number of Red Cross volunteers travelling on the
Queen Mary
. The atmosphere on board the ship was tense: 300 officers, 160 Army nurses and 18,000 GIs crammed every inch of floor space. ‘The only lounge available to the officers is the one main one and you can imagine how crowded that is at all hours of the day,’ Kick wrote. ‘And the deck space is about 40 feet long for walking. I pace 400 or 500 times a day trying to eke a mile out of it.’

It had been ‘Black May’ for the German U-boats: that month, a total of forty-one were destroyed in the Atlantic as a result of developments in sonar and radar technology and the breaking of the German Navy’s Engima code. But still, as Kick recorded, the danger was great: ‘
About a half-hour
after each sharp swerve we are informed that this good ship has just missed a sub. There’s another one. It was probably about nine miles to starboard.’ As the ship zigzagged its way across the Atlantic, when not pacing the decks or standing in a long line with her mess kit waiting for the twice-daily regulation meals, Kick spent her time on her bunk reading or writing home to her family. ‘This life on an Army troop transport has been an eye-opener. It seems too unreal and far removed from anything I’ve ever known that I can’t believe I’m a part of it. Sometimes it almost feels like a dream … This arrival certainly is going to be very different from the last one.’

Five years earlier, in 1938, the Kennedy family had docked at Plymouth on a mild overcast day in March amidst a storm of publicity.

Kick, then aged eighteen, wearing, as the newspapers reported, a beaver coat, ‘her hat a brown heart-shaped halo with a spotted veil, her eyes blue starry bright’, had lined up with her brothers and sisters against the handrail of the 20,000-ton liner
Washington
to pose for photographers. Her father, Joe Kennedy, who had travelled ahead of his family, was there to greet them. ‘Now I’ve got everything,’ he announced to the horde of waiting reporters, ‘London is going to be just grand.’

Joe Kennedy was America’s new Ambassador to Britain. His appointment was highly controversial: it was the first time America had sent an Irish Catholic – and a self-made man – to the Court of St James.

Brash, abrasive and extraordinarily rich, in the 1920s Kennedy had amassed one of America’s largest private fortunes. To the disdain of Manhattan’s ruling White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families and the old Bostonian Catholic dynasties, his money had been made through a series of speculative ventures. As a movie mogul in Hollywood he had cashed $5 million and produced the first talking picture starring the ‘Queen of Hollywood’, Gloria Swanson. In 1929, in the weeks leading up to the Wall Street Crash, he netted $15 million driving the bear market, selling his vast share portfolio and making millions more when he reinvested it after the index reached rock bottom. By 1930, when he was forty-two, he was reputedly worth over $100 million.

Kennedy was deeply ambitious. Exploiting his friendship with Jimmy Roosevelt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s eldest son, he had lobbied relentlessly for the job of Ambassador.
When the President
was first told by his son that the freckle-faced, red-headed Irishman wanted to represent his country in London, he had laughed so hard ‘he almost toppled from his wheelchair’. The idea, as FDR subsequently told Dorothy Schiff, the owner of the
New York Post
, was ‘a great joke, the greatest joke in the world’.

The position of Ambassador to Britain – one held by five future US Presidents – had traditionally been reserved for the heads of America’s powerful old-moneyed Protestant families. Kennedy, the son of a saloon keeper, had grown up in East Boston on the wrong side of the tracks. Just two generations separated him from the ‘coffin ships’. His grandparents had been among the hundreds of thousands who risked their lives crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century to escape death from starvation during the Irish Potato Famine.

It was not only Joe’s pedigree that had caused the President to rock with laughter: his reputation hardly equipped him for such high office. A notorious philanderer, he had been famously linked with Gloria Swanson; he was also rumoured, as a consequence of his activities in the bootleg whisky trade in the Prohibition years, to have links with crime. Yet Roosevelt owed Kennedy a substantial favour. In the early 1930s, Joe’s millions had helped him win the democratic nomination; further donations in 1932 and 1936 had been instrumental to the success of his Presidential campaigns. Mulling over whether to give him the job he so coveted, FDR decided to play his own joke.

Jimmy Roosevelt was with his father when Joe called to discuss the appointment. After ushering him into the Oval Office, the President asked Kennedy to stand opposite him by the fireplace, so that he could ‘get a good look at him’. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘would you mind taking your pants down?’ Looking, as Jimmy described, ‘silly and embarrassed’, Kennedy did as he was asked, his trousers dropping to the floor.

‘Joe, just look at your legs,’ FDR chided. ‘You are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen. Don’t you know that the Ambassador to the Court of St James’s has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee breeches and silk stockings? Can you imagine how you’ll look? When photos of our new Ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughing stock. You’re just not right for the job, Joe.’

‘Mr President,’ replied Kennedy, ‘if I can get the permission of His Majesty’s Government to wear a cutaway coat and striped pants to the ceremony, would you agree to appoint me?’

‘Well, Joe, you know how the British are about tradition. There’s no way you are going to get permission, and I must name a new Ambassador soon.’

‘Will you give me two weeks?’

Joe left, leaving the President chuckling. He had already decided to give him the job. He wanted Kennedy out of the way. Over the years, their relationship had been competitive and mistrustful. Mooted as a challenger to Roosevelt, Kennedy had frequently criticized the President in public. Privately, as he confided to his Secretary to the Treasury, Roosevelt regarded him as a ‘
very dangerous man
’. Banishing him to the plum position at the Court of St James seemed a smart way of getting rid of him. He also hoped, in making such a maverick appointment, that Kennedy, with his reputation for straight-talking, would offer a clear perspective on the increasingly threatening European situation: as FDR knew, previous US Ambassadors to London – resolute Anglophiles drawn from America’s grand Protestant dynasties – had displayed a tendency to turn native.

Quite how unconventional Joe Kennedy was became apparent on his first day in London, when he railed against the refined interior of the US Embassy. ‘I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect is a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May. If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my life,’ Kennedy wrote to Jimmy Roosevelt. ‘I have just made my first trip around through the building. Not only was the designer a fairy, but he was probably the most inefficient architect I have ever seen.’

From the moment he arrived in London, America’s new Ambassador courted the British Press, his lavish entertaining and unconventional style supplying the newspapers with yards of lively copy. Characterized as the gum-chewing envoy with ‘lots of go’, Kennedy was hailed as ‘One of the most dynamic men in the present-day life of the United States’. ‘To the London crowd’, the
Star
reported, he embodies ‘the sparkling vitality of a continent’.
After he referred
to the Queen as a ‘cute trick’, it made front-page headlines; so did his breach of royal etiquette at a ball at Buckingham Palace when, striding directly up to her, he had asked her to dance without waiting to be invited to do so by her equerry. Guests invited to dinner at the Ambassador’s residence overlooking Hyde Park at 14 Princes Gate, a palatial six-storey building staffed by twenty-six servants, were treated to the latest Hollywood film after their meal; when the King and Queen dined, they were shown an uncut version of
Goodbye Mr Chips
.

But it was the Ambassador’s nine children – the boys with their American crewcuts and handsome faces, the girls similarly wholesome-looking – the whole Kennedy magic – that most enthralled the British Press. Joe Kennedy was as ambitious for his children – his ‘nine hostages to fortune’, as he once called them – as he was for himself. ‘You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the laws of nature, that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged,’ Charles Spalding, a family friend, recalled of a weekend spent at Hyannis Port, the Kennedys’ summer home, in the late 1930s. ‘There was endless talk – the Ambassador at the head of the table laying out the prevailing wisdom, but everyone else weighing in with their opinions and taking part. It was a scene of endless competition, people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came into contact with them. They were a unit.’

Fleet Street followed the young Kennedys’ every move: six-year-old Teddy’s attempt to take a photograph upside down at the Changing of the Guard outside St James’s Palace; thirteen-year-old Bobby’s awkward efforts to engage Princess Elizabeth in conversation at a tea party at Buckingham Palace. Judging from the Kennedys’ giddy letters home to their friends, they were evidently as enthralled with their new life in Britain as the British public seemed to be with them. ‘
Met the King
this morning at Court Levee,’ wrote Jack Kennedy to his friend Lem Billings: ‘It takes place in the morning and you wear tails. The King stands and you go up and bow. Met Queen Mary and was at tea with Princess Elizabeth, with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night I’m going to Court in my new silk breeches which are cut to my crotch tightly and in which I look mighty attractive.’

Seventeen-year-old Eunice was similarly entranced by her presentation at Court: ‘As I entered the Palace more excitement and joy seized me than ever before in my life,’ she wrote in her diary.

During the first moment of waiting, I was breathlessly excited; then a strong rich voice called MISS KENNEDY and I started to walk alone toward their Majesties. I glanced upward and wondered if ever I would reach the throne thirty feet away; but somehow, I did. As I made my curtsey … I realized that at this moment I was the center of interest of this King and Queen and all the pompous ceremony that England holds so sacred. Shortly after midnight, I left the Palace for home, happy in the realization that I had achieved the aim of every young girl – that of being presented at the Court of St James – the world’s greatest empire – ‘The Empire upon which the sun never sets’.

But of all the Kennedy children, it was Kick who drew the most attention.

In 1938, in her first season as a debutante, she dazzled English society as few American women ever had. Catapulted into the limelight – and into the highest strata of the pre-war social whirl – by her father’s position, she was presented at Court two months after arriving in London. In advance of her debut,
Queen
, the leading society magazine, devoted a one-page spread to her, bearing the headline ‘America’s Most Important Debutante’. At the coming-out ball that followed Kick’s presentation, the Ambassador spared no expense.
Eighty guests
were entertained to dinner at Princes Gate, a further 300 joining them for the dance afterwards. London’s most fashionable jazz band, the Ambrose Band, was hired for the evening to play in the ballroom, filled with clouds of purple and pink flowers.

Kick danced every dance, her partners including the Duke of Kent, Prince Leopold and Viscount Newport. At eighteen, she was not conventionally beautiful. She had mousy-brown hair, her face was a little too square and her figure slightly plump. The catch-all expression ‘handsome’ was how she was described. It was her personality that captivated the Press and her contemporaries. ‘When she came into a room,’ her friend Dinah Bridge, Lady Astor’s niece, said, ‘everybody seemed to lighten up. She made everyone feel terribly happy and gay.’ ‘She was just “Darling Kick”,’ recalled Janie Compton, Kick’s closest friend from her debutante days. ‘I adored her. She was absolutely enchanting. A heavenly person. She was very genuine, very kind and very funny.’ Kick’s letters home to her friends in America about life in London were comic and ironic, traits largely absent in those of her brothers and sisters. Of her own presentation at Court she wrote to Jack’s friend Lem Billings, ‘Wish you could be here for it. I so often think of you when I meet a guy who thinks he’s absolutely the tops and is just a big ham … Very few of them take any kidding at all.’ In another letter to Billings, written from Cliveden, the Astors’ country seat, she wrote breezily, ‘Very chummy and much gaiety. Dukes running around like mad freshmen.’

Kick was her father’s daughter: like the Ambassador, she was tough and unconventional – sides to her character which impressed her English contemporaries in the course of one grand country house weekend. Soon after arriving in England, she was invited to stay at Hatfield House, the home of the Marquess of Salisbury and the Cecil family. In the late 1930s, the vast Jacobean mansion was still run in high Edwardian style, requiring a 100-strong staff.

Veronica Fraser
, the daughter of Lord Lovat, was one of a dozen young people in the house party. At the start of the weekend, Kick, she remembered, was regarded as an interloper. As an Irish-American Catholic, she was a social upstart in her fellow guests’ eyes, and some of them took a dim view of having an ‘outsider’ foisted in their midst. The boys decided to play a joke on her; in a peculiarly aristocratic version of bullying, they stole all her left shoes and hid them in Hatfield’s centuries-old maze. For the entire weekend Kick was forced to hobble around on a mismatched pair of right-feet shoes. ‘Why are you limping, Kick?’ the other girls, entering into the boys’ conspiracy, were primed to ask. ‘Oh,’ she replied when it came to Veronica’s turn, ‘Robert broke my leg before dinner.’ What a great sport, Veronica thought. She was also charmed by Kick’s disarmingly frank ignorance of the social etiquette at a grand country house weekend. At least ten times on her first day, she nudged Veronica or caught her eye, mouthing ‘OK, so what do I do now?’