Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (13 page)

Death had become a factor in the young people’s lives in a way it simply hadn’t been before. Constantly, inescapably, one was reminded of one’s mortality. Tony Loughborough—now Tony Rosslyn, the 6th Earl of Rosslyn—wrote to Jack Kennedy of how unsettling it was to realize that friends with whom one had attended Eton, boys with whom one had once played games, suddenly no longer existed: “Every few days one reads of another shot down in the air or killed at sea.” Jean Ogilvy narrowly escaped being killed when she and a Women’s Voluntary Service coworker with whom she had dined in London changed plans at the last minute, staying the night at her family’s surviving mews cottage rather than at the friend’s residence, which a bomb proceeded to destroy that very evening. And of course there was the prevailing sense that if the Germans ever did manage to occupy Britain, it would be, in Tony Rosslyn’s words, “over the dead bodies of all our 44,000,000 that are old enough to bear arms.” Under the circumstances, Debo and Andrew were far from the only couples who found themselves rushing into marriages they might otherwise have put off for years, or perhaps never have entered into at all. As Nancy Astor was to declare in another context, it was difficult, if not impossible, for anyone who was not then in Britain to comprehend quite what it was like there as a consequence of the war: “Nobody could—it has all changed so.”

Two weeks after Nancy Astor sent off her warning to Kick, there occurred in Billy’s life precisely the sort of event that had been causing a good many young people of late to drastically rethink their personal timetables. Billy had an evening off in London, where the nightclubs were regularly packed with merrymakers determined to live life to the fullest, not so much in spite of the bombs as in defiance of them. He and the other young grandees tended to travel in packs, and since Kick’s return to the U.S. he had regularly squired various young women whom he’d known for much of his life and whom he regarded as “pals,” such as Rene Haig and Sally Norton.

On this particular Saturday evening, March 8, 1941, he and Sally Norton arrived by taxi at Coventry Street in Soho, shortly after a pair of 50-kilogram high-explosive bombs had hit the Café de Paris, killing thirty-four customers, club staff, and band members, and gravely injuring dozens of other people. Bodies were being removed as the taxi pulled up, and Billy rushed into the club to assist.

Illuminated by torches and cigarette lighters, the scene that greeted Billy on the plush dance floor, some twenty feet belowground, was horrific—headless, limbless bodies; blood and death everywhere. Having encountered similar piles of mutilated corpses of the innocent in France, he found that he was strangely numbed to the nightclub carnage. The establishment’s subterranean location had been generally assumed to provide a modicum of safety against the aerial pounding. Tonight, however, the bombs had roared down a ventilation shaft from the roof, exploding in the midst of the crowded dance floor. Billy, when he told the story afterward to his brother, emphasized that had he and his companion arrived but ten minutes earlier one or both of them might have been killed.

On April 19, 1941, Billy served as best man at his brother’s wedding ceremony in London’s oldest surviving church. Andrew and Debo had been attracted to St. Bartholomew the Great, which had been in continuous use since the twelfth century, for its reassuring aura of permanence and stability in a world that seemed to have been turned “upside-down” by war.

As it happened, the setting for the reception that followed, the ballroom of Lord Redesdale’s house in Rutland Gate, bore the marks of the random violence and sudden, shocking upheaval that the young people had been hoping to escape for at least a few hours on their wedding day. Shortly beforehand, bombs had blown out all of the windows, shredding curtains and littering floors with broken glass. By the time the guests arrived, Debo’s mother had had the debris removed and the windows covered over with faux curtains, in the form of gray and gold wallpaper strips that left the house precariously exposed to the elements. Fortunately, the weather proved to be mild that day.

For the members of the set, there was something upside-down as well about Andrew’s being the first of the brothers to marry. Even he had been heard to exclaim, on the eve of his nuptials, that he was much too young to be doing this. The second son had long striven to catch up to Billy. And indeed the previous November, much to Billy’s annoyance, Andrew had been commissioned as an officer in the same battalion of the Coldstream Guards, the Fifth, in which Billy was already serving. Billy and Andrew soon often found themselves to be near neighbors when training, and the arrangement appeared to work out no better than when, as boys, they were forced to share a room. Now, Andrew had taken the lead over his brother by becoming a husband—and more.

The newlyweds honeymooned at Compton Place, where German bombers nightly roared overhead, en route to London. Not long after the honeymoon, Debo announced that she was “in pig,” as she referred to being pregnant. She and Andrew were wonderfully happy together during this period, living in the various improvised quarters of a soldier’s marriage while he trained in various parts of the country.

There would come a day in the not too distant future when Billy would write to Kick: “It was a very long time before I gave up all hope of marrying you.” It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when that abandonment of hope occurred. But surely the process began in the wake of Ambassador Kennedy’s resignation, when Billy had had to absorb that Kick was not likely to return before the end of the war. He might have been able to bear that knowledge with equanimity had he still been the person whom Kick had last seen in September 1939. As it was, what he had confided to Jean Ogilvy in June of 1940 remained powerfully true many months later. To his cousin’s perception, at moments Billy appeared almost to be living more in Belgium and France than in London. Far from having abated, his need to go back and finish the fight seemed to have grown the more urgent and intense. He saw himself as having come home to England but “temporarily.” He regarded it as unquestionable that he must return to battle before very long; and he would tolerate no suggestion, however well meant, to the contrary. If he were to become a husband and a father, if he were to produce an heir, if he were to enjoy at least some portion of the private happiness that most men desire, he sensed that he must accomplish all of these things before he left.

By degrees, the people around Billy began to detect a shift in his relations with Sally Norton. Rene Haig, to her manifest disappointment, ceased to be an alternate companion when Billy was on leave. Now, it was left solely to Sally Norton to accompany him to fashionable London restaurants and nightclubs on her days off from war work. She held a top-secret position at Bletchley Park, where she applied the language skills that she had honed at a German finishing school before the war. On official orders to give no hint of her role in the breaking of Nazi codes, she steadfastly described herself to family and friends, including Billy, as a Foreign Office clerk. Less discreet about her new role in the life of the duke’s heir, Sally made a point of routinely, and to not a few ears gratingly, referring to him in company as “my Billy.” The duchess certainly noted the altered dynamic; so did Debo, Andrew, Jean, Fiona, and others. Within that circle, it was said disparagingly of Sally Norton that she was “after Billy.” Billy would later reflect that during this period he attempted to make up his mind that under the circumstances he “should have to make do with second best.”

Kick had told Billy that she hoped 1941 would bring them together again, and in the late spring a dramatic change in Germany’s war strategy seemed to make that objective somewhat less impracticable. On May 9, 1941, the last and worst of the bombing raids on London took place, leaving a record fourteen hundred people dead and reducing to rubble the Chamber of the House of Commons. In the weeks that followed, though sporadic bombing persisted, it soon became apparent that the war was moving in a different direction. On the twenty-second of June, the Germans unleashed their military might against the Soviet Union. The invasion of Russia meant that for a time at least, the threat of a Nazi invasion of the British mainland seemed to be in abeyance. London was no longer the impossibly dangerous place it had been during the Blitz. As Kick would soon argue to her father, though bombs continued to fall on London, she was as likely to be hit by one there as she was to be struck by an automobile at home in the U.S.

Ironically, it was Joe Kennedy who inadvertently provided Kick with the opportunity she had long been seeking. When she earned her junior college diploma that spring, her father suggested that she consider a career in journalism. He had encouraged his two eldest sons to make their mark by writing about world events and the European scene, and now he had it in mind for Kick to find employment at a newspaper in Washington, D.C. Working there would put her in what he portrayed as “the thick of things” in the world’s most important capital at a critical time in history. Though her father clearly never planned for her to use the job to catapult herself back to London, that, she would later acknowledge, had been her intention from the first when old Joe’s friend Arthur Krock arranged for her to be hired as a secretary to Frank Waldrop, executive editor of the ultraconservative, isolationist newspaper the
Washington Times Herald
.

In the
Times Herald
’s culture, assisting Waldrop was regarded as a stepping-stone toward other more important assignments. Waldrop liked to try out new girls, often wealthy former debutantes like Kick (and in later years Jacqueline Bouvier, the future Mrs. John F. Kennedy), to determine whether they were serious about journalism or merely intended to “hang around” until they made a suitable marriage. Meanwhile, being rich, they provided the newspaper with a cheap form of labor. If at length Waldrop judged a girl to be sincere, he liked to take his time deciding exactly where she belonged in the organization.

Hardly had Kick moved to Washington and reported to work in September of 1941 that it seemed as if she were about to demonstrate to Waldrop that a career in news was far from her priority. Obviously it was going to take a while before she advanced to the reportorial position she saw as her ticket to London. So, for all of her grand talk to her parents about wanting to be a journalist, she was very happy indeed when another friend of her father’s, Carmel Offie, told her that he could arrange to get her over to London immediately. By this point, Kick had heard nothing from Billy for, in her phrase, “simply ages,” so the shortcut suggested by Offie could scarcely have been more opportune.

Offie, the former assistant to U.S. ambassador to France William Bullitt, had the reputation of a “fixer”; his methods were frequently illegitimate or in the neighborhood thereof. In the present instance, he promised to use his personal influence with his new boss, the recently designated U.S. ambassador minister to the exile governments in London, Anthony Drexel Biddle, to provide Kick with the coveted visa. Offie assured her that Biddle would “do anything” for him. On October 3, 1941, Kick wrote to tell Joe Kennedy of Offie’s involvement, and to let her father know that the one thing she still needed was his consent. She underscored that she had a good many friends whom she would really like to see, “and even if the British feel a little embittered about your opinion in the present struggle I don’t think any real friends such as I have would let that bother them. And even if it does as Offie says ‘the hell with them.’”

On October 20, 1941, Kick had yet to hear back from Joe Kennedy when she had lunch in Washington with Dinah Brand. Nancy Astor’s niece had just arrived in Washington to live with her widowed father, Bob Brand, who was then the director of the British food relief program. She brought with her urgent messages, both written and spoken, for Kick. Dinah handed Kick a letter in which Debo and Andrew implored her to come at once and “save” Billy from Sally Norton, who had him “in the bag.” Other friends had asked Dinah to personally convey similar pleas. Even after Dinah had left Britain en route to the U.S., during a stopover in Portugal she had encountered Fiona Gore, who’d added her own forthright voice to the chorus. Andrew, for his part, wrote at the urging of his mother. Sally Norton was not what the duchess wanted for her son; nor, she believed, was Sally quite what Billy himself wanted and needed. The duchess remained determined that he marry the girl of his heart, not the girl he had lately chosen as a matter of wartime expediency. Indeed, that it was Kick whom Billy still really loved was the underlying assumption of all the people who reached out to her through Dinah Brand. He and Sally Norton were set to publicly announce their engagement in January of 1942. Andrew, Debo, and the others were certain that Kick needed only to come back to prevent that from taking place.

After lunch, Kick returned to the office, where she poured out the news in a frenzied letter to her father. Two weeks before, Kick had been careful to maintain the long-established pretense that she wished merely to see old friends in London. In this follow-up message, she made no effort to conceal why she was really so anxious to travel to the war-ravaged city even though she had just begun a new job. This time, there was no subterfuge, no artifice; there was, after all, not a moment to be lost. She spoke openly of the urgent messages about Billy that had just been transmitted to her, and of the engagement announcement that she yet hoped to prevent. And she was honest about the chaos of her emotions: “I am nearly going mad,” Kick disclosed to her father. “… I am so anxious to go back that I can hardly sit still.”

This was her condition of mind when, on the evening of the twenty-first, she received the letter in which Billy spoke of having waited a very long time before he’d given up hope of marrying her. He said he had never been engaged before, thanks to Kick. He fondly reflected that what sense of humor he possessed he owed to her. He related the news that (unbeknownst to him) she had already heard from Debo, Andrew, and the rest; and more than a little oddly, he asked her to keep writing in spite of his engagement to Sally Norton.