Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (26 page)

As she waited to return to England, she took out her diary and wrote: “So ends the story of Billy and Kick … I can’t believe that the one thing I felt might happen should have happened—Billy is dead—… Life is so cruel—… Writing is impossible.”

Also in Quebec City, she found herself rereading the letter that Billy had written to her from Giberville in the aftermath of Operation Goodwood, in which he had bidden her to face the possibility that this time, in contrast to other partings in their past, they might not be reunited after all. When she first read that letter—before the Bakewell Fair and before the tragic news about Joe and then Billy—she had focused on Billy’s talk of death.

Now, it was another element of the letter that drew her attention: her late husband’s “orders” as to what he would wish her to do should he indeed fail to return from the war zone. Billy wrote: “I’ll just say that if anything should happen to me I shall be wanting you to try to isolate our life together, to face its finish, and to start a new one as soon as you feel you can. I hope that you will marry again, quite soon—someone good & nice.”

Kick copied out Billy’s words in a letter to her parents written from the Château Frontenac, adding pointedly and poignantly: “I like to think about what he said and though it makes me sad to write this I just want you both to know what B’s orders were.”

Ten

Eddy Devonshire was waiting for Kick when the special train from Poole Harbour arrived in London at about half past two in the afternoon on Friday, September 22, 1944.

As soon as Lord Halifax had arranged for her to travel back to England, word had been sent to the Duke of Devonshire that she would soon be en route. In the course of the flight from Quebec City, the Air Ministry kept the duke apprised of the aircraft’s progress. So when a blinding mist caused the plane to alter course, landing initially at Plymouth rather than at the planned destination, Poole Harbour, the duke had been promptly notified. At Plymouth, Kick and the British chiefs of staff lingered over breakfast at the RAF mess until word arrived that the weather had cleared. Presently, they flew to Poole Harbour, where their special train awaited.

The duke wanted there to be no chance that he would fail to be there when his widowed daughter-in-law stepped off the train. In anticipation that Kick might be tearful and in need of physical comforting, he had arranged for Mrs. Bruce to accompany him. Two weeks after the death of his son and heir, the duke remained absolutely devastated. And, though of course no one knew it at the time, his state of despair was to persist for the rest of his life. He would long drink to excess, and he would chop wood in an obsessive fashion in hopes of lessening his anguish. When, in 1950, Eddy Devonshire died of a massive heart attack, a photograph of Billy would be discovered in the lid of the Russian silver cigarette box that the duke kept in his coat pocket. It was the photograph that Jean Lloyd had taken with her Brownie box camera on a sunny spring morning in her garden in Yorkshire, showing Kick and Billy in what was for the latter a moment of perfect satisfaction, as both his marriage and his return to the battlefield were finally guaranteed.

The grieving father who collected Kick at the train station and brought her back to his suite at the Mayfair Hotel to be reunited with other family members bore no trace of his former negativity about her. Nor did there seem to be any residue of the bad feeling that had previously existed about Kick’s decision to fly back to the Kennedys in the U.S. when the duke and duchess perceived that her proper place was with her husband’s family. For the duke and duchess, from this point on Kick served as a living reminder of their beloved son and heir, whose remains, to their further anguish, had been buried not in the graveyard at Chatsworth, but rather in Belgium, beside the graves of other Guardsmen. As Moucher Devonshire, speaking of herself and her husband, would later tell Rose Kennedy, Kick had the miraculous capacity “to bring Billy back to us more than anyone else can.”

The duke and duchess’s firstborn had come so close to dying in infancy that it had always somehow struck them as a miracle that he had survived. Then, in 1940, they had again feared that he was lost to them, only to again be given the gift of his return. In 1944, however, there had been no miracle, no gift of good news; and it struck Debo, who was at the Mayfair with the other family members when the duke came in with Kick, that Eddy and Moucher’s hopes for the future had “died” with the loss of Billy. Both parents loved Andrew, of course, but, quite simply, the second son was not to them as Billy had been.

Debo had been visiting with Diana Mosley and her husband when she learned of Billy’s death, and she had gone at once to Compton Place to be with the duke and duchess and their daughters. When she and Kick faced one another on September 22, 1944, a mere month had passed since they had stood on either side of Billy and Andrew’s paternal grandmother, Duchess Evie, at the Bakewell Fair. That August day, both young Cavendish wives had been content and seemingly settled about their respective futures. Despite Andrew’s lifelong jealousy of his brother, Debo had been very pleased indeed with the prospect of being the wife of a publisher and politician, a man who adored her beyond measure. A month later, Debo’s life had been instantly upended by Billy’s death, and by Andrew’s ascendency to the long-coveted position of heir to the dukedom.

For Debo, all of this was immensely complicated by the fact that she was personally so fond of Kick, and well aware of the excitement with which both Billy and her sister-in-law had been looking forward to their future roles and responsibilities. Suddenly, it seemed, Debo was to have the life that would have been Kick’s, had not fate intervened. The abrupt shift in the two young women’s respective fortunes was responsible for a certain undertone of awkwardness at the time of their reunion. Nothing was said of course, but the tension was palpable.

At least as Debo would remember it, however, it all took the form of but a vague awareness on her part, for her focus at the moment was on her fears for Andrew’s safety on the Italian Front. In light of Billy’s death, she had asked Duke Eddy whether something might yet be done to bring Andrew home at once. But her father-in-law had replied that, having failed in his efforts to save Charlie Lansdowne, he had no hope of getting Andrew home until the war was at an end. Nancy Mitford, who saw Debo in London during this visit, thought that her sister seemed “distracted” by her concerns for her husband; and as Debo would recall many years later, indeed she had been. Not for nothing, Debo had dubbed this summer of 1944 “the summer of death.” The recent deaths of Ned Fitzmaurice and Charlie Lansdowne had been almost more than she could bear. Even as she grieved for Ned and Charlie, she found herself thinking about what their deaths might foretell with regard to another set of aristocratic brothers. Would Andrew fall soon after his brother, as Charlie Lansdowne had been killed soon after his? Would the dreaded telegram arrive addressed to Debo, as previously it had come for Kick?

Of the Cavendish sisters-in-law, Kick at this point seems to have perceived the more sharply the profound alteration in their respective circumstances. Quite apart from anything to do with love, her relationship with Billy had also long been about matters of identity, ambition, and power. By 1944, she had become as never before, in Richard Wood’s phrase, “very clear about what she wanted.” Now, all that had fallen away from her. Now, it was Debo, not Kick, who would one day be duchess—and whose son would one day be a duke. What, then, would Kick’s role be? She suddenly had no idea.

When she wrote to her parents and siblings from Compton Place soon after she returned to England, she highlighted her lost sense of identity and purpose. Prior to Billy’s death, she wrote, her life had “had its purpose. I knew what it would be. Now I feel like a small cork that is tossing around.” In a similar vein, she would later write to her brother Jack: “It just seems that the pattern of life for me has been destroyed. At the moment I don’t fit into any design.”

And there was worse: In America her young husband’s death had had an air almost of unreality. At Compton Place—where she and Billy had had their honeymoon less than five months before—everything served as a trigger of memories that were at once painful and bittersweet. “The realization of Billy’s death has come to me very acutely here,” she wrote that first full day at Compton Place, “and I should probably have spared myself a great deal of agony if I had remained in America … now that I am here … every thing reminds me of him so much.”

In New York and Hyannis Port, she had done what she could to hold her emotions in check, to mourn, as it were, in the traditional Kennedy manner. At Compton Place, by contrast, her feelings—often provoked by the countless reminders—poured out in an unstoppable torrent. Years later, Billy’s sister Elizabeth would reflect that she had never in her life seen anything quite like Kick’s wrenching grief. It was so overwhelming that, the duke and duchess agreed, the young widow could not possibly be left alone in her room at night. Elizabeth, the shy girl whose evening dress Ned Fitzmaurice had accidentally set afire at the November 13, 1943, party—a party that now seemed less an evocation of prewar frivolity and ease than an adumbration of the tragedy to come—had herself just lost a beloved brother. Nonetheless, with her mother’s encouragement, the eighteen-year-old instantly accepted the role of devoted consoler and protector of that brother’s widow. Elizabeth volunteered to sleep on the floor beside Kick’s bed each night. If Kick screamed out in her sleep, or if she just needed someone to talk to, Billy’s sister was determined to be there to comfort her.

On September 26, just four days after her arrival in Britain, Kick attended a Catholic Mass for Billy and young Joe, and she received Communion for the first time since her marriage. But if Kick had hoped that her Church-sanctioned return to the Communion railing would provide some solace, as religious ritual had long seemed to do for her mother, it soon became apparent that this was not to be the case—at least not now. Far from being comforted by the Catholic Church’s renewed embrace, the widow reacted with slow-burning resentment to what she took to be the Church’s abiding message that her marriage to Billy had been wrong. The very idea remained anathema to her.

Her mother’s view, implicit in much that Rose Kennedy did and said, that Kick’s relationship with Billy had indeed been sinful and that in some strange way Billy’s death had been a punishment for the couple’s transgressions, would contribute to a painful breach between mother and daughter that was never to be healed. The contrast between Rose’s response to Kick’s loss and that of Billy’s mother and sisters was another factor in Kick’s increasingly fraught relations with the Kennedy matriarch. Jack Kennedy would long complain of his mother’s failure, when he was a boy, to hold him, to touch him, to give him the physical affection a child craves and requires. Kick, who early on had assumed the lonely role of their mother’s protector and defender in the family, now found herself to be in uneasy agreement with Jack about Rose’s shortcomings as a parent. In the company of the duchess, Elizabeth, and Anne, Kick discovered, and thrived on, the emotional and physical comfort that had been denied her in Hyannis Port. Literally as well as figuratively, Billy’s mother and sisters embraced Kick as her own mother simply had failed to do.

There was to be a memorial service for Billy at Chatsworth on Saturday, the thirtieth of September, and Kick worried that the occasion would only exacerbate her great sadness. The golden palace had played such an important part in her and Billy’s dreams for the future. Now it called to mind all that was gone. For Billy’s family as well, the day proved to be extremely painful. The last major family event there before the duke and duchess had decamped to Churchdale Hall had been Billy’s coming-of-age celebration in August of 1939. Rose Kennedy had prevented Kick from attending that party, but Billy’s parents and sisters each had highly emotional memories of the day, memories that made their return for his memorial service all the more difficult. Eddy Devonshire perhaps suffered the most, so much so that he made a point of vowing never to set foot in Chatsworth again. The service took place in the church in Edensor, beside which stood the cemetery in which Billy’s mother would very much have preferred that her son be laid to rest with other family members, had wartime conditions not precluded the return of his remains.

For Kick, the day proved to be all that she had feared, and at intervals the tears poured down her cheeks. To make matters worse, on this and other occasions when she encountered individuals from outside the duke and duchess’s immediate family circle, she had to endure the stares and speculation of people who, well disposed to her though they might be, were inevitably curious about whether Billy’s widow might yet produce an heir.

The question of Lady Hartington’s possible pregnancy was then on many lips. Kick had been in the U.S. since the middle of August. Conceivably, at the time of her departure from Britain after her brother’s death she might have been pregnant, if not yet visibly so. If there were to be a child, and if that child were to be a son, then he, not Andrew, would eventually inherit the dukedom and all that came with it. Meanwhile, in the absence of such a child, Andrew would officially become Marquess of Hartington and Debo the marchioness one year after Billy’s death. Kick, known as the Dowager Marchioness of Hartington, or as Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington, would also be called Lady Hartington; but so, under the circumstances, would Debo.

The duke and duchess, along with others who saw Kick every day at Compton Place, were aware by this point that she was not pregnant. But the world did not yet share that knowledge, and the sense that people were constantly watching and wondering was very grievous to Kick. Her close friends perceived that all the speculation upset her the more acutely because she was already distressed about her failure to have become pregnant, when so many other brides had succeeded in doing precisely that before their young husbands had had to go off to war. In separate conversations with Jean Lloyd and Fiona Gore, Kick gave the same anguished account of her less than ideal wedding night. She talked of Billy’s inexperience and ineptitude that first night, and she insisted that in the end they had indeed been very happy together. Kick assured Jean and Fiona—and, to both women’s perception, seemed to be reassuring herself—that had he come home after the war, there would have been plenty of children.