Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (30 page)

Meanwhile, Kick returned to London on Monday, August 13, 1945, to make the remarkable discovery that Winston and Clementine Churchill had taken up residence in the very flat above hers. Defeat had come as such a shock to Churchill that he had had no plan in place for where he would live in the event of a Labor victory. It was therefore arranged that, while his country estate Chartwell and a new London house near Hyde Park were being readied for him, Churchill moved temporarily to the Westminster Gardens quarters of his daughter and son-in-law, Diana and Duncan Sandys, who had offered to go elsewhere for the duration. Kick, when she arrived home, observed that “at all hours of the day and night,” well-wishers came and sang beneath Churchill’s window—and, as it happened, beneath her own.

Kick had been in Ireland when the U.S. unleashed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Tuesday the fourteenth, the day after she arrived in London, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. The following morning, great crowds of people gathered round the block of flats where Kick resided, in hopes of seeing and cheering the man who had saved his country only to be hurled from power at the moment of his supreme triumph. By chance, Victory over Japan Day overlapped with the state opening of Parliament. Driven there in an open vehicle, Churchill was greeted by impassioned cries of “Churchill forever!” and “We want Churchill!” Churchill had regarded the Conservative rout as a public rebuff of his wartime leadership, so today’s ovations seemed to comfort and reassure him. He responded with palpable delight to the celebrations in the streets.

By contrast, the former prime minister’s downstairs neighbor, Lady Hartington, when she made her own separate trip to Parliament to hear the King’s speech, found the universal jubilation “rather depressing.” Naturally, she shared the people’s happiness that the enemy had at last been conquered. But, lamenting as she did the passing of the old 1939 world, she emphatically failed to share their enthusiasm for what she regarded not as the brave, but rather the bland new world that was about to come into being in England. Kick vigorously endorsed Churchill’s description of his socialist successor Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” Six years after Nancy Astor had welcomed her to her first English country house weekend, Kick happened to encounter Lady Astor on the day Parliament opened. Kick discovered that the older woman as well was “feeling very depressed” by events—and for reasons similar to her own.

Churchill had another reason to seem upbeat. In his new capacity as Opposition leader, he was scheduled to speak in the House of Commons the next day. He planned to lay out the new threat posed by the Soviets and to urge that a postwar settlement with Moscow be aggressively pursued during the limited time that remained before other powers besides the U.S. were likely to be able to produce an atomic bomb of their own. He calculated that Stalin was far more likely to agree to a deal so long as the U.S. could threaten him with the bomb without his being able to strike back with equally deadly force. The speech was an early articulation of the ever-elusive objective of a postwar settlement in Europe that was to preoccupy the titan throughout the tumultuous last decade of his political life, and that would someday profoundly influence and inspire President John F. Kennedy.

By the time Churchill gave his landmark address, however, Kick had already fled London, feeling painfully out of sync with the prevailing holiday mood. Interestingly, it was that very same holiday spirit that would cause Churchill’s speech—for all of its abundant merits, both of matter and manner—to be a good deal less than successful with the British public. Impatient to begin their peaceful, prosperous new life under the Labor government, war-weary citizens proved unreceptive to Churchill’s urgent message that hardly had the enemy been overcome than a potentially even more dangerous foe had arisen in its stead, and that henceforward the Soviet menace must become the nation’s priority.

On Thursday the sixteenth of August, Kick left to spend the weekend in the country as the houseguest of Michael Astor and his wife, Barbara. Michael was just taking up his duties as a member of Parliament, and Barbara was expecting another child. Jakie Astor and his wife, Chiquita, were also present during Kick’s visit. In 1938, Kick’s ability to participate in the political talk of Michael, Jakie, David, and Hugh had smoothed her entree into their elite set. In 1945, though the specific topics of debate and discussion had changed, Kick again found herself drawn into Michael and Jakie’s animated and immensely pleasurable talk. Unlike their mother, they looked upon the convening of the new House of Commons with immense curiosity and excitement over the monumental battles that were about to be fought, both in the House and within the Conservative Party itself. Among senior Conservatives, led by Robert Cecil’s father, Lord Cranborne, a movement was already afoot to oust Churchill as Opposition leader in favor of his longtime and long-suffering forty-eight-year-old heir apparent, Anthony Eden. In Michael and Jakie’s company, Kick began to find the unfolding drama irresistible.

She returned to London after the weekend, in time to observe Hugh Fraser make his maiden speech in the House of Commons on the twentieth of August. The members of Kick’s prewar set all had such grand hopes for Hugh, whom they had long regarded as the most promising young man of their group. The excitement attendant upon the launch of his parliamentary career did much to help Kick begin to discover a new “pattern of life,” as she called it, after the war. There was never really any question of her being romantically involved with Hugh, but in 1945, as in 1938, she delighted in his invariably provocative and stimulating outlook and conversation. Kick thereafter frequented Parliament in the exuberant company of a group that, besides Hugh, included the writers Christopher Hollis (also a fledgling Conservative MP) and Evelyn Waugh.

On the night before Parliament recessed, Kick was dining at the House of Commons with her trio of Catholic cavaliers when she caught sight of Tom Driberg, a Labor MP who, in his capacity as a left-leaning journalist, had mocked Billy Hartington in print during the West Derbyshire by-election. Driberg, who had undertaken to interview the candidate touted by Conservatives as “Churchill’s personal choice” in the race, had mirthfully informed readers that he soon “desisted from questioning,” for the process had been “too like pulling the wings off a fly.” A year and a half later, Billy’s widow used the opportunity of their chance encounter in the House to insult Driberg—an experience that she afterward pronounced “very satisfactory.”

Also in the waning summer of 1945, Kick took an intense personal interest in the plight of her distinguished upstairs neighbor, whose electoral defeat she was far from alone in associating with Billy’s. Churchill—determined not to allow himself to be edged out as party leader; frustrated that as in the 1930s he perceived a looming danger that his countrymen foolishly refused to acknowledge; and, on the most basic level, miserable at the loss of power and prestige that had formerly allowed him to eat well when other men had to endure rationing and shortages—was mightily unhappy in these weeks. Kick, when she learned of Churchill’s discontent with the lack of eggs and milk in particular, made a point of returning from a weekend in the country with a bounty of eggs for him. She went upstairs to deliver them personally, only to learn from the cook, with whom she proceeded to have “a little chat,” that the former prime minister was away.

On September 9, it would be a year since Billy’s death. That day, Andrew and Debo would become Marquess and Marchioness of Hartington, its having been firmly established by then that Billy and Kick had failed to produce an heir. Kick did not wish to spend the day at Compton Place. Before that, she did, however, go to Eastbourne to see Billy’s family. In the course of the weekend, Andrew made a point of going off with Kick, just the two of them, to play golf. Though for different reasons, the impending anniversary, and all that it meant in terms of their respective future fortunes, was no easier for Andrew to contemplate than it was for his brother’s widow. And while seeing Kick provided the duke and duchess with a welcome reminder of their late son, the same sight, triggering as it did memories of Billy, provoked in Andrew a pang of guilt. Kick herself alternated between finding it difficult to absorb the fact that her young husband had been gone for a full year and feeling, as she said, as if a hundred years had passed.

Kick arranged to be at Garrowby on September 9, in the company of Richard Wood, his mother, and several of his cousins. The following morning, she and Richard shot partridges, Kick walking for three hours, he galloping alongside on a horse, which he had learned to ride, in her phrase, “extraordinarily well.” As always, Richard was kindness itself to the girl he adored, but even now he refrained from speaking to her of his feelings.

Nonetheless, rumors soon abounded in the British press that she and Richard had become engaged. On the assumption that the anniversary of her husband’s death signaled Lady Hartington’s reentry into the marriage market, press people rang up the duke and duchess in hopes they might comment on her supposed betrothal. Intent as they were that Kick go on serving as a living reminder of their firstborn, Eddy and Moucher were horrified and hurt by the inquiries. Their agitation was a source of distress to Kick, who found both the gossip and the assumption about her being ready to marry again hugely irritating and embarrassing.

Kick had by now given up her post at the Red Cross in anticipation of making her first postwar visit to the U.S. Initially she planned to leave London in the latter half of September so that she might reach America in time for an address that Jack was set to give on October 5 to informally launch his political career. But the date of her departure had to be continually put off till she finally had to tell her parents that she had no choice but to miss Jack’s big speech. These days, U.S.-bound ships were packed to capacity with returning soldiers, and despite her connections she found booking passage exceedingly difficult to arrange.

Traveling as part of a Red Cross contingent, Kick sailed on the liner
Queen Mary,
which reached New York Harbor on November 9, 1945. Overhead, sixteen P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes flew in formation to welcome the more than nine thousand servicemen traveling on the British transport. That day alone in New York City, another fourteen vessels carrying an additional fourteen thousand U.S. soldiers were also due. Joe Kennedy, waiting at the West Fiftieth Street dock, made a point of informing press people that his widowed daughter intended to reside with her family in Boston. If he meant that she planned to live with them on anything like a permanent basis, the assertion would certainly have been news to Kick, who now had a permanent address of her own—4, Smith Square, London.

Nonetheless, she had been aching to see her family again. As she said, though surrounded by friends in England, there were moments when in spite of that companionship she still felt “very lonely,” which was why she had been so keenly anticipating the reunion with her parents and siblings. Her inability to join them at Jack’s big speech the previous month had been a considerable disappointment to her. At the time of his visit to England to cover the general election, she had been acutely conscious of acting in a way that was best for his imminent political future. To her delight, when she celebrated Thanksgiving with her family at the Cape, talk abounded of a possible run for Congress. A seat in the House of Representatives for Massachusetts’ 11th Congressional District had lately opened up when its occupant, James M. Curley, became mayor of Boston. It remained only for Jack to make up his mind whether to participate in a primary, which was set to take place in June.

One element of the political table talk, however, was decidedly not to Kick’s liking. Should Jack indeed enter the congressional race, Kick, because of her controversial marriage, threatened to be very much a liability among Irish Catholic voters in Boston. When Billy stood for West Derbyshire in 1944, Kick had had to be kept in the background due to her association with that figure who was so reviled in Britain, former ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Now again, in the event that Jack ran for Congress, it was thought best that she remain offstage as much as possible. This time, the problem was her troubling association with one of the great Protestant families of England. Any prominent participation by Lady Hartington at campaign events in Boston was likely to be political poison. In this sense at least, Kick had become as much a problematic outsider here as she had been in West Derbyshire.

Kick spent Christmas of 1945 with her family in Palm Beach. At the outset of 1946 she headed to New York, where she encountered Winston Frost, a thirty-three-year-old attorney who had served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy, and whom she had known before the war. “The Southern Gentleman,” as she now dubbed him, came from an old but not wealthy Virginia family. He had attended Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School, and was said to be hunting for a rich wife. Kick, nostalgic for late nights spent at the 400 Club and other prewar London spots, was easily drawn to the tall, fair-haired, consummately charming bachelor whose principal focus was hardly his law work, but rather the dance floors of El Morocco and the Stork Club. Joe Kennedy, when he learned that his daughter had begun to see a good deal of Frost, wasted no time moving to end the relationship. He concentrated on the fact that, according to his investigations, Frost seemed to be simultaneously involved with another woman.

But, as Kick would subsequently suggest, the problem with him as a suitor really lay elsewhere. It had to do with the contrast between the life of power and politics she had been anticipating when she married Billy and the so much more limited existence of a denizen of New York cafe society. In ancient times when Kick, then a teenager, had accompanied Jack and his friends to nightclubs in New York and Palm Beach, a fellow such as Winston Frost might have seemed very suitable indeed to her. Not so now, when her experiences in England, and the particular aspirations they had generated, led her in search of something very different. Eventually, she came to look upon Winston Frost as having been “a passing fancy.” She wrote of the relationship, “In the cold light of morning, after having the life I had, one doesn’t waste it going from El Morocco to the Stork Club. Not if one has any sense one doesn’t.” Quite simply, she had outgrown that sort of existence; but where possibly was she to find something more suitable and more satisfying?