by Kerri Maher
I leaned heavily on Will Swift’s excellent The Kennedys Amidst the Gathering Storm: A Thousand Days in London, 1938–1940 for a better understanding of how Joe’s ambassadorship fit with the lead-up to World War II, and how those years in London affected not just Kick but also Rose and the whole Kennedy brood. On that subject, I suspect many readers familiar with Joe Sr.’s foibles will have read my passages about his helping the Jewish refugees with surprise, since in other arenas he was a noted anti-Semite. In response, I can only say that people are complicated; my research revealed Joe to be much more interesting than simply an anti-Jewish isolationist, and he did try to help Jewish people out of Germany. In my view, it’s the role of fiction to mine the paradoxes of characters like Joe, not oversimplify them. Along similar lines, I am frequently asked about Rosemary, who really did disappear from the family for close to two decades, her locations and circumstances shrouded in mystery. In fact, though she was cared for first at Craig House in New York, she spent most of the rest of her long life at St. Coletta in Jefferson, Wisconsin. The first time Rose saw her oldest daughter after the lobotomy was 1962, and in 1968 Eunice founded the Special Olympics in her sister’s honor.
I am also grateful that Debo was a writer and memoirist, as I found passages of her memoir Wait for Me! to be extremely helpful (especially for that anecdote about the duke and his method for testing flies!). Parts of Catherine Bailey’s Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, and my friend Michele Turk’s Blood, Sweat and Tears: An Oral History of the American Red Cross, were also illuminating, as was a well-remembered 1983 Vanity Fair piece, “The Kennedy Kick” by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. I dipped in and out of Barbara A. Perry’s biography of Rose Kennedy (Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch), Kate Clifford Larson’s and Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff’s biographies of Rosemary (Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter and The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women, respectively), as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga and Laurence Leamer’s The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family. And, of course, there is Google. What did writers of historical fiction do before they could Google “songs 1939” or “movies 1943” and instantly have the answer? I feel lucky to be writing about the past in the Information Age.
Although all the real people I used as characters in The Kennedy Debutante behave in ways that I made up, only two important characters are wholly fictional: Bertrand and Father O’Flaherty. Having been raised a Catholic myself, I know there are nurturing, forward-thinking priests in the world. Given Kick’s decisions about her life and religion, I like to imagine there really was for her a religious authority like Father O’Flaherty who could give her hope for a better future. And while Bertrand might not be real, the deep and lasting friendships Kick formed in England were very real indeed. Real and transformative, as great friendships are.
MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE QUOTES
One of the things I learned while researching this novel is that quotes are surprisingly slippery. For instance, in biographies and profiles of the Kennedys, one of the most quoted telegrams from Joe Sr. to Kick is the one he sent after her wedding to Billy: WITH YOUR FAITH IN GOD YOU CAN’T MAKE A MISTAKE REMEMBER YOU ARE STILL AND ALWAYS WILL BE TOPS WITH ME. Lynne McTaggart seems to have been the first to use it, but because the telegram itself has been taken out of public circulation—and believe me, I looked for it!—all subsequent writers can only cite her citation, or one of the subsequent writers, like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who quote her. To further complicate matters, among the books I read, the rules for citation varied widely with publisher and year of publication, so some of the original sources were tough to find.
Since this is a novel and not a biography, there aren’t any footnotes or endnotes, but I thought I would highlight a few of my direct quotes in case readers are curious. I couldn’t resist using two of Billy’s tantalizing telegrams to Kick, which are pasted right into one of her scrapbooks: LETTER JUST ARRIVED WONDERFUL NEWS GET LEAVE JUNE 22 LONGING TO SEE YOU WRITING LOVE BILLY HARTINGTON. And also: REACH LONDON 7.15 SATURDAY STAYING AT MAYFAIR CAN YOU KEEP SUNDAY FREE BILLY. Moreover, there was “a permanent lump” in Billy’s throat at the end of the war, and he really did write that he wanted to share the experience with Kick—it’s all there in a letter he wrote to her just before he was killed. There was a lump in my throat when I read those lines. I couldn’t think of better words than Billy’s own, so of course I used them.
It was also fun to play with quotes here and there. When Bertrand says he should start taking bets on when Kick and Billy will announce their engagement, I was actually putting Kick’s words in his mouth: in a letter dated July 14, 1943, to “Dearest Little Kennedys,” she wrote that there is “heavy betting on when we are going to announce it.” I also had to employ Jack’s melodramatic line, used to counsel Kick against marrying Billy, that he has “come to the reluctant conclusion that it has come time to write the obituary of the British Empire.”
I integrated about twenty short quotes from my sources, all of which I tried to weave in as I did the real-life events in the book—with imagination. My guiding light was the “beautiful dream” quote that opens The Kennedy Debutante, from a letter Kick wrote to her father in 1939, which she herself echoes so movingly when she writes in her 1943 diary of her first day back in London that “it all seems like a dream from which I shall awaken very soon.”
Readers Guide
The Kennedy Debutante
Kerri Maher
Questions for Discussion
In these days of Facebook and FaceTime, it is hard to imagine a love like Kick and Billy’s, which endures four years of their being separated by an ocean and a war, with infrequent letters and telegrams their only means of communication. Why do you think their love survives that distance of time and space?
Kick often struggles with the relationship between her internal desires and her external image. Where do the internal and external meet for her? Where are they most different? How does Billy deal with the same struggle?
Family, religion, and class are powerful forces in Kick’s life. How does she use them to her advantage? In what cases do they undermine her desire for an independent life?
Kick makes a number of observations about the differences between her own life and upbringing, and the expectations of her new milieu, English society. How does she use these differences to her advantage? Which ones does she try to minimize?
Have you ever been thrown into a new social scene and felt that you had to perform? How did it make you feel? What did you do?
Kick has to make a painful decision between her family and her love. Do you think you would make the same choice?
In what ways are Kick’s years in England before the war like a “beautiful dream,” as she described them in the letter she wrote to her father in 1939? Does the dream continue when she returns during the war?
Jack, Joe Jr., and Billy all fight valiantly in World War II, but how are their attitudes toward the war different from one another’s? What do they have in common? What seems to be each man’s primary objective?
Kick and her English friends tend to “Keep Calm and Carry On”—or maybe “Party On” is a better description. Why do you think that is possible for them? Do you think the modern sensibility about war would produce the same result today?
Kick often envies her older brothers for their independence and freedoms. In what ways have young women today transcended those gender roles? In what ways are they still present?
Many women have to reconcile personal desires with the constraints of family and society. What do you think of Kick’s strategy? Do you think she would take the same approach today?
How does the Kennedy family as portrayed in the book fit with your own picture of the family? What surprises y
ou?
The Kennedy women invest a great deal of time, effort, and money on fashion. What role does fashion play for them?
Jack tells John White, “There is Saturday night, and there is Sunday morning. Never the twain shall meet.” Do you think Kick agrees?
How does the portrayal of Jack as a young man fit or not fit with your image of him as JFK, the man who—as Debo’s mother correctly predicted—became president of the United States?
“Some lives are short,” Kick writes to Father O’Flaherty from Washington, DC, “and I increasingly feel that it’s essential to live the life it’s in one’s soul to live.” In addition to the premature death of Kick’s friend George Mead, what do you think prompts this revelation? Do you think Kick lives the life it’s in her soul to live? Why is she so conflicted about her soul?
About the Author
KERRI MAHER is also the author of This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World under the name Kerri Majors. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded YARN, an award-winning literary journal of short-form YA writing. A writing professor for many years, she now writes full-time and lives with her daughter in Massachusetts, where apple picking and long walks in the woods are especially fine.
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