by Paula Byrne
Always loving and kind towards Kick, he told her that Palm Beach had been unseasonably cold and that she hadn’t missed much, and that Jack had been in hospital for two months: ‘we are trying to find out what is the matter with him’. Then he wrote, ‘I am terribly proud of the way you handled yourself over there and your whole attitude towards everything and I am sure you will get a great deal out of your year abroad . . . Try to get all you can out of this trip, because it will be of great help to you in everything you do hereafter.’10
Kick wrote back uncomplainingly: ‘Understand perfectly – Really didn’t expect to go but thought I might as well ask.’ She wasn’t, however, about to give up on her dream of Derek and Cambridge. ‘It would be more fun to go later when everything could be arranged. Everyone says the crew races are better than the hockey match anyway.’11 She kept her letters home breezy and cheery. ‘I still have no asma so everything is daisy’; ‘It has been raining nearly every day since we have been back’; ‘Going to see La Boheme this coming Sat. Really, I shall be educated.’ She went to lectures on Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘it was excellent and I understood it quite well’.12
But she was also determined that Rose should not spoil her summer plans. Her hint about the boat races disguised the fact that Richardson, persistent and not prepared to give Kick up easily, had issued an invitation for her to be his date for his college’s prestigious May Ball at Cambridge (which actually takes place in June).
The only problem was that Rose was planning to visit Kick in Paris at that time. Kick knew that her mother’s presence would stop her from going to the May Ball, and she was determined not to let this happen. It was the first time she defied her in matters of the heart. It would not be the last. She tried to persuade Rose to visit earlier in the spring: ‘School lets out the tenth of July and by that time think I shall be quite ready to get home. So it would be rather silly just to come over and go right home for you.’13 She did, however, drop in that Richardson was writing to her. She had promised that she would stay away from French men, having decided, though, that they were ‘really not as bad as they are made out to be’.14
Kick still suffered from homesickness. She was only fifteen, a continent away from her beloved family, and surrounded by people speaking French. Mother Superior wrote to Rose with an update on Kathleen’s progress, on her ‘home-sickness’ and on her French, which she still found so difficult. Despite not wanting Rose to spoil her Cambridge plans, she desperately missed her: ‘If it is not too much trouble Mother please come over because it will be so much easier to get through this year.’15
Kick was clashing with the Reverend Mother, and told Rose that she had been criticized for being ‘rather stuck on my own ideas and won’t listen to anyone else’.16 The Reverend Mother was right to see that she had a stubborn streak and would stick to her guns if she thought she was right.
One of Kick’s Noroton friends, Marie Celeste O’Malley, was visiting Europe with her sister. Marie Celeste was then staying on at Neuilly to get some extra tuition in Latin and Maths before attending Manhattanville College. Kick told her mother that the two girls were on their way to Garmisch for the Winter Olympics. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had presided over the opening ceremony on 6 February.
Kick’s friendship with her English roommates continued to flourish. They were her first taste of England and she was intrigued. Derek had written to her from England telling her all about the funeral of King George V who had died on 20 January. His eldest son, David, had succeeded as Edward VIII. Kick reported to her mother that Derek thought the funeral ‘the most impressive sight he had seen while in London’.17 Kick had listened to the coverage of the funeral over the radio. Her English friends attended a service, and Kick reported to Eunice that they now wore black bands on their arms. She was genuinely amazed at their response to the King’s death: ‘Have never seen anything like the love they had for the old king and more than love for the new king.’
She was also aware of the gossip that circulated about the wild new King: ‘Mrs Larkin herd some stories of the new Prince [crossed out] King – She has plenty of Scandal.’18 All the girls knew that the dashing Prince of Wales had been in a relationship with the married American Mrs Wallis Simpson. Having so much enjoyed the lecture on Henry V, the play about the former wild and dissolute Prince of Wales, Kick loved the idea of the handsome raffish Prince falling in love with a twice-divorced American, who was fashionable but not especially beautiful. Kick was beginning to express an interest in the English aristocracy. She told her social-climbing mother that ‘the Earl of Dudley and [his sister] Lady Patricia Ward’ were at Gstaad.
Kick was approaching her sixteenth birthday and she wanted some fun. ‘Just think am almost 16 years old. Sweet Sixteen. Oh My,’ she wrote to Eunice.19 She was always finding funny stories about Convent life to amuse her siblings. She was given the honour of being sacristan at mass, which involved ‘laying out the Priest’s things and fixing the altar’. By mistake she poured oil rather than wine into the priest’s bottle. Luckily her mistake was discovered before the priest got round to drinking the oil.20
She was also learning just how attractive she was to boys. Rose intuited that Kick was up to something with Derek. Just before Kick’s birthday on 20 February, she cabled her parents to suggest a time for a birthday phone call. There was a mix-up and she forgot to put in the word ‘birthday’. Rose feared the worst, panicked and telephoned immediately. Not because she thought Kick was ill or homesick, but because she feared that her headstrong daughter had eloped. Kick wrote: ‘When you said you thought I had eloped I didn’t know what to think. Hope you don’t think I’m gallivanting like a chicken over here. Thought something dreadful had happened when I heard you were calling.’21
She had a lovely birthday. Honey Fitz had sent her candy, which she couldn’t eat until Lent was over, as she had given up sweets. Her English friends gave her a picture frame, a Spanish friend a compact, and she got a huge box of crackers ‘from the Irish girls’.22 She went to a movie and then enjoyed a birthday chocolate cake and read her cables from her parents and several of her Noroton friends. She kept them all.
The rain continued to pour down throughout February. Kick was depressed about hardly seeing the sun, and longed for ‘Paris in the Spring’.23
She had heard from her family about Jack’s serious illness, and she was delighted when he was well enough to write to her. ‘Thought you might have died off,’ she wrote, disguising her deep anxiety about him. ‘Glad to hear you are finally out of hospital and getting very tan under Florida’s sunny skies.’24 She gossiped about all the girls who had been asking after him, and teased him about them finding ‘Jack Kennedy the cutest thing’. She told him that she was planning a trip to Italy and that the following year she wanted to go to Germany to learn German.25
In February, shortly after her birthday, she attended a magnificent ball at the Paris opera house. She was dazzled by the gowns, the jewels and the women wearing plumes in their hair. She wore a white gown trimmed with velvet, and danced with a young officer who later called at the Convent to ask the Reverend Mother if he could take Kick to an Aviation Ball: ‘Of course she said no.’26
Kick subtly mentioned ‘the boy from Cambridge’. Derek Richardson had been writing to her, and in March she went sightseeing in Paris with him and his mother. They climbed the Eiffel Tower, had lunch at a little bistro and went to the races at St Cloud. She told Rose that Mrs Richardson came to the Convent each time to collect her.27 The weather was finally improving: ‘Mother, Paris is really heavenly in the Spring.’
Her French was also slowly improving. She was reading classic novels, and made her ‘confession’ entirely in French when she was at retreat. She joked: ‘Finished the jolly old Retreat yesterday so feel very holy at this point.’ She enjoyed her confessor, a Belgian Jesuit whom she thought ‘very inspiring’.28 She told Rose that she longed to go to Lourdes, the home of St Bernadette, the girl who had
seen visions of the Virgin Mary, which was now a place of spiritual retreat and pilgrimage for the sick and dying. She had been warned that it would be very hot in July, and also distressing to see so many sick people, but she was keen to go: ‘the sight is really worth seeing’.29
She added that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Children of Mary . . . Feel very well that I have finally succeeded in getting it.’30 She worried about the storms and the bad weather in the United States: ‘Hope the floods aren’t too bad around the various Kennedy mansions – Sounds terrible from this side of the Earth.’ She reminded her parents: ‘next time I write will be under Italy’s balmy skies’.
At the end of March, she joined a group of friends for a month-long trip – chaperoned by the requisite nun, of course. Joe’s secretary wrote to her before she left, sending her the Rome address of a friend of the family, Count Enrico Pietro Galeazzi, a wealthy architect who had close Vatican connections in his capacity as Rome director of the Knights of Columbus, an American Catholic fraternity: ‘Your father would like to have you see him when you arrive in Italy as he thinks he will be able to help you a great deal.’31 Kick knew that this was an order, not a request. The nuns also hoped to arrange an audience with the Pope.
They first went to Venice, which Kick adored. They stayed at the Hotel Gabrielli Sandwirth, and she wrote excitedly to her parents, ‘Venice is too wonderful to give you all a good idea of how we are doing here.’ She described how they had taken the train with its impressive view of the snow-capped Alps, before passing through Milan and Verona. Her first view of Venice was in pouring rain, but she was unperturbed and the girls and chaperone nun travelled to the hotel on the Grand Canal in two gondolas. She thought it hilarious to be chaperoned by a nun: ‘it is the funniest thing to be with a nun in a hotel’.
They visited many churches, and the Accademia which had ‘a great many lovely pictures in it’. They took the boat out to the islands of Murano (‘the most lovely glass and Mosaics I have ever seen’),32 Burano (‘lace works’) and Torcello (‘noted for old cathedral of ninth century’). She was having the time of her life: ‘we walked for a while after dinner and it was the most perfect night’.33
Kick laughed when a friend was ticked off at mass at San Marco. When her friend was taking communion the priest told her that ‘her lips were too red’. ‘So that’s that,’ she quipped. In the evening the girls took a moonlit gondola ride: ‘Never have I seen such a night – we have all decided to come back here on our honeymoon.’34 A gondolier sang Venetian melodies to the girls, and the nun joined in, to ‘help him along . . . she thought the gondola was tipping over every other minute’.
The trip brought out her romantic side: ‘We sleep and are awoken by the sound of singing gondoliers.’ She loved San Marco and the Doge’s Palace (‘Perfectly marvelous’), and a trip to the Lido was a great success despite a scrum to get on to the crowded ferry. She complained, however, about the lascivious Italian men. ‘It is not very funny here as all the men talk to the girls on the street,’ she wrote to her parents. ‘We had about 6 in a cavalcade following us all over Venice today.’35 She sent a postcard to Eunice, Jean and Pat (the other sister, four years Kick’s junior): ‘no cars at all here. The gondolas are marvelous. All the men walk along the street singing.’36
To the boys she wrote: ‘Suppose you are tearing Palm Beach apart.’ She joked: ‘When I made the very crude remark that Venice reminded me of Palm Beach I was all but thrown in the Grand Canal.’ She told her brothers that she had fallen in love with Italy.37
But it wasn’t all gondolas and art galleries and fine dining. Among the gallant Venetians chasing Kick and her friends along the streets of the city were ominous-looking young men wearing black shirts. Kick was ticked off by the nun for not finishing her pea soup: ‘the nun proceeded to tell me that since the country was at war I must eat everything’.38 Italy was at war with Ethiopia (known at the time as Abyssinia). Young Italian veterans, returning from the front, strutted down the streets proudly wearing, stitched on to their military caps, the names of the towns they had attacked. Kick was swept up in the fervour, and attended a Fascist demonstration in the Palais des Doges, in honour of a Dominican priest who had been killed in Ethiopia: ‘His brother spoke. – Never seen such a collection of uniforms – very thrilling.’39 She bought herself a Fascist hat, ‘which will certainly make a big hit’, reassuring her mother that there was ‘Really no sign of war here at all except of course the [League of Nations] sanctions have closed down a great deal of the glass and lace works’.
She may have felt little sense of the war in Venice, but when the party moved on to Florence on 2 April she got caught up in a Fascist parade: ‘Just saw a parade celebrating victory of Gondar which was taken tonight. Shall be very Fascist by the time I get home.’40
Florence was not what she had expected but she loved it, and described the lovely pensione overlooking the Arno, where Dante had supposedly once lived. They visited art galleries and museums and attended lectures on Italian art.
The party reached Rome on 7 April. Kick was entranced. They were staying in a Sacred Heart convent, where another party from Switzerland was staying, as well as a group of English girls – ‘and are they English!’ she exclaimed.41 She did the tourist sights, the Colosseum and an old Roman church, and then ‘It certainly was a thrill to see St Peters.’ After morning mass in the Sacred Heart church, she took a horse and buggy to ride around the Roman parks.42
On her father’s orders, she made an effort to contact her man at the Vatican, Count Galeazzi, but failed to understand his maid. It was Galeazzi who was intending to arrange a private audience with the Pope. It was Holy Week, the most important week in the calendar of the Catholic Church.
Kick was desperate for a glimpse of the Pope, who was saying mass on Holy Thursday in the Sistine Chapel, so she went along with the other girls and they sat outside on camp stools: ‘What a crowd we were all nearly squashed to death.’43
In the afternoon of Maundy Thursday, the girls attended Tenebrae at St Peter’s. This is a special service in the Roman Church in which psalms and prayers are read to a gradual extinguishing of candles. The final candle, hidden beneath the altar, ends the service, leaving the church in complete darkness. At St Peter’s three ‘wonderful’ relics were being shown: ‘Veronica’s veil, part of the true cross and the spear that pierced our Lord’s heart’. Kick was extremely moved by the experience – ‘Never have seen so many American priests all together at once,’ she reported to her father.44
That evening Galeazzi called at the Convent to see her: ‘He is one of the most charming men I have ever met.’ He arranged for her to have three tickets for the Pope’s mass on Good Friday at the Sistine Chapel. She was thrilled by the honour. The girls dressed themselves carefully in black and a car was sent to fetch them. At St Peter’s they went through the ‘magnificent’ Pacelli apartments and then through to the Sistine Chapel, where ‘the Mass was most impressive’. The girls were special guests of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Secretary of State in the Vatican). Kick felt proud of her father’s Vatican connections.
The next morning on the way to the Capitoline Hill, they were caught up in a demonstration: ‘a policeman told us that Mussolini would probably appear from his office in response to cheering and yelling’. Kick was thrilled that she got to see Il Duce. ‘Lo and behold we had only been there about an hour . . . Il Duce came out with a big stride and an even bigger grin.’ Kick was the only girl who had brought along her camera, and in the crowd she was pushed and shoved as she tried to take his picture. ‘He is magnificent and one cannot help liking him after seeing the patriotism of the Italians.’ She had seen both the Pope and Mussolini on the same day.
Kick was happy in Rome. She enjoyed the Vatican museum, where she shopped for Vatican stamps to send home to Bobby. She had expected rationed food but found it delicious: ‘Am still getting very fat and spaghetti is helping plenty.’ She loved the way the Italian priests blesse
d everything, and was amused when the girls were sipping sodas in a café and a priest came in to bless the soda fountain. ‘It seems they bless every store, restaurant etc in Italy on Holy Saturday.’
Galeazzi duly arranged the private audience with the Pope. Kick was thrilled: ‘The Holy Father spoke a few words to us in French and gave holy cards.’ Galeazzi singled Kick out for special attention. Later he took her and a few friends to the ruins of Tivoli, outside Rome. The nuns insisted that the girls had a chaperone since they were ‘going out with a man’. Kick was furious and told the nuns that he was ‘old enough to be her father’. But they insisted that this was how things were done in Rome.45
They left Rome for Naples, and visited a small volcano, where she collected pieces of lava for little Bobby. She shopped for leather handbags, and they drove along the Amalfi coast – ‘never have I seen such blue water’ – but the road twisted and turned so much that the girls ‘were saying our prayers continuously’.46 In the Bay of Naples she saw a troop ship ‘bound for Abyssinia’.47 They visited Pompeii, lunched at a former Franciscan monastery and then boarded the train for Rome, where they made a final trip to St Peter’s. They climbed the Scala Sancta (the staircase said to have been ascended in Jerusalem by Jesus and brought to Rome by St Helena), saw the city by night for the last time, and then went home to pack for Paris. Kick loved the Forum Mussolini (‘tremendous’) and was sorry to be leaving as there were parades planned for the following day, and Il Duce would be making a speech.
She saw Galeazzi and made her farewells. He gave her a parting gift – his Fascist brooch. ‘All the girls are very jealous,’ she told her father.48