by Paula Byrne
Jack shared Kick’s great vitality and wit, and her friends were drawn to his keen intelligence and sense of irony. He teased his sister over her plethora of aristocratic suitors, and laughed at the idea of his rather ordinary-looking sister being the belle of England, but after meeting some English girls he quipped that ‘she had no competition’.6 He seemed bemused by the shy, silent English debs. One of his dates was mute all night until she finally broke the silence to describe the brook at the end of her father’s garden.7 Not the kind of girl to interest Jack Kennedy.
Kick’s diary for July shows that she and Jack were constantly together. She took Jack and Joe to meet the Bessboroughs, and then to a dinner dance at Lady Astor’s noting, ‘no hard drink as usual for an Astor party’.8 William Douglas-Home thought that Joe carried heavily the weight of being the eldest Kennedy child. He considered that Jack was intellectual in a bright, quick way, but that Joe was ‘much more serious and had . . . gravitas about him’.9
Jack was a keen dancer (one of Kick’s nicknames for him was ‘Twinkle-toes’), and he took his sister to nightclubs. One of the most popular was the 400 in Leicester Square. Debo Mitford recalled that members could buy a bottle of spirits there, write their name and date on it, and on the next visit the bottle would be waiting for them.10 Kick was beginning to spread her wings, and deceive her parents. For the first time in her life, she was meeting friends who were not Catholic, and who wanted to have fun. She was liberated, and she was resisting Rose’s attempts to restrict her movements. She and her brothers drank alcohol, something that her parents frowned upon.
Nevertheless, Kick did have some Catholic friends. One of them was a recently converted Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, the celebrated comic novelist and chronicler of the crazy antics of the ‘Bright Young People’. Waugh was charmed by Kick. They met at a dinner, and Waugh asked her what was the size of her ‘dot’. Kick had no idea what he meant and assumed he meant the size of her belly button; she responded that she didn’t think hers was larger than any one else’s. Waugh replied that hers must be ample, as her father was in finance. She finally realized, to her great amusement, that he was referring to her dowry.11
Kick’s best friend was the beautiful and willowy Sylvia ‘Sissy’ Lloyd Thomas. She had lustrous dark hair, hazel eyes and translucent skin. Sissy’s father, Hugh Lloyd Thomas, was a former private secretary to the Duke of Windsor, and he had died in February 1938, in a steeplechase accident. Sissy came to the Embassy to stay with Kick in the months following the tragedy. Unlike most of Kick’s friends, Sissy was a Roman Catholic, and the girls had a special bond. They were like sisters. Unlike many of her other friends, Sissy recognized the more serious side to Kick. The girls often attended mass together. It was important to both of the girls that they should marry Catholic suitors. But Sissy was deeply in love with the handsome young aristocrat David Ormsby Gore, who was extremely anti-Catholic. The girls chatted endlessly about their suitors.
That summer Lem wrote to Kick to warn her that Peter Grace was determined to hold on to her. ‘Grace is wildly in love with you,’ he told her, ‘and is heading for England this summer in order to clinch the romance – so watch it, Kick.’12 Peter had made plans to visit England in July. He sailed on the Queen Mary and arrived on the 25th of that month, full of excitement and anticipation at the thought of Kick ‘always bubbling over and that wonderful smile’. At the Embassy the butler opened the door and Peter announced himself, adding that Kathleen was expecting him. When the butler informed him that she was in Sussex at the races, Peter was distraught.
Peter knew that she was expecting him and that this was a rejection of the highest order, given how far he had travelled in order to see her. He turned right around and took the next boat back to New York. Kick was indeed at the races, and she had a new suitor.
18
Billy
She was a young girl, extremely attractive around all these dukes and princes. She was getting around in the highest circles in England.
Peter Grace
Buckingham Palace, 17 July 1938.
It was a perfect English summer’s day. The scene was the King and Queen’s annual garden party, which was the official close of the London Season. Black clouds were gathering over Europe in 1938, but few would have noticed them on this sun-filled day.
Kick Kennedy was one of the Queen’s guests at the garden party, along with her parents, her brothers Jack and Joe and her sister Rosemary. She was not impressed by the event: ‘Very hot and very dull procedure’.1
She was looking out for a young man she had met in recent weeks. His name was Billy Hartington. Kick had been introduced to him by Sissy’s boyfriend, David Ormsby Gore. David and Billy were cousins and had been brought up so closely that they were more like brothers. David Ormsby Gore (lifelong friend to the Kennedy family) was a brilliant young man, fond of reading, politics and jazz. He knew that, ever since being introduced to Andrew Cavendish, Kick had been curious to meet the elder brother, the Marquess of Hartington.2
On 13 July, Kick noted in her diary that she had attended a garden party at the Tower of London at which Queen Mary came up the River Thames on a barge. That evening Billy Hartington, in the company of his aunt, Adele Cavendish (sister of Fred Astaire, married to Billy’s uncle Charlie), picked her up to take her to dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Kent. After dinner she went with the Mountbattens (Lord Louis, who would be the last Viceroy of India, and his wife Edwina) to their penthouse flat and danced the night away.3
Billy was instantly smitten. Kick thought he would be yet another of the effete, bashful English noblemen she had met in London, and nothing like the masculine ideal represented by her athletic American brothers and Peter Grace. But this tall handsome young man stirred her interest. He was quite different to his brother Andrew. As the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, he took his position and his responsibilities seriously.
The Cavendishes were one of the first families in the land. Billy’s ancestor Sir William Cavendish, who married Bess of Hardwick (the earldom of Devonshire was bestowed on their son), was an English courtier and MP closely connected to Henry VIII. It was William who oversaw the dissolution of the monasteries at the end of the 1530s. The family seat was the magnificent Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and the family also owned Lismore Castle in Ireland, Hardwick House, also in Derbyshire, Bolton Abbey Hall in Yorkshire and Compton Place by the sea at Eastbourne in Sussex. Their splendid London residence overlooking Hyde Park, Devonshire House, was sold directly after the First World War, in order to pay death duties, but they still had a townhouse in Belgravia.
The Cavendishes were known for three things: wealth, politics and being supremely anti-Catholic. The 4th Earl was one of the ‘Immortal Seven’ who issued a secret invitation to William of Orange to depose the Catholic King James II and set up the Revolution Settlement of 1689 to guarantee the sovereignty of Parliament over a constitutional monarchy and restrict the royal succession to those who professed the Protestant faith. He was created Duke of Devonshire six years later. Billy’s grandfather died in 1938 and his father Edward succeeded him as the 10th Duke.
Born in December 1917, Billy Hartington had been educated at Eton and was now an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Like so many of his ancestors, he wanted a political career. At the Buckingham Palace garden party, where Rose later recalled Kick looking at her loveliest, he invited her to be his guest at ‘Glorious Goodwood’, one of the highlights of the British flat-racing season, held on the estate of the Duke of Richmond. She would stay with him at his family estate in Eastbourne. Kick, knowing that Goodwood fell on the same day as Peter Grace’s arrival, agreed to be Billy’s guest. The house party contained many of her new friends, including Debo Mitford, Robert Cecil, Tom Egerton, Irene (Rene) Haig, Zara Mainwaring and Jakie Astor. Rene Haig was irked that Billy had asked Kick along, as until then she had been Billy’s favourite.4
On 25 July, the day Peter docked, she left with Jack for Compton Place, ‘to
spend Goodwood with the Devonshires’. Her diary noted Peter’s arrival in England, but said nothing more about him. Despite his pain and humiliation, Peter later refused to criticize Kick: ‘I don’t blame her. She was a young girl, extremely attractive around all these dukes and princes. She was getting around in the highest circles in England.’ She had got swept up with the ‘highfalutin people of England . . . I sort of figured she was caught up on that glamour, and you can’t fight that.’5 Kick might have been swept up by the glamour of the English aristocracy, but she always retained a healthy scepticism towards the upper crust.
A picture of Billy and Kick at Goodwood was published in Queen magazine, Kick wearing a printed tea gown and jaunty hat and Billy in suit and trilby. She liked Compton Place (‘not a big house’, she observed). Goodwood was ‘Quite smart but not like Ascot’.6 When Jack became President of the United States, he reminded Debo of the outing to Goodwood as being an especially memorable occasion.7
Goodwood was Kick’s first meeting with Billy’s parents, and if she felt daunted, she didn’t show it. The meeting was extremely difficult for Eddie, Billy’s father, who was known for being extremely anti-Catholic, but he was impeccably mannered and Kick was amused by his eccentricities.
Eddie was a true English eccentric who wore paper collars, a threadbare suit and no overcoat whatever the weather. He smoked Turkish cigarettes that he lit with a tinder cord, occasionally burning holes in his suits. He would have been a dentist if his life had turned out differently. He loved fly-tying and spent hours trying to judge which flies were the most attractive to salmon. ‘He made an odd sight, a white apron over his well-worn, blue velvet smoking jacket, leaning across a table covered with all the ingredients for fly-tying . . . Once the flies were ready, he lay in the bath imagining he was a salmon while Edward, the butler, pretending to be a fishing rod, jerked them over his submerged head.’8
Eddie was MP for Derbyshire West for fifteen years, until 1938, when his father the 9th Duke died, and he was elevated to the House of Lords. He was driven to meetings in the ‘Yellow Peril’, his 1914 Humber. Debo Mitford recalled that Eddie was not much good at small talk, and was often silent: ‘Coming from a family that never drew breath, I found this silence intimidating.’
Both Kick and Debo adored Billy’s mother, the Duchess. She came from the illustrious Cecil family, but she was no social snob and everyone who knew her loved her. Her nickname was ‘Moucher’, and Debo wrote that she was ‘quite unconscious of the effect her goodness, beauty and ready understanding had on all around her’.9 Her pride and joy was her first-born son, Billy. She doted on him and they were exceptionally close. If she felt alarmed by Billy’s infatuation with Kick Kennedy, she did not show it.
The Duke of Devonshire had recently published an anti-Catholic pamphlet in which he railed against Catholic girls marrying into the British aristocracy. Kick was potentially the embodiment of the very type he had warned against. But she managed to charm even him. After the weekend, he wrote to Lady Astor and gave his first impression: ‘She is very sharp, very witty, and so sweet in every way. The Irish blood is evident, of course, and she is no great beauty, but her smile and her chatty enthusiasm are her salvation. I doubt, of course, she’d be any sort of match for our Billy even if we managed to lure her out from under the papal shadow.’10
In the meantime, Rose and Joe had arranged a summer holiday in the South of France. For the first time in her life, Kick rebelled against her mother. She stayed with Billy, saying that she would meet them later on. Debo recalled that Rose, ‘a forceful character of whom all the children were in awe’, was not pleased. She ‘wondered what reception Kick would get when she eventually joined her family’.11 Kick’s rebellion was a taste of things to come.
19
The Riviera
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934)
The Hôtel du Cap, huge, white and shimmering in the heat, perched on a dense, tree-covered cliff above the sparkling sapphire-blue Mediterranean Sea. The hotel was a Napoleon III chateau, located on the southern tip of the Cap d’Antibes in 22 acres of pine and tropical gardens. Candy-striped cabanas were located among the rocks down below the hotel, where guests would descend 150 steps down a mile-long esplanade to reach the boulders along the sea.
Its famous restaurant, the Eden Roc Pavilion, was built below the hotel and overlooked the swimming pool. Guests would feast on ‘flame-red lobsters, pink shrimp, orange salmon, purple sea urchins, midnight blue mussels, silvery fishes, primrose langoustines, and pearly-gray oysters’.1 Ice-sculptures of leaping dolphins, reclining mermaids and majestic swans adorned the tables alongside fluted goblets and ornate silver. It was a riot of ‘shimmering Technicolor’.
As one of the most famous hotels along the Côte d’Azur, immortalized by Scott Fitzgerald as the Hôtel des Etrangers in his great Riviera novel Tender is the Night, it was where the ‘beautiful people’ gathered. Dressed in the silks and linens of Lanvin, Molyneux and Schiaparelli, they exchanged gossip, sipped cocktails and observed one another.
A thirteen-year-old girl, chubby and plain, played on the rocks below under the watchful eye of her English governess. She stared enviously as the large group of young people gathered at their cabana, close to her own. She had never seen anything quite like them. The boys were so virile and handsome, the girls so pretty and sporty. She made enquiries and discovered that they were the children of Joe and Rose Kennedy, here for the entire summer. The girl, Maria, thought them ‘wonderful’ and remarked, ‘I would have gladly given up my right arm, the left, and any remaining limb, to be one of them. They looked, and were, so American. All had smiles that never ended, with such perfect teeth each of them could have advertised toothpaste.’2
Maria Sieber was the shy, awkward only child of one of the most famous and beautiful screen sirens of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich. Maria, known by her mother as ‘the Child’, had been raised in Hollywood seclusion by the doting but controlling Dietrich. Surrounded by bodyguards and nannies and tutors, she barely knew any other children. She became her mother’s dresser, accompanying her to the studios and ensuring that her every wish was met. From an early age, she was aware that her parents’ marital arrangements were unconventional. Though they would be married for half a century, they mainly lived apart and took lovers. In the early years, Dietrich made some attempt at pretence, but once Maria became a teenager, her mother was open about her many male and female lovers.
Maria lived in the shadow of her magnetic, beautiful and talented mother, but she inspired great love and affection in almost everyone she met. Many of Dietrich’s friends and lovers pitied the timid girl, who was so obedient, never answered back and, despite her privileged upbringing, never displayed a spark of petulance or spoilt behaviour. She made friends with her bodyguards and the staff, always careful to ensure that she hid her friendships from her jealous mother, who demanded complete and all-encompassing devotion.
Now, in Antibes, she was captivated by the Kennedy family, who looked so jolly and were so much fun. Maria was delighted when the younger Kennedys ran up to her mother on the beach asking for her autograph.
Maria would always remember this Riviera holiday, and its special ‘summer light . . . Stark, intense, hot and white, making all color come into its own’. She recalled that during that ‘first summer in Antibes, Dietrich forsook her beiges and blacks, wore flowing beach robes in Schiaparelli’s invention “shocking pink” and looked divine’.3
No one was more impressed than Rose Kennedy: ‘Marlene is gracious, animated, pleasant to meet, seems to be taking a holiday with her hair thrown to the winds and no worry about make-up.’4 Rose might not have been so ple
ased with Dietrich had she realized that her husband Joe would soon embark upon a passionate affair with her.
Young Joe and Kick arrived from London on 3 August. Kick found Cannes oppressively hot and was happier at Cap d’Antibes, where Rose had rented a private villa called Le Domaine de Beaumont for two months. She found household help, ordered in supplies of fresh milk and cream, arranged for tours of the region and encouraged the children to keep journals. She was desperate for skinny Jack to put on weight, while ensuring that the other children did not. The children obsessed about their weight, driving her to distraction: ‘Almost go mad listening to discussion of diets, as Jack is fattening, Joe Jr. is slimming, Pat is on or off, and Rosemary (who has gained about eight pounds) and Kathleen and Eunice are all trying to lose’.5
The Ambassador, despite the growing crisis over Hitler’s sabre-rattling, joined the family later in August. He recalled the ‘blue Mediterranean and the sun-drenched sands, the casualness of people in a holiday mood, luncheons, teas, dinners and golf’.6 It didn’t feel a million miles away from Hyannis Port, and the family was together.
That summer, Dietrich had broken one of her own rules, never to allow herself a suntan. With no film scheduled, she ‘embraced the process of acquiring a tan’, wearing for the first time a bathing suit with a new-fangled built-in bra that showcased her amazing cleavage and her long legs: ‘the first ever exposure of Dietrich’s body to summer was born, and the admiring glances were legion’.7
No one was more admiring of Dietrich than the man described by her daughter as ‘the sexy Irish politician on the cliffs below’. He was always drawn to Hollywood movie stars, and there was none more queenly than Dietrich. They flirted together openly, and the families spent time together. Maria was invited to the Kennedy villa for lunch. She was terrified and changed her sundress four times, desperate to look not like an ‘aristocratic European’ but like a ‘normal child coming to lunch’. The problem was that she just didn’t have the first idea of how to behave like a normal child. The dining table was very long, and she sat with the younger children listening ‘while the older ones discussed topics and issues proposed by their father, while Mrs. Kennedy supervised the serving of lunch by her staff and the table manners of her youngest’.