Kick

by Paula Byrne

  As usual, Joe took control at the dinner table, asking the children questions about politics and the economy. Maria observed that ‘most of the questions were directed at the bigger boys, but the younger children, boys and girls, were expected to listen and contribute if and when they had something to add. He drew them out, prodded them to back up their arguments, and filled in the blanks.’8 For someone who was constantly criticized by her own parents, she was amazed by the warmth and solidarity exemplified by the Kennedy family: ‘Never once was a critical comment made without corroborating evaluation. No sarcasms.’9 She, who was so used to Hollywood movie stars of the first rank – Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Mae West, Greta Garbo – was enraptured by their particular brand of magic: ‘No one “starred”, and yet, all had a star-like quality.’10

  Maria never forgot the Kennedy children. She remembered young Joe as ‘the heir, broad and chunky, a handsome football player with an Irish grin and kind eyes’. She adored and fell in love with Jack, ‘the glamour boy, the charmer of the wicked grin and the “come hither” look – every maiden’s dream. My secret hero’. Eunice she thought a little daunting: ‘opinionated, not to be crossed, the sharp mind of an intellectual achiever’. Pat was closest to her in age, but ‘not gawky, nor fat, with not a pimple in sight’. Bobby was the ‘fixer’ in the family, ‘the one who knew everything, and never minded being asked to share his information’. Jean was ‘a quiet, gentle girl, who picked up forgotten tennis rackets and wet towels’. And ‘Teddy on his chubby legs, [was] always running, always eager to show you love, trying to keep up with his long-legged siblings’.

  Maria loved them all. She remembered Kick as ‘a lovely girl who assumed the role of the official eldest daughter, even though she wasn’t and seemed to have matured too soon because of it’. Quiet but intelligent and highly observant, Maria noticed how Kick felt the pressure of Rosemary’s incapacitation. She saw the difficulty for her of being not the eldest daughter but having to assume the role. Maria loved and was drawn to Rosemary, ‘the damaged child amidst these effervescent and quick-witted children’. Rosemary became her special friend. ‘Perhaps being two misfits, we felt comfortable in each other’s company.’ The two girls would sit in the shade, ‘watching the calm sea, holding hands’.11

  Maria liked Rose Kennedy, who was so kind. She felt bad when she realized that her mother and the Ambassador had begun an affair. He was, she recalled, ‘a regular visitor to our beach cabana’, and he made sure that everyone knew as much.12 To save embarrassment, Maria stopped visiting the children: ‘I didn’t want any one of his family to feel uncomfortable.’ As usual, Rose turned a blind eye. Maria felt a sense of kinship with the children, whom she felt sure knew what was really going on. She overheard a woman whispering that Joe Kennedy was Gloria Swanson’s lover, and surmised that ‘maybe they [the children] were as used to their father disappearing as I was my mother’.13

  The former King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson were now living in exile in France as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Kennedys, much to the chagrin of the King and Queen, accepted an invitation to dine with them. They went sailing together.

  On 14 August, Kick and Jack left the Riviera for a ten-day stay in Austria’s equivalent of Monte Carlo, the Wörthersee, a lake in the southern state of Carinthia. Their host had a house on the lake’s edge. One night they went out to a bar. A member of the party was an Austrian Jew called Rudi. Another was an Englishman called Peter, who became engaged in a fist-fight. The climate in Austria since the Anschluss in March was such that it would have been all too easy for a bar-room brawl to turn into a racial attack: Kick noted that Rudi was ‘scared to death as Nazis would probably have killed him’. It was a grim reminder of the tense situation. With more than a touch of understatement, Kick wrote that ‘everyone says that Austria has lost its sense of gayness and carefreeness’.14 After ten days, they returned to the South of France. In Cannes, Kick went swimming and almost drowned: ‘I was left by all my younger brothers and sisters for 45 minutes while they aquaplaned.’15

  At the beginning of September Kick was invited by another friend, Jane Kenyon-Slaney, to stay with her in Scotland for her twentieth-birthday celebrations. She knew that she would be meeting up with Billy, who was also there for the grouse season. Janey, a beautiful, tall and elegant blonde, became one of Kick’s closest friends. She was a granddaughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and Kick loved her aristocratic drawl (‘It’s soooo extraordinary’).16

  Everyone was aware of the deeply worrying political crisis as Hitler prepared to annex the Sudetenland. Billy, whose sense of honour and duty was deeply ingrained, believed that Britain would fight alongside the French to protect Czechoslovakia.

  They were all waiting for Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg on 12 September. For many Americans, it would be the first time they had ever heard him speak (this was the first world crisis to be played out in real time on the radio). Though Hitler screeched and screamed and railed against the Czech government, he did not, as had been expected, declare war. But it was only a matter of time. When Rose boarded the sleeper train to Paris, she remarked in her diary that the coming months would be ‘an accumulation of meeting and seeing men who are shaping the world’s destiny’.17 She had a ‘heartbreaking’ conversation with a Frenchwoman she encountered along the way, who said: ‘My grandfather was killed in the war in 1870 against the Germans. My husband and brother were killed in the war in 1914, and my cousin was blinded. And now they are asking me to send my son to war in 1938. I cannot, I will not.’18

  Kick, meanwhile, was on her way to Scotland, but stayed first in Leicestershire with the Duke and Duchess of Rutland at Belvoir, ‘a lovely castle, high above the trees’. She loved the interiors: ‘everything in the house is full of historical interest’. She found the Duchess very pretty, and noted that she had been one of the four trainbearers at the Coronation. The Duke, though, was ‘rather sour and very pompous. He wears a white tie at dinner which is a sure sign.’19 She was moved by her meeting with the Duke’s mother, whom she thought a great beauty and very talented. She heard the story of how the Dowager Duchess had lost her eldest son when he was only nine. After he died of a sudden illness, she locked herself in her room for six weeks and when she emerged she had sculpted a beautiful model of his small body: ‘It was practically a miracle as she had never done any before.’20 She went on to become a distinguished sculptor and painter.

  Kick, looking slim and tanned from her time on the Riviera, was desperate to be reunited with Billy. On 19 September, she arrived at Cortachy Castle in Angus, north-east Scotland.

  20

  Peace for our Time

  All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come. Am so damn sick of it.

  Kick Kennedy

  Kick loved the beauty of the Scottish heather as she took walks around the grounds of Cortachy Castle. The castle, a cream house overlooking the River South Esk, dated back to the sixteenth century but had been given Gothic turrets in the nineteenth. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a drummer boy, who would play his drum late into the night. Kick was more excited to be reunited with Billy than troubled by ghosts.

  Jane’s father, Lord Airlie, who was the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, was dressed in a kilt. Kick found him ‘terribly Scotch’. He took the party to meet his mother, the Dowager Lady Airlie, who lived in a different castle which was ‘also supposed to be haunted’. The dowager was ‘very sweet’ and they ate roast potatoes.1 Back at Cortachy, the men went shooting every day, complaining that the grouse were not plentiful, and in the evening the party gathered around the gramophone and chatted into the night.

  Kick was amused when one of the guests let off the fire hydrant and Jakie Astor spilt whisky all over the floor. But despite the high jinks, everyone was troubled by the news abroad and gathered around the radio to hear the newsflashes about the Czech crisis. ‘The international situation grows increasingly worse,’ Kick noted in her diary. She
wrote to Lem Billings: ‘All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come. Am so damn sick of it.’2

  Kick left for racing at Hamilton Park with Billy, and then went on to Balado, near Kinross, to stay with a Scottish girl called Frances Dawson: ‘It was not much fun as the crisis is at its height and it was touch & go for war.’3 She listened to Chamberlain’s radio address saying that he had done everything he could. Rose was in Scotland, too, and she listened to the Prime Minister’s speech, ‘urging people to keep calm, to cooperate quietly and with confidence, and not to give up the last shred of hope’. The next day Rose wrote in her diary: ‘Today, individual, brooding silence was general, as were unsmiling, unemotional faces. Everyone unutterably shocked and depressed, feeling from the Prime Minister’s broadcast that his hopes for peace are shattered and that war is inevitable.’4

  The world was waiting to hear what Hitler would say on 26 September. Down in London, the Ambassador wrote to Arthur Krock: ‘I have a few minutes before Hitler speaks . . . I’m feeling very blue myself today because I am starting to think about sending Rose and the children back to America and stay here alone, for how long God only knows. Maybe never see them again.’5 Her father might have been making plans to send the children home, but Kick was determined to stay in Britain.

  Hitler’s speech from the Sportpalast in Berlin could leave no one in any doubt about his intentions. ‘Shouting and shrieking in the worst state of excitement I’ve ever seen him in,’ said one observer, ‘he stated . . . that he would have his Sudetenland by October 1 – next Saturday . . . If [Czech President Edvard] Beneš doesn’t hand it over to him, he will go to war.’6

  Kick attended the Perth races on 28 September (the press reported that she had gone hatless). While she was there, the news came through that Chamberlain was making his final attempt to intercede with Hitler and taking a flight to Munich. Hitler had requested a conference with Chamberlain, Mussolini and the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier. The relief was enormous. Kick wrote in her diary: ‘when the news came through that he was going to Munich, I have never seen such happiness’.

  The next day, Kick left for London on the overnight train. She arrived in the morning ‘to find Peace and everyone deliriously happy’. That night she went to the theatre with Billy and then on to the Café de Paris. It was the night of Chamberlain’s return: ‘so imagine the excitement’.7 Nevertheless, she found it terrifying that trenches had been dug in front of the houses in preparation for fortification against air raids.

  When the Prime Minister returned from Munich he was hailed as a hero. Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini had signed an agreement with Hitler, giving over the Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler and Chamberlain also signed a declaration that their two peoples desired never to go to war with one another again. Hitler told his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that the ‘scrap of paper is of no significance whatsoever’,8 but Chamberlain waved the note to the crowds who had gathered outside 10 Downing Street and made his ‘peace for our time’ speech. He read from the declaration he had signed and added, ‘my good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.’

  Joseph Kennedy, always in favour of appeasement, was ecstatic. In his Diplomatic Memoir he recalled that ‘the tone of the crowds had changed. They were cheering and laughing and waving at every passerby.’ Smiling as he entered the Embassy he said, ‘Well, boys, the war is off.’9 President Roosevelt, though no fan of Chamberlain’s, sent a congratulatory telegram.

  Not everyone was happy. Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, immediately resigned in angry protest: ‘What do these words [of the Munich agreement] mean? . . . Do they mean that [Hitler] will get away with this, as he has got away with everything else, without fighting, by well-timed bluff, bluster and blackmail?’10 Winston Churchill, in the political wilderness and adamant against appeasement, denounced the Munich agreement in the House of Commons in powerful words:

  We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat . . . you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude . . . we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road . . . we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged . . . And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.11

  Rose was present in the House and she was impressed by Churchill’s oratorical skills, even though Nancy Astor heckled him: ‘fascinating, delightful and easy to follow’, she commented in her diary.12 On 3 October, she took Kick to the final session of Parliament, where Churchill reiterated his warning: ‘England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.’

  Joe Kennedy definitely saw Munich as his triumph too and was given an opportunity to express his views in a speech he gave before the Navy League on Trafalgar Day on 19 October. Everyone was expecting a tribute to the great British spirit, which wasn’t quite what happened. Rose, ever the politician’s daughter, warned her husband that his speech was controversial and could be damaging: ‘Have you thought how this would sound back home?’ He didn’t listen and went ahead. His message was that democracies and dictatorships ‘have to live together in the same world, whether we like it or not’. At no point did the Ambassador speak of his own personal abhorrence of Hitler, which was an egregious mistake. The President was furious that Kennedy had implied publicly that America was pro-appeasement. He openly reprimanded him in a radio address. The American press attacked him vociferously. American citizens wrote to him denouncing him: ‘It is unbelievable the way you have misrepresented your country . . . by suggesting that the United States of America should submit itself to Nazism! Shame, Shame, Shame!’13

  For Joe Kennedy, it was the beginning of the end.

  The Ambassador, terrified that war was imminent, had cabled Washington to find out ‘what ships could be made available for the hordes of American citizens clamoring to get home’.14 In the meantime he had his three youngest daughters fitted for gas masks at their school in Roehampton. He told Rose that none of the children wanted to go home to America, except for Teddy who wanted to have his tonsils out back home, so that he could ‘drink all the coco-cola he wishes and all the ice cream’.15 It was dawning on Joe that in coming to London he had made the biggest mistake of his life: ‘I am still trying to think of the fellow who suggested my name as Ambassador to Great Britain. Shooting would be too good for him.’16

  21

  Chatsworth

  Cavendo tutus: Safe through Caution.

  Devonshire family motto

  Billy chose his moment carefully to showcase the peculiar magic of Chatsworth. They went together on an early-October day, when the grounds were at their loveliest. Chatsworth nestles in a valley in the picturesque Peak District. The honey-coloured Palladian mansion sits on the east bank of the River Derwent. Below, a steep wooded hill and expansive parklands lead down to the Wye and Derwent valleys.

  Billy’s family had lived there since 1549, and each generation had improved the house and gardens. A sculpture gallery displayed the 6th Duke’s collection of marble statues, the magnificent library held a valuable collection of early printed books, and there were wonderful paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Poussin, Reynolds and dozens of others. Old Master drawings were a particular speciality: the collection was the finest in the world other than that of the Queen at Windsor.1 Then there were the collections of go
ld and silver plate, the exquisite porcelain, the gems and jewels.

  Kick would have been shown the Mary Queen of Scots apartments, where the Catholic queen had once been held against her will as a prisoner of Elizabeth I, and the beautiful rosewood rosary beads made for Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She saw portraits of Billy’s ancestors, and heard about their long-standing links with religion and politics. She also learnt about the extraordinary Cavendish women: from beautiful Bess of Hardwick in the sixteenth century to the infamous Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire in the eighteenth century, who went canvassing in the streets for the Whig party and turned the drawing rooms of Chatsworth into a salon and a hub of political power. Portraits of Bess and Georgiana lined the walls. Georgiana, like Kick, was not a conventional beauty, but she had vitality and charisma and her passion was politics. She was a perfect role model for the Kennedy girl reared at a dinner table where politics were part of everyday conversation, and where the concept of public service was continually stressed.

  The vast gardens of 105 acres included an Elizabethan Garden and lawns landscaped by the great eighteenth-century designer ‘Capability’ Brown. There was an Arboretum and a Pinetum. Billy and Kick walked for hours around the grounds in the October sunshine. The house glowed a deep, burning ochre in the low sunlight. She particularly loved the Willow Tree Fountain, an imitation tree, made of lead, which squirted water at unsuspecting guests.2