by Paula Byrne
At the end of July, Kick left London for Spain with young Joe and their friend Hugh Fraser, younger son of the 14th Lord Lovat and a prominent Roman Catholic who had a commission in the army. It was her first taste of the damage war could wreak. She was in a country run mercilessly by General Franco’s autocratic military regime with a history of terrible war crimes. She had a worthy guide in Joe, who had been an eyewitness to the siege of Madrid. He had been deeply shocked by the poverty, death and devastation he had witnessed as a result of the civil war. Kick was impressed by the admiration in which her brother was held: ‘I remember thinking then, of how brave Joe was when different Spaniards told me of how he, the only American there, used to walk about the streets during the horrible, bloody days of the siege of Madrid.’10
Kick met General Moscardó, who had held the fort of Alcázar for three months. She was told the story of how on 23 July 1936 he had picked up the telephone within the Alcázar to hear that Republican forces had kidnapped his sixteen-year-old son, Luis. The boy spoke up proudly, ‘Father, if you surrender your command to the enemies of Spain in order to save my life, I shall disown you and never more acknowledge you as my blood!’ His father replied, ‘Die like a Spaniard, my son!’ The story went that enraged Communists then shot Luis in the head.11 In the Alcázar today, the telephone remains on display. It became clear to Kick that there had been horrible brutalities on both sides during the civil war.
At the beach of San Sebastián, Kick wore a long, modest bathing suit, as now strictly required by law, but Joe got into trouble for going bare-chested. Another family member was also getting into trouble in Fascist Europe. Jack went driving through Nazi Germany in the company of David Ormsby Gore and Torby Macdonald. Ambassador Kennedy had warned the young men to ‘stay out of trouble’. He told them that the Germans were tough and paid no attention to laws and rules: ‘if anything happened, just back away’.12 Stopping the car (with British licence plates) to inspect a Nazi monument, they were attacked with stones and bricks by Nazi stormtroopers. Jack told Torby: ‘You know, how can we avoid having a world war if this is the way these people feel?’13 To his father, he wrote from Munich: ‘The German people are being whipped into a fierce hatred of the British.’14
The boys made their way to France, as Joe and Kick came up from Spain to Cannes to meet the rest of the family for their summer vacation. The residence was the Domaine de Ranguin, which reputedly had the ‘finest rose garden on the Riviera’. The family sailed, sunbathed and played golf.
Marlene Dietrich was staying again at the Hôtel du Cap. She called the Ambassador ‘Papa Joe’ and asked for advice about her career. That summer, she took up with a lesbian cross-dressed heiress who appeared suddenly on a magnificent three-masted schooner, dressed as a pirate. The pirate rowed ashore and lunched at the Eden Roc. Dietrich was enchanted. So for once there was a summer when Joe Kennedy could concentrate more on his family.
Kick’s English friend Janey Kenyon-Slaney was her guest at Cannes. Jack had a huge crush on Janey, but she didn’t return his affection, causing ever-loyal Kick to complain, ‘I can’t think why you’re not being nicer to Jack.’ Torby noted that Rose was keeping Kick ‘exiled’ in France, away from Billy. She was desperate to return to England for Billy’s big delayed birthday party at Chatsworth, but Rose forbade her to attend. Kick did not dare oppose her mother’s wishes, but privately she was furious at being left out of the celebrations.
It was a lavish affair involving 2,800 guests over a period of three days. There was a dinner and a ball, and a garden tea party with a circus, showing performing horses and dogs, and live music by Billy’s regiment, the Coldstream Guards. As was the tradition, Billy gave presents to the staff and tenants, all 3,000 of them. By the end of the weekend, the Duchess had to put her arm in a sling because she had shaken so many hands. Kick had missed one of the most important days of Billy’s life, though she cut out numerous clippings of the great event and pasted them into her scrapbook. She noted that Irene Haig, her rival, was there, looking ‘very smart in coat and skirt and new-style felt hat with shovel brim’. Billy was, as always, dressed impeccably in a beautifully cut suit, handsome and poised. His brother Andrew later recalled that the atmosphere of the party ‘had something of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before the battle of Waterloo. We sensed it was the closing of an age.’15
On the very day of the party, August 15, a story was published in the Boston Globe under the headline ‘Kennedy Girl May Wed Peer’. A denial was issued, but Billy and Kick had indeed begun talking about marriage. Nevertheless, in France she threw herself into the family holiday. The Tatler published a two-page spread about the family in August, with photographs of them linking arms and flashing the Kennedy smile. It was the last holiday they would ever have together as a family in Europe.
Joe and Jack headed back to Germany, where young Joe bumped into Debo’s sister Unity, just two weeks before she put a revolver to her head and pulled the trigger. He described her as ‘one of the most unusual women I have ever met . . . thinks only of the Führer and his work. She looked at me rather funnily when I called him Hitler, as if I was taking his name in vain.’ Unity told him that she felt sorry for the Jews, ‘but you had to get rid of them’. She said that Hitler greatly admired the British and would do them no harm ‘unless they forced his hand’. He ended his notes on Unity: ‘She is the most fervent Nazi imaginable, and is probably in love with Hitler.’16
On 21 August, on the news from Europe of Germany’s imminent invasion of Poland, the Ambassador flew back to England. Once home, Chamberlain informed him that ‘I have done everything that I can think of and it seems as if all my work has come to naught.’17 Back in the South of France, the news that the war was coming ran through the hotel like a ‘flash fire’. Guests began to pack up and leave.
Joe called Rose, telling her that they must leave France immediately. The children were summoned from the beach. Kick and Janey were still wearing their tennis clothes and were told to head for the station. Their luggage would follow them later.
On 24 August, the Ambassador issued a press release urging Americans to leave England: ‘Accommodations are now available on most vessels. The same may not be true in another day or two.’18
The following day, Joe saw Chamberlain, whom he described as ‘a broken man’. Arrangements were made for Rose and the children to be evacuated to Wall Hall Abbey in rural Hertfordshire. Gas masks were issued and Anderson air-raid shelters assembled. These were makeshift structures of corrugated iron half buried in the back garden.
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Billy Cavendish was ordered to his regiment the next day. The Ambassador was devastated by the invasion. He called the President and told him it was the end of the world, the end of everything.
25
‘This Country is at War with Germany’
3 September 1939.
Under a clear blue sky on an early-autumn Sunday, three sombre-looking adults walked together from the American Embassy to Westminster. They were used to the lens of the photographers forever seeking a photograph of the handsome, smiling Kennedys, but there were few smiles today. Young Joe and Jack were wearing suits and ties. Kick was wearing an elegant and demure black dress trimmed with white, her trademark pearls, white gloves and wide-brimmed hat. She looked impeccably English. She had come a long way from the all-American girl in bobbysocks and sweater of two years before. They noticed people in the streets carrying gas masks.
Shortly after eleven o’clock their father, sitting in his office in the Embassy, had listened to Prime Minister Chamberlain speaking on the radio:
I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequen
tly this country is at war with Germany.
As soon as the broadcast had finished, Joe telephoned Chamberlain and was surprised to find that he was immediately put through. The Prime Minister told the Ambassador: ‘We did the best we could but it looks as though we have failed.’1 At 11.20 a.m. Joe issued a Diplomatic Dispatch: ‘The Prime Minister has just broadcast that no undertaking having been received from the German Government to withdraw its troops from Poland, Great Britain is in consequence at war with Germany. Kennedy.’2
Less than an hour later, Jack, Kick and Joe Jr stood in the Strangers’ Gallery in the House of Commons as the Prime Minister made what Rose described as his ‘heart-broken, heart-breaking speech’. Chamberlain was crushed by the realization that his policy of appeasement had failed: ‘This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything I have worked for, everything I have hoped for, everything I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins.’ Joe Kennedy echoed these words in his diary that night: ‘I almost cried. I had participated very closely in this struggle and I saw my hopes crash too.’3
But the three young adults were more impressed by backbencher Churchill, who evoked loud cheers with his impassioned oratory: ‘Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our hearts this Sunday morning there is peace . . . our consciences are at rest.’ Jack and Kick were spellbound by Churchill’s speech: ‘This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of what is sacred to man.’4
Almost immediately an air-raid siren went off, sending panic through the crowds who had gathered outside the Embassy. The Ambassador rushed out to find Rose, Kick, Joe and Jack returning from Parliament on foot. He told them to go immediately to an air-raid shelter in the basement of the couturier Molyneux. The incongruity was not lost on fashion-conscious Rose: ‘I thought later, what an ironic way for a woman to build her war experiences.’5 Joe walked over to Molyneux’s to cheer them up and found them in good shape.6 Meanwhile, panicky Americans rushed into the Embassy, demanding to know when the next boat was going.
Chamberlain’s War Cabinet went into session. That afternoon, Parliament passed the National Service (Armed Forces) Bill which provided that men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were liable to be called up. At 6 p.m. sharp, families clustered around their wirelesses once more as King George VI broadcast to the British Empire on the BBC, lamenting that – for the second time in the lives of most – they were at war.
That night Kick gathered her English friends to talk about the war. There was a great sense of energy and excitement. Chatsworth was being turned into a boarding school for girls, the paintings, antiques and treasures all carefully packed away. All of Kick’s friends were joining up or getting involved in the war effort in some way, the women offering their services in factories or hospitals.
Kick held a farewell dinner at Prince’s Gate for the young men about to go to war, and once again her father embarrassed his children by claiming that England would be ‘badly thrashed’. For the young men like Billy in uniform, his remarks were offensive. Joe simply did not understand why Billy and his friends felt so strongly about the humiliating Munich pact, and why they would fight to the death. Even Jack misunderstood the British sense of honour and principle. He would later claim that it was ‘fear, violent fear’ that had motivated the British.7 He was wrong. Only Kick understood, because she knew through her long talks with Billy of his supreme sense of duty and principle.
Kick, feeling that her destiny was in England, begged to stay. Her father refused. He didn’t care that he would be criticized for sending the family back to safety while London was bombed. Rose was secretly relieved that Kick would be removed from her romance with Billy.
The plan was that the Ambassador would stay in England alone with Rosemary, who was doing so well at her Montessori school. Joe, terrified by the thought that his family could be torpedoed on the boat back to America, arranged for them to return in batches. Kick was to return on the Washington with her mother, Eunice and Bobby. In the meantime, Kick said her goodbyes to her beloved friends. There was a strong possibility that she might never see Billy Hartington again.
The Kennedys planned their final weekend in London. There was only one outsider present, Tom Egerton, who remembered the occasion vividly: ‘They were all so gay and they never stopped talking, chatting away, sometimes even over the top of one another.’ But he also remembered Kick’s misery.8
Later in September Kick wrote an account called ‘Lamps in a Blackout’, probably intended for publication.9 The piece is a first-hand narrative of experiencing the blackout in that first month of the so-called ‘Phoney War’.
It begins lyrically: ‘Blackout, blackout. England must be blacked out, and on the night of September 19, issuing her final defense commands, England lay in dark silence while smiling moon and twinkling stars shone over her like lights of an anticipated victory.’10 Then it becomes more personal: ‘It is an eerie experience walking through a darkened London. You literally feel your way, and with groping finger make sudden contact with a lamp post against which leans a steel helmeted figure with gas mask slung at his side.’ She takes the reader with her as she makes her solitary journey around the city’s deserted streets:
You pause to watch the few cars, which with blackened lamps, move through the streets. With but a glimmer you trace their ghostly progress . . . Gone are the gaily-lit hotels and nightclubs; now in their place are sombre buildings surrounded by sand-bags. You wander through Kensington Garden in search of beauty and solitude and find only trenches and groups of ghostly figures working sound [-detector] machines and searchlights to locate the enemy.11
On the first night of the blackout, it was all excitement and mistakes. Little Teddy ripped the curtain and within three minutes air-raid wardens were complaining of ‘great streaks of light shining through the window’. Accidents occurred: Jean slipped and sprained her ankle; Joe Jr came home with a very swollen black eye, the result of walking into a lamppost. The next morning they heard news of accidents, people bumping into trees, tripping on the kerb, being hit by cars, broken legs, even deaths. ‘Thus, now one hears tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns, but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward, for it is a perilous task.’
The narrative then zooms into her bedroom, where she lies dreaming of ‘peace and the bright lights of New York’, only to be awakened from her reverie by a series of ‘piercing blasts that shook me from my bed’. She grabs her gas mask, offers her soul to God and runs downstairs to meet the rest of the family. They wait for the servants, help one another with gas masks and run for the air-raid shelter: ‘within fifteen minutes the streets were cleared of men, women, children and animals’. She notes the ‘unlovely women’ in curl-papers and face cream, a woman upset that she had to leave her dog, another who promises to enter a convent if she is spared (‘I wonder if she did’). Then after forty minutes, the all-clear sounds and it is back to bed, everyone muttering a prayer of thanks.
Through all the drama, there seems to be no fear. And Kick, in love with England and her English lord, delivers her swansong to London: ‘But yet the moon shines through and one can see new beauties in the silent, deserted city of London. It is a new London, a London that looks like Barcelona before the bombs fell.’12
26
The Personality Kids
It all seems like a beautiful dream.
Kick Kennedy
The SS Washington was packed with Americans returning home to safety. The liner was loaded with 1,756 passengers, beds pushed into every available space.1 Kick wrote to her father from the liner: ‘I can’t get excited about landing, but I suppose it will come when we sight that Statue of Liberty.’2 She made a rare dig at her adored father when she joked, ‘Everybody said they didn’t think the Germans would torpedo this boat with us on board,�
� letting him know that she was acutely aware of his public reputation as an appeaser.
Returning home to Bronxville was a shock to the system. The house had not changed, but Kick had: ‘it was like returning to a house you lived in as a child and being surprised at how shabby everything suddenly seems’.3 But she soon adapted to American social life, visiting the World’s Fair twice and taking up again with Peter Grace. She went to a polo match with him and to the theatre. Everything was as it always had been, but she now felt detached.
Her friends noticed the change in her. Nancy Tenney was surprised to see her using English expressions and calling people ‘Darling’. One weekend when she was staying overnight with Nancy, Kick left her shoes outside the bedroom door, expecting them to be polished.4 She knew that her friends thought she had changed, but she couldn’t get England out of her mind. She wrote to her father, telling him that her life there now seemed ‘like a beautiful dream’: ‘Thanks a lot Daddy for giving me one of the greatest experiences anyone could ever have had. I know it will have great effect on everything I do from here on in.’5
Kick tried to get into the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College, but was not accepted, despite the fame of her family, so she decided to attend Finch College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was little more than a finishing school: ‘It is a junior college and one gets a diploma, which is something,’ she wrote to her father. The only thing in its favour was its location.