by Paula Byrne
Joe Kennedy left London on 22 October 1940. He had been Ambassador for two and a half years. He was met by the family – Kick and the rest of the girls – at La Guardia Airport. Wearing beautiful fur coats, they smothered him in kisses before he was besieged by the press. ‘I have nothing to say until I have seen the President,’ he announced.
His trusted friends and advisers asked him whether he still had the President’s support, and Rose urged him to remember that for the sake of the family he should support the President. She calmly reminded him that he had been the first Catholic to be US Ambassador to Britain and the American representative for the Pope’s coronation at Rome. The President ensured that Rose was invited to the White House. It was her job to keep her husband calm. Roosevelt asked for Joe’s support by way of a public radio announcement supporting his re-election for an unprecedented third term. He knew the benefit of having Joe declare that he was not intent on sending America’s sons to fight England’s war. Joe also had the Catholic vote.
Joe vented his spleen, told FDR of his anger and humiliation, and finally agreed, with bad grace, to give the radio address. What Joe wanted above all was to keep America (and his sons) out of the war, and he trusted that the President wanted this too. He urged rearmament ‘because it is the only way America can stay out of the war’. The speech he gave ended on a highly emotional note:
My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world. The kind of America that they and their children will inherit is of grave concern to us all. In light of these considerations, I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President of the United States.10
The President, hugely relieved, gave a speech in Boston, saying how pleased he was to ‘welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador in the court of St James’s, Joe Kennedy’. Kick sent a telegram to her father: ‘The Pres[ident] really went to town for you tonight in Boston amidst terrific cheers from the crowd . . . It’s great to be famous – Goodnight from your fourth hostage.’11
Joe simply couldn’t enjoy his victory. When FDR was re-elected President in November, he headed for Washington and told him that he was resigning. Nothing could shake his pessimism. He was simply unable to see that the war was not going the way that Hitler intended. The RAF were holding off the Luftwaffe. London had not been cowed. But Joe would not accept that he was wrong. It was the end of the world for him. It was also the end of his career.
29
Billy and Sally
Sometimes I feel that almost anything is better than an existence that is neither one thing or the other.
Kick Kennedy
8 March 1941.
A tall, dark, handsome man was running across Leicester Square heading for the Café de Paris. He was late and he couldn’t find a taxi. He was a famous face in wartime Britain. He was Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson.
Snakehips was just twenty-six and at the height of his career, a dancer, singer and bandmaster. He had been training to be a doctor at Edinburgh University but left to become a singer. He had earned the nickname ‘Snakehips’ because of his silky, sensuous dancing style. He had his own band, the West Indian Orchestra, and they had secured a residency at the Café de Paris.
Captain Billy Cavendish was in London on leave. He had been seeing a lot of Kick’s friend Sally Norton. Sally spoke fluent German and had been recruited to the signals-decoding operation at Bletchley Park, where she was assigned to Hut 4, the German naval section. She remembered taking the oath of silence and signing the Official Secrets Act. She pretended to her friends that she was keeping records of those due to be given war honours.
Sally’s position gave her a newfound confidence and independence; she no longer needed a chaperone to date men. She recalled dancing all night and then taking the milk train back to Bletchley Park at five in the morning, still wearing her evening clothes.1 At the first opportunity, she and her friend, the beautiful Osla Benning, who was dating Prince Philip of Greece, would dash up to London to meet their boyfriends. Billy Cavendish was stationed at Elstree and met up with Sally in London, returning to their old haunts, the Café de Paris, the 400 and the Mirabelle. They usually began the evening with cocktails at the Ritz before heading off to dinner and then a nightclub.
Mr Gibbs, the head porter of Claridge’s, would inform Sally that Lord Hartington was in town and would meet her later that evening. On the night of 8 March, Sally and Billy had dinner and then set off for the Café de Paris to see Snakehips. As they left the Ritz they heard the wailing of sirens and as they got to the Mirabelle ‘the guns and bombs sounded’.2
When they arrived at the Café de Paris, they saw a scene of carnage and devastation, people being carried out on stretchers. The unthinkable had happened to the ‘safest’ nightclub in London. The band were ten minutes into a rendition of ‘Oh Johnny’ when two bombs burst through the roof, down a shaft on to the ballroom. One rescue worker tripped over a girl’s head and saw her torso still sitting in a chair. Some perished as the powerful blast sucked the air out of their lungs, a deadly phenomenon which caused the victim to display no outward signs of injury, but instead left them statue-like, frozen in the pose they’d been in at the moment of impact.
Thirty-four people were killed, including bandleader Snakehips. Some reports claimed that his head had been blown from his shoulders. He died with a flower still in his lapel. Eighty more were injured. One man was carried out on a stretcher: ‘At least I didn’t have to pay for dinner,’ he said to the crowd. Billy Cavendish, arriving with Sally Norton, went inside to investigate and was horrified by what he witnessed. ‘Well, then, let’s go on to the 400,’ said Sally.3 All evening Hitler’s bombs rained on London. Sally noted the events in her diary, recording that every time a bomb rocked the room, its velocity propelled her across the dance floor, but they carried on dancing. The bombs continued until 4. a.m. They finally saw their opportunity and ran to Claridge’s. To their astonishment Billy and Sally found a party there in full swing. Sally’s mother was among the guests. When the all-clear finally sounded they went for a walk. ‘It was horribly beautiful, London at that moment. The sky was a brilliant red. As the All Clear faded out there was a complete and utter silence, except for the crackling of fires in the distance.’4
With death so near, many were quick to wed. Two days after a massive raid, on 14 April 1941, Deborah Mitford married Billy’s brother Andrew at St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield. Debo wrote to Kick to tell her all about the day.
Kick took out a subscription to the Transatlantic Daily Mail to keep up with world news. She pasted into her scrapbook articles about the ‘Lend-Lease’ agreement (material aid provided by America ‘for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States’). She wrote letters applying for nursing courses run by the American Red Cross. She told an English friend that she was just killing time while she planned her return to England.
In May, FDR declared a ‘state of unlimited national emergency’ in response to Nazi Germany’s threat of world domination. He urged Americans to consider entering the war before waiting to be attacked. Kick and her family gathered round the radio to hear the President’s speech delivered from the White House. It was an impassioned speech in which Roosevelt declared that ‘The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler’ and that ‘It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction’. He went on to speak movingly about Britain’s courage: ‘In June, 1940, Britain stood alone, faced by the same machine of terror which had overwhelmed her allies. Our Government rushed arms to meet her desperate needs . . . And now – after a year – Britain still fights gallantly.’5
Kick wrote to her English friend Janey Lindsay, explaining her response to the broadcast: ‘Af
ter the President’s speech last night everyone feels that we are in the war although there has been no official declaration . . . All possible aid to you for the survival of the British Empire is the only way in which our economic, political and moral life will be safe for the future.’ She ended her letter, ‘We do live in upsetting times . . . But sometimes I feel that almost anything is better than an existence that is neither one thing or the other.’6
By June 1941, Joe Jr had enlisted in a special unit of the US Naval Air Corps, and by the end of the summer Jack too was in uniform, as an officer in Naval Intelligence. Kick had enrolled at Florida Commercial College, still plotting to return to England. She was worried that she had not heard from Billy for many months. She knew that he was getting closer to Sally Norton, and she feared that he had lost interest.
The family gathered for the usual Hyannis summer of touch football, sailing, riding and movies. They were glad to be together, the only blight being Rosemary’s increasingly erratic behaviour. She was becoming aggressive and lashing out at her siblings. On one occasion, she attacked her grandfather.
As the summer on the Cape drew to a close, the Kennedys dispersed to their schools and jobs. Kick pondered on her inability to connect fully with men. In a letter to Janey Lindsay she talked about how all her English friends were getting married but remarked that there were ‘still no signs of marriage’ in her own family: ‘Sometimes I feel that I am never going to take that on. No one I have ever met ever made me completely forget myself and one cannot get married with that attitude.’7
She turned her mind to her career. Her father told her that she had to ‘get a job and earn a living’. She was a good writer, a good listener, had plenty of intellectual curiosity and a way of getting people to open up to her. People instantly trusted her. Her friend Page Huidekoper was now working as a journalist on the Washington Times-Herald. Kick managed to get an interview on the paper with the editor, Frank Waldrop.8 He offered her a job as his secretary. Kick was finally leaving home, and she would never go back. Her father sent her a congratulatory telegram:
WHEN I WAS IN PRIVATE BUSINESS I ALWAYS HAD A SIGN ON MY DESK WHICH READ AFTER YOU’VE DONE THE VERY BEST YOU CAN THE HELL WITH IT ANYWAY I AM PROUD OF YOU FOR TRYING ALL KINDS OF GOOD LUCK LOVE DAD9
30
Kick the Reporter
What’s the stooory . . .
Kick Kennedy1
‘Can you lend me ten dollars?’
Kick Kennedy, the new secretary to Frank Waldrop of the Washington Times-Herald, burst out laughing at this impudent request made by the newspaper’s star reporter, John White. She couldn’t have known it then, but he was to be the man who got closest to driving Billy out of her mind. It certainly wasn’t love at first sight. John was thirty-one years old, with thinning blond hair, and carelessly dressed. He had a tattoo of a serpent coiling up his bicep. Though he wasn’t conventionally handsome, he was sexy, with a strong nose and sensuous lips. He had a piercing stare. He was brash, sardonic, argumentative and opinionated. He was nothing like the English noblemen Kick had dated and dreamed about marrying, or indeed the preppy boys that her brothers brought to Cape Cod from Harvard and Princeton. She didn’t know what to make of him.
In some respects, he was similar to her brothers. He was Harvard educated, extremely intelligent and loved a good fight. He was a challenge, and sparks flew from the start. Unlike most of the men Kick had previously met, he didn’t throw himself at her feet. For once in her life, she did not have the upper hand and this intrigued her.
Kick rented a modest apartment in north-west Washington DC, which she shared with a friend from Philadelphia called Betty Coxe. She was living for the very first time as a working girl. Kick did not want her colleagues to know about her wealthy, privileged background, so she kept quiet about being the Ambassador’s daughter. She earned a meagre salary, and worked hard and efficiently to prove her worth. No one knew that she had been presented at court, dined with British royalty, dated the heir to Chatsworth, partied at Blenheim Palace.
Frank Waldrop, her boss, loved having pretty girls around him. Kick thought she had got her job because of her friendship with Page, but, as usual, her father was pulling the strings. Joe’s friend Arthur Krock had called Waldrop up and suggested that he give Kick an opportunity, even though she couldn’t type very well and knew very little about the newspaper business.2
The Washington Times-Herald was an isolationist newspaper, its founder an extraordinary woman called Eleanor ‘Cissy’ Patterson. She was no fan of Roosevelt, though she adored his wife Eleanor. Some people accused her of being a Nazi sympathizer. She bought and merged two newspapers, the Washington Herald and the Washington Times, making her title the most widely read in the capital. Cissy was one of the most powerful and most hated women in America.
Her quotes were legendary: ‘I’d rather raise Hell than vegetables’; ‘Women have always bossed men, although most of the time they don’t know it’; ‘the trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch’. Her father was a newspaperman, whose motto was ‘when your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page’.3
One of Cissy’s writers was a beautiful blonde Danish woman called Inga Arvad. She was a daily columnist, penning a feature called ‘Did You Happen to See . . .’, which profiled government officials. She was twenty-eight and on her second marriage, which was already in trouble. She exuded glamour and sensuality. She became Kick’s close friend. In Denmark, Inga had been a beauty queen, but she was not just stunningly beautiful, she was intelligent and kind. She was cultivated and sophisticated, speaking several languages. She had attended the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism in New York before relocating to Washington.
Kick was intrigued by Inga. In the absence of her own beautiful but damaged elder sister Rosemary, Inga became a mentor and surrogate big sister. They became inseparable. Unlike so many other women, Kick was not intimidated by Inga’s beauty. She was utterly secure in her own skin, thanks to her personality and effervescence.
Inga was wholly unlike her friends from Convent or England. There was nothing repressed about Inga. Kick was intrigued that she was apparently on her way to a second divorce, yet seemingly free of guilt. Everything that Kick had learnt from the nuns at school, and from her mother at home, was thrown into question by Inga, with her free spirit and her devil-may-care attitude to men and to life. Kick began, for the first time, to question some of the attitudes and tenets of her strict upbringing.
This was the beginning of a new and exciting epoch in her life. To Kick’s delight, Jack had been assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, which meant that they could spend much of their social life together. Always close, their bond intensified as their lives entwined around work and play.
Waldrop recalled that, soon after Kick began working for him, he was called up by Joe Kennedy with an invitation to dinner. Waldrop remembered the dinner, to which Jack and Kick came along too. He noted the ebullience of the pair, the way that they described everything as ‘terrific’: ‘a terrific day, a terrific movie, terrific this, terrific that, everything was terrific’.4 Their enthusiasm could have been grating, but somehow he was charmed and he loved the way that Jack and Kick teased Joe. They mockingly referred to him as ‘the Ambassador’: ‘Now that the Ambassador has stated his position we can go on,’ Kick joked. Underneath it all, Waldrop was struck by the affection they had for him: ‘I mean they loved the old son of a bitch for what he was because they knew he loved them.’5 Waldrop also knew that Joe was sussing him out, ever careful of his adored daughter. Joe might have said, ‘get out and get a job’, but he wanted it to be the right sort of job and environment.
Kick, though, did not want it bandied around that she was Joe Kennedy’s daughter. One day she was meeting her father for dinner. She dressed herself beautifully and put on her mink coat. Suddenly remembering that there was something she had forgotten to do in the office, she ran back, only to bump into some of he
r colleagues. They were astounded to see Kick dressed in such an expensive coat, and rumours soon abounded that she must have fallen into bad ways and have found herself a sugar daddy.6
When word finally got out that she was Joe Kennedy’s daughter, some of Washington’s elite frowned upon her. A wealthy girl was taking a job she didn’t really need and thus depriving an ordinary girl of work. But it didn’t take long for everyone to be won over by her charms. It was the same pattern that had been established in England when she had been teased by her aristocratic friends and then had won them over. She was so funny, so honest, with her radiant smile. She was irresistible.
She had been in her new job for just three weeks when she received the letter from Jack telling her that he was coming to live in Washington. Inga never forgot Kick’s reaction to the news: Kick was ‘curled up like a kitten her long tawny hair fell over her face, then she jumped up . . . her Irish blue-eyes flashed with excitement as she leaped onto the floor and began a whirling dance like some delightful dervish. “He’s coming to Washington, I’m going to give a party at the F Street Club. You will just love him!”’
Inga thought that Kick was talking about one of her many admirers, and then learnt that it was her brother Jack, who was in the navy: ‘He came. She hadn’t exaggerated. He had the charm that makes birds come out of their trees. He looked like her twin, the same thick mop of hair, the same blue eyes, natural, engaging, ambitious, warm and when he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering but exuding animal magnetism.’7 Inga and Jack embarked upon a passionate love affair. He was a handsome, charismatic male version of her beloved Kick, and she fell deeply in love.8 Inga told John White that she was drawn to his ambition and single-mindedness. She also liked his honesty. Jack made it perfectly clear that the affair would not be long lasting. She thought that he had a lot to learn ‘and I’ll be happy to teach him’.9