‘They called me a bloody nigger,’ Prince Aly once said of his upper-class English contemporaries, ‘and I paid them out by winning all their women.’ Suave and good-looking, the owner of six houses and a suite at the Ritz, the Prince was an international playboy and lothario known for his extravagant gestures. When he married the actress Rita Hayworth in 1949, he filled the swimming pool at his house on the Riviera with 200 gallons of eau-de-cologne for the wedding reception.
The close friendship between Peter and the Prince sprang from their common interests and similar temperaments. In the years immediately after the war, both their marriages were failing; in 1947, Aly, married to Joan Yarde-Buller, the former wife of Joel Guinness, had numerous affairs, including one with Pamela Churchill, who had recently separated from Winston’s son, Randolph. Like Peter, Aly’s passions were horses and women. Michael Wishart, the English artist, remembered staying at Château de l’Horizon, Aly’s gleaming white Moorish-style villa on the Riviera. Here the Prince held court ‘resplendent as a basking shark, surrounded by a claque of pretty girls wearing the lower halves of bikinis’; Aly wore, as Wishart described, a pair of swimming trunks ‘with the would-be tantalizing admonition “not to be opened until Christmas” embroidered down the fly’. Aly’s reputation as a demon lover was legendary. ‘I only think of the woman’s pleasure when I am in love,’ was one of his maxims. He was famed for practising a lovemaking technique called ‘Imsak’, an ancient Arabic art taught to him by an Egyptian doctor that reputedly enabled him to delay orgasm for hours.
Peter and Aly shared other attributes. Aly had also had a ‘good war’, serving in the French Foreign Legion and in British and American intelligence units. Brave and reckless, both men were known for the restlessness that drove their high-octane lifestyle. ‘I once left Aly at four in the morning at Deauville,’ remembered Jean Fayard, the Prix Goncourt-winning author. ‘When I got back to his house late that same day, he had ridden a horse in the morning, played tennis, flown to England to watch one of his horses, flown back, and then we played bridge until three the next morning.’ While Jean and the other guests went to bed, Aly, as Fayard recalled, got in his car and drove along the Grande Corniche to the Casino at Monte Carlo, finally returning at seven to snatch two hours’ sleep before beginning a new day.
It was to this decadent world that Peter whisked Kick: throughout 1947, their weekends were spent at Château de l’Horizon, and in private boxes at glamorous racing venues in France and England. ‘I never imagined it would last,’ remembered Janie Compton. ‘I was convinced Peter could never make Kick happy.’ As the months passed, and the affair showed no signs of cooling off, Janie did not hide her disapproval from Kick. ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know him,’ she would reply.
There was a side to Peter’s character that only his close friends knew. ‘Peter had all the charm in the world – to a rather dangerous extent, really,’ Harry Sporborg, his business partner and former SOE colleague, recalled. Peter’s accounts show that, although his gambling debts were huge, he was also extremely generous. In 1947, he stood as personal guarantor to four of his friends’ bank overdrafts: the total sum amounted to almost £38,000 – almost £1 million in today’s money. As Kick confided to her brother Jack, Peter made her laugh: she had found a man who knew how to play, who swept her along with him and with whom she could have fun after the sadness and sacrifices of the war.
‘Peter was mad about Kick, absolutely mad about her. Oh yes!’ his niece, Lady Barbara Ricardo, recalled. ‘I know exactly why people thought it would never last because he did have masses of girlfriends, so you can understand them thinking that. But he was crazy about Kick. All his life he never seemed to do the obvious thing – go for a conventional upper-class English girl. He was never attracted to the sort of girls people expected him to be attracted to. Girls I suppose from his world. I think his mother was so determined for him, wanting so much for him, always trying to choose the right girl for him before he married. And I think that was probably one of the reasons why he was always trying to escape. Kick was an escape. She also had the double attraction – because of the whole Catholic thing – of being seemingly unobtainable.’
The Fitzwilliams were as virulently anti-Catholic as the Devonshires. ‘I remember inviting a girl up to stay for the weekend,’ recalled Ian Bond, Peter’s cousin. ‘On the Saturday evening she asked my mother where the nearest Catholic church was for Mass.
The next morning she’d gone. My mother had sent her home: she wouldn’t have a Catholic in the house.’ In the winter of 1947, fearing that Peter would seek to obtain a divorce from Obby, Billy Fitzwilliam’s trustees voiced their disapproval. ‘My father was against the whole thing,’ remembered Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Heathcote Diggle. ‘It wasn’t just the Catholic issue. He belonged to the old school. Divorce was regarded as a let-down. It was difficult to get divorced. It was a laborious process, even then. The advisers felt it would bring the family into disrepute.’
Maud Fitzwilliam sided with the family trustees. ‘My grandmother disapproved of divorce,’ Juliet, Peter’s daughter, recalled. ‘I believe she had heard a rumour that Kick might not be able to have children. If so, this would have horrified her.’ But nothing – and no one – could ever drive a wedge between Maud and her son. Ultimately, as Barbara remembered, ‘It was how it had always been: what he wanted, she wanted.’
At Christmas, in 1947, Kick told her friends she was going to marry Peter. For the most part, they were against the marriage. ‘I liked Peter very much, he was so charming, but if they had married there would have been a reaction,’ Andrew Cavendish, Billy’s younger brother, recalled. Janie Compton had not changed her view: ‘I think there would have been problems and I don’t think she would have been happy with him.’ David and Sissy Ormsby-Gore were even more disapproving. Devout Catholics, they reminded Kick of what it would mean to marry outside the Church again. David thought Peter the utter antithesis of everything she had been taught to value in terms of public service and sacrifice: surely, he urged, she would feel out of place in Peter’s world and come to find it irritating.
Kick would not listen to any of them. Early in February 1948, she caught a boat to America to break the news to her parents. In New York, she told Charlotte Harris of her plans. ‘My reaction,’ Charlotte remembered, ‘was having done just about the worst thing she could have by marrying Billy, Holy Good Night, now look what she’s done! Billy I think was a very conscious decision. But not Fitzwilliam. It was passion. It was hysterical. It was all “I gotta do, I gotta go”. If she couldn’t marry him, she was ready to run off with him. She just wasn’t concerned about the consequences.’
Despite her bravado, Kick was nervous. Peter had told her emphatically that he would not convert to Catholicism, nor would he allow his children to be raised as Catholics. She was in the same position as she had been before she married Billy, only this time it was worse. Facing excommunication once again, she was aware that marriage to a Protestant divorcee would involve the Kennedy family in their first major public scandal. While she would never be named as the third party in Peter’s divorce suit – a sordid encounter with some unknown woman in a hotel room would be cited in the papers instead – inevitably, the details of her role would be bound to leak out.
On 19 February, Kick joined the Kennedy family for their traditional winter break at their holiday home in Palm Beach. She put off telling Rose and Joe about Peter for as long as she possibly could. Week after week, in the endless round of games and parties, she talked about anything and everything else. Jack had kept her secret well: neither Rose nor Joe had any idea of the affair.
By mid-April, Kick had been in America for two months and still she had failed to confront her parents. The week before she sailed to England – on 22 April – there was just one opportunity left. After visiting friends on the East Coast, she was due to spend her last weekend with Rose and Joe at a party at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs to celebra
te its reopening after four years of service as a wartime army hospital. Jack Kennedy, by now a young Congressman, and Kick’s sisters Jean and Eunice were also going to be there.
The weekend party had been trumpeted as the society event of the season. The Greenbrier, owned by Robert Young, a family friend of the Kennedys, was America’s premier spa hotel, an elegant 600-room mansion built in the ante-bellum style, set in acres of parkland, framed by spectacular beech forests. It had an illustrious history. Before the war it had been favoured by Hollywood celebrities, European royalty and America’s first families: the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Bing Crosby were among the regular guests.
Some weeks before the party, to his surprise, Kick had invited Jackie Pierrepont to accompany her for the weekend. An old childhood friend, Jackie, who came from a grand Episcopalian family, had shocked society by converting to Catholicism during the war. On the journey to White Sulphur Springs – travelling in one of fourteen private railroad cars laid on by the party organizers to ferry the 300 guests – it soon became evident to Jackie why Kick had asked him: she was badly in need of moral support. As the train wound its way up the East Coast, he noticed that she seemed preoccupied. Suddenly, she brought their small talk to a close.
‘I want to do something that is going to make everybody very mad at me,’ she said, looking hard at Jackie.
‘You’re going to leave the Church?’ Jackie guessed.
‘No, I’m very much in love with this married man.’
Swearing him to secrecy, she confided the whole story. It was almost as if she was rehearsing the conversation she was about to have with her family. She assured Jackie that she was not breaking up a marriage, that in fact it was a disaster already. They debated her decision to tell her parents for the rest of the journey; though Kick knew her father would be furious, she felt confident of being able to handle him: it was her mother’s reaction, the idea of hurting her all over again, that she dreaded the most.
The weekend was crowded with activities: golf on the championship links, swimming in the hotel’s glamorous first-floor art deco pool, dancing till dawn in the pink ballroom, festooned with balloons. In the afternoons, as the local paper reported, tea was served by ‘Negroes dressed as slaves’. Kick had hardly been discreet about her affair; to her discomfort, she found herself the subject of whispered attention. ‘We all knew Jean’s sister was carrying on with someone,’ Margaret Hutchinson recalled, ‘and that gave us a lot of scandal to talk about. We all felt that what we called a holy runaround was going on.’
Kick kept delaying the moment she told her parents, finally confronting them on the last night of the weekend. Neither Rose nor Joe kept a record of the discussion, nor were there, understandably, any other witnesses present. But, as Jackie Pierrepont remembered, the next morning, on the train journey up north, Kick remained visibly shaken.
Rose, apparently, had been livid. Forbidding Kick to marry Peter, Rose warned her that, if she went ahead with the wedding, she would be disinherited and – most wounding of all – she would never be seen or spoken to again.
On Kick’s arrival in Washington the afternoon after the confrontation, it was Patsy White – the friend who had comforted her after Billy had been killed – to whom she turned. Banishment by Rose meant banishment from the Kennedy clan – from the ritualistic summer and winter gatherings at Hyannis Port. Of all people, Patsy knew how much Kick’s family meant to her. ‘She never wanted to be separated from her family, even if she were living in England. I never heard Kick criticize her father or mother or brothers or sisters. She was completely happy with them, being a Kennedy, happy with all of them.’ The last thing she wanted, as Patsy recalled, was to be ‘sent off into perpetual exile’.
Her identity as a Kennedy lay at the very core of Kick’s personality. Two months after Billy’s death, writing to Lem Billings, she believed it gave her the strength to overcome her grief. ‘One thing you can be sure of,’ she wrote, ‘life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage and death before the age of 25. It’s hard to face the future, without someone who you thought would always be there to help and guide and for whom you’d sacrificed a lot. Luckily I am a Kennedy. I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things … I know that we’ve all got the ability to not be got down.’
The thought of being severed from her family was unbearable to Kick. It also seemed implausible. Though deeply distressed by her mother’s threat, she had no reason to believe that Rose really meant to carry it out. She had, after all, eventually forgiven Kick for marrying Billy. Even during the two months when she had been estranged from her mother, she had still been in touch with the rest of her family. Her father had been the crucial link. If he could be won over, Kick reasoned, he might eventually persuade Rose to forgive her, as he had done when she married Billy.
Kick was due to sail back to England – and to Peter – on 22 April. During her last days in Washington, the indications were that Joe would come round to her marriage. Since the row at the Greenbrier, far from forbidding Kick to marry Peter, Joe had called her to tell her about a ruse he had thought up. As Kick told Patsy, he planned to convince the Church authorities that Peter had never been baptized, thereby invalidating his marriage to Obby. Rather than obtaining a divorce, Joe suggested, the marriage could be annulled, leaving Peter and Kick free to marry. It was a ludicrous idea, as Kick knew. Peter’s christening in 1911 had been attended by tens of thousands from the pit villages around Wentworth and widely covered in the British Press. Yet while she and Patsy shared a laugh at Joe’s expense, giggling at his naivety over the time-honoured practices of the English aristocracy, Kick was profoundly touched by his support.
Throughout her eighteen-month affair with Peter, Kick had suffered none of the doctrinal debates over her religion, both with others and within herself, that had tormented her before she married Billy. She was not about to suffer them now. After the showdown with Rose, Eunice had telephoned Bishop Fulton Sheen to arrange an appointment for Kick to meet him in New York. The Bishop was one of the most charismatic and persuasive in America and Eunice hoped that he would be able to persuade her to change her mind. For her sister’s sake, Kick had agreed to see him. But, as Patsy discovered on 20 April, the night before Kick left Washington, she could not go through the charade.
The meeting was scheduled for first thing the following morning. Unable to sleep, Kick came into Patsy’s room and lay down beside her.
‘I just don’t want to do it, I just don’t want to do it,’ she kept repeating. ‘What good can it do? I’m not going to change my mind about Peter. It’s just more pressure. What would you do?’
‘I’d call Bishop Sheen and cancel the appointment,’ Patsy replied.
‘You’re right,’ Kick said. ‘It’s my life. There’s no point going through catechism all over again. I’m going back to England to do whatever I have to do to be with Peter.’
It was two o’clock in the morning. Then and there, she picked up the phone and rang the Presbytery to cancel the appointment. It had been over two months since she had last seen Peter. Before they fell asleep, she told Patsy excitedly about the Whitsun weekend they had planned in three weeks’ time – their first alone together at a villa in the South of France.
Kick sailed from New York on the Queen Elizabeth. Oblivious to the full extent of her mother’s wrath, she was in high spirits before she left. Tom Schriber, Joe Jr’s old friend, had lunch with her at the 21 Club in Manhattan: ‘She looked radiant,’ he recalled, ‘really alive. She was revved up, ready to go. She had written off her mother but not the old man. She said, “I’d like to get Dad’s consent. He matters. But I’m getting married whether he consents or not.”’
Within a matter of days, Kick would find herself wavering, cowering before her mother’s abuse.
‘You are a twenty-eight-year-old married woman and a British resident,’ Ilona Solymossy, Kick’s housekeeper,
reasoned with her. ‘How could your mother possibly stop you from marrying?’
Rose had pursued Kick across the Atlantic. In early May, days after Kick arrived back in London, her mother turned up on the doorstep of her house in Smith Square. More than thirty years later, Lynne McTaggart, Kick’s biographer, tracked down Ilona Solymossy, the only person to witness what happened during the four ugly days of Rose’s stay.
Relentlessly – day and night, according to Ilona – Rose bullied Kick. Hounding her around the house, unmoved by her daughter’s tears, Rose insisted that she should end her relationship with Peter, call off any marriage plans and return immediately to America. Repeatedly, Rose reminded her daughter of God’s view of divorce. Kick wept helplessly. In all her life, Ilona said, she had never seen an adult cower before a parent as Kick did before her mother.
Rose did not – as she had intended – take Kick with her when she left. But she did leave her, as Ilona remembered, with the feeling that she might not be able to go through with the marriage without the support of at least one parent. She was also left in no doubt that her mother would carry out her threat to banish her from the family; terrified that Rose would turn her brothers and sisters against her for good, Kick rang her father.
The weekend she and Peter planned to fly to the South of France for their Whitsun break, Joe was due to be in Paris on business. Perhaps they could meet, Kick thought. If her father would not give his formal consent to their marriage, he might at least give it his blessing.
When Kick came into the room after finishing the call, Ilona had never seen her looking so ecstatic. Joe had agreed to her suggestion: she and Peter were to meet him for lunch at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on Saturday 15 May.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 44