Kick

by Paula Byrne

  That spring, he wrote a loving letter to Kick at Noroton. He knew how much she disliked it, but felt that she was making a go of it. Jack had told his father how much the nuns liked Kick, and Joe was gratified and encouraging: ‘I think that is really a great tribute to you, knowing how you felt about going back to the convent, to have made as big a success as you have of it.’5

  Kick met a handsome shipping heir called Peter Grace. She was seventeen and he was twenty-three when her closest friend Charlotte McDonnell introduced them. She took Kick to a dinner at her friend Michael Grace’s home. That evening his elder brother Peter, a Yale graduate, turned up. He was instantly dazzled by Kick. When his brother offered him a challenge he took it up in order to impress. Michael, knowing that his brother was a hockey player and not a footballer, challenged Peter to tackle a huge football player who was one of the guests. Peter, still in his business suit, tackled the man and broke his leg. With utter insouciance, Peter, without breaking a sweat, walked away with the words: ‘If you don’t want your friend hurt, don’t bring him around here.’

  Kick, as he fully expected, was impressed. He had a hunch that she liked tough men. He became her first serious boyfriend. She liked to remind him of their first meeting: ‘pretty tough guy, aren’t you?’6

  Peter Grace was similar to her brothers. He had Irish Catholic roots, was educated at an Ivy League college, was a first-rate sportsman and was wealthy. Peter was captivated by Kick. He liked the fact that she was a good convent girl, and wanted to marry her, even though she was only seventeen. When he picked her up for dates he noticed that her father was away on business but her sharp-eyed mother would sit and talk to him while he waited for Kick to get ready.7

  In June 1937, Kick finally graduated from Noroton. Joe sent her a congratulatory telegram: ‘You have proved to me very definitely that you are made of fine stuff and I am more than proud of you.’ She was free at last. She enrolled at Parsons School of Fine and Applied Art in New York to learn design and decorating. But, for the summer, it was back to Europe.

  Rose, young Joe and Kick boarded the SS Washington for their European tour, planning, vaguely, to meet up with Jack later in the summer.

  Jack’s trip was on a low budget, as Lem was short of money. Lem was impressed by Jack’s ability to slum it.8 Kick had given her brother a present of a leather-bound diary entitled ‘My Trip’. Lem observed that this European tour was a seminal moment in Jack’s life. ‘He had been studying French and European history at Harvard, and now he wanted to see it all himself.’9

  They travelled to France, Italy, Germany, Holland and England. Jack was disappointed that they were forbidden entry to Spain on account of the civil war. Lem observed a new seriousness in Jack as he encountered Europe in those pre-war years, showing advanced powers of ‘observation and judgment’.10 ‘He was the same irrepressible, girl-obsessed millionaire’s son from Bronxville, yet also a different Jack, for the intellect that he normally kept so well concealed was at last engaged. Harvard had begun to bite.’11

  Jack kept detailed notes in the diary that Kick had given him, and sent letters home to his father about the European situation. Though no fans of Fascism, both young men were impressed by Italy, as had been Kick the year before. ‘Italy was cleaner and the people looked more prosperous than we had anticipated,’ recalled Lem. ‘I had a feeling when I was in Italy that Mussolini had done a lot of good for Italy.’12

  In Germany, Lem noticed that Jack insisted on picking up every hitchhiker. He was puzzled about this until he realized Jack’s strategy. Most of the hikers were students, who had good English, which meant that the two Americans learnt a lot about the situation in Germany. Jack and Lem loathed Germany and the Germans. Jack noted in his diary: ‘Hitler seems popular here, as Mussolini was in Italy. Although propaganda seems to be his strongest point.’13 He found the Germans arrogant and insufferable, virulently nationalistic and anti-American. The nicest German they met, he said, was a dog called Dunker, which they bought for Jack’s current girlfriend. They missed seeing Hitler speak at Nuremberg by just a few days, something they always regretted.

  Kick and Joe Jr took in tours of Ireland, home of their ancestors, and of Scotland. In Ireland they stayed for two weeks. ‘Loved every part of it from Killarney upwards,’ Kick told her father.14 Killarney, in County Kerry, is one of the most beautiful parts of south-western Ireland. Lush and green, it boasts lakes, waterfalls, woodland, beaches and moors. She thought the scenery ‘gorgeous’, and sent her father a postcard of Dinis Island, with its spectacular hills and lake. One of the most memorable sights was the fifteenth-century Ross Castle, on the edge of the waters of Lough Leane. Kick could never have anticipated that one day she would have her very own Irish castle. She wrote excitedly to her father, in Washington, that she was ‘amidst many Kennedys’.15

  She visited her Neuilly Irish friends in the small seaside resort of Portrush in County Antrim, in Northern Ireland: ‘It was cold but a lot of fun.’16 Rose and Joe had spent their lives trying to escape their Irish roots, but Kick loved the Irish: ‘they really are awfully nice, but there is quite a marked difference between a Northern and Southern Irishman. Prefer the Southerners.’ She told Joe Sr that she had ‘kissed the Blarney Stone, which was quite a feat’. Kissing the stone, which is supposed to give you the gift of the gab, involves climbing to the top of Blarney Castle, near Cork, and stretching backwards over the edge of a parapet. Kick achieved it, while Joe Jr, pessimistically, told her how easy it was to fall to your death below.

  From Ireland it was on to Scotland. They were staying at the grand country house of their father’s friend and business associate Sir James Calder, with whom relations were now less strained than they had been. They went trout fishing and met some Scottish friends of the Calders, and Kick went shopping to buy tweeds and sweaters. An English MP took a shine to Kick, and asked her to go out with him when she got back to London.17 Joe went shooting every day, and walked across the moors wearing only one shoe, as his other foot had blisters. Sir James gave Kick a small rifle to shoot rabbits: ‘I shall try my luck today.’

  Back in London, Kick arranged less glamorous lodgings, a cheap boarding house in Talbot Square, off Hyde Park. She met up with Jack, now back from Germany, and they went shopping before heading off on a train to Southampton to meet Rose. Kick and Rose left for home and Jack made his way back to London and Lem. On the journey, he consumed a ‘liberal dose of chocolates and tomato juice’. He suddenly became very ill, covered in hives. He saw no fewer than four doctors, who were puzzled by his hives and low blood count. Lem said that Jack was terribly sick, but as usual he did not complain. Lem joked to Jack that if he ever wrote his life story he would call it ‘John F. Kennedy, a Medical History’.18 Suddenly the hives disappeared and off they went, exploring England.

  At the end of August, the boys went home and were met by Kick in New York. They proudly handed over the brace of grouse they had shot in Scotland for her to look after while they went through customs. When they met up afterwards, she told them that the birds had smelt so bad that she had thrown them off the dock. Jack and Lem were furious.

  This trip to Great Britain was memorable for Jack and Kick. It was when they truly fell in love with England. Both romantic by nature, they adored the lush scenery, the stately homes and castles and, above all, the people. They intuitively understood the understated British humour. Both being gifted with ‘Irish Blarney’, they appreciated wit and irony. They had a very British sensibility: never cry, don’t show your emotions, make light of troubles and always keep a sense of humour. Kick and Jack were drawn to emotional coolness, but also to loyalty and kindness. A friend was a friend for life.

  Lem said that Jack would do anything to hide his emotions, but at the same time he was extremely warm: ‘I never knew anyone with stronger feelings of loyalty.’19 The journalist Joe Alsop thought that there was something ‘intrinsically English’ about Jack: ‘He was terribly old-fashioned, almost like, sort of English
grandee kind of snobbishness. It was a kind of snobbery of style . . . he was snobbish about courage, and he was snobbish about experience . . . He wanted experience to be intense . . . to my way of thinking he wasn’t really like an American.’20

  Jack’s love of reading, especially history, and his intellectual curiosity endeared him to the English people he met. His travels in Europe, much as the situation was deteriorating politically, moved him deeply. Like Kick, he also relished being in countries (France, Italy and Southern Ireland) where Roman Catholicism was the main faith. Throughout the great European road trip, he never missed church on Sunday.

  When he returned to Harvard, Jack took as one of his courses ‘The History of European Art’. He had become a Europhile. He saw England as ‘the political anchor of Europe, the guarantor of peace between arrogant Germans, complacent French, noisy Latins and Communist Russians’.21 This was not a position that his father would share. Jack wrote in the diary given to him by his sister: ‘Isn’t the chance of war less as Britain gets stronger?’ Lem noted that after their European tour there was a new seriousness to his friend.

  Jack and Kick were to get to know England more thoroughly than they ever could have anticipated. Rose had a plan. She was just as ambitious as Joe, and now they wanted payback from Roosevelt for Joe’s support. In her memoirs, Rose made the point that Joe wanted a diplomatic role, but he was bad at languages. What else could he do?

  12

  The Ambassador

  You tempt all the Gods of the world by diving into the Court of St James’s as an expert . . . if you don’t realize that soon enough, you are going to be hurt as you were never hurt in your life.

  Boake Carter, friend of Joe Kennedy1

  In the fall of 1937, Joe Kennedy entered the Oval Office with Jimmy Roosevelt, the son of the President and one of his closest friends.

  ‘Joe, would you mind taking your pants down?’

  Joe looked at the President, incredulous. ‘We couldn’t believe our ears,’ recalled the President’s son, who had arranged the meeting.

  ‘Did you just say what I think you said?’ asked Kennedy.

  The President replied, ‘Yes, indeed.’

  James Roosevelt recalled that ‘Joe Kennedy undid his suspenders and dropped his pants and stood there in his shorts, looking silly and embarrassed.’ The President told Kennedy, ‘Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true. Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bow-legged man I have ever seen. Don’t you know that the ambassador to the Court of St James’s has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee britches and silk stockings? Can you imagine how he’ll look? When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughing stock. You’re just not right for the job, Joe.’2

  Having been chairman of the SEC and later of the Maritime Commission, Joe had been angling for the position of Secretary of the Treasury. When it was made clear by FDR that he was not in the running, he set his mind on Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, egged on by Rose. Kennedy, as an Irish-American, had no great love for England, but with Hitler’s rise and Mussolini’s march through Ethiopia it was now one of the most important diplomatic posts in the world.

  Roosevelt was initially sceptical in the extreme about the idea of Joe as Ambassador to Great Britain. When his son Jimmy told him the position that Joe was angling for as a reward for his loyalty, the President was so flabbergasted that ‘he laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair’.3 On reflection, though, he saw the value of getting Joe out of the way abroad. The story goes that the President had already made up his mind to give Joe the post when he summoned him to the Oval Office, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease him about his bow-legs. Joe responded that he would obtain special permission to wear trousers. Within hours he had secured that special permission. The story may well be apocryphal, symbolic of Joe’s refusal to take no for an answer and of his ability to charm his way to whatever he wanted.

  The post was his. From now on in the family he was to be known as and given the title of ‘the Ambassador’. He was the first ever Irish-Catholic Ambassador to Great Britain. Colleagues and friends were amazed by the appointment. Why was he appointed to a diplomatic role when he was so noted for his lack of tact and diplomacy, the blunt, plain-speaking Irish Bostonian with the dubious reputation? There were many friends who strongly advised Joe not to take the job. He didn’t have the skills, he would be Roosevelt’s puppet, and he would no longer be able to speak his mind freely. He was all wrong for the role, and it would be a disaster.

  Joe simply would not listen. He told everyone that he was joining an elite and distinguished line of men. No fewer than five US Presidents had held the post. And, above all, he felt that it would benefit his children for their father to be Ambassador to the Court of St James’s.

  In the meantime, Roosevelt, who did not trust Joe Kennedy for a single second, made arrangements for him to be watched hourly, ‘and the first time he opens his mouth and criticizes me, I will fire him’.4

  It was agreed that Kick would drop out of Parsons and help her mother in her new role as Ambassador’s wife. She would also make her ‘debut’ in London. Rose took elocution lessons and made preparations to relocate her large family. They knew enough about English life to understand that they needed some American modern conveniences. There was a lot to do before the move in February 1938.

  Rose had ensured that her daughters would each have a fabulous trousseau. The girls had shopped in Paris for outfits that would equip them for the English Season. Tweeds for racing, tea dresses, fur coats for when it turned cold, and evening dresses of silk chiffon. Kick was always stylishly dressed, and she soon began to dress like an upper-class British girl, with cardigans and pearls. She loved hats, and wore outlandish creations that suited her quirky face. She sometimes wore pink camellias in her hair.

  In October, Kick made another ‘Spiritual Bouquet’ to her parents: 100 masses, 100 communions, 100 rosaries, 25 acts. She was still seeing Peter Grace, who was as smitten as ever but nervous about the prospect of Kick’s relocation. England seemed a long way away. Kick, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be too heartbroken about leaving him or America.

  There was enormous excitement on both sides of the Atlantic about the arrival of the Kennedy family at the Court of St James’s. They had planned to arrive together in February, but Rose had had an emergency appendectomy, so she and the children embarked a few weeks later than planned. The Ambassador would be waiting there to greet them. Eunice, at Noroton, wrote to her mother about her shock at hearing of her operation: ‘I am sure you will be up and even running around dear old England in no time.’5

  13

  At the Court of St James’s

  I guess I’m off to find my Destiny.

  Kick Kennedy

  Kick Kennedy was a celebrity even before she set foot on English soil. She arrived with her mother and four siblings on 17 March 1938 on the SS Washington. The rest of the family were coming on a later boat. The family faced an army of journalists greedy to catch an image and interview with this most photogenic of families. Joe teased Kick about the press that she had already received.

  She was shocked to discover, on her arrival, that a report had reached England that she and Peter Grace were to be engaged. Kathleen was charming to the English reporters: ‘Really, I don’t know very much about it. I can’t think how that started. It’s so silly, but he’s awful nice. I like him a lot, but I do not know anything about him at all.’1

  Rose later recalled that ‘everyone was interested’ in Kick being married into the Grace family.2 This was the start of huge media interest in Kick and her love life. The English press were enchanted by Kick, who had just reached her eighteenth birthday and was so pretty and smiley. ‘Kathleen, aged 18, is in love,’ screamed the Daily Express. As Deborah Mitford recalled, ‘when they arrived it caused a sensation in London because no diplomat had ever a
rrived with nine children before’.3

  Rose was beside herself with excitement; it was the culmination of her dreams, but she advised the children to just ‘act natural’.4 Accompanying the family were their governess Elizabeth Dunn and their new nurse Luella Parsons. The crossing had been stormy, and Rose had been made anxious by news of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, the Anschluss.5

  Rose, poised, slim and impeccably dressed, was also a hit with the Brits, who described her as ‘vivacious as a screen-star, as wise as a dowager’. Likewise Joe’s down-to-earth honesty and brusqueness endeared him to everyone. ‘You can’t expect me to develop into a statesman overnight,’ he remarked.6 But everyone agreed that it was the nine handsome children that were Joe and Rose’s greatest assets. Life magazine reported that Great Britain ‘got eleven Ambassadors for the price of one’. The family was ‘big enough to man a full-sized cricket team’.7 England had taken them all to its heart.

  Rose’s father, Honey Fitz, teased Joe about the photo coverage of his grandchildren. Joe, ever sensitive when it came to his father-in-law, replied stonily: ‘We are not sending any pictures to any paper . . . If you have an attractive daughter and attractive grandchildren, you can’t get mad if their pictures appear in the papers.’8 In fact, the Ambassador, canny as ever, knew how to take advantage of the favourable publicity. He also hired a speech-writer, a public relations man and an RKO publicist named Jack Kennedy who was nicknamed ‘London Jack’. The faithful Eddie Moore joined the Ambassador to head up the London team.9