by Paula Byrne
Kick and Elizabeth flew up to Washington DC on a DC-4 Silverliner, Kick sending a cheery postcode to the Duchess on the way, telling her that Elizabeth was looking ‘very healthy & athletic’ from playing tennis every afternoon in Palm Beach.8 After a weekend with Jack in DC, she finally plucked up the courage to speak with complete candour to her parents. The family had gathered at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia at a grand reopening of the hotel, the Greenbrier, where Joe and Rose had honeymooned. On the last night of the reunion, she confessed that Peter was a married man with a child, planning to divorce his alcoholic wife. Rose was furious, threatening to disown her, saying she would never see her beloved family again. Her allowance would be cut off. She even threatened to leave Joe if he did not support her.9
Kick returned to Washington, where she stayed with the Whites. Patsy thought that Kick was truly in love, indeed ‘more fulfilled with Peter than in her short marriage to Billy’. Her brother John, speaking as a former boyfriend, was amazed by the force of her account of her love:
As she talked of Fitzwilliam, the man sounded like the hero of Out of Africa, a professional Englishman, a charming rogue. Rarely in life do you see someone so bubbling over with love, everything that love should be, every bit of it. Poor old Billy Hartington. But again he probably would have been blown away if she had felt that way about him. Very few people could stand that love, the sheer blast of emotion.10
Jack supported Kick. Eunice was distraught. She blamed John White and shouted, ‘You made Kathleen leave the Catholic Church. It’s all your fault.’11 Eunice had arranged for Kick to speak to Father Fulton Sheen. But Kick had been here before with Billy, and her passion for Peter was more primal than her love had been for the Marquess. She told Patsy that she didn’t want to go through with the interview. ‘Then don’t, honey,’ said Patsy. Kick phoned Eunice at two in the morning and cancelled the meeting.12
Kick told Patsy that she was planning a weekend in the South of France. Throughout the affair there had been snatched meetings, lunches, the odd night together, but this would be time for themselves far away from the eyes of friends, servants and gossips.
The day before she and Elizabeth left for England, Kick had lunch with Joe Jr’s friend Tom Schriber. He remembered that Kick looked ‘radiant’ with love, ‘really alive’: ‘She was revved up, ready to go. She had written off her mother, but not the old man.’ She told Tom that she wanted her father’s consent: ‘He matters. But I’m getting married whether he consents or not.’13 Her father had told Kick that he would try to find a way to make the marriage possible. He adored Kick and he wished to help as he had failed her before with Billy.
Kick’s return to England was not an escape from her mother. Rose, remembering that she and Joe had been absent throughout the ‘Agnes and Hartie’ debacle, decided that she should go to England and reason with the headstrong daughter who had defied her before. Years before, during the war, when travel was impossible, Kick had slipped through the net. It wasn’t going to happen again. This time, Rose crossed the Atlantic, knowing the full force of her powers. Kick’s devoted housekeeper Ilona Solymossy listened in to the row, as Rose stormed and Kick cowered. She could hardly believe that a twenty-eight-year-old widow would allow herself to be spoken to in such a way. Kick was like a scolded child.14 Rose was adamant that Kick was losing everything, including her family. That was the worst thought of all, that she would be disowned not just by Mother Rome but also by the real church: the Kennedy family.15
Kick’s only resort was to appeal to her beloved father. He understood her, and he had always taken her side. Kick spoke to Joe on the telephone, begging him to meet Peter in Paris. He agreed.
Early in May 1948, she wrote a newsy letter, from where she was staying with some friends, Freddy and Sheila Birkenhead. She told of dinner parties, going to nightclubs, watching the royal family driving to Buckingham Palace in open carriages. She had been at Eastbourne with Elizabeth and Anne Cavendish and the Duchess. They were thrilled with the presents that she had brought back from America. She was as close to them as ever, even though they knew of her affair with Peter. Her old beau, Richard Wood, had visited her with his new wife. Kick had been to the Royal Ballet. She had lunched with the Irish High Commissioner. It was like a roll call of the great and the good, but there was something frenetic and dispassionate about it all. There was no mention of Peter.16
Peter invited Kick to fly down to Cannes on the French Riviera for a weekend. He planned to buy a racehorse as well as indulge his lover. For Kick, this was the opportunity she was waiting for: she proposed that when changing planes in Paris on the way back they would meet with her father.
Before they left, Peter took her to Wentworth Woodhouse. A woman who worked in the Post Office saw them: ‘They looked so happy and carefree. Peter wanted to show her the family mausoleum. We watched them set out across the Park and I remember she was wearing an immaculate pair of beautiful white shoes. There was all that coal dust and muck around from the open-cast mining! They’d be ruined, I thought!’17
On the way back from Yorkshire to London, they made a stop at Milton Hall, the family’s southern seat near Peterborough, home to Peter’s cousin Tom. Kick joked, ‘Not another big house!’ ‘Don’t worry, Kick,’ Peter said. ‘We’ll be living in Ireland.’ He told Tom Fitzwilliam that he had Kick with him, ‘May I bring her in?’ ‘For God’s sake, do.’ They stayed for dinner and Peter told Tom his plans – that they would be meeting with Joe in Paris to obtain his permission for the marriage. He joked: ‘If he objects, I’ll go to the Pope and offer to build him a church.’18
13 May 1948.
Kick packed a suitcase with beautiful clothes and jewels and a family photograph album.19 She placed exquisite lingerie, a silk negligee and lacy garter belts alongside a vaginal douche. She was no longer the naive girl who dressed in flannel nightdresses. She was a sophisticated woman, finally in touch with her own sexuality.
For the flight she dressed in a navy suit with her trademark pearls. She carried her rosary beads. Peter laughed when he saw how much luggage she was taking for a long weekend.
‘Wish me luck,’ she said to her housekeeper.
‘Should I cross my fingers?’ Ilona asked.
‘Yes, both hands.’20
Kick was happy and excited, but she had not forgotten Billy. Days before she left for Paris, she had spoken to Lady Anderson about her love for Billy. She had talked about her feelings of joy when she had been married. Being in love with Peter was wonderful, but he hadn’t obliterated her memory of Billy and all she had lost. Lady Anderson recalled that Kick was still wistful, that in her deepest self she had not changed from the girl who in a letter to the Duchess of Devonshire the previous year had talked about her belief that she would one day be reunited with ‘our beloved Billy’ in heaven, where he would be waiting to greet her.21
Peter had chartered a private plane, a de Havilland Dove, to fly from Croydon to Nice. The pilot planned to stop for half an hour at Paris’s Le Bourget airport to refuel. Peter, on a whim, and looking for fun, called some of his racing friends to meet for a quick lunch in the city.
Peter Townshend, the highly experienced pilot, consulted weather reports and saw that a thunderstorm was predicted to hit the Rhône Valley at around five o’clock. If they were to beat the storm they had to leave for Cannes as soon as possible. But Peter and Kick had failed to return to the airport from lunch. Forty minutes had turned into two and a half hours. Townshend called the air-traffic controller, telling him that he was going to be late. He was furious when the lovers finally turned up; he told them that all commercial flights had been cancelled and that it was not possible to fly. They would be flying over the Rhône at precisely the time that the storm was predicted to hit.
Peter, with his usual charm, persuaded the pilot to change his mind. There was, no doubt, a financial inducement. When they boarded, Kick was asked to sit on the back left seat, with Peter in front of her, to balance the weight. T
hey took off into calm skies.
Passing over Valence at 10,000 feet, they entered the storm just north of the Ardèche mountains in the Cévennes. Townshend and his radio pilot lost communication, and with poor visibility, flew into the eye of the storm. Locals later testified that the storm was of exceptional strength.22 The tiny plane was tossed about, buffeted in violent cross-currents for twenty-eight minutes. Townshend lost control of the Dove, but could see that he was about to crash into a mountain ridge and as a last-ditch effort to avoid it he yanked the controls towards him. The force of the manoeuvre broke the Dove up in mid-air. The right wing snapped off and then the engines were off. The fuselage landed on the mountainside. During the last two minutes, the pilot and co-pilot stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths, a standard procedure for a crash landing, to avoid biting through the tongue. All four people on board would have known that they were going to crash.
A farmer called Paul Petit, looking out from his stone farmhouse high in the Cévennes mountains, had heard the noisy plane flying into the cloud, and watched in horror as it appeared out of the clouds and broke up in mid-air. He and his father climbed to the top of the mountain, where they found the fuselage, with only one wing attached, and the four bodies inside. The two pilots were crushed in the cockpit, the male passenger crumpled under his seat. The woman was still in her seat, belt fastened, the body slumped at an angle. Paul Petit called the Mairie at St Bauzile, the nearest village, and the bodies were carried down to the village in makeshift stretchers on ox-carts.23
Searching through the woman’s handbag, the Gendarmes found a passport belonging to Lady Hartington.
Joe Kennedy was asleep in his suite at the George V hotel in Paris, when a call came through from the Boston Globe. His friend Joseph Timilty, who was travelling with him, took the call and broke the news. Joe was too stunned to speak to the press. First Joe Jr and then Billy and now Kick. He sat silently for half an hour and then took out a piece of paper and wrote a note to himself: ‘No one who ever knew her didn’t feel that life was much better that minute. And we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.’24
He made arrangements to travel by train to the Ardèche to identify the body, hoping that it was a case of mistaken identity. But in his heart he knew. When he arrived, he was shown the body. The right side of her face had a long gash, and her legs, jaw and pelvis had been crushed on impact. But he said that she looked beautiful. He told the family that they had discovered her with her shoes kicked off.
One of Jack’s assistants in Washington heard the news on the radio and called Eunice. She hoped, just for a single moment, that it was Debo who had been killed and not Kick. Jack was in the back room listening to a recording of the Irish musical Finian’s Rainbow. Jack asked for confirmation, and when he heard that the body had been formally identified by his father he wept. As they had done before and would do again, when tragedy struck, the Kennedys gathered at Hyannis Port to mourn, and to take solace from each other.
Joe had been shocked when he was handed Kick’s personal effects. The birth-control device was a distressing reminder that Kick had been in the sole company of a married man. The Devonshires, the Kennedys and the Fitzwilliams sprang into action.
At Wentworth, staff were dispatched to sweep Peter’s bedroom, clean the sheets and remove all traces of Kick. His wife Obby was on her way from London. The staff were ordered to clear the chapel for Peter’s coffin. Andrew Cavendish ensured that the press did not report that Kick and Peter were lovers, but were merely travelling as friends.25 It was stated that Kick had bumped into Peter at the Ritz and he had offered her a seat on his private jet.
Kick’s body was taken to a Paris church while plans were being prepared. Joe had hoped that Jack would make arrangements but he was too upset about her death to do anything. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who had loved her, offered to bury her in the family plot at Chatsworth. They knew about Peter, but Kick was family. The Devonshires asked the Kennedy family if they would like a Roman Catholic funeral. It was a symbol of how much they loved her. They would give her a Catholic funeral and still bury her at Chatsworth.
Joe was the only member of the Kennedy family to attend her funeral. Jack intended to, but at the last minute couldn’t face it and turned back.
On 20 May a High Requiem Mass was said at Farm Street. Many friends came to pay tribute to the young woman they had loved. The chief mourners were Joe, the Duke and Duchess and Elizabeth and Andrew Cavendish. Winston Churchill sent a huge sheaf of arum lilies. The church was packed with politicians and the cream of high society. When the coffin passed Sissy Ormsby Gore she fell to her knees, put her head on the coffin and wailed.26
Afterwards, a special train transported Joe and 200 of Kick’s friends to Chatsworth with the coffin. Joe wore a crumpled blue suit; Debo recalled that ‘he was crumpled just like the suit. I never saw anything like it.’27 It was the first funeral that she had ever attended, and she was distraught. She was exactly the same age as Kick, twenty-eight: ‘not the time of life when you think about death, yet that most vital of human beings had been taken from us’.28
The head gardener at Chatsworth, Bert Link, lined her grave with pale purple wisteria, ‘the sweet-smelling, short-lived flowers so fitting for a life cut short so tragically’.29 The Duchess chose the words for her gravestone: ‘Joy she gave Joy she has found’.
EPILOGUE
An anonymous friend said to The Times after her death: ‘No American, man or woman who has ever settled in England, was so much loved as she, and no American ever loved England more. Strangely enough, it was those in London who are most disenchanted with this day and age who perhaps derived the greatest comfort and light from her enchanting personality.’1
Lady Anderson, who had loved her like a daughter, wrote a beautiful tribute:
It is not always a compliment to say that a woman or man has no enemies, but the fact that everyone loved her came from no weakness in her nature, but from the sheer worth of her character . . . in what lay her unusual charm? Her evident goodness, her most attractive sense of humour, her radiant blue eyes, her smile in which was reflected the beauty of her spirit? It is difficult to say, but no one could have been more richly endowed for friendship.2
The tributes poured in from both sides of the Atlantic. For friends of the Cavendishes, Kick’s death was a reminder of her great love of Billy: ‘For Kick somehow I cannot grieve, strange as it may seem,’ wrote one of the Duchess’s friends. ‘I have always felt her life in a way ended with darling Billy and that without his help she had lost the rudder that controlled her life, and the forces of her being would always have been pulling her in different ways.’3
John White wrote a final ‘Did You Happen to See . . . Kathleen’:
It is a strange, hard thing to sit at this desk, to tap at this typewriter (your old desk, your old typewriter), to tap out the cold and final word – good-by. Good-by little Kathleen. THE Wires have at last stopped rattling out the details of what happened in France, Thursday, late . . . in the storm . . . Kathleen. Little ‘Kick’ Where have you gone?4
In the end he never filed it. Instead, the Washington Times-Herald published a small tribute to their intrepid reporter: ‘Everyone in this office has tried to write this piece. But the white space is more eloquent. * Kathleen, Lady Hartington was found stretched on her back and appeared to have been asleep * Dream, Kick.’5
The story concocted by the three families that it was a chance encounter that sent Kick to her death was duly reproduced. The New York Daily News was the first to break the news: ‘Chance Invite Sends Kennedy Girl to her Death’. The paper was owned by a friend of Joe’s. Kick was described as an ‘old friend of both Lady and Lord Fitzwilliam’.6 In her memoir, Rose wrote that her daughter was killed ‘flying in a private plane with a few friends to Paris, where her father was waiting to meet her’.7 Lem Billings s
aid that for Rose ‘that airplane crash was God pointing his finger at Kick and saying no!’8
Joe was broken. After the funeral, he wrote a moving letter to the Duchess in which he revealed the extent of his grief: ‘I think that the only thing that helped me retain my sanity was your understanding manner in the whole sad affair.’ He had sent recent photographs of Kick (the last ones he had taken of her) to be distributed among her friends: ‘I can’t seem to get out of my mind that there is no possibility of seeing Kick next winter and that there are no more weeks and months to be made gay by her presence.’9
The person most affected by her death was Jack. Of the three ‘personality kids’, he had been the one who suffered from ill health and had several times been close to death. Joe Jr and Kick had been the epitome of health and vitality. How could they both be dead, while he was still alive? ‘Kathleen and Joe [had] everything moving in their direction. That’s what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But for someone who is living at the peak, then to get cut off – that’s a shock.’10 To Lem he confessed his sleepless nights thinking about his sister and all they had shared. She was the one who had always believed in him.
When he came to England, six weeks after Kick’s funeral, he spoke to her housekeeper Ilona, wanting to know everything about her last days. He told Ilona that he would never speak about his sister again. Years later, Bobby did exactly the same thing. For many years, Jack couldn’t bring himself to visit her grave at Chatsworth.
Ilona and her sister had been Kick’s loyal staff, and after her death they were given employment at Chatsworth and set about restoring the great house at Debo’s request. They were a huge success and became as devoted to Debo as they had been to Kick.
