Joe left, leaving the President chuckling. He had already decided to give him the job. He wanted Kennedy out of the way. Over the years, their relationship had been competitive and mistrustful. Mooted as a challenger to Roosevelt, Kennedy had frequently criticized the President in public. Privately, as he confided to his Secretary to the Treasury, Roosevelt regarded him as a ‘very dangerous man’. Banishing him to the plum position at the Court of St James seemed a smart way of getting rid of him. He also hoped, in making such a maverick appointment, that Kennedy, with his reputation for straight-talking, would offer a clear perspective on the increasingly threatening European situation: as FDR knew, previous US Ambassadors to London – resolute Anglophiles drawn from America’s grand Protestant dynasties – had displayed a tendency to turn native.
Quite how unconventional Joe Kennedy was became apparent on his first day in London, when he railed against the refined interior of the US Embassy. ‘I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect is a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May. If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my life,’ Kennedy wrote to Jimmy Roosevelt. ‘I have just made my first trip around through the building. Not only was the designer a fairy, but he was probably the most inefficient architect I have ever seen.’
From the moment he arrived in London, America’s new Ambassador courted the British Press, his lavish entertaining and unconventional style supplying the newspapers with yards of lively copy. Characterized as the gum-chewing envoy with ‘lots of go’, Kennedy was hailed as ‘One of the most dynamic men in the present-day life of the United States’. ‘To the London crowd’, the Star reported, he embodies ‘the sparkling vitality of a continent’. After he referred to the Queen as a ‘cute trick’, it made front-page headlines; so did his breach of royal etiquette at a ball at Buckingham Palace when, striding directly up to her, he had asked her to dance without waiting to be invited to do so by her equerry. Guests invited to dinner at the Ambassador’s residence overlooking Hyde Park at 14 Princes Gate, a palatial six-storey building staffed by twenty-six servants, were treated to the latest Hollywood film after their meal; when the King and Queen dined, they were shown an uncut version of Goodbye Mr Chips.
But it was the Ambassador’s nine children – the boys with their American crewcuts and handsome faces, the girls similarly wholesome-looking – the whole Kennedy magic – that most enthralled the British Press. Joe Kennedy was as ambitious for his children – his ‘nine hostages to fortune’, as he once called them – as he was for himself. ‘You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the laws of nature, that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged,’ Charles Spalding, a family friend, recalled of a weekend spent at Hyannis Port, the Kennedys’ summer home, in the late 1930s. ‘There was endless talk – the Ambassador at the head of the table laying out the prevailing wisdom, but everyone else weighing in with their opinions and taking part. It was a scene of endless competition, people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came into contact with them. They were a unit.’
Fleet Street followed the young Kennedys’ every move: six-year-old Teddy’s attempt to take a photograph upside down at the Changing of the Guard outside St James’s Palace; thirteen-year-old Bobby’s awkward efforts to engage Princess Elizabeth in conversation at a tea party at Buckingham Palace. Judging from the Kennedys’ giddy letters home to their friends, they were evidently as enthralled with their new life in Britain as the British public seemed to be with them. ‘Met the King this morning at Court Levee,’ wrote Jack Kennedy to his friend Lem Billings: ‘It takes place in the morning and you wear tails. The King stands and you go up and bow. Met Queen Mary and was at tea with Princess Elizabeth, with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night I’m going to Court in my new silk breeches which are cut to my crotch tightly and in which I look mighty attractive.’
Seventeen-year-old Eunice was similarly entranced by her presentation at Court: ‘As I entered the Palace more excitement and joy seized me than ever before in my life,’ she wrote in her diary.
During the first moment of waiting, I was breathlessly excited; then a strong rich voice called MISS KENNEDY and I started to walk alone toward their Majesties. I glanced upward and wondered if ever I would reach the throne thirty feet away; but somehow, I did. As I made my curtsey … I realized that at this moment I was the center of interest of this King and Queen and all the pompous ceremony that England holds so sacred. Shortly after midnight, I left the Palace for home, happy in the realization that I had achieved the aim of every young girl – that of being presented at the Court of St James – the world’s greatest empire – ‘The Empire upon which the sun never sets’.
But of all the Kennedy children, it was Kick who drew the most attention.
In 1938, in her first season as a debutante, she dazzled English society as few American women ever had. Catapulted into the limelight – and into the highest strata of the pre-war social whirl – by her father’s position, she was presented at Court two months after arriving in London. In advance of her debut, Queen, the leading society magazine, devoted a one-page spread to her, bearing the headline ‘America’s Most Important Debutante’. At the coming-out ball that followed Kick’s presentation, the Ambassador spared no expense. Eighty guests were entertained to dinner at Princes Gate, a further 300 joining them for the dance afterwards. London’s most fashionable jazz band, the Ambrose Band, was hired for the evening to play in the ballroom, filled with clouds of purple and pink flowers.
Kick danced every dance, her partners including the Duke of Kent, Prince Leopold and Viscount Newport. At eighteen, she was not conventionally beautiful. She had mousy-brown hair, her face was a little too square and her figure slightly plump. The catch-all expression ‘handsome’ was how she was described. It was her personality that captivated the Press and her contemporaries. ‘When she came into a room,’ her friend Dinah Bridge, Lady Astor’s niece, said, ‘everybody seemed to lighten up. She made everyone feel terribly happy and gay.’ ‘She was just “Darling Kick”,’ recalled Janie Compton, Kick’s closest friend from her debutante days. ‘I adored her. She was absolutely enchanting. A heavenly person. She was very genuine, very kind and very funny.’ Kick’s letters home to her friends in America about life in London were comic and ironic, traits largely absent in those of her brothers and sisters. Of her own presentation at Court she wrote to Jack’s friend Lem Billings, ‘Wish you could be here for it. I so often think of you when I meet a guy who thinks he’s absolutely the tops and is just a big ham … Very few of them take any kidding at all.’ In another letter to Billings, written from Cliveden, the Astors’ country seat, she wrote breezily, ‘Very chummy and much gaiety. Dukes running around like mad freshmen.’
Kick was her father’s daughter: like the Ambassador, she was tough and unconventional – sides to her character which impressed her English contemporaries in the course of one grand country house weekend. Soon after arriving in England, she was invited to stay at Hatfield House, the home of the Marquess of Salisbury and the Cecil family. In the late 1930s, the vast Jacobean mansion was still run in high Edwardian style, requiring a 100-strong staff.
Veronica Fraser, the daughter of Lord Lovat, was one of a dozen young people in the house party. At the start of the weekend, Kick, she remembered, was regarded as an interloper. As an Irish-American Catholic, she was a social upstart in her fellow guests’ eyes, and some of them took a dim view of having an ‘outsider’ foisted in their midst. The boys decided to play a joke on her; in a peculiarly aristocratic version of bullying, they stole all her left shoes and hid them in Hatfield’s centuries-old maze. For the entire weekend Kick was forced to hobble around on a mismatched pair of right-feet shoes. ‘Why are you limping, Kick?’ the other girls, entering into the boys’ conspirac
y, were primed to ask. ‘Oh,’ she replied when it came to Veronica’s turn, ‘Robert broke my leg before dinner.’ What a great sport, Veronica thought. She was also charmed by Kick’s disarmingly frank ignorance of the social etiquette at a grand country house weekend. At least ten times on her first day, she nudged Veronica or caught her eye, mouthing ‘OK, so what do I do now?’
Veronica, like many of her contemporaries, was bowled over by Kick’s informality. Small things made a deep impression – like the way, after a game of tennis, she would slip off her shoes in front of strangers in the state rooms of some stately home. To her generation, Kick’s lack of inhibition, in contrast to the strict social conventions they had been taught to observe, was a breath of fresh air. Swiftly, she became hugely popular. In the mornings, she and her brothers would ride out together along Rotten Row in Hyde Park; there were dances and dinners every night. She was invited to all the grandest house parties, staying with the Dukes of Devonshire and Marlborough at Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace, as well as with the Astors and the Cecils at Cliveden and Hatfield House.
In September 1939, the party came to an end.
Days after the Nazis invaded Poland, Joe Kennedy, fearful for the safety of his family – and to Kick’s frustration – insisted she and her mother and sisters should return to the States. ‘I can’t get excited about landing but I suppose it will come when we sight that Statue of Liberty,’ she wrote to her father on 18 September from on board the US liner Washington. ‘It can’t be eighteen months since we were on this boat going in the other direction. It all seems like a beautiful dream. Thanks a lot Daddy for giving me one of the greatest experiences anyone could have had. I know it will have a great effect on everything I do from herein.’
‘All my ducks are swans,’ Joe once said of his children, but Kick was ‘especially special’. She had grown up participating with Jack and Joe Junior in the spirited conversations that took place over meals in the Kennedy household, the other children sitting with their governess on a small table of their own. ‘Those three – Joe Junior, Jack and Kick – were like a family within the family,’ a friend of the Kennedys recalled. ‘They were the pick of the litter, the ones the old man thought would write the story of the next generation.’
‘So-o-o what’s the sto-o-ry?’ was one of Kick’s catchphrases. Months after her return to England in the summer of 1943, she would become the story.
A story that her devoted father could never have imagined – or wanted to see written.
‘Today it is windy and wet and we really are getting near England. I really am becoming quite excited at the thought,’ Kick wrote on 27 June 1943 as the Queen Mary drew close to land.
The seagulls picked the ship up first, followed by a large flying boat which circled, then darted away to report its arrival. Kick stood on deck among the thousands of soldiers lining the rails. Relieved the journey was over, they chatted excitedly, reporting every low-hanging cloud as landfall. The ship turned and swerved constantly. Its lines of approach were narrower now, the threat from German U-boats greater. The waters close to England were the most dangerous of all. Four Spitfires roared out of the haze shrouding the horizon. Buzzing above the ship, they flew so close she heard the whistle of their wings.
The Queen Mary was due to dock at Glasgow. From there Kick planned to catch an early-morning troop train to London with the other Red Cross recruits. She had deliberately told none of her friends that she was coming. Staring out across the horizon, hoping to catch her first sight of land, her excitement was tinged with trepidation. It had been nearly four years. During her absence she had felt desperately left out. In Washington, she had transformed her flat into a shrine to her pre-war life, covering the walls with photographs of her English friends, as one American ruefully remarked, ‘a living room of Lords and Ladies’. Everyone she had known before the war had joined up; the men were fighting overseas or stationed at training camps around Britain, her girlfriends working in armaments factories or at secret Government establishments like Bletchley Park. Kick had longed to be part of it, but her father had forbidden her to leave America. Desperate to get back to England, in the second year of the war she had even persuaded her brother Jack to intercede on her behalf: ‘Kick is very keen to go over,’ he wrote to his father, ‘and I wouldn’t think the anti-American feeling would hurt her like it might us – due to her being a girl – especially as it would show that we hadn’t merely left England when it got unpleasant.’
The Ambassador had been the chief cause of the ‘anti-American feeling’ – more accurately, the anti-Kennedy feeling. The tide of the family’s popularity had turned. Vilified in the British Press, branded ‘Jittery Joe’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’, his fierce opposition to America’s intervention in the war and his defeatist pronouncements on Britain’s ability to win it had caused him to be loathed. ‘Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double crosser and defeatist,’ a Foreign Office official reported in a memo initialled by Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. ‘He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope this war will at least see the elimination of his type.’ In 1939, after the Nazis conquered Poland in eighteen days, Kennedy had announced that England did not stand a ‘Chinaman’s chance’. His views remained unchanged as the war progressed: ‘The British have had it. They can’t stop the Germans and the best thing for them is to learn to live with them,’ he told his aide as the Battle of Britain blazed. Hounded out of London by Winston Churchill, in November 1940 the Ambassador had been forced to resign.
From the outset of the war, Kick had taken the opposite stance to her father, publicly advocating America’s intervention long before Pearl Harbor. A passionate Anglophile, she ended her letters to her friends with popular patriotic catchphrases – ‘There’ll always be an England’ and ‘The English lose the battles but they win the wars’. Yet, having got to England at last, Kick was nervous that she might find herself a social pariah. Not having shared or suffered the hardships of war, bearing the stigma of her father’s anti-British pronouncements, she feared her old friends might shun her.
Britain, in the throes of war, was a very different country to the one she had left behind. At the mouth of the Clyde, the roofless houses, the burnt-out buildings, the piles of rubble where the bombs had fallen, were clearly visible from the Queen Mary. The GIs crowding the decks were aghast at their first sight of war: they had seen pictures of it, they had read about it, but this was real. The ship dropped anchor at the centre of the harbour; on the quay opposite, the tiny figures of a band of pipers swung into view. Dressed in kilts, they paraded up and down playing martial music – an official greeting party sent to pipe the American troops into the war. Scores of lighters, flat-bottomed boats designed to carry the soldiers to shore, hugged the sides of the Queen Mary; it would take as long to offload the 18,000 men as it had to pack them on to the ship. Waiting her turn to get on to the lighters, standing for what seemed like interminable hours alongside the GIs with their heavy packs and rifles at their shoulders, other anxieties troubled Kick.
One, particularly, had preoccupied her during her last months in Washington. In her absence, many of her closest English friends had become engaged or married: Sissy Lloyd-Thomas and David Ormsby-Gore; Janie Kenyon-Slaney and Colonel Peter Lindsay; Debo Mitford and Andrew Cavendish. Kick was twenty-three years old. In a letter to Janie, after hearing the news of the engagements, she had confided: ‘Sometimes I feel that I am never going to take that on. No one I have ever met made me completely forget myself and one cannot get married with that attitude.’ Her inability to fall in love upset her deeply, as John White, who wanted to marry her, recalled. A few months before leaving Washington, Kick, on the verge of tears, had said to him, ‘Listen, the thing about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack – incapable of deep affection.’
It was not from want of admirers. ‘I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life,’ recalled Tom Egerton years later when he was in his early s
eventies. ‘She wasn’t especially pretty, but she just had this appeal.’ Kick’s scrapbooks from her debutante days are full of love letters and messages from would-be suitors. ‘Darling Kick, when – oh when’, reads one; ‘You’ll always mean everything to me’, another. She had had many offers of marriage; before the war, William Douglas-Home, to whom Kick was ‘the merriest girl you ever met’, had proposed to her at dawn by a fountain at Hever Castle. The next morning, she appeared to have forgotten all about it and asked him, so he remembered, to drive her to some other beau. In 1938, Peter Grace, the American shipping heir, had crossed the Atlantic to claim her. On knocking at the door of 14 Princes Gate he was told by the butler that she had gone to the races. He went straight back to Southampton and caught the boat home. ‘We were close,’ he later recalled,
I had taken her out every night in New York, but I don’t blame her. She was a young girl, extremely attractive around all these dukes and princes. She was getting around in the highest circles in England. To some people if you get in with all the highfalutin people in London, that sweeps you away. I sort of figured she was caught up on that glamour, and you can’t fight that.
Yet the dukes and princes had not captured Kick’s heart either. It was as if she was playing a game with them. In the months before her departure for England, she had shown Betty Coxe, her flatmate, letters that she had received from her various English admirers. Which did Betty think was the most appealing, she had asked. After playing the same game with her brother Jack, she had been teasingly cautioned: ‘I would advise strongly against any voyages to England to marry any Englishman. For I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it has come time to write the obituary of the British Empire.’
Within days of arriving in London, any doubts Kick had that she might not be welcome had been dispelled.
Yesterday Lord Beaverbrook rang up and asked me down for the weekend. I am going to dine with him next week even though he said, ‘this admirer is the combined age of all your other admirers’. Lady Astor also rang and asked me to come to Cliveden. She said Jakie [Astor] had been invited to stay with the Duchess of Kent but refused until he found out whether or not I was coming to Cliveden.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 36
