Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  I do feel terribly keenly the sacrifices I’m asking Kick to make, but I can’t see that she will be doing anything that is wrong in the eyes of God. My first worry has been to decide whether she could really be happy with me, having made these sacrifices. Obviously if I felt she could not, and if I felt that she would live with a sense of guilt, I should not be justified in asking her to marry me. But I do think in my heart that she is so holy and good that God will continue to help her and that she can be happy, and I know that selfish though it sounds, I should never be happy or be much good without her.

  I will try with all my power to make her happy, and I shall never be able to express my gratitude to you and to Mr Kennedy for your understanding and goodness in giving your consent.

  Please excuse this dopey and after reading over, pompous letter, I think we both feel a bit punch drunk after the emotional battering of the last few months.

  I shall never be able to get over my amazing good fortune in being allowed to have Kick as my wife; it still seems incredibly wonderful.

  Please try not to think too harshly of me for what must seem to you a tyrannical attitude. I promise that both Kick and I have only done what we really believed in our hearts to be right.

  Thousands of miles away, across the Atlantic, far from consenting to the marriage, Rose and Joe Kennedy were appalled. Rose was in hospital in Boston for a minor operation when she received the telegram announcing the wedding would take place in seven days’ time. On a sheet of paper headed ‘Personal Reminiscences Private’, she wrote of feeling ‘disturbed, horrified – heartbroken’. Joe was equally shocked. ‘Joe phoned me, said he hadn’t slept … Talked for a minute of our responsibility in allowing her to drift into this dilemma, then decided we should think of a practical way to extricate her. I said I would think it out and then call him later.’

  The Kennedys, an American dynasty in the making, were as mindful of setting a bad example as the Devonshires: their political ambitions turned on the Irish Catholic vote. ‘Everyone pointed to our family with pride as well-behaved, level-headed and deeply religious,’ Rose noted. ‘What a blow to family prestige.’ Resolving to do their utmost to stop the ceremony from going ahead, she and Joe sent a telegram to Kick: ‘Heartbroken – think – feel you have been wrongly influenced. Sending Archie Spell’s friend to talk to you. Anything done for Our Lord will be rewarded hundredfold.’

  ‘Archie Spell’ was Archbishop Spellman, the Archbishop of New York. Under instructions from Rose and Joe, drawing on his connections in the Catholic Church in London, Spellman dispatched various clergymen to persuade Kick to change her mind. In the first week of May, a flurry of coded telegrams flew to and fro across the Atlantic as Spellman’s stooges reported back. ‘EFFORT IN VAIN’, Archbishop Godfrey, the Holy See’s Chargé d’Affaires to the Polish Government in exile and the first apostolic delegate to Britain since the Reformation, cabled to Spellman after visiting Kick. ‘MOTHER COULD TRY AGAIN WITH ALL HER POWER. AM CONVINCED THIS ONLY CHANCE.’

  Kick was deeply upset by both her parents’ and the rest of her family’s reaction. None of her brothers and sisters back home had offered their congratulations. Jack Kennedy expressed their view in a letter to his friend Lem Billings. Drily offering his verdict on the marriage, he wrote: ‘As sister Eunice from the depth of her righteous Catholic wrath so truly said: “It’s a horrible thing – but it will be nice visiting after the war, so we might as well face it.”’ There was only one member of the family Kick could count on: her eldest brother Joe, stationed in England in the West Country with the US airforce.

  Throughout that week Kick spoke to Joe daily. ‘Whenever she heard from you she would call me and ask me what I thought,’ he later wrote to his parents. ‘I did the best I could to help her through. She was under a terrific strain all the time, and as the various wires came in she became more and more upset.’ Out of loyalty to Kick and against his parents’ wishes, Joe stoically defended the couple. ‘Billy is crazy about Kick,’ he told them, ‘and I know they are very much in love. Everyone talks about it. I am much more favourably impressed with him than I was the last time I was over here. I think he really has something on the ball, and he couldn’t be nicer. I think he is ideal for Kick.’

  By now nothing was going to convince Kick to change her mind. On the day before she married Billy, she sent one last telegram to her father: ‘RELIGION EVERYTHING TO US BOTH WILL ALWAYS LIVE ACCORDING TO CATHOLIC TEACHING PRAYING THAT TIME WILL HEAL ALL WOUNDS YOUR SUPPORT IN THIS AS IN EVERYTHING ELSE MEANS SO MUCH PLEASE BESEECH MOTHER NOT TO WORRY AM VERY HAPPY AND QUITE CONVINCED HAVE TAKEN THE RIGHT STEP.’

  She received no reply. Rose was inconsolable. It had not occurred to her that her own implacable stubbornness was a trait shared by her daughter. Kick’s piety, her craving for approval, had led Rose to believe that she would succumb to matriarchal pressure. To the last, she clung to this belief: on the day of the wedding, still bent on stopping it, she instructed Archbishop Spellman to send a telegram to Archbishop Godfrey in London: ‘WILL YOU KINDLY CALL ON KK EXPLAINING THAT HER MOTHER IS GREATLY DISTRESSED NEWS OF CONTEMPLATED ACTION AND IF POSSIBLE PERSUADE HER TO POSTPONE THIS STEP.’

  The bouquet of pink camellias Kick clutched in her hand as she ran up the steps past the hordes of waiting pressmen to be married was the only remnant of a grand society wedding. The flowers, grown in the Camellia House at Chatsworth, had been sent down by train that morning. The Duchesses of Devonshire of centuries past had worn tiaras and jewel-encrusted long silk gowns at their weddings; Kick was wearing a knee-length pink crêpe dress and a hat of blue and pink ostrich feathers, set off by a salmon-coloured taffeta veil. The dress had been made the night before by a friend, the material purchased with ration coupons – some contributed by the local milkman. To complete her outfit, Kick had borrowed a gold mesh bag and a large diamond brooch. She was not about to walk down an aisle in the private chapel of some stately home: the venue for the wedding was Chelsea Town Hall, a municipalgrey public building on London’s busy King’s Road. It was all over in ten minutes. Billy’s best man, Charles Granby, the heir to the Duke of Rutland, who had never been to a civic ceremony before – commonly the scandalous and tawdry resort of divorcees – was shocked by the brevity and austerity of it all.

  For many of the guests – especially the bride and groom’s relations – the day was to be endured rather than enjoyed. Kick was escorted by her brother Joe, the only member of the Kennedy family to attend the wedding. As the two of them dashed up the steps to the Register Office, dodging the flashbulbs of the world’s press, Joe, as Kick wrote, was ‘quite conscious after seeing his face plastered all over the papers that he was “finished in Boston” ’. Since the announcement of the marriage two days earlier, the Press on both sides of the Atlantic had had a field day. ‘Parnell’s ghost must be smiling sardonically,’ crowed the London News. ‘It was the Lord Hartington of the eighties who headed the Liberal-Unionist revolt that wrecked Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill … Now a Hartington is to marry a Catholic Irish-American who comes from one of the great Home Rule Families of Boston.’ Over in America, as the Boston Traveller caustically observed, Kick’s marriage would ‘bring her into a family prominent in the defence and spread of Protestantism throughout the British realm’.

  The Devonshire family, putting on a brave face, turned out in force. The Duke and Duchess were there, as were Billy’s grandmothers – the Marchioness of Salisbury and the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire – and his two sisters, Lady Anne and Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. Anne was mortified at having to wear stockings that were laddered and torn, but with the wartime restrictions she had no other pair. Meeting the Duchess for the first time, Joe liked her enormously; the Duke he described as ‘a shy old bird … as jittery as an old duck’. Ushered into a drab room, brightened only by vases of pink carnations, Joe and the Duke witnessed the marriage. The ring Billy placed on Kick’s finger was inscribed with the words ‘I love you more than anything in the world.’
Afterwards, the wedding party posed for photographs on the steps of the Town Hall. ‘It seemed better than have the photographers take them anyway and have them turn in awful ones,’ Joe told his parents. ‘I saw no point in looking extremely grim throughout so I looked as if I enjoyed it.’ As the group posed for the Press, crowds of Red Cross girls and American GIs, Kick’s compatriots from her volunteer work, muscled into the frame. ‘The result,’ she noted later, ‘is that the Marquess and Marchioness are surrounded by the strangest-looking group of wedding guests that has ever, ever been.’

  The reception was held at the Devonshires’ townhouse in Eaton Square. ‘The chef at Claridges supplied an enormous chocolate wedding cake and the Dukie-Wookie supplied the champagne,’ Kick wrote in a separate letter to her mother. ‘We sent out telegrams the day before, thinking and hoping many would not come but over 150 showed up.’ The guests were an eclectic bunch; along with the GIs and Red Cross girls from the club in Hans Crescent, Kick had invited the hall porters. Mingling with the Devonshire family and a handful of society grandees, ‘a few of the GIs,’ as Kick recalled, ‘became rather tiddly on the champagne, carrying on long conversations with Lady Cunard who looked more terrifying than ever.’ At one point during the reception, one of the soldiers accosted Billy: ‘Listen, you God damn limey,’ he told him, ‘you’ve got the best damn girl that America could produce.’ Kick was irrepressible, as she later confessed, ‘I enjoyed every minute of it and I shouldn’t have thought I was very well married without it.’

  Two days after the wedding, for the benefit of his parents, Joe composed his own, more measured account of the day. As the Kennedy heir he was mindful of the family’s position in the whole affair. ‘As far as publicity was concerned over here, I think we got off pretty well,’ he wrote. ‘Only one paper had much of a discussion about it … I suppose Boston went wild.’ Hoping to reassure Rose and Joe and bolster their spirits, he confided, ‘Somehow I think things will work out OK. It doesn’t look so now, but I am sure something will happen … As far as Kick’s soul is concerned, I wish I had half her chance of seeing the pearly gates. As far as what people will say, the hell with them. I think we can all take it. It will be hardest on Mother, and I do know how you feel, Mother, but I do think it will be all right …’

  Kick heard nothing from Rose and Joe on the day of the wedding.

  That morning, Rose left New York for a retreat in Virginia. At the airport, swamped by reporters, she issued a terse statement. The family, she said, had been unable to communicate with Kick, much as they would have liked to, due to wartime cable restrictions. She herself, she added, was ‘physically unfit to discuss the wedding with Kick or anyone’.

  The following day, Kick read her mother’s statement in the newspapers. Aware of its fallacy, knowing the number of cables that had been sent to and fro across the Atlantic in the course of the previous week, she immediately called Joe. He responded by sending a one-line telegram to their father: ‘THE POWER OF SILENCE IS GREAT.’ Kennedy senior relented; breaking the silence, he sent a cable back by return. While there is no record of its content, Kick was immensely relieved, evident in the telegram she composed in reply: ‘MOST DISTRESSED ABOUT MOTHER PLEASE TELL HER NOT TO WORRY YOUR CABLE MADE MY HAPPIEST DAY WIRE NEWS COMPTON PLACE EASTBOURNE SUSSEX HAVE AMERICAN PAPERS BEEN BAD ALL LOVE KICK.’

  It would be two months before Rose could bring herself to speak to her daughter.

  ‘Dearest family,’ Kick wrote on 18 May, twelve days after her wedding, ‘I have now become a camp follower. Am living in a small hotel near to where Billy is stationed. It is very comfortable and we have the prize suite. I wouldn’t compare it to Daddy’s set-up at the Waldorf Towers, but as I often said it takes all sorts of experience to make life worthwhile …’ Writing five days later, she told them, ‘I am feeling better now than I have since I left America. This is the first really good rest I have had for a year. Have put on some weight and am getting plenty of sleep. MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!’

  After a five-day honeymoon at Compton Place, the Devonshires’ seaside home at Eastbourne, Kick and Billy had moved into the Swan Hotel at Alton in Hampshire, a modest half-timbered building in the village. Preparations were in full swing for the Normandy landings; Billy’s regiment, the Coldstream Guards, was due to take part in the invasion. It was simply a question of when.

  While Billy spent his days training with his regiment at the military camp outside the village, Kick explored the countryside on a bicycle and delighted in the comedy of manners that unfurled at the Swan during their stay.

  [It] gets funnier and funnier every day. Little did we know what we were in for when we arrived in this town. There never has been a funnier assortment of people in one spot than in this hotel. The little bellboy, a native of Dublin, informed me that his name was Kennedy and we might be related. Every time Billy or I stick our noses out of our room – there he [is] waiting to march in front of us, flinging open doors and saying ‘This way, Marquess’ at the top of his lungs. Last night we went to call on the Chef, as he had put us up such a delicious picnic on the Sunday. The Chef told me a long sad story about how he almost came to work for us in the Embassy days. He said one of the secretaries had gotten the letters mixed up so he never came. The food here is exceptionally good and much better than any London restaurant. Last night he christened the dessert after Billy by calling it ‘croûte Cavendish’. I must say it was most disgusting but we had to grin, eat and bear it.

  There is another old retired Army man here who has had his house taken over by the Americans so he lives here. He collects prints and happened to have one of the 3rd Duke of Devonshire. He has already given it to us as a wedding present.

  D-Day, the anticipated invasion of Europe, finally came on 6 June. Wave upon wave of British and American troops were to follow the battalions that had landed on the beaches of north-west France. On 17 June the Coldstream Guards received orders to leave for the Front.

  It had been ‘the most perfect month’, Billy wrote later that evening. ‘How beastly it is to be ending things … This love seems to cause nothing but goodbye. I think that that is the worst part of it, worse even than fighting.’

  Kick missed Billy dreadfully in the weeks after he left for France. Returning to London, feeling lonely and isolated, she was also profoundly disturbed by her mother’s silence. Since her wedding day, she had done all she could to win Rose back. She had sent messages of love to her via her father and her brothers and sisters and written her numerous letters – all of which her mother had ignored.

  Rose was incapable of seeing beyond Kick’s apostasy. The idea that a daughter of hers was living in sin was unbearable, her horror validated by the reaction the marriage had provoked among leading Catholics. In the weeks following the wedding, she had received many letters offering nuptial condolences. ‘May the Blessed Mother give her the necessary grace to see the error of her ways before many weeks have passed,’ Father Hugh O’Donnell, an influential Catholic priest, had written. Across the Atlantic, the reaction was equally strong. At Chatsworth, the Devonshires were inundated with letters from irate Catholics accusing Kick of having sold her soul for a title. Writing to his wife with the zealotry of a convert, Evelyn Waugh had remarked, ‘Kick Kennedy’s apostasy is a sad thing. It is Second Front nerves that has driven her to this grave sin and I am sorry for the girl.’

  On 6 July Kick sat down to compose yet another letter to her mother. It merely repeated thoughts and sentiments she had expressed in others she had written to Rose since her wedding – letters her mother had failed to answer. In the same way Rose could not bring herself to see beyond Kick’s apostasy, Kick refused to recognize her mother for the rigid, overbearing and emotionally frigid woman that she was. On the contrary, Kick absolutely adored her. As Kick’s abject letter reveals, her happiness depended on her mother’s approval.

  Darling Mother

  This letter is just meant for you. It’s a birthday letter – Hope it arrives by July 23r
d.

  By now I hope you are happy about my marriage, I suppose I really always expected to marry Billy. Some day – some how.

  However you and Daddy know that I never would do anything against your will. You two have been so wonderful to me as well as to every member of the family. The older I get and the more I see makes me realize this and a lot of other things. First, that you are the most unselfish woman in the world. Any house where we have all been has been difficult to run and you have always put us before any of your own desires or pleasures. We all have happy personalities and get along with people far easier than most people – this is due to the happy atmosphere which has always surrounded us.

  When I see some homes I marvel at you more and more.

  Certain qualities I have – people admire. They are all traits that you have instilled in me.

  In the matter of my marriage – I knew you would be upset, but I felt sure you would see the ultimate good. I knew you would never forbid anything if you felt it meant my happiness. It must have been hard for you to resign yourself to the idea of my doing something quite against all your principles – I repeat, the one thing I don’t want you ever to think is that my religious or moral education has ever been lacking. You have done more than enough to show me the gateway to Heaven. Please God I can do half as well for the little Cavendishes.

  I miss you so much and long to see you. We have so much to talk about. There wasn’t anyone to really take your place at the time of the wedding and it seemed so odd that at the time, the moment, the period of one’s life which one has looked forward to for so long, the dearest person in the world wasn’t there –

  Please have a wonderful birthday. Think of me and always remember that if I spend the rest of my life trying to repay you for everything it will be very little. All love to you, from Kick