Kick: The True Story of Kick Kennedy, JFK’s Forgotten Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth

Kick arrived at the Sacred Heart Convent in St Maux. She loathed it, and was determined that nothing was going to make her stay. Rose later admitted that the school was ‘so strict in its rules and so remote from the general life of the country’ that Kick was ‘forlorn’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Kick pleaded with her mother to let her transfer to the Holy Child Convent at Neuilly in Paris. Rose, for once, gave in.

Rose had endured the strict regime of Blumenthal, and she had expected her daughter to do the same at St Maux. Kick felt she had had a lucky escape. The Holy Child Convent in Neuilly was liberal and sophisticated, located in an affluent suburb, just 4 miles from the centre of Paris. In many ways, it was a finishing school for wealthy Roman Catholic girls. Its close proximity to the art galleries, museums, restaurants and shops of Paris meant that Kick could reach beyond the cloisters in a way which had been impossible at Noroton.

At Neuilly, she threw herself into the life of the Convent, studying Latin in the morning and skating at the outdoor ice rink in the afternoon. Her favourite nun was Mother Bernadette, who taught her History and Latin. One of the other nuns took her out to distribute leaflets about Sunday school: ‘We talked French all the time, so it was not a waste of time.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) Kick found some of her schoolfriends catty. She had her hair cut shorter and was told by one of the girls that she looked less intelligent with her new style. ‘You can have my full share of her,’ she remarked to her parents. Her roommate was English: ‘she seems very nice’. Kick thanked Rose for sending clothes: ‘my red velvet hat arrived and it is very cute’.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

She enjoyed seeing the sights of Paris. She saw the cell where Marie Antoinette was incarcerated, and the Palais de Justice where she was tried. She thought the Sainte-Chapelle ‘the most lovely thing I have ever seen’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) She loved the Louvre, where she gazed at the Mona Lisa. ‘Am really getting too cultured for words,’ she wrote. The girls made fortnightly visits to the Louvre to study the paintings: ‘I shall be the official Parisienne guide for the Kennedy family.’ She told her mother that she was going to Solemn High Mass at Notre Dame for All Saints Day.6 (#litres_trial_promo) She loved the circular rose windows at the great cathedral: ‘Think I know every monument and church in Paris by this time.’7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Her friend Hope was on her way to visit, and they planned to ice-skate together. Hope was enrolled at St Maux, and returned after her weekend with Kick. Kick wrote to her mother as if to vindicate her own decision: ‘Mother, Hope looks simply ghastly. She hates the convent like anything and when she had to go there last nite she was crying terrifically. It is a crime to leave her there …’ She added, melodramatically, ‘if she stays there much longer she will honestly kill herself. Every night I thank God I am not there. The head nun is always trying to turn Hope against me because I left and didn’t have the spirit to stay.’8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick was obsessed with not gaining weight: ‘Am eating plenty and getting very fat.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) She worried that she wouldn’t be able to fit into her evening clothes (‘by the way, the red velvet and blue silk are darling’), and she told Rose that the nuns were trying to fatten her up. She did not want to put herself on a diet the minute she returned to America.

Kick told her parents that Joe Jr had written to her but she had been surprised that Jack had gone quiet. ‘Please tell Jack to drop me a line.’ Jack’s time in London had not been successful. He had been hospitalized in October and was gravely ill, though once again he made an unexpected recovery. Then, having told Lem that he planned to spend Christmas in St Moritz, he fell ill again and decided to return home to America. Kick was furious that he was returning. The news about Jack hit her hard. As he was always the one to share her quick wit and sense of fun, she had looked forward to spending time with him and he was now leaving her alone in Europe. Jack sailed back home and was hospitalized for suspected hepatitis. Then, to her horror, she heard that her best friend Hope was ill and returning home. Kick was devastated: ‘I do not know all the details but she will rest for a while and may have to wear a belt on her stomach for two years. All I can say is a fine lot I came over with. First Jack, then Hope. I shall probably contract something sooner or later.’10 (#litres_trial_promo) She had lost her two lifelines, but it was Jack’s loss that she felt most keenly: ‘every time I think of that darn brother of mine I burn’.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

She masked her deep love for him by mock anger, that he had ruined her plans and let her down, but she was in fact deeply worried about him. Like Jack, she found it hard to express her feelings and disliked sentimental talk, but underneath the tough exterior she was a deeply emotional girl. When Jack finally got out of hospital she was immensely relieved. But she didn’t reveal her anxiety to her younger siblings. When she wrote to Eunice, who was now at Noroton, it was in her usual jocular, teasing voice, addressed to ‘Puny Euny’: ‘You should write your lonely little sister at least once a week. Boy, I could just see you over here. Lots of time I wished you were here. Now isn’t that sweet of me.’12 (#litres_trial_promo) To Bobby, she wrote a sweet letter, enclosing stamps for his collection. She told him about the electric animals on the Normandie: ‘you pressed a little button and the horse would trot and then another button and then he would gallop’.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

She missed her siblings, telling Bobby that she would watch from her Convent window and see the little French boys and girls (‘about Teddy’s age’) going to school wearing blue smocks and hats and carrying briefcases laden with schoolbooks. She added that they went to school from 8.30 until 4.30: ‘I don’t think you would like to be a French boy, Bob, because they don’t play football, baseball or any games like that.’14 (#litres_trial_promo)

She confided in Bobby and Eunice her difficulty in speaking French. She was not a natural linguist: ‘It is rather hard at first not to talk English but everyone is supposed to talk French all the time.’15 (#litres_trial_promo) The nuns forbade the English-speaking girls to go out together without a French girl being present for fear they would start to chat in English. Kick was allowed to speak English for only one hour each evening. It was extremely difficult, but she made the best of it and worked hard, reading a French edition of A Tale of Two Cities and trying not to lapse into English: ‘The French is going quite nicely but it is still rather discouraging at times. Time will tell though. I am trying to read as much as possible as I think it is the greatest help besides talking.’16 (#litres_trial_promo)

She didn’t much like the French girls but bonded with a Belgian girl. She felt frustrated by her accent: ‘It is quite disheartening though to go into a shop and ask for something in perfect French and they don’t understand and when a French girl says seemingly the same thing and they do understand her.’17 (#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, the Kennedy stiff upper lip was in place: ‘All the Frenchies including the nuns say I have made great progress … everything is daisy.’18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick was a success at Neuilly, charming everyone with her good humour and curiosity. The nuns called her ‘Mademoiselle Pourquoi’, because she was always questioning the rules. This was of course how she had been brought up around Joe Kennedy’s dinner table, but it was an apt nickname, and a key to her character, because Kick was always one to question and, if possible, break the rules. She was Joe Kennedy’s daughter more than she was Rose’s, and she fought against the nuns in a way that Eunice, more sensitive, more academic, more spiritual, never did. Eunice was very much her mother’s daughter and the family thought that, of all the Kennedy girls, she would have been the one to make an ideal Sacred Heart nun.

Kick was moved by the parades for Armistice Day. ‘Saw all the parades and soldiers and was in Paris during the two minutes silence. It really was marvelous.’ The girls couldn’t get within a mile of the Arc de Triomphe: ‘I have never been so squashed in my life.’19 (#litres_trial_promo) In the afternoon, she saw lots of Communist parades, ‘and policemen lined all the residential parts of Paris’.

She was enjoying Paris, lunching at the Ritz and the Café de Paris, and going riding in the Bois de Boulogne, ‘the biggest park in the world’. She joked to her family that ‘I haven’t ridden for a year so my derrier was plenty sore afterwards’.20 (#litres_trial_promo) A family friend, Mrs Wilson, took her window-shopping at the House of Paquin. ‘I wore my red velvet and coat … she told me to be sure to tell you how nice she thought I looked.’21 (#litres_trial_promo)

For Thanksgiving, she was invited to dinner ‘with all the trimmings’ with Mrs Larkin, Hope’s chaperone, and attended a Thanksgiving mass at the Madeleine Church: ‘Nearly all Americans in Paris go.’ She was invited to London for Christmas by her parents’ friend Lady Calder, but revealed to Eunice that she had decided to go skiing instead. She asked Eunice to send her photographs from home, ‘as I love to see how everyone is looking’. Kick was always to be found carrying her beloved camera. She had tried to take snapshots of the Paris sights to send home, but was cast down by the awful weather: ‘It is very difficult to take pictures here as the sun is never out. It is nearly always raining or foggy.’22 (#litres_trial_promo) She was missing home, and all things American: ‘You should see the football they play over here … dressed in little shorts and kick a ball around. Very sissified I think.’

She told Eunice that the French priests looked very funny: ‘They all wear little hats like saucers.’ As Christmas approached, she was homesick for her family, who, as usual, were gathering at Palm Beach. For once, she was sentimental, writing to Eunice: ‘I miss you very much and would give my right arm for a glimpse of your funny-looking mug.’23 (#litres_trial_promo) She told her parents that there were times when she felt like ‘jumping the next boat’.

One of the attractions of Neuilly was that the girls were encouraged to travel in their vacations. Kick planned to ski at the Winter Palace in Gstaad and wrote to her parents to discuss the financial side of the trip. Rose and Joe encouraged frugality, and Kick convinced them that because the trip was in Switzerland, she could practise her French (though in reality Gstaad was in a predominantly German-speaking canton). It was her first Christmas without the family, and far from home. She told Bobby, ‘I shall be skiing through all the mountains while you are swimming in Palm Beach,’ but she hoped that ‘Daddy will call up on Xmas so I can talk to you all’.24 (#litres_trial_promo)

9

Gstaad and Italy (#uf9c37b9e-24ca-51ad-af1e-5774b7de9ba7)

Hope you don’t think I’m gallivanting like a chicken over here.

Kick Kennedy

It was a magical Winter Wonderland and Kick felt as if she was in another world as she gazed at the rows of snow-capped pines and the enormous fairy-tale hotel nestling under the Swiss Alps, which loomed over the tiny village of Gstaad. Horse-drawn sleighs draped in soft furs carried the girls to their destination: the famous Winter Palace Hotel. The view was breathtaking. The Palace, lit up at night, encircled a huge skating rink, and was set on a hill. The heavy snow muffled the sound, creating a peaceful, tranquil atmosphere.

Kick was looking forward to the winter sports – tobogganing, ice-skating and skiing. She had spent the week before Christmas planning her winter vacation, going to the hairdressers for a ‘permanent’, having her asthma injection and buying all her skiing things. ‘My allowance dwindles like sand,’ she told Rose.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

On Christmas Eve the girls attended Midnight Mass. The cold, fresh air made them hungry and when they got back to the Winter Palace they arranged a late-night feast. Kick’s French perhaps wasn’t quite as good as she thought it was: when she ordered five egg sandwiches from room service, she was surprised when the waiter arrived with sixteen ham ones. The girls ate them and then felt sick.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick got a suntan from skiing, which she confessed to Bobby was now her favourite sport: ‘The best part of all is when the snow is very deep and you fall in a nice, soft white bed.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) She joked that she had nearly killed herself a couple of times. She told Bobby about the special sleds that took the girls to mass, and the horse races in the snow: ‘The horses jump beautifully.’ And to her sister Jean she wrote about the little girls who were the best skiers she had ever seen. She bought a new Swiss sports watch as a Christmas present to herself.

On Christmas Day a man dressed as Santa Claus came and delivered presents. In the evening there was a Winter Ball. She told Jean that they travelled everywhere by sleighs: ‘You should have seen us flying down the hill every morning to the village.’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rose had sent Kick snapshots from home: ‘The pictures of the family are adorable.’ One of them was of the other Kennedy girls on their ponies: ‘none of you look different yet. I wonder if you will be when I come home.’5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rose had suggested that they ship over her favourite records for her Christmas present. Kick was delighted: ‘The record idea is swell.’ Her mother sent a list of the latest songs, and Kick added some extra: ‘I should really like the new songs of “Cole Porter” … also I found a Dream, Thanks a Million, Let’s Swing it, Now You’ve Got Me Doing It.’6 (#litres_trial_promo) She also asked for charms for her bracelet, skirts and sweaters in pastel shades and ‘one of those evening bags that have everything in them’.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Jack was once again seriously ill. He had returned from England with offers of places at both Harvard and Princeton. He chose Princeton in order to be with his Choate friends. But after a brief stint he returned home to be under the supervision of his Boston doctors, who suspected he had leukaemia. His skin was yellow and brown and he was frighteningly thin. Lem and another Princeton friend sent a cable: ‘Tell us what time to arrive for funeral.’8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Meanwhile, his favourite sister was living the high life in Gstaad. Kick noted the presence of the Earl of Dudley, his sister Patricia and his son William. The boy was a year older than Kick, and took a fancy to one of her Irish friends. Kick also bumped into Derek Richardson at Gstaad. He was an American studying at Cambridge University. She had first met Derek at the home of Charlotte McDonnell in Southampton in the Hamptons.

Derek was instantly attracted to Kick and invited her to a Cambridge vs Oxford hockey game on 22 January 1936. She wrote to her parents asking for permission to visit Cambridge: ‘this is a rush note to give you more details about why and where I should like to go to England … I could fly over quite easily from Le Bourget … I suppose this sounds fantastic and I wouldn’t miss anything as Thurs is free …’ She assured Rose that she would stay with Lady Calder: ‘will you please cable immediately so I can let him know’.

Joe was unimpressed and sent a telegram: ‘MOTHER AND I BOTH FEEL YOU SHOULD NOT GO TO LONDON THIS TIME PLENTY OF OTHER OPPORTUNITIES AND WE’LL ARRANGE IT LATER EXPLAINING MORE FULLY IN LETTER LOVE DAD’. He sent a follow-up letter from Palm Beach, explaining their position: ‘you know mother and I have no objection to your seeing as many things as you can over there and we want you to, but the idea of merely going over for a game was not quite the thing to do’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) He also explained that his ‘business relationship’ with Sir James Calder was under strain: ‘I am sure you will understand this.’ Calder owned Haig & Haig whisky and exported via Joe, who had the concession in the United States. Joe reassured Kick that there would be ample opportunities to visit Oxford and Cambridge in the future ‘and see all there is to be seen’.

Always loving and kind towards Kick, he told her that Palm Beach had been unseasonably cold and that she hadn’t missed much, and that Jack had been in hospital for two months: ‘we are trying to find out what is the matter with him’. Then he wrote, ‘I am terribly proud of the way you handled yourself over there and your whole attitude towards everything and I am sure you will get a great deal out of your year abroad … Try to get all you can out of this trip, because it will be of great help to you in everything you do hereafter.’10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick wrote back uncomplainingly: ‘Understand perfectly – Really didn’t expect to go but thought I might as well ask.’ She wasn’t, however, about to give up on her dream of Derek and Cambridge. ‘It would be more fun to go later when everything could be arranged. Everyone says the crew races are better than the hockey match anyway.’11 (#litres_trial_promo) She kept her letters home breezy and cheery. ‘I still have no asma so everything is daisy’; ‘It has been raining nearly every day since we have been back’; ‘Going to see La Boheme this coming Sat. Really, I shall be educated.’ She went to lectures on Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘it was excellent and I understood it quite well’.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

But she was also determined that Rose should not spoil her summer plans. Her hint about the boat races disguised the fact that Richardson, persistent and not prepared to give Kick up easily, had issued an invitation for her to be his date for his college’s prestigious May Ball at Cambridge (which actually takes place in June).

The only problem was that Rose was planning to visit Kick in Paris at that time. Kick knew that her mother’s presence would stop her from going to the May Ball, and she was determined not to let this happen. It was the first time she defied her in matters of the heart. It would not be the last. She tried to persuade Rose to visit earlier in the spring: ‘School lets out the tenth of July and by that time think I shall be quite ready to get home. So it would be rather silly just to come over and go right home for you.’13 (#litres_trial_promo) She did, however, drop in that Richardson was writing to her. She had promised that she would stay away from French men, having decided, though, that they were ‘really not as bad as they are made out to be’.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick still suffered from homesickness. She was only fifteen, a continent away from her beloved family, and surrounded by people speaking French. Mother Superior wrote to Rose with an update on Kathleen’s progress, on her ‘home-sickness’ and on her French, which she still found so difficult. Despite not wanting Rose to spoil her Cambridge plans, she desperately missed her: ‘If it is not too much trouble Mother please come over because it will be so much easier to get through this year.’15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick was clashing with the Reverend Mother, and told Rose that she had been criticized for being ‘rather stuck on my own ideas and won’t listen to anyone else’.16 (#litres_trial_promo) The Reverend Mother was right to see that she had a stubborn streak and would stick to her guns if she thought she was right.

One of Kick’s Noroton friends, Marie Celeste O’Malley, was visiting Europe with her sister. Marie Celeste was then staying on at Neuilly to get some extra tuition in Latin and Maths before attending Manhattanville College. Kick told her mother that the two girls were on their way to Garmisch for the Winter Olympics. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had presided over the opening ceremony on 6 February.

Kick’s friendship with her English roommates continued to flourish. They were her first taste of England and she was intrigued. Derek had written to her from England telling her all about the funeral of King George V who had died on 20 January. His eldest son, David, had succeeded as Edward VIII. Kick reported to her mother that Derek thought the funeral ‘the most impressive sight he had seen while in London’.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Kick had listened to the coverage of the funeral over the radio. Her English friends attended a service, and Kick reported to Eunice that they now wore black bands on their arms. She was genuinely amazed at their response to the King’s death: ‘Have never seen anything like the love they had for the old king and more than love for the new king.’

She was also aware of the gossip that circulated about the wild new King: ‘Mrs Larkin herd some stories of the new Prince [crossed out] King – She has plenty of Scandal.’18 (#litres_trial_promo) All the girls knew that the dashing Prince of Wales had been in a relationship with the married American Mrs Wallis Simpson. Having so much enjoyed the lecture on Henry V, the play about the former wild and dissolute Prince of Wales, Kick loved the idea of the handsome raffish Prince falling in love with a twice-divorced American, who was fashionable but not especially beautiful. Kick was beginning to express an interest in the English aristocracy. She told her social-climbing mother that ‘the Earl of Dudley and [his sister] Lady Patricia Ward’ were at Gstaad.

Kick was approaching her sixteenth birthday and she wanted some fun. ‘Just think am almost 16 years old. Sweet Sixteen. Oh My,’ she wrote to Eunice.19 (#litres_trial_promo) She was always finding funny stories about Convent life to amuse her siblings. She was given the honour of being sacristan at mass, which involved ‘laying out the Priest’s things and fixing the altar’. By mistake she poured oil rather than wine into the priest’s bottle. Luckily her mistake was discovered before the priest got round to drinking the oil.20 (#litres_trial_promo)

She was also learning just how attractive she was to boys. Rose intuited that Kick was up to something with Derek. Just before Kick’s birthday on 20 February, she cabled her parents to suggest a time for a birthday phone call. There was a mix-up and she forgot to put in the word ‘birthday’. Rose feared the worst, panicked and telephoned immediately. Not because she thought Kick was ill or homesick, but because she feared that her headstrong daughter had eloped. Kick wrote: ‘When you said you thought I had eloped I didn’t know what to think. Hope you don’t think I’m gallivanting like a chicken over here. Thought something dreadful had happened when I heard you were calling.’21 (#litres_trial_promo)

She had a lovely birthday. Honey Fitz had sent her candy, which she couldn’t eat until Lent was over, as she had given up sweets. Her English friends gave her a picture frame, a Spanish friend a compact, and she got a huge box of crackers ‘from the Irish girls’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) She went to a movie and then enjoyed a birthday chocolate cake and read her cables from her parents and several of her Noroton friends. She kept them all.

The rain continued to pour down throughout February. Kick was depressed about hardly seeing the sun, and longed for ‘Paris in the Spring’.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

She had heard from her family about Jack’s serious illness, and she was delighted when he was well enough to write to her. ‘Thought you might have died off,’ she wrote, disguising her deep anxiety about him. ‘Glad to hear you are finally out of hospital and getting very tan under Florida’s sunny skies.’24 (#litres_trial_promo) She gossiped about all the girls who had been asking after him, and teased him about them finding ‘Jack Kennedy the cutest thing’. She told him that she was planning a trip to Italy and that the following year she wanted to go to Germany to learn German.25 (#litres_trial_promo)

In February, shortly after her birthday, she attended a magnificent ball at the Paris opera house. She was dazzled by the gowns, the jewels and the women wearing plumes in their hair. She wore a white gown trimmed with velvet, and danced with a young officer who later called at the Convent to ask the Reverend Mother if he could take Kick to an Aviation Ball: ‘Of course she said no.’26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Kick subtly mentioned ‘the boy from Cambridge’. Derek Richardson had been writing to her, and in March she went sightseeing in Paris with him and his mother. They climbed the Eiffel Tower, had lunch at a little bistro and went to the races at St Cloud. She told Rose that Mrs Richardson came to the Convent each time to collect her.27 (#litres_trial_promo) The weather was finally improving: ‘Mother, Paris is really heavenly in the Spring.’

Her French was also slowly improving. She was reading classic novels, and made her ‘confession’ entirely in French when she was at retreat. She joked: ‘Finished the jolly old Retreat yesterday so feel very holy at this point.’ She enjoyed her confessor, a Belgian Jesuit whom she thought ‘very inspiring’.28 (#litres_trial_promo) She told Rose that she longed to go to Lourdes, the home of St Bernadette, the girl who had seen visions of the Virgin Mary, which was now a place of spiritual retreat and pilgrimage for the sick and dying. She had been warned that it would be very hot in July, and also distressing to see so many sick people, but she was keen to go: ‘the sight is really worth seeing’.29 (#litres_trial_promo)

She added that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Children of Mary … Feel very well that I have finally succeeded in getting it.’30 (#litres_trial_promo) She worried about the storms and the bad weather in the United States: ‘Hope the floods aren’t too bad around the various Kennedy mansions – Sounds terrible from this side of the Earth.’ She reminded her parents: ‘next time I write will be under Italy’s balmy skies’.