The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years by Edward Klein

Author:Edward Klein [Klein, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

At Bakewell, a chauffeur greeted Kick and took her things to an idling car. They turned onto a narrow, twisting road that ran out of Bakewell toward Churchdale Hall, the fourteenth-century Cavendish residence in the neighboring medieval village of Ashford-in-the-Water.

The formidable Mary, duchess of Devonshire, had invited Kick to her family’s countryseat to discuss the young woman’s prospective engagement to her eldest son, William Robert John Cavendish, marquess of Hartington. As heir to the Devonshire dukedom, Billy Hartington was considered the most eligible bachelor in England.

Kick’s journey that day was the culmination of years of social striving. She had been plotting to marry someone like Billy ever since her spectacular London debut in 1938, which was arranged by her father. Her success, which was widely publicized in the London papers, gave Kick grandiose notions about what she could accomplish in British society. And indeed, she succeeded in captivating one noble heir after another with her wit, fearless nature, and seductive wiles.

“I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life,” recalled a friend of Kick’s brother Jack.

Kick had a special knack with stiff British aristocrats, who marveled at her American informality but never thought her crude. A temperamental twin of her brother Jack, she never betrayed personal feelings in her merry-go-round flirtations. Few of her escorts suspected that in the back of her mind, she was shrewdly cataloging each of them according to his wealth and potential influence.

On that score, Billy Hartington easily topped the list.

“Kick was after Billy,” one member of her circle observed. “He had a nice big fat title and estate coming, and all that. That is not a nice thing to say, but it was so well known and terribly obvious.”

A graceful but shy young man, Billy was thrilled by Kick’s boundless energy, and the two became an unlikely item. The match was even physically incongruous: at six feet four, he towered more than a foot over her. Considering Billy’s future role as a pillar of English society and the Anglican Church—he was often mentioned as a prospective suitor for Princess Elizabeth—few people could believe that his relationship with Kick was anything more than a youthful dalliance.

But Kick never gave up on her glorious dream. None of the American boyfriends she juggled back home compared with Billy Hartington in terms of social prestige and wealth—the things that really mattered to her. When Page Huidekoper, who worked with Kick as a junior reporter at the Washington Times-Herald, announced that she planned to wed a well-born American serviceman whose family had no money, Kick scoffed, “But Page, I thought you were ambitious.”

During the early years of the war, when Kick was confined to Washington, her London friends started pairing off, and eventually she heard that Billy Hartington had become engaged to Sally Norton, a niece of Lord Mountbatten. Kick immediately started pulling family strings and arranged for a job in Britain as a Red Cross worker. Within a month of her

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