Black Diamonds (51 page)

At the end of March 1944, turning to the Church for guidance, Kick arranged a meeting with Bishop Matthew, the Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster. It was a final attempt on her part to see if she could obtain some sort of dispensation to marry. She went to the meeting with a heavy heart, believing her mission to be impossible. But what the Bishop told her was what she longed to hear. A dispensation was out of the question: as the Bishop explained, it would place the Church in a very difficult position. Instead, he advised Kick that it would be better to go ahead and marry on the basis that dispensation would be given at some point in the future. ‘Of course he wouldn’t guarantee that anything could be done,’ she wrote to her family afterwards. ‘I am certainly not going to count on everything being made OK – I shall only hope for it.’ For the first time, she hinted that she was considering changing her mind. ‘If I do marry Billy within the next two months, please be quite sure that I am doing it with the full knowledge of what I’m doing and that I’m quite happy about it and feel quite sure that I am doing the right thing.’ Crucially, the Bishop had reassured her on the one point she was most anxious about. Contrary to the views of the other senior Churchman who had been consulted, Bishop Matthew advised Kick that if she were to marry Billy she would not be committing a mortal sin. According to his interpretation of canon law, she was not wilfully turning away from God. ‘As my Bishop said,’ she triumphantly informed her parents, ‘“No one can say that you are committing a sin because a sin is done from a selfish motive. What you are doing is done entirely from a non-selfish motive.”’

In the last week of April, after spending three days in Yorkshire with Billy, Kick finally agreed to marry him on his terms. The moment she said yes, it was left to Billy to compose his first – and difficult – letter to the formidable Rose Kennedy. Suspecting that Rose regarded him as the devil incarnate for having caused her daughter’s fall from grace, somehow he had to find the words to explain himself to his future mother-in-law.

Dear Mrs Kennedy

I feel so ashamed at not having written to you before and I hope you won’t think too harshly of me for my bad manners. The situation has changed so much from day to day, and I’m afraid I’ve kept on putting off writing to you until we could reach a decision one way or the other.

I have loved Kick for a long time, but I did try so hard to face the fact that the religious difficulties seemed insurmountable, and I tried to make up my mind that I should have to make do with second best. I felt too that if she could find someone else she could really be happy with, it would be much better & more satisfactory for her.

But after Christmas I realized that I couldn’t bear to let her go without ever asking her if we couldn’t find a way out and I knew that the time before I should have to go and fight was getting short.

I could not believe, either, that God could really intend two loving people, both of whom wanted to do the right thing, and both of whom were Christians, to miss the opportunity of being happy, and perhaps even useful, together because of the religious squabbles of His human servants several hundred years ago.

I do feel extremely strongly about the religion of my children both from a personal and from a national point of view, otherwise I should never have asked Kick to make such sacrifices in agreeing to their being brought up Anglican.

I know that I should only be justified in allowing my children to be brought up Roman Catholic, if I believed it to be desirable for England to become a Roman Catholic country. Therefore, believing in the National Church of England, as I do very strongly, and having so many advantages, and all the responsibilities that they entail, I am convinced that I should be setting a very bad example if I gave in, and that nothing would justify my doing so.

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 …’