The best and brightest-eyed

Alastair Forbes

Kathleen Kennedy: The Untold Story of Jack Kennedy's Favourite Sister Lynne McTaggart (Weidenfeld £10.95)

When, in answer to a query from the then still puppy-plump teenager, Caroline Kennedy — 'What was my Aunt Kick really like?', I had thoughtlessly begun 'Well, imagine a mixture of your father and...' she had swiftly interrupted me with That's no good to me. I can scarcely remember my father at all.' She soon moved on to seek out a more articulate inform- ant, and one more mindful of the passage of time from a group that included other surviving middle-aged friends of Jack and his dearest, if not in age nearest, sister, Kathleen 'Kick' Hartington, bereft of her gentle and gallant Protestant Cavendish marquess after a brief pre-D-Day honey- Moon and, after four years of widowhood, killed in a 1948 French aircrash in the sole company of her not yet divorced Protestant ver, the multi-millionaire playboy, Earl Fitzwilliam. A rather too pretentious and often cm- i barassingly clumsy attempt at an answer is made by this book — the work of an earnest American girl describing herself as the lucky writer asked to dig up "the good story" that had been belatedly detected in Kathleen Kennedy's life and death by New York's Dial Press and its star editor, Joyce Johnson,.

The principal fault of the American publisher and the editor, to whose awesome talents and dedication' Lynne McTaggart pays such sycophantic tribute in her preface, has been their too avid effort to squeeze yet another 'Kennedy best-seller' out of a life so very short, albeit mostly so very merry, that it seems hardly capable of Sustaining as much as a whole article, even in the sort of magazine which — like the last issue I happened to see of Life — still gives to a paparazzo-shot of Caroline's handsome brother John the . caption America too has its Royalty'. Indeed, such by article was some time ago churned out by the collaborating pair of Collier and

Horowitz, one in which they ambitiously, but not unreasonably, hinted, without pur- suing the idea further, that Kick's life had resembled 'a Jamesian novel about a headstrong young American girl and her transatlantic obsessions'. The 'Henry James Junior' listed by the author among the six score names of per- sons contributing recollections or documents is a new one on me, but, so long as the distinguished name has been drop- ped, one is reminded of the Master's rule

that criticism should always be applied less to the subject than to what an author art- istically makes of it. Perhaps at a time when even our own supposedly Top People's Paper is often just as slipshoddily ignorant or ignorantly slipshod, one should not jib at the ten major mistakes in the styles and titles of her British sources, on the very page before the one on which she tells us that 'my bible on this project was Debrett's Peerage'. (Her idiosyncratic reading of that concordance has even produced the curious notion that a hereditary title, on the death of its holder, takes a dawdling year or so to pass on to the next heir). She seems to have ended her investigative visits to Europe with an innocence about local history, customs and manners almost as profound as the young marines reembarking from the Beirut beach.

It was the piling of solecism on malapropism that made the Churchill books of William Manchester and Ted Morgan just such pains in the eye to read. At Weidenfeld, of all publishers, there ought surely to have been someone to edit out such transatlantic nonsense as the state- ment on page eight that 'British society was not only the most exclusive in the world but the one that was most off limits to an Irish Catholic' — which is, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, as exemplarily demonstrated by the jolly snaps included of week-end parties at Sledmere (where, in- cidentally, I recall that there were often as many Irish Catholic voices to be heard at the hospitable Sykeses' table as from those waiting at it.) Yet the apartheid practised in Boston, Mass, where the Kennedy parents were both born and brought up, was a stan- ding affront not only to America's vaunted egalitarianism but to the Constitution itself. There the Catholic Irish lived, at any rate until lately, in a parallel world, subdivided into 'lace-curtain and shanty', and there, too, were lesser microcosms, peopled by Italians, Jews, Hispanos, Greeks and Blacks. There was no snobbery quite like the Yankee snobbery of Back Bay Boston, where even Astors and Vanderbilts could sometimes be dismissed as mere 'summer people' one only deigned to meet at Newport's Bailey Beach.

Many of the best Yankees found it so distasteful that they were as glad to get out of the place as Joe Kennedy was when, in the early Twenties, his first fortune made, he moved his family, bag and baggage, by private rail-car south to New York, where his daughters would no longer be excluded from the allegedly 'best' debutante balls, even after chumming up with 'proper Bostonian' Episcopalian co-evals at Cape Cod. For himself, Jack didn't give a damn, but he had enough filial piety to agree with his brother Bobby's judgment that 'both my parents had felt very strongly about the discrimination in clubs, business, golf courses and so on' they had encountered in and about Boston. The family's total accep- tance by everybody in Britain, from the King and Queen down, was a tremendous boost to their self-confidence. Pictures of George VI and his Consort in Kennedy company have never been taken off the walls of their hideous and uncomfortable Hyannisport summer home. They still bear witness to the days when the Ambassador's views were shared by 85 per cent of the

British people, all cheering their heads off at the wing-collared peacenik from Munich who was escorted by his Sovereign onto the , Palace balcony and whom the Spectator forthwith proceeded to propose for the Nobel Prize.

Publicity for their nine children (hardly equalled until the post-war arrival of the Osmonds) secured them wide press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. This Kick unashamedly enjoyed as a lark, shar- ing with her sisters a rather unsophisticated excitement at celebrity, even when it was by association only. Her self-deprecating wisecracks, couched in slang that was often

fresh to their ears, together with her seem- ingly continual and contagious happiness, enchanted the high-well-born Limeys of both sexes with whom she was now daily thrown together. Alone of her family, she also possessed the gift, not by any means always shared by nobs and swells (let alone nouveaux riches) the world over, of being liked, even loved, by domestic servants. Dyed-in-the-wool anti-Americans like Boofy Gore (much later Arran, the House of Lords' Buggers' Benefactor') fell com-

pletely under her spell.

On Boofy's cousin, Billy Hartington, the effect her comradeship produced was so transcendent and transforming that his gratitude soon turned to adoration. Unlike his Jewish-American showbiz aunt, Adele Astaire Cavendish, who, at the same age, hadn't cared who knew she wore no knickers and why, Kick had been brought up to believe that No Sex was better than Good Sex, and had never let any of her many beaux indulge in the sort of heavy petting, first described by Dr Kinsey and most lately by Dr Greer, and the girdle she wore on her mother's instructions would anyway have put off anyone but an incor- rigible rubber fetishist. Perhaps the tempta- tion had not been strong. Certainly to one rather too self-consciously oddball suitor, whose attentions to women have proved to have been confined to proposing marriage to them, she had once exclaimed 'Listen, the thing about me is that I'm like Jack, in- capable of deep affection.' (Of my revela- tion, a decade ago, that the last confidence Jack had made to a close friend we shared shortly before leaving for Dallas and death was that he had never in his life been in love, Gore Vidal commented 'Well, that makes two of us').

But Kick, when she returned as a Red Cross volunteer to Britain during the war, was nevertheless herself to be deeply af- fected by the strength of Billy's love, and, after his death in action, was to confess that `the amazing thing about Billy was that he loved me so much .• I felt needed, and I real- ly felt I could make him happy'. It was not just, as Evelyn Waugh claimed, 'Second Front nerves' that made her contract a mar- riage that, in his overzealous convert's fashion, he dubbed a 'grave sin' and which her Khomeinishly bigoted mother saw as a one-way ticket to hell-fire, but her own natural Scarlett O'Hara instinct to hope for the best and let tomorrow take care of itself. Besides, as she sensibly observed, `It's rather nice not having to be a Kennedy. Lord knows there are enough of them about.'

It would surely have been more Christian of that thorny old Rose to have prayed `Lord I believe, help thou my daughter's unbelief!' For I am quite sure that, in her heart of hearts, Kick increasingly shared the scepticism about their mother's drearily dogmatic form of religion that Jack was not ashamed to admit between certain four walls. Old Joe Kennedy, for all his faults, as warm-hearted and loving a father as Rose was a freeze-dried mother, resolutely refus- ed to reject his daughter, despite his wife's maledictions, and she was equally sup- ported by her genuinely devout eldest brother, himself to be killed in action before Billy. Young Joe had found the British bishop he and Kick had consulted to be 'a nice fellow; his attitude seemed to be that if they loved each other a lot, then marry outside the church. He didn't seem to be disturbed about it creating a bad ex- ample', though this sensible sub specie aeternitatis view could hardly be blamed on `Second Front nerves'. Later, he would have known that between the fatal thunderstorm and the ground, she absolu- tion sought and absolution found.

Lynne McTaggart insinuates that neither Jack nor Bobby wished to speak of Kick after her death. In fact, Bobby named his firstborn child Kathleen Hartington Ken- nedy, and I myself talked of her often with Jack, not least, in between criticising the crazy politics of their Dad, in the bedroom we were once forced by the Founding Father to share 'at the Cape', as Kennedys always called Hyannis. Lynne McTaggart also in- sinuates that Billy, no less than his wife, was a virgin on his wedding night. This was emphatically not so, and I doubt if it had even been so at Trinity, Cambridge, years before. But too much pent-up romantic male physical passion is often too quickly spent, and the five weeks they were to be granted together were probably not quite enough to make them as perfectly compati- ble in the sack as outside it — a dis- appointment that was not a rare wartime phenomenon.

When Rose Kennedy complained that Kick was the only Kennedy 'eager to leave home', she did not realise that what she was really saying was that she was the first nor- mally maturing member of her family. As a widow, she could never return to the fold, except for visits, and an important point also to be taken into consideration was the one so well expressed by Madame de Sevigne: 'A young widow is not greatly to

be pitied; she will enjoy being her own mistress or finding a new master.' I saw myself how thoroughly Kick enjoyed the three years of adult education she ex- perienced which, if it failed to improve her lamentable dress sense, broadened her mind as well as her friendships before she en- countered her homme fatale in the shape of the dashing Peter Fitzwilliam, whom the author unfairly accuses Evelyn Waugh of calling 'scum'. Had she more carefully read Waugh's diaries and letters, she would have seen that this was the label censoriously af- fixed to him and his rich-white-trash, aristo Commando friends by the puritanical Tory MP, Godfrey Nicholson, and only thereafter affectionately adopted by fellow officers. Kick and Peter certainly made a rather rum Isolde and Tristan, though I was not alone in seeing in their passionate union a certain successful symbiosis of separate Irish coarsenesses. Had their marriage taken place and proved childless like her first, I doubt it would have lasted, for it would have too much restricted the oppor- tunities for spreading happiness amongst an ever widening circle of friends to which, before her infatuation, she had become ac- customed.

In the brief bibliography of Miss McTag- gart's unindexed volume I found no reference to the best Kennedy book to date, Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and his Times. Taking it down from the shelf, I came across some words of my own quoted in it. 'I can still see the stricken face of old Joe Kennedy, as he stood alone, unloved and despised, behind the coffin of his daughter amid the hundreds of British friends who had adored her and now mourned her... she was the best and brightest-eyed of all Kennedys... liPon whose gravestone at Chatsworth is most truthfully written "Joy she gave" 'All these people', wrote Bobby in a letter, 'lov- ed Kick so much, it's really impressive', though he spoilt it rather by adding 'bet- ween you and me, except for a few in- dividuals, you can have the bunch'.

Today, I find myself applying to her the words Antony West has just used about another of the dozen or so dead women most miss and often think of, his father's s `Last Attachment', Maria Igneneva (`Moura') Boudberg, as popular a London Russian as Kick a London American: ,Her good humour made her a comfortable rather than a disturbing presence; I always looked forward eagerly to my next meeting with her and remember my last with pleasure.' Or, as H.G. Wells himself once more simply put it to Raymond Aron: `Everybody likes Moura because she so likeable.'

I cannot help wondering what Boston's Louisa M. Alcott, of Little Women fame, would have made of Kick and her short story. Rather more than Lynne McTaggart, that's for sure, and, with her Unitarian thoroughness, she would have expunged from her text all the many mistakes and misapprehensions that mar this more or less well-meaning essay in popular biography.