the loss of her big brother, best friend, and champion. “Luckily, I am a Kennedy,” she writes. “I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability not to be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”
* * *
Six years earlier, when the Kennedys had landed in England, the government called Joe Sr. “Ambassador” and tall Joe Jr. was known to British debutantes as “the Big One.” In that first whirl of the London social season, Kathleen, known as Kick, set her sights on William John Robert Cavendish, the future Duke of Devonshire.
The outbreak of World War II would eventually separate the pair, as Billy explores a career in politics and Kick works at the Washington Times-Herald. But by 1943, Kick has negotiated a return to London through service in the Red Cross. She makes a late-June crossing to reunite with Billy in early July.
The pair is in love and determined to marry. Yet despite Billy’s impressive wealth and pedigree—assets Rose’s father once insisted Joe was lacking—Joe and Rose withhold their blessing. Kick’s parents hold hard and fast to the Catholic teaching that marrying outside the Church is a mortal sin. And Billy, a handsome, six-foot-four soldier who would rise to the rank of major in the Cold Stream Guards, is not only an Englishman, but also of Anglican faith.
Rose dismisses any possibility of compromise. “When both people have been handed something all their lives,” she tells Kick, “how ironic it is that they can not have what they want most.”
Only one Kennedy supports her decision: Joe Jr. Breaking from his role as one of the like-minded “two Joes,” as Kick and Eunice call father and son, Joe Jr. chastises his hard-hearted parents. Joe says of their condemnation of her so-called sinful marriage, “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.”
On May 6, 1944, in the midst of the privations of wartime London, the couple forgoes the kind of lavish, formal wedding that could have topped the society pages of every newspaper around the world for a modest civil ceremony at a registrar’s office in Chelsea. Not only is Joe Jr. the sole Kennedy in attendance, but he gives the bride away. Kick loves him even more for that fraternal gesture.
“MISS KENNEDY A MARCHIONESS” a London paper announces. “THURSDAY—ENGAGED: TO-DAY—MARRIED,” the headline continues somewhat snidely, noting that although the “engagement was announced only on Thursday,” the couple had “a quiet wedding” that Saturday. “The bride’s naval brother, Lieutenant J.P. Kennedy, brought her in, and the ceremony took place in a bare room, brightened only by three vases of carnations.”
“MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!” Kick jubilantly reports to her family. But barely five weeks later, on June 13, Billy is ordered to active duty in France.
He leaves his beloved bride in a flurry of romantic longing. “This love,” Billy writes, “seems to cause nothing but goodbyes.”
* * *
Even at twenty-nine, Joe Jr. seems not to be in any rush to marry himself, though there are rumors of a broken engagement to the Broadway actress Athalia Ponsell. (Ponsell is best known in later years for her grisly—and as yet unsolved—murder in January 1974, when she is found decapitated by machete outside her home in St. Augustine, Florida. She later becomes the subject of two true-crime books, as well as lingering questions of the cost of romancing a Kennedy.)
In the summer of 1944, Alvin Jones Jr. recalls, “Kennedy usually borrowed a quarter from his mechanic, so he could call a girlfriend before takeoff.”
Those calls are likely to Patricia Wilson, whom he met in 1943 through Kick’s social circles. The twice-divorced, Protestant daughter of a wealthy Australian sheep farmer would likely not have pleased Rose and Joe any more than Billy Cavendish has, and while Joe confides in Kick his growing love for Wilson, no other Kennedy ever knew that she was more than a passing acquaintance. “I had better get a gal while there is some life left in the old boy,” Joe Jr. writes his mother in the last week of July. The family believes that he dies a lonely bachelor.