The House of Kennedy(15)
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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.
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Kick flies home to Hyannis Port from London to attend Joe Jr.’s memorial mass. As the designated recipient of her brother’s possessions, she then travels on to New York City to receive them via the Personal Effects Distribution Center in Scotia, New York.
In the city, her sister Eunice plays messenger, summoning Kick to Joe Sr.’s hotel room to receive yet another grim communication. It’s been weeks since Kick has heard from her new husband, Billy. Now she learns that in the German-occupied town of Heppen, Belgium, Billy has been killed by a sniper’s bullet. His sacrifice comes only weeks after Joe Jr. gave his life for his country. Within a month, Kick has lost her beloved brother and her husband.
For the next several years, Kick’s search for happiness is unfulfilled—until she takes up with the married Earl Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam, some years her senior, who has a reputation for being a womanizing gambler.
Kick confides in her brother Jack about this latest Kennedy dalliance with a Protestant, down to the cinematic detail that the man looks like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. When Fitzwilliam promises to divorce his wife, Obby, and marry Kick, she once again summons up the courage to tell her estranged parents. Over the scandalous specter of divorce, Rose vows to disown her daughter.
Despite her mother’s attitude, Kick reaches out to her “Darling Daddy,” and arranges for the two of them to meet Joe Sr. at the Paris Ritz.
“I’d like to get Dad’s consent,” she tells Joe Jr.’s old friend Tom Schriber before she leaves New York. “He matters. But I’m getting married whether he consents or not.”
On Thursday, May 13, 1948, Kick and Fitzwilliam fly out of London, stopping outside Paris to refuel their chartered ten-seater de Havilland Dove aircraft en route to the French Riviera before meeting with Joe Sr. During the layover—which includes a boozy lunch with friends—a terrible storm sets in, and the next leg of their route is to cross the storm center. The pilot and the navigator say the flight is too dangerous. But the couple won’t wait.
They never make it to to their romantic weekend in Cannes. Friday morning, rescuers traverse the mountainous Rh?ne-Alpes region, some two hundred miles from Cannes, to reach the wreckage of the plane. There are no survivors. Kick’s shoeless corpse is transported in an oxcart to the tiny town center of Privas.
A heartbroken Joe Sr. identifies Kick, who, in the words of Rose, was his “favorite of all the children.”
The family decides not to bring Kick’s body home, preferring to remember her in Hyannis Port at the same church where they mourned Joe Jr. four years earlier.
Billy’s family arranges a memorial service. Rose refuses to fly to England. Jack promises, then fails, to represent the Kennedys.
Kick is interred in the small Derbyshire cemetery alongside members of the Cavendish family. The last line of her epitaph captures the essence of the vibrant young woman who touched so many lives: “Joy she gave—joy she has found.”
Joe Sr. later attends a Requiem Mass in Kick’s honor. He stands at her grave, a shattered man in a rumpled blue suit.
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Unlike his sister Kick, Joe Jr. has no grave for his family to visit. Since losing his son, Joe Sr. has been focused on mounting a fitting tribute. On July 26, 1945, at a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, Jean Kennedy christens the Navy destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (now part of the Battleship Cove Maritime Museum in Fall River, Massachusetts). But no memorial to his heroic final mission exists in Blythburgh, in spite of calls by local military groups to establish a tribute.
Huby Fairfield, curator of the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum at Flixton, tells the Times of London, “If someone doesn’t do something soon, he will be forgotten. He gave his life for his country and ours—he didn’t have to take part in the operation. He volunteered.”
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In January 1946, according to historian Edward J. Renehan Jr., Joe Sr. has a chance meeting with the former prime minister Winston Churchill at the Hialeah Park Race Track, where Joe has an ownership interest.
Churchill and Joe were frequently in conflict over Joe’s certainty of Hitler’s invincibility. Yet the former prime minister seems glad to reminisce. “I remember that one of the last times we met we were having dinner during an air raid. It didn’t bother us very much, though, did it?”