Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
A forbidden affair with a racy Kennedy
How JFK’s sister’s liaison with the married Eighth Earl ended in tragedy
Asa thunderstorm, the worst in living memory, raged over the Ardèche mountains in France, on 13 May 1948, a light aircraft plummeted out of the clouds, disintegrated in mid-air and crashed to the ground.
The first rescuers on the scene, a farmer and his father, found four bodies: the pilot, co-pilot and two passengers. One was a woman, socialite Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy – younger sister of future US president John F Kennedy. The other was the Eighth Earl Fitzwilliam, her married lover.
Within hours, the two families closed ranks to conceal the circumstances that led to the crash. Peter Went worthFitzwilliam, a decorated war hero, and Kick, whose husband, the Marquess of Hartington, had been killed in action in 1944, had been desperately in love for two years.
Rumours swirled that, when they crashed, they were on their way to the Vatican to obtain special dispensation from the Pope to marry, if Peter divorced his wife.
The passionate affair was an open secret among their friends. Yet there is no official record of it: soon after their deaths came the first great bonfire of papers at Wentworth Woodhouse, and their love letters were destroyed.
None of the Kennedy family ever spoke of the affair, nor even acknowledged it. The Fitzwilliams waited almost 40 years before they broke their silence.
In fact, Kick could talk to none of her relatives except her beloved brother Jack (JFK) about her passion for Peter. The rest of the Kennedys wouldn’t accept it: she was Catholic, he was Protestant. But the autumn before the crash, she whispered to her brother, ‘I’ve found my Rhett Butler at last.’
To their friends, the affair was inexplicable. One of Kick’s pals, Janie Compton, said, ‘Peter and Kick were absolutely different personality types with different friends. She had intellectual friends. He belonged to a set where you gambled terrifically and drank a lot. He was terribly naughty, with lots of girlfriends. And that was just not Kick. He must have been a very good lover. It was the only way to explain it.’
Peter and his wife Olive, known to all as Obby, had a daughter but no sons – no male heir for Wentworth Woodhouse if he died. Their marriage had been ill-starred from the first. Peter was a philanderer; Obby an innocent, very beautiful but also frivolous and immature – a ‘flibbertigibbet’, according to Peter’s niece Lady Barbara Ricardo.
The marriage struggled on for more than a decade… until he met Kick. She was the daughter of Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to the United Kingdom. And she had a magnetic effect on men. ‘She had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met,’ recalled one admirer. Another lamented that she had so many suitors that after he’d proposed to her one day, she’d completely forgotten it by the next. She told yet
another besotted beau, ‘The thing about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack – incapable of deep affection.’
Eventually the persistence of Billy Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, won her over. She wasn’t in love with him but he was heir to the Duke of Devonshire and would one day be the richest man in England. However the Marquess was shot and killed in action four months after their wedding.
The disastrous love between Peter and Kick began at a ball in the Dorchester Hotel, Mayfair, in 1946. It was a fundraiser for the widows of Commandos killed in the war, Peter’s old comrades. London society was there in force; even the future Queen Elizabeth attended. Kick, aged 26, was chairing the Ball Committee. That night she wore a pink taffeta gown and a pair of diamond and aquamarine clips. She had buried her grief for Billy during a year immersed in working for the Red Cross. Life had returned to normal, a whirl of admirers and parties. Then Peter invited her to dance.
Before the end of the ball she was lovestruck. ‘It was overnight and it was the real thing,’ remarked a friend. ‘One got the impression that she’d discovered something she didn’t really plan to experience in life.’
Another pal, an ex-suitor, was overwhelmed by the intensity of her passion. ‘As she talked of Fitzwilliam, the man sounded a devastatingly charming rogue,’ he recalled. ‘Rarely do you see someone so bubbling over with love. Poor old Billy Hartington. But then again he probably would have been blown away if she’d felt that way about him. Very few people could stand that much love, the sheer blast of emotion.’
Peter and Kick’s affair scandalised London society, not simply because a titled Catholic war widow was having an affair with a Protestant married man, but because Peter was seen as the antithesis of her late husband – kind, gentle, moral Billy. An habitué of White’s Club in St James’s, Peter’s gambling losses were said to amount to more than £20,000, the equivalent of £820,000 today.
When Kick worked up the courage in 1948 to tell her parents Joe and Rose about her new love, they were incandescent and she was warned that if she married him Kick would be disinherited and banished from the Kennedy clan.
No one will ever know for certain what Peter and Kick were planning when they took off from Croydon airport, with enough luggage for a world cruise – including dozens of outfits, a caseful of negligees and most of Kick’s jewels. Such was her love of clothes, all this might really have been packed for just a long weekend – or maybe, as friend Evelyn Waugh believed, the couple were actually eloping.
Kick and JFK all dressed up in 1938
Perhaps this was a mad mission to the Vatican, or perhaps just a flying visit to Cannes.
Whatever the reason, on landing near Paris to refuel, they had a long lunch with friends at a restaurant in the city, and then insisted on continuing their journey despite the severe weather forecast. Peter dismissed the pilot’s warnings. He’d crossed the North Sea in storm-force winds in a small motor torpedo boat, he scoffed – a little turbulence wouldn’t bother him. ‘It was so stupid,’ said Lady Barbara. ‘They’d been told it wasn’t safe. You see, he was spoilt by my grandmother. As a child, he always got what he wanted.’
After the tragedy their families saw to it that the pair could not be together, even in death. The names of the crash victims were withheld in the British press, and they were buried separately. Joe Kennedy, Kick’s father, was the only relative to attend her funeral. Kick’s mother, Rose, regarded the crash as divine retribution, an act of God to prevent Kick from marrying a divorced Protestant.
Kick’s brothers and sisters knew better than to talk about her in Rose’s presence. Jack did pay a visit to her housekeeper, to thank her for years of devoted service, but left saying, ‘We will not mention her again.’ And when Bobby Kennedy wanted to name his eldest daughter Kathleen,
Rose consented – on the understanding that she should never be nicknamed ‘ Kick’.
But this irrepressible young woman has not been entirely forgotten by her family. Actress Kathleen Kennedy, 29, is Bobby’s granddaughter... and known to her friends as ‘Kick’.