Laurie Graham - The Importance of Being Kennedy

LAURIE GRAHAM

THE IMPORTANCE OF

BEING KENNEDY

To Jeremy Magorian,

Venice's own Mrs Thrale

Prelude

Chapter 1 - Accidentally, Through The Keyhole

Chapter 2 - The Right Kind Of Family

Chapter 3 - The Trouble With Blood Fitzwilliam

Chapter 4 - A Perfect Little Doll

Chapter 5 - A Washer And A Dryer And Separate Beds

Chapter 6 - Two-Toilet Irish

Chapter 7 - Three Categories Of Feeble-Mindedness

Chapter 8 - Learning The Ways Of The Enemy

Chapter 9 - Another Little Blessing

Chapter 10 - Kennedys Everywhere, Like A Rash

Chapter 11 - The Sacred Duties Of A Wife

Chapter 12 - No Crybabies, No Losers

Chapter 13 - An Anniversary Trip For One

Chapter 14 - Something In The Blood

Chapter 15 - The Queen Of Bronxville, The Queen Of England And Walter Stallybrass

Chapter 16 - The Fox Supervises The Henhouse And Mr Chamberlain Goes To Munich

Chapter 17 - Other People's Babies

Chapter 18 - Our Pope

Chapter 19 - The Season At The End Of The World

Chapter 20 - Keeping Going With A Cheery Smile

Chapter 21 - Future Prospects Unknown

Chapter 22 - Everything By The Book

Chapter 23 - An Insult Of A Cake

Chapter 24 - A Broken Doll

Chapter 25 - Girl On A Bicycle

Chapter 26 - A Trainee Duchess

Chapter 27 - The Beginning Of The End

Chapter 28 - A Real Winner, With A Bit Of Grooming

Chapter 29 - A Kennedy Poodle

Chapter 30 - Perpetual Light

Chapter 31 - The Latest Thing For Diseases Of The Mind

Chapter 32 - The Official Black Sheep

Chapter 33 - The Irish Card

Chapter 34 - Mr Congressman Kennedy

Chapter 35 - A Day Of Tears

Also by Laurie Graham

Copyright

About the Publisher

I happened to be in London in January 1970 when I got a call from my office to say my Aunt Nora had died. We were just finishing up the photo shoot for a big piece on platform shoes for Sassy! magazine so I was able to get away to Derbyshire in time for her funeral. Darling Aunt Nora, who'd started life three to a bed in Ballynagore, had a duke and a duchess at her Requiem Mass. If Aunt Ursie had lived to hear that she'd have popped her corset bones.

I didn't really start getting to know Aunt Nora till she ferreted me out in Saks Formal Wear in 1947 and stood me lunch. She had a nifty figure and beautiful skin for a woman in her fifties. She was wearing a tweed suit, I remember, petrol blue, fully lined, with a great corded buttonhole detail. Old-fashioned but very classy.

She said, ‘It's one of the perks of working for a lady who keeps up with trends. When the rest of the world won't be seen dead in a garment it can always be passed along to the help.’

We hit it off right away. She'd been a hazy, absent relation when I was a kid. She did visit, but too rarely for me to know her.

‘Your Aunt Nora is with the Kennedys,’ Mom used to say, and as we had another aunt who was a nun in Africa I also pictured Aunt Nora in a grass skirt and the Kennedys as some kind of ferocious tribe. In a sense I suppose I wasn't so very wrong.

Aunt Nora was a blast. I relished the letters that came each year with her Christmas card, her annual report on life as a gardener's wife on the great Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire. ‘Another twelve months of 'tater peelings,’ as she called it.

She outlived four of the nine Kennedy babies she'd raised. When Jack was killed in 1963 she wrote me that she had not watched the funeral. She said, Stallybrass was glued to the telly all afternoon but I walked to Hassop and prayed the rosary till it was over. I don't care for the telly myself. They tell you the same thing over and over. Walter loves his cowboy shows and I'll sit with him for company, but I turn my chair round the other way and get on with my knitting. Anyway, Jack's dying didn't shock me the way it shocked the rest of the world. I kept the death watch over Jack Kennedy more times than the sands are numbered and I could have swung for him once or twice too, little devil that he was. But my heart does go out to Mrs Kennedy. This is surely too much even for that tough little nut to endure.

Bobby Kennedy's death and old Joe Kennedy's, she hardly mentioned. Her own health was failing by then, though I didn't realize it. As her beloved Walter put it, ‘Nora were never one to skryke about her aches and pains.’ I asked him if she'd believed there was a gypsy curse on the Kennedys. There had been a lot of stories about that, after Jack and Bobby's deaths.

‘Nay, lad,’ he said. ‘In fact it got on her pippin when folk brought that up. Nora always reckoned old man Kennedy didn't need any gypsy curse to bring him calamities. He brought them on himself, the way he thought he could buy the world, the way he pushed them lads into the spotlight. Pride goeth before a fall, that were her opinion.’

I said, ‘I wish Aunt Nora had written about her Kennedy years. She must have had some stories.’

He said, ‘But she did write about them. That first cottage we had at Edinsor, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote everything down in exercise books. She called it her “Memoirs,” said she were only doing it to stop herself going round the bend with nothing to look at only sheep and trees. She liked the city best, you know, Nora? She liked busyness. She only endured all this beautiful countryside for me, God bless her. Should you like to see her writings some time? If my memory serves, they're in the back of her tallboy.’ So Aunt Nora's notebooks, with multiplication tables printed on the back cover and that old-lady smell of mothballs and dried lavender, came into my possession. This is her story.

Ramon N. Mulcahy, New York, 1972

Herself came to the house at Smith Square. It was April 1948. She was meant to be going directly to Paris for gown fittings but then she announced she was coming to London first, to visit with Kick. Landed on us with all her bags and baggage as if it was the Ritz we were running. Now I've seen Mrs Kennedy walk away when her own child lay sick in bed, turn her back on him sooner than delay a shopping trip, so we knew she wasn't coming for the pleasure of it. There was trouble on the agenda.

Walter had to have the car at the aerodrome by eight o'clock. Too early for Kick to get herself out of bed and go with him.

I said, ‘I'd have thought you'd make the effort. Go and meet her, get off on the right foot.’

‘No fear,’ she said. ‘Talk about being trapped in a confined space. It could feel like a very long drive.’

I was worried Mrs K would start quizzing Walter about what had been going on, if she had him to herself. I said, ‘Just act dumb.’

‘Nora,’ he said, ‘I don't need to act. When you've been driving gentry for thirty-five years dumb comes natural.’

It was about eleven when they arrived. She looked as smart as a brass button, as usual. You'd never have guessed she'd been on an airplane all night. She walked right past me in the hallway, unsnapped the fox head on her stole, handed it to Delia and made straight for the drawing room still wearing her little hat, one of those round chocolate-box affairs with a bit of net veiling that came down over her brow.