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LAURIE GRAHAM
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING KENNEDY
To Jeremy Magorian,
Venice's own Mrs Thrale
Table of Contents
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
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