by Kitty Kelley
My sisters, Mary Cary Coughlan and Adele O’Toole, provided loving encouragement throughout the writing, as did my dear friend Margaret Engel, director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Members of the International Women’s Forum were extraordinarily helpful, particularly Sheryl Marshall, Joni Evans, Shirley Nelson, Peggy Czyzak-Dannenbaum, Martha Teichner, Barbara Hosking, Pam Garside, Susan Greenwood, Willie Campbell, Maureen Kindel, Mary Lehman, and Fruzsina Harsanyi. I’m also grateful for the support of I.W.F. friends like Patricia Gurne, Michele Hagans, Sandra Taylor, Mitzi Wertheim, Lilia Ann Abron, Alexandra Armstrong, Esther Smith, Patricia Bailey, and Patricia Goldman.
I appreciate the efforts of Bill Chaput of the Lotos Club in New York City; Rich Salke; Erna Steiner; James Henderson; Fabiola Molina; Germaine Attebery; Susan Nicholas; Silvia Castanos; Joan Worden; Deborah Cohen; Russell Kott; Eunice and Mones Hawley; Susan Mickelwaite; Patti Pancoe; Carolyn Telman; Forrest Mac Cormack; and Samuel Melman of Justine Melman, Inc.; Eliane Laffont, president of Sygma Photo News; and Mr. and Mrs. Louis J. Appell Jr., whose flat in Lenox Gardens became my London home.
For various research projects, I had expert help from Melissa Goldblatt; Aura Lippincott; Helaine R. Staver; Jacqueline Williams; Anne Whiteman, ABC News; Audrey Sands; Ray Boston; Barry Phelps; Sue Harmer; Mary Aylmer; Simon Nathan; Daphne Srinivasan; Lilly Lessing; Roger Law, Spitting Image; Pamela Warrick, Los Angeles Times; Ellen Warren, Chicago Tribune; Wade Nelson; Rachel Grady; Abby Jones Pauley; Emily Greines; Rebecca Salt, Reed Consumer Books, London; Phoebe Bentinck; Edda Tasiemka, the Hans Tasiemka Archives; Ann Geneva, Yale University Press; Ted Richards, Olsson’s Books; Tim O’Connor, Palm Beach Polo Club; Frank Tenot, president, Hachette Filipacchi Presse.
For tapes and documentaries I received generous assistance from Howard Rosenberg of CBS News and Richard W. Carlson, president and CEO of Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
For foreign-language translations I relied on the expertise of Vivian Glick, whose linguistic skills encompass French, German, and Italian. Maria de Martini assisted with Spanish interviews.
For investment analysis of royal finances, I was guided by Marvin H. McIntyre of Legg Mason Wood Walker in Washington, D.C., and his staff: Colleen Bradley, Kim Dexter, Don Metzger, Bob Parr, Swati Patel, A. J. Fector. I’m also grateful to Arnold H. Koonin of Coopers & Lybrand; and Steve Weisman and Tracy Noble of Weisman, Noble and Moore.
For legal advice I relied on Marc Miller of McLeod, Watkinson and Miller, Washington, D.C.; Robert Wald, Michael Nussbaum, and Benjamin Zelenko of Nussbaum & Wald, Washington, D.C. My favorite lawyer is still my ninety-three-year-old father, William V. Kelley, of Witherspoon, Kelley, Davenport & Toole in Spokane, Washington.
In recent years I’ve spoken to many people about the House of Windsor. Among those generous with their time, knowledge, and insights were Peter and Pamela Evans; Robert Lacey; Sue Townsend; Michael Cole; Linda White; Steve Aronson; Patricia Bosworth; Peter and Kit Hammond; Barbara and Ken Follett; Mara Berni; Lecia Crystal; Ericka Barty-King; Andrew David Ball and Judith Ball; Nancy, Barbara, and David Morowitz; Bob Glick; Sheila and Dobli Srinivasan; Cissy Finley Grant; Lionel Epstein and Elizabeth Streicker; Lynette and John Pearson; Anthony Holden and Cindy Blake; Rosie Boycott, Esquire; Ross Benson, Daily Express; Peter McKay, Evening Standard; Gordon MacKenzie, Daily Mail; Hal Robinson; Michael Bywatter; Peter Kazaris; Roberta Ashley; Richard Cohen; David Patrick Columbia; Fiammetta Rocco, Independent on Sunday; Sue Crewe; Phyllis Stirman; Eric Weil, Buenos Aires Herald; Ivanna and James Whitaker, Daily Mirror; Barbara Cartland; Tim Heald; Giles Gordon; Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair; Francis Wheen, the Guardian; Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye; Matthew Evans; Caroline Michel; Larry Adler; Larry and Mary Devlin; Daryll Bonner; Nancy Pollard; Mark Hollingsworth; Norman Douglas Hutchinson; Anthony Summers; Muriel Fox and Shep Aaronson; Ken Burrows and Erica Jong; Bonnie Goldstein, ABC-TV; Jim Grady; Myuki Williams; Jacqui and Jeff Weaver; Maurice Weaver, Daily Telegraph; Betsy and Ira Silverman; Monica Worth; Christopher Gulkin; William Norwich, New York Observer; Marian Lear Swaybill; Heather Perram; Richard Hough; Franklin Johnson; Fleur Cowles; Dominic Lawson, the Spectator; Margaret Gardner; Ken Jennings; Rex Reed; Eunice Roberts; Wendall (Sonny) Rawls; G. H. Hutchinson Smith; Geoffrey Bailey; Geoffrey Harley; Joyce Hopkirk; Emily Malino Scheur; Bevis Hillier; Veronica Forwood; Laura Zelenko; Rory Knight Bruce; Robin Knight Bruce; John Davey Beverton; Noreen Talor; Rosalind Miles; Richard Johnson, the New York Post; Richard Turley; Carlos Anessi; Nina Myskow; Grant McCahon; Mary Kyreakowdis; Carinthia West, Marie Claire; John Teenan; Philip Benjamin; Taki Theodoracopulos; Margaret Holder; Michael Thornton; Lady Colin Campbell; Sylvia Wallace; Jonathan Engel, Reuters; Michael Nagel; Geoffrey Acquilina Ross; Kevin Dowling; Jean Ritchie; Nicholas Haslam; Caroline Kennedy; John Barratt; Stephen Maitin; Lindka Cierach; Una Mary Parker; Jeanette Walls, Esquire; Majorie Wallace; Wendy Leigh; Richard Ingrams; Christopher Silvester; Jack Hedley; Willie Hamilton; Kenneth Jost, Congressional Quarterly; James Bellini; Philip Knightley; Andrew Rosthorn; Paddy Crerand; Desmond Ellott; Gant Gaither; Jody Jacobs; Sharman Douglas; Achtar Hussein; Arlene Dahl; Pamela and Ronald Kessler; John Prince; Fornida and Nang Sang, People; Wanda Baucus; Mark Gisbourne; John Woods; Tony and Audrey Charles; Felicity Green, Daily Telegraph; Sheila Hailey; Geraldine Sharpe Newton, CNN; Susan Yerkes, San Antonio Express News; Ian Coulter; Angus Coulter; Heather Elliott; Gordon Graham; Marco Pierre White; Victoria Mather; Penelope Mortimer; Desmond Elliott; Ian Gordon; Michael Bloch; Ingrid Seward, Majesty magazine; Stephen Birmingham; Bob Jerome; Andrew Neil, the Sunday Times; Susan Watters, Women’s Wear Daily; Judy (Demetra) Green; Roberta Klein; Charles Higham; Julie Schoo; Lissa August, Time; Connie Bransilver; Lester Hyman; Ann Landers; Lucy Scardino; Kevin McMannus, Town & Country; Warren Rogers; Joe Laitin; Lilla Pennant; Leslie Linder and Norma Quine; Nicholas Monson; Stephen Haseler; Lindsay Mackie; Roy Greenslade; Hugh Bygott-Webb; Magdalene de Blaquier; Nicki McWhirter, Detroit News; James Reginato, Women’s Wear Daily; Maxine Champion; Leslie and Andrew Cockburn; Robert Sam Anson; Martin Peretz, the New Republic; David Hume Kennerly; Norman Mailer; Annie Groer, the Washington Post; Toni Aluisi; C. Wyatt Dickerson; Terry Lichstein, ABC-TV; Ed Curran; Barry Everingham; David Kogan, Reuters; Carolyn MacDonald; Gilbert Mathieu; Maxine Mawhinney, GMTV; Joan Worden; William Keating; Barbara Dixon; Susan Tolchin; Marianne Means, Hearst newspapers; Al Eisele, The Hill; Evangeline Bruce; Dr. Nelson Lankford, the Virginia Historical Society; Priscilla Baker; Robert M. Eisenger; Gillian Pachter; Ronnie and Arnie Pollard; Ricki Morell; Nancy A. Poland; Penelope Farthing.
I also wish to thank my literary agent, Wayne S. Kabak of William Morris Agency, Inc., who combines brilliance and good humor, even in the midst of crisis. He brings to mind Chaucer’s “verray parfit gentil knight.” I value his counsel and the friendship extended by his wife, Marsha Berkowitz, and his children, Victoria and Benjamin. His staff makes the writing life less burdensome, especially his extraordinary assistant, Laura Blaustein. I’m also grateful to the London office of I.C.M. where Duncan Heath and his assistant, Lucy Morrison, were so helpful.
I salute Warner Books and its dynamic C.E.O., Laurence J. Kirshbaum, Chairman of Time Warner Trade Publishing; Maureen Egen, President and Publisher and C.O.O.; Chris Barba, V.P., Director of Sales and Marketing; Emi Battaglia, V.P., Director of Publicity; Tina Andreadis, Associate Publicity Manager; Jackie Joiner, Assistant to the President; Harvey-Jane Kowal, V.P., Executive Managing Editor; Diane Luger, Executive Art Director; Martha Otis, V.P., Director of Advertising and Promotion; Karen Torres, Director of Marketing; Nancy Wiese, Subsidiary Rights Director; Tracy Howell, Subsidiary Rights Manager; Sarah Telford, Subsidiary Rights Assistant. My thanks to Sona Vogel for expert copy editing and Vincent Virga for compiling the photographs.
Writing is tough, so writers need mentors. Mine continues to be Mervin Block, who sets the standard of excellence. After twenty years of friendship, I still marvel at his skill and intelligence. Humbling as it was, I’
m mighty grateful for the red pen he wielded on my rough drafts and his insistence on making the contents shorter, sharper, stronger.
When the manuscript was completed, my publisher sent me a treasure in Carolyn Blakemore, an editor who arrived in Washington, D.C., determined to turn hopsack into velvet. She departed with my affection and gratitude.
My deepest appreciation goes to my husband, Jonathan E. Zucker, to whom this book is dedicated. He came into my life five years ago and continues to fill my heart with joy.
February 13, 1997
THE ROYAL HOUSE OF WINDSOR
ONE
Princess Margaret strode out of the theater. She had barely managed to sit through the opening scenes of Schindler’s List. She began squirming as soon as she saw the Jewish prayer candles burn down, leaving only wisps of smoke to evoke the ashes that would follow. She crinkled her nose at the sight of the captive Jewish jeweler being tossed a handful of human teeth to mine for fillings. As the nightmare unfolded, she stiffened in her seat.
On screen, the streets filled with screaming Jewish prisoners, brutal Nazi soldiers, and snarling police dogs quickly emptied, except for the scattered suitcases of those Jews who had just been hauled off to the death camps. At that point the Princess bolted out of her seat.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I refuse to sit here another minute.”
Her friends were aghast but immediately deferred to her displeasure. They left their seats and accompanied Her Royal Highness back to her servants in Kensington Palace.
“I don’t want to hear another word about Jews or the Holocaust,” said the Queen’s sister. “Not one more word. I heard enough during the war. I never want to hear about it again. Ever.”
Margaret’s friends later wondered why, feeling as she did, she had suggested going to the movie in the first place. She had to know that Schindler’s List would depict the horrors of genocide. What they didn’t understand was that the Princess had read reviews of the movie and been taken with the portrait of the good German, Oskar Schindler, who had come to reap the spoils of war and ended up as a selfless hero who saved countless lives. That was the story she wanted to see enacted on screen.
For more than sixty years Margaret Rose had been a princess of the royal House of Windsor, reared to renounce her German roots, to deny the mix of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha blood that coursed through her veins, to repudiate the lineage of Wurttemburgs mixed with Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs that haunted her ancestors.
She was not disturbed by searing childhood memories of Britain during the Blitz. When war broke out in 1939, she was nine years old. At sixty-four the Princess rarely reflected on the shattering bombs, the blackouts, or the deprivation that she felt she and her older sister, the Queen, endured to serve as public examples for others who were suffering much more. She no longer complained as much as she once did about being deprived of a normal childhood.
During those years, her royal image had inspired a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl in Amsterdam who was hiding from the Nazis. To remind herself of a better world, Anne Frank had pasted pictures of Princess Margaret Rose, and her sister, Princess Elizabeth, on the wall of the attic where she hid with her family for two years. But then the family was betrayed to the Gestapo and herded off in windowless boxcars on the train bound for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne died there one month before Europe was liberated. When the Anne Frank House was opened to the public after the war, the pictures of Britain’s little Princesses, yellowed with age, still smiled from the wall.
Princess Margaret was proud of her performance during the war and that of her earnest sister and her gallant parents, who had made sure that they presented the world with an image of royalty at its finest.
What Princess Margaret resented about Schindler’s List and “those other tiresome movies about the Holocaust” was the lingering stench of Germany that continued to hang over her family. Their secrets of alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, insanity, homosexuality, bisexuality, adultery, infidelity, and illegitimacy paled alongside their relationship with the Third Reich. Those secrets, documented by captured German war records and family diaries, letters, photographs, and memoranda, lay buried in the locked vaults of the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, safe from the prying eyes of scholars and historians. Few people remembered that Margaret’s mother and father had been disinclined to oppose Hitler and preferred Chamberlain over Churchill as Prime Minister. Most people had forgotten that the Princess’s favorite uncle had embraced Nazi Germany as Europe’s savior and one of her German cousins had run a concentration camp, for which he later stood trial as a war criminal. Margaret Rose remembered but knew that these facts—some secret, some sinister—were best left buried.
Yet the Princess was not averse to expressing her opinions, which sounded astoundingly ignorant coming from a woman who professed to read as much as she did. Despite her public participation in the arts and her devotion to ballet and theater, Margaret Rose remained closed-minded to the world beyond her privileged view. She made no apologies for her prejudices. In a discussion of India, she said she hated “those little brown people.” Shortly after the IRA assassination of her cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, she denounced the Irish. “They’re pigs—all pigs,” she told the Irish American mayor of Chicago while visiting the city. When the Princess was introduced to the respected columnist Ann Landers, Margaret looked at her closely. “Are you a Jew?” she asked. “Are you a Jew?” The columnist said she was, and the Princess, no longer interested, moved on. She dismissed Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the President of Guyana, as loathsome. “He’s everything I despise,” she said. “He’s black; he’s married to a Jew; and furthermore, she’s American.”
After walking out of Schindler’s List, which she described as “a tedious film about Jews,” she advised her butler not to waste his money on the Academy Award– winning film.
“A movie like Schindler’s List just incites morbid curiosity,” the Princess said when her butler served her breakfast the next morning. “I couldn’t stand it. It was so thoroughly unpleasant and disgusting that I had to get up and leave.”
The butler listened patiently, as always. Then he bowed his head and returned to the pantry. Later he repeated the conversation to an American, who asked if he were not offended by Princess Margaret’s remarks. He seemed puzzled by the American’s question.
“Oh my, no. You don’t understand. The Princess is royalty. Royalty,” he said, pronouncing the word with reverence. “The Princess belongs to the House of Windsor—the most important royal house in the world. She’s the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen. That’s as exalted as you can possibly be on this earth.”
“Do you mean to suggest that royalty, especially British royalty, can do no wrong? That just because she’s a princess, she’s immune to criticism?”
“She is royalty,” repeated the butler.
“And therefore above reproach?”
“Royalty is royalty,” he said. “Never to be questioned.”
TWO
Once upon a time… the House of Windsor was a fantasy. The figment of a courtier’s imagination. The dynasty was created in 1917 to conceal the German roots of the King and Queen, and the deception enabled the monarchy to be perceived as British by subjects who despised Germany.
Until then, many English kings never spoke the King’s English. They spoke only German because for almost two hundred years, from 1714 until this century, a long line of Germans ruled the British empire. By 1915 England finally had a king, George V*, who could speak English without a German accent. Although he was a German from the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line that had ruled England for eighty years, he considered himself to be indisputably British. His subjects, who hated Germany, Germans, and all things Germanic, were not convinced.
For years, especially in the early 1900s, the English had become increasingly afraid of Prussian militarism. They felt threatened by the Kaiser’s oppression. And they were “sore-headed and fed up,” as Georg
e Bernard Shaw wrote, with Germany’s rattling sabers. They viewed World War I as a war against Germany.
Newspapers carried eyewitness accounts of revolting cruelty by the Germans, who bombed undefended towns and killed civilians. Those actions shocked the world in 1915. In England, editorials denounced “The March of the Hun” and “Treason to Civilization” as German U-boats sank British ships. The mounting death tolls on French battlefields caused hardships in England, which exacerbated Britain’s hatred of foreigners.
King George V was disturbed as he watched his subjects stone butchers with German names and burn the homes of people who owned dachshunds. Pretzels were banned and symphony conductors shunned Mozart and Beethoven.
This antipathy was not unique to Great Britain. Blood hatred of everything German had infected all of Europe and spread to America, where Hollywood produced a string of hate films such as To Hell with the Kaiser, Wolves of Kultur, and The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin.
The King of England deplored the “hysterical clamor,” calling it “petty and undignified,” but few listened. The image of the hideous Hun as a fiendish torturer who raped, pillaged, and murdered innocents had gripped the public imagination.
The King became so concerned about the reaction of his volatile subjects that he was afraid to protect his relatives of German descent. Instead he stood by silently as his beloved cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg was vilified simply because of his German name. When war had threatened, Battenberg as the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy mobilized the Admiralty with speed and efficiency, so that when war broke out, England was ready. But Battenberg, a naturalized British subject, became a target for abuse: his name was German, he was born in Germany, he spoke with a German accent, he employed German servants, and he owned property in Germany.